Chapter 7 #2
“Yeah, I know,” he said again, and this time he sounded both upset and annoyed at the same time. “But I can’t do anything about that—since if they won’t report it to the cops, they’re not going to talk to us, either.”
It was a good point, presumably made by whomever Raj was talking to—that Arcanids weren’t likely to report a failed hit-and-run to the police, given how closely the police seemed to be tied to groups like the Magic-Free Movement.
I knew—as did Raj—that Dan Maza wasn’t that kind of cop, but unless you knew the people who worked in the RPD, you weren’t going to know who was safe to talk to.
And I also knew that most people thought of the FBI as essentially a bigger version of the cops—the US cops instead of local ones.
I’d never asked Raj or Hart about whether or not the same kind of anti-Arcane bigotry was present in the FBI as it was in the police.
I knew that wasn’t the case in A-Branch, where they worked with other Arcanids: Cass was an Arc-human, a future seer; Raj and Drew were shifters; and Hart was an elf who had replaced a faun, John Kurtzweil, whom I’d met a few months ago while trying to track down Dagget and Garraway.
But that didn’t tell me anything about the rest of the FBI.
Besides, I’d learned that it doesn’t really matter what the actual truth is—what matters is what people think the truth is. And people thought that the FBI would be against them, if they even realized they could talk directly to the FBI at all.
Raj had been quiet as I thought about this, but since he was still holding the phone up to his ear, it seemed like he was listening to whatever the person on the other end of the line was saying. Because I don’t have shifter hearing, I had no idea what they were saying.
I leaned against the wall, waiting.
Raj glanced up, meeting my gaze, and made an expression that I didn’t understand, since it looked like a half-smile, half-grimace, but he kept pacing the room, clearly unconcerned about me overhearing whatever he might have to say.
“No,” he said then. “Nothing concrete. Call it a hunch—I just don’t know if it’ll play out in a way that means anything.
” Another pause. “Yeah, thanks. Take care, Cass.” He thumbed the button to end the call and tucked his phone back in his pocket.
“What did you think of?” I asked him.
He walked up to me, settling his hands on my shoulders. “I didn’t think of anything,” he replied. “You did.”
I looked up at him. “What did I think of?” I asked.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, then moved past me and back into the kitchen. I followed. “That we should be looking for victims who might not have been killed. Failed hit-and-runs.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is that… helpful?”
“I hope so,” came his reply as he sat back down at the table, picking up his fork again.
I rejoined him, taking up another forkful of pasta. It was starting to get a little cool, so I stood up again, taking my metal tray and dumping the pasta in a bowl so that I could heat it up again in the microwave. “Raj?” I asked.
“Mmm?” he asked around a mouthful of pasta.
“Is it good or bad if there are more victims?” I asked. “Living ones, I mean.”
He chewed and swallowed. “Good, mostly,” came the response.
“Because the more there are, the more information we might be able to get. Someone who wasn’t actually hit but who saw a vehicle following them, for instance, might be able to give us descriptions of them. Maybe even descriptions of the driver.”
“Is that likely?” The microwave beeped, and I took out my bowl, moving it quickly to a stained potholder so that I didn’t burn my hand on the hot ceramic.
“Honestly?” Raj replied. “No, not really.” He put another bite of pasta in his mouth, speaking around it.
“It’s hard to see someone in a car anyway, especially at night, and someone in a panic isn’t likely trying to make out what the driver looks like.
If we’re lucky we might get an apparent gender.
If we’re lucky.” He shrugged, making it clear that he didn’t expect they would be.
“But a license plate or description of the cars would be good, since you can’t give us one. ”
“Isn’t that something Ward could ask?” I asked him, poking my fork through some noodles. I knew they’d done victim interviews, but I wasn’t usually a part of them.
“Oh, we did,” he replied. “But we didn’t get much.
A dark SUV. A light-colored pickup, rusty.
And a dark Cadillac sedan, and that one we know mostly because of you, because the victim only knew that the car was dark.
” He shrugged. “Surviving victims aren’t really any more likely to have seen the vehicle that tried to hit them.
But more people is still more data points. ”
I nodded. It made sense, I supposed.
Raj opened his mouth to say something else, but his phone started buzzing, and he frowned, pulling it out of his pocket. His expression turned hopeful as he glanced at the screen.
“You have something for me already?” he asked, presumably talking to Cass again. “No shit?”
He pushed back his chair, and I assumed our dinner was over. Or, at least, the part where we were both eating was over.