“He told you exactly who to sell it to? Does he do that a lot?”
“N-never, but this was, you know, circumstances, and I mean, I…” He thumped the back of his skull against the coffin. “I didn’t want to hurt those kids! But Jesus, he was gonna pay me ten grand. Cash. You know how much money that is to a guy like me? I could get a new van, pay off my bills—”
I stood over him and searched his eyes.
“You knew. You knew the ink was bad.”
“He told me, get it to Rob before his house party, stay cool, don’t blow it. And don’t go. I was—I was planning on going. So I asked him why. And he told me. He told me his boss needed to take somebody out, and this was how they wanted it done. I said I wasn’t gonna do that, that’s not me, and that’s when he offered me the money. All I had to do was sell Rob the stuff and walk away. It wasn’t like I had to kill anybody with my own hands. I just had to sell it and walk away.”
He knew. He’d lobbed a bomb made of madness into a house filled with kids. And he did it for ten thousand measly bucks. I didn’t lose my temper. I was too angry for that. All I felt was cold, like a sheath of ice crackling its way down my spine, frost flooding my veins. I was cold enough to do anything.
“Who was the target?” I asked, my voice soft now. “Was it Rob?”
“N-no,” he stammered. “It was this chick, Mel…Melanie something. Loomis! Melanie Loomis. Santiago said she was going to be at the party, and his boss wanted her dead. Dead in a way that would look like an accident.”
I set my hand on the edge of the pine box and took a slow, deep breath. Four seconds in, four seconds out.
“Sit tight,” I told him. “I need to make a phone call.”
*
I came back half an hour later, and I wasn’t alone.
“I want you to meet some people,” I told him.
Todd’s eyes flicked from me to Caitlin to Emma and back again. He was too scared to open his mouth. That suited me fine. I needed him to hear every word I was about to say.
“First of all, this ‘chick’ you were paid to kill with tainted drugs? I know her. In fact, I’m really, really protective of her. I suppose you could almost say I’m her”—I glanced sidelong at Emma—“godfather? Is that fair?”
“Against my better judgment,” she replied. Her eyes were locked onto Todd like a pair of diamond-tipped drills.
“Now, this lady on my right, her name is Caitlin. Here’s a fun fact, Todd. He might not have gone into specifics, but your buddy Santiago has demon blood.”
“Demon blood,” Todd echoed, breathing the words.
“Yep. But just a little. Just enough for a tiny kick. A little spice. But Caitlin, here? She’s the real thing.”
Caitlin’s eyes blossomed with swirling motes of copper. They gusted across her pupils like a storm of burning embers, blotting everything out until nothing remained but two seething orbs of molten metal. She parted her lips, showing double rows of jagged shark’s teeth.
“Part of Caitlin’s job is watching out for people under her prince’s protection. People like Melanie. She takes her job very seriously.”
Todd squirmed in his duct-tape cocoon, thrashing against the walls of the pine coffin like a fish drowning in air. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t know—”
“Now, on my left,” I said, “here’s someone you really need to meet. This is Emma Loomis. Melanie’s mother. She also works for the courts of hell. Emma, you had the best idea just now, out in the hallway. Want to tell him about it?”
She curled her lips into a razor-thin smile.
“Absolutely. I was just saying that we’re in a mortuary filled with autopsy tools. Scalpels, saws, caustic chemicals, so much to play with…and I was thinking that unless you tell us everything we want to know, and I do mean everything, we’d take turns tearing you apart, one little piece at a time. And I get to go first.”
Emma leaned in close and dropped her voice to a whisper.
“You tried to murder my daughter. I’ve already decided what I’m going to cut off first and what tool I’m going to use. Would you like to guess, or should I make it a surprise?”
He talked after that. He talked plenty.
What we mostly got out of him—between frantic, babbling apologies—was that he didn’t know why Melanie had been targeted. All Santiago told Todd was that she’d been green-lit, they wanted it to look like a tragic accident, and the Network had no problem murdering an entire houseful of teenagers to get at a single target.
Santiago had set him up with a dedicated burner phone, for business only. He kept it stashed under the passenger seat of his van. He gave up the phone, the unlock code, and the password he always started texts with so Santiago would know it was really him. They used a custom-built app to talk, set to erase each message after it had been read, so I couldn’t get at their past chats to verify that. Still, at this point I had no doubt that every word on Todd’s lips was the purest truth. He was a drowning man, clutching at imaginary life preservers.
We also found out Todd was as incompetent a hit man as he was a drug dealer. He hadn’t gotten the money up-front. Santiago gave him the tainted batch of ink and told him he’d be paid once the job was done. I could use that.
The three of us peppered him with questions until we’d wrung him dry. There wasn’t anything left inside of him after that, nothing but fear and the faintest, most distant glimmer of hope.
I saved the hope for last.
“That’s it, then,” I told him and turned to walk away. Caitlin curled her arm around mine and followed suit.
“Wait!” he called out. “What…what now? Are you going to let me go?”
I glanced back at him, then looked to Emma.
“Not really my place to say. I mean, under the circumstances, I think that’s Melanie’s mom’s decision. What do you say, Emma? Should we let him go?”
She lingered beside a tray of autopsy tools. Her outstretched fingers glided across the implements while she thought it over. Her hand stopped. She scooped up a long pair of stainless-steel jaws, designed to crack open a corpse’s rib cage, and held them up to the light.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Todd started to scream. Caitlin and I walked out. As the door swung shut, my last glimpse was of Emma leaning over the pine box, slowly reaching inside.
11.
I needed some air. I sat in the front seat of Todd’s van, sideways, legs dangling out the open door as I huddled over his burner phone. I’d have one shot at approaching Santiago and setting up a meet. If I got it wrong, he’d dive underground, too deep to follow.
“It’s like submarine warfare,” I muttered.
Caitlin leaned against the side of the van. She stretched, languid, one hand raised like she was beckoning to the cold and starless sky.
“How’s that?”
“We’re prowling around each other, aiming for a direct shot. When we de-roached one of their dealers, and I had my run-in with that lawyer from Weishaupt and Associates, Smith…that was the opening salvo. We know the Network exists. They know that we know. The outstanding question now is, how much do they know about us?”
“You’re straddling two worlds these days, pet. Do you mean how much do they know about our court, or how much do they know about your criminal friends?”
“Both,” I said. “Look, I think we can agree that Melanie wasn’t targeted because of that article she was trying to write. There’s no chance the Network murdered over a dozen people—with their own product, no less—to knock off a teenager who wants to be an investigative journalist. The most Melanie could have possibly uncovered was…well, Todd. And that’s as far as the cops would have gotten, too.”
Caitlin nodded, taking that in as she got on my wavelength. “Not remotely worth the risk or the cost. Which suggests the real target was Emma.”
“Exactly. Kill a family member to send a message. But here’s the kicker: Emma works for your court—”