"I know about Zee," I told him. "He didn't kill anyone."
There was a little pause.
"Is it that you don't think he could do something like this, or do you know something specifically about the crime?"
"Zee's perfectly capable of killing," I told him. "However, I have it on very good authority that he didn't kill this person." I didn't tell him that if Zee had found O'Donnell alive, he would most likely have killed him. Somehow, that didn't seem helpful.
"Who is your very good authorityand did they happen to mention who did kill our victim?"
I pinched the top of my nose. "I can't tell youand they don't knowjust that the killer was not Zee. He found O'Donnell dead."
"Can you give me something more substantial? He was found kneeling over the body with blood on his hands and the blood was still warm. Mr. Adelbertsmiter is a fae, registered with the BFA for the past seven years. Nothing human did this, Mercy. I can't talk about the specifics, but nothing human did this."
I cleared my throat. "I don't suppose you could keep that last bit out of the official report, eh? Until you catch the real killer, it would be a very good idea not to have people stirred up against the fae."
Tony was a subtle person, and he caught what I wasn't saying. "Is this like when you said it would be very good if the police didn't go looking for the fae as a cause of the rise in violent crime this summer?"
"Exactly like that." Well, not quite, and honesty impelled me to correct myself. "This time, though, the police themselves won't be in danger. But Zee will, and the real killer will be free to kill elsewhere."
"I need more than your word," he said finally. "Our expert consultant is convinced that Zee is our culprit, and her word carries a lot of weight."
"Your expert consultant?" I asked. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing to an expert consultant on fae that the Tri-Cities police forces had.
"Dr. Stacy Altman, a folklore specialist from the University of Oregon, flew in this morning. She is paid a lot, which means my bosses think we ought to listen to her advice."
"Maybe I should charge more when I consult for you," I told him.
"I'll double your paycheck next time," he promised.
I got paid exactly nothing for my advice, which was fine with me. I was liable to be in enough trouble without the local supernatural community thinking I was narking to the police.
"Look," I told him. "This is unofficial." Zee hadn't told me not to say anything about the deaths on the reservationbecause he hadn't thought he would have to. It was something I already knew.
However, if I spoke fast, maybe I could get it all out before I thought about how unhappy they might be with me for telling the police. "There have been some deaths among the faeand good evidence that O'Donnell was the killer. Which was why Zee went to O'Donnell's house. If someone found out before Zee, they might have killed O'Donnell."
If that were true, it might save Zee (at least from the local justice system), but the political consequences could be horrific. I'd been just a kid when the fae had first come out, but I remembered the KKK burning a house with its fae occupants still in it and the riots in the streets of Houston and Baltimore that provided the impetus to confine the fae on reservations.
But it was Zee who mattered. The rest of the fae could rot as long as Zee was safe.
"I haven't heard anything about people dying in Fairyland."
"Why would you?" I asked. "They don't bring in outsiders."
"Then how do you know about it?"
I'd told him I wasn't a fae or a werewolfbut some things bear repeating so eventually they believe you. That's the theory I was working with. "I told you I'm not fae," I said. "I'm not. But I know some things and they thought I might be able to help." That sounded really lame.
"That's lame, Mercy."
"Someday," I told him, "I'll tell you all about it. Right now, I can't. I don't think I'm supposed to be telling you about this either, but it's important. I believe O'Donnell has killed" I had to go over it in my head"seven fae in the past month." Zee hadn't taken me to the other murder scenes. "You aren't looking at a law enforcement agent who was killed by the bad guys. You are looking at a bad guy who was killed by" Whom? Good guys? More bad guys? "Someone."
"Someone strong enough to rip a grown man's head off, Mercy. Both of his collarbones were broken by the force of whatever did it. Our high-paid consultant seems to think Zee could have done it."
Oh? I frowned at my cell phone.
"What kind of fae does she say that Zee is? How much does she know about them?" I figured if Zee hadn't told me any of the stories about his past, and I had looked for them, this consultant could not possibly know any more than I did.
"She said he's a gremlinso does he, for that matter. At least on his registration papers. He's not said a word since we picked him up."
I had to think for a minute on how to best help Zee. Finally I decided that since he was actually innocent, the more truth that came to light, the better off he would be.
"You're consultant isn't worth squat," I told Tony. "Either she doesn't know as much as she says she does, or she's got her own agenda."
"Why do you say that?"
"There are no such things as gremlins," I told him. "It's a term made up by British pilots in the Great War as an explanation for odd things that kept their planes from working. Zee is a gremlin only because he claims he is."
"Then what is he?"
"A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I've done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I've never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I've seen him do it. I don't know if he'd have had the strength to rip someone's head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she's calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation."
"World War One?" asked Tony thoughtfully.
"You can look it up on the Internet," I assured him. "By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons."
"Maybe that's when he was born. Maybe he's where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy's planes."
"Zee is a lot older than World War One."
"How do you know?"
It was a good question, and I didn't have a proper answer for it. He'd never really told me how old he was.
"When he is angry," I said slowly, "he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original languageZee sounds like that."
"I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German."
Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren't entirely useless. "English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages."
Tony made an unhappy noise. "Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you're telling me that he didn't do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn't know as much as she says she does. That O'Donnell was a murdererthough the fae will probably deny that any murders ever took placebut if I so much as ask about it, we're going to have the Feds breathing down our necks because now this crime involves Fairyland. All this without one hard, cold piece of evidence."
"Yes."
He swore nastily. "The hell of it is that I believe you, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how I'm going to tell any of this to my bossespecially as I'm not really in charge of this case."
There was a long silence on both our parts.
"You need to get him a lawyer," he said. "He's not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is innocent, especially if he is innocent, he needs a very good lawyer."
"All right," I agreed. "I don't suppose I could get in to get a look" a sniff, actually"at the crime scene?" Maybe I'd be able to find out something that modern science could notlike someone who'd been at one of the other murder sites.
He sighed. "Get a lawyer and ask him. I don't think I'm going to be able to help you with that. Even if he gets you in, you'll have to wait until our crime scene people are through with it. You'd do better to hire a private investigator, though, someone who knows how to look at a crime scene."
"All right," I said. "I'll find a lawyer." Hiring a human investigator would either be a waste of moneyor a death sentence for the investigator if he happened upon some secret or other that the Gray Lords didn't want made public. Tony didn't need to know that.
"Tony, make sure you are looking farther than the length of your nose for a killer. It wasn't Zee."
He sighed. "All right. All right. I'm not assigned to this case, but I'll talk to some of the guys who are."
We said our good-byes and I looked around for Kyle.
I found him standing in a small crowd a little ways away, far enough from the stage that their conversation didn't interfere with the next performer's music. Samuel and his instrument cases were in the center of the group.
I put my cell phone in my back pocket (a habit that has destroyed two phones so far) and tried to blank my face. It wouldn't help with the werewolves, who would be able to smell my distress, but at least I wouldn't have complete strangers stop and ask me what was wrong.
There was an earnest-looking young man wearing a tie-dyed shirt talking at Samuel, who was watching him with amusement apparent only to people who knew him very well.
"I haven't ever heard that version of the last song you played," the young man was saying. "That's not the usual melody used with it. I wanted to find out where you heard it. You did an excellent jobexcept for the pronunciation of the third word in the first verse. This" he said something that sounded vaguely Welsh"is how you said it, but it should really be" another unpronounceable word that sounded just like the first one he'd uttered. I may have grown up in a werewolf pack led by a Welshman, but English was the common language and neither the Marrok nor Samuel his son used Welsh often enough to give me an ear for it. "I just thought that since everything else was so well done, you should know."
Samuel gave him a little bow and said about fifteen or twenty Welsh-sounding words.
The tie-dyed man frowned. "If that's where you looked for pronunciation, it is no wonder you had a problem. Tolkien based his Elvish on Welsh and Finnish."
"You understood what he said?" Adam asked.
"Oh, please. It was the inscription on the One Ring, you know, One Ring to Rule Them Alleveryone knows that much."
I stopped where I was, bemused despite the urgency of my need. A folk song nerd, who would have thought?
Samuel grinned. "Very good. I don't speak any more Elvish than that, but I couldn't resist playing with you a little. An old Welshman taught me the song. I'm Samuel Cornick, by the way. You are?"
"Tim Milanovich."
"Very good to meet you, Tim. Are you performing later?"
"I'm doing a workshop with a friend." He smiled shyly. "You might like to attend it: Celtic folk music. Two o'clock Sunday in the Community Center. You play very well, but if you want to make it in the music business, you need to organize your songs better, get a themelike Celtic folk songs. Come to my class, and I'll give you a few ideas."
Samuel gave him a grave smile, though I knew the chances of Samuel «organizing» his music was about an icicle's chance in Hell. But he lied, politely enough. "I'll try to catch it. Thank you."
Tim Milanovich shook Samuel's hand and then wandered off, leaving only the werewolves and Kyle behind.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Samuel's eyes focused on me. "What's wrong, Mercy?"
CHAPTER 4
Kyle found a lawyer for me. He assured me that she was expensive, a pain in the neck, and the best criminal defense attorney this side of Seattle. She wasn't happy to be defending a fae, but, Kyle told me, that wouldn't affect her performance, only her price. She lived in Spokane, but she agreed that time was of the essence. By three that afternoon she was in Kennewick.
Once assured that Zee wasn't talking to the police, she'd demanded to meet with me in Kyle's office first, before she went to the police station. To hear the story from me, she told Kyle, before she spoke to Zee or the police.
Since it was a Saturday, Kyle's efficient staff and the other two lawyers who worked with him were gone, and we had his luxurious office suite to ourselves.
Jean Ryan was a fifty-something woman who had kept her figure with hard work that left taut muscles beneath the light linen suit she wore. Her pale, pale blond hair could only have come from a salon, but the surprisingly soft blue eyes owed nothing to contact lenses.
I don't know what she thought when she looked at me, though I saw her eyes take in my broken nails and the ingrained dirt on my knuckles.
The check I wrote to her made me swallow hard and hope that Uncle Mike would be as good as his word and cover the amountand this was for only the initial consultation. Maybe my mother had been right, and I should have been a lawyer. She always maintained that at least as a lawyer my contrary nature would be an asset.
Ms. Ryan tucked my check into her purse, then folded her hands on the top of the table in the smaller of Kyle's two conference rooms. "Tell me what happened," she said.
I had just started when Kyle cleared his throat. I stopped to look at him.
"Zee can't afford for Jean to know just the safest part," he told me. "You have to tell her everything. No one knows how to sniff out a lie like a criminal defense lawyer."
"Everything?" I asked him, wide-eyed.
He patted my shoulder. "Jean can keep secrets. If she doesn't know everything, then she's defending your friend with one hand tied behind her back."
I folded my arms across my chest and gave her a long, level look. There was nothing about her that inspired me to trust her with my secrets. A less motherly looking woman I'd seldom seenexcept for those eyes.
Her expression was cool and vaguely unhappywhether it was caused by driving a hundred and fifty miles on a Saturday, defending a fae, defending a murderer, or all three, I couldn't tell.
I took a deep breath and sighed. "All right."
"Start with the reason why Mr. Adelbertsmiter would feel the need to call in a mechanic to examine a murder scene," she said without tripping on Zee's name. I wondered uncharitably if she'd practiced it on the drive over. "It should begin, 'Because I'm not just a mechanic, I'm a "
I narrowed my eyes at her; the vague dislike her appearance had instilled in me blossomed at her patronizing tone. Being raised among werewolves left me with a hearty dislike of patronizing tones. I didn't like her, didn't trust her to defend Zeeand only defending Zee would be worth exposing my secrets to her.
Kyle read my face. "She's a bitch, Mercy. That's what makes her so good. She'll get your friend off if she can."
One of her elegant eyebrows rose. "Thank you so very much for the character assessment, Kyle."
Kyle smiled at her, a relaxed, full-faced smile. Whatever I thought of her, Kyle liked her. Since it couldn't be her warm manner, it must mean she was good people.
I'd have felt better if she'd had pets. A dog or even a cat would have hinted at a warmth that I couldn't see in her, but she only smelled of Chanel No. 5 and dry-cleaning fluid.
"Mercy," coaxed Kyle in a tone he must have perfected with the women whose divorces he handled. "You have to tell her."
I don't go around telling people I'm a walker. Outside of my family, Kyle is the only human who knows.
"Freeing your friend might mean that you have to take the stand and tell a whole courtroom of people what you are," said Ms. Ryan. "How much do you care about what happens to Mr. Adelbertsmiter?"
She thought I was a fae of some kind.
"Fine." I got out of the sinfully comfortable chair and walked over to the window to look down at the traffic on Clearwater Avenue for a moment. I could see only one way to get this over with quickly.
"I'm not just a mechanic," I told her, using her words, "I'm Zee's friend." I spun abruptly on my heel so that I faced her and pulled my T-shirt over my head, using my toes to push off my tennis shoes and socks at the same time.
"Are you trying to tell me you're a stripper, too?" she asked, as I took off my bra and dropped it on top of my shirt on the floor. From her tone of voice, I could have been doing sit-ups instead of undressing.
I unsnapped my jeans and pushed them off my hips along with my underwear. When I stood wearing nothing but my tattoos, I called the coyote to me and sank into her shape. It was over in moments.
"Werewolf?" Ms. Ryan had scrambled out of her chair and was backing slowly to the door.
She couldn't tell a coyote from a werewolf? That was like looking at a Geo Metro and calling it a Hum-Vee.
I could smell her fear and it satisfied something deep inside me that had been writhing under her cool, superior expression. I curled my upper lip so she could get a good look at my teeth. I might weigh only thirty or so pounds in my coyote shape, but I was a predator and could have killed a person if I wanted to: I'd killed a werewolf once with nothing but my fangs.
Kyle was up and beside her before she could run out the door. He took her arm in a firm grip.
"If she were a werewolf, you'd be in trouble," Kyle told her. "Never run from a predator. Even the best behaved of them will have a hard time restraining themselves from chasing after prey."
I sat down and yawned away the last of the change-tingles. It also gave her another look at my teeth, which seemed to bother her. Kyle gave me a chiding look, but continued soothing the other lawyer.
"She's not a werewolf; they're a lot bigger and scarier, trust me. She's not fae either. She's something a little different, native to our land, not imported like the fae or werewolves. The only thing she can do is shift to coyote and back."
Not quite. I could kill vampiresas long as they were helpless, imprisoned by the day.
I swallowed, trying to get moisture to my suddenly dry mouth. I hated this sudden, gut-wrenching fear that assaulted me without warning. Every time I saw the little hitch in Warren's walk, I knew I would destroy the vampires againbut I paid the cost of their elimination with these panic attacks..
Kyle's calm explanation had given Ms. Ryan time to restore her calm facade. Kyle probably couldn't tell how angry she was, but my keener senses weren't fooled by the cool control she'd regained. She was still afraid, but her fear was not as strong as her rage.
Fear usually made me angry, too. Angry and careless. I wondered if showing her what I was had been such a good idea.
I changed back into my human self and ignored the growl of hunger that the two quick changes left me with. I put my clothes back on, taking time to tie my tennis shoes so that the bow was even before I resumed my seat, giving Ms. Ryan time to regain her composure.
She was seated when I looked up, but she'd moved to the other side of the table and taken the chair next to Kyle's.
"Zee is my friend," I told her again in measured tones. "He taught me everything I know about fixing cars and sold me his shop when he was forced to admit he was fae."
She frowned at me. "Are you older than you look? You'd have been a child when the fae came out."
"All of them didn't come out at once," I told her. Her question settled my nerves. It was Zee whose life was at stake here, not mine. Not just yet. I kept talking so she wouldn't ask why Zee had come out. The one thing I absolutely couldn't tell an outsider was the existence of the Gray Lords. "Zee only admitted what he was a few years ago, seven or eight, maybe. He knew that being a fae would keep people away from the shop. I'd been working for him for a couple of years and he liked me so he sold it to me."
I collected my thoughts, trying to tell her what she needed to know without taking forever about it. "As I told you, he called me yesterday to ask for my help because someone had been killing fae in the reservation. Zee thought my nose might be able to pick out the killer. I gather I was sort of a last resort. When we got to the rez, O'Donnell was at the gate and wrote down my name when we drove throughthat is on record. I imagine the police will find it, if they think to look. Zee took me through the murder scenes and I discovered that one man had been present at each houseO'Donnell."
She'd been taking notes in a stenographer's notebook but stopped, set down her pencil, and frowned. "O'Donnell was present at all the murder scenes and you verified that by smelling him?"
I raised my eyebrows. "A coyote has a keen sense of smell, Ms. Ryan. I have a very good memory for scents. I caught O'Donnell's when he stopped us as we went inand his scent was in every one of the murder victims' houses I visited."
She stared at mebut she was no werewolf who might rip my throat out for challenging herso I met her stare with one of my own.
She dropped her eyes first, ostensibly looking at her notes. People, human people, can be pretty deaf to body language. Maybe she didn't even notice that she'd lost the dominance contest, though her subconscious would.
"I understand O'Donnell was employed by the BFA as security," she said, turning back a few pages. "Couldn't he have been there investigating the deaths?"
"The BFA had no idea there were any murders," I told her. "The fae do their own internal policing. If they had gone to the Feds for help, I'm pretty sure it would be the FBI who would have been called in, not the BFA anyway. And O'Donnell was a guard, not an investigator. I was told that there was no reason O'Donnell should have been in every house that there was a murder in, and I have no reason to doubt that."
She'd started writing again, in shorthand. I'd never actually seen anyone use shorthand before.
"So you told Mr. Adelbertsmiter that O'Donnell was the murderer?"
"I told him that he was the only person whose scent I found in all the scenes."
"How many scenes?"
"Four." I decided not to tell her that there had been others; I didn't want to tell her why I hadn't gone to all the murder scenes. If Zee hadn't wanted to talk about my trip Underhill with me, I thought it would not be something he wanted me discussing with a lawyer.
She paused again. "There were four people murdered in the reservation and they did not ask for help?"
I gave her a thin smile. "The fae are not fond of attracting outside attention. It can be dangerous for everyone. They are also quite aware of the way most humans, including the Feds, feel about them. 'The only good fae is a dead fae' mentality is quite prevalent among the conservatives who make up most of the rank and file in the government whether they be Homeland Security, FBI, BFA, or any of the other alphabet soup agencies."
"You have trouble with the federal government?" she asked.
"As far as I know, none of them are prejudiced against half-Indian mechanics," I told her, matching her blandness with my own, "so why would I have a problem with them? However, I can certainly see why the fae would be reluctant to turn over a series of murders to a government whose record for dealing with the fae is not exactly spotless." I shrugged. "Maybe if they'd realized sooner that their killer wasn't another fae, they might have done so. I don't know."
She looked down at her notes. "So you told Zee that O'Donnell was the killer?"
I nodded. "Then I took Zee's truck and drove home. It was early in the morning, maybe four o'clock, when we parted company. It was my understanding that he was going to go over to O'Donnell's and talk to him."
"Just talk?"
I shrugged, glanced at Kyle, and tried to decide how far I trusted his judgement. All the truth, hmm? I sighed. "That's what he said, but I was pretty sure that if O'Donnell didn't have a good story, he wouldn't wake up this morning."
Her pencil hit the table with a snap.
"You are telling me that Zee went to O'Donnell's house to murder him?"
I took a deep breath. "You aren't going to understand this. You don't know the fae, not really. Imprisoning a fae isimpractical. First of all, it's damned difficult. Holding a person is hard enough. Holding a fae for any time at all, if he doesn't want to be held, is near impossible. Even without that, a life sentence is highly impractical when fae can live for hundreds of years." Or a lot more, but the public didn't know that. "And when you let them go, they aren't likely to shrug it off as justice served. The fae are a vengeance-hungry race. If you imprison a fae, for whatever reason, you'd better be dead when he gets out or you'll wish you were. Human justice just isn't equipped to deal with the fae, so they take care of it. A fae who commits a serious crimelike murderis simply executed on the spot." The werewolves did the same.
She pinched the bridge of her nose as if I were giving her a headache.
"O'Donnell wasn't fae. He was human."
I thought about trying to explain why a people who were used to dealing out their own justice would care less that the perpetrator was human, but decided it was pointless. "The fact remains that Zee did not kill O'Donnell. Someone got there first."
Her bland face didn't indicate belief, so I asked, "Do you know the story of Thomas the Rhymer?"
"True Thomas? It's a fairy tale," she said. "A prototype of Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle. "
"Uhm," I said. "Actually, I'm under the impression that it was mostly a true story, Thomas's I mean. Thomas was, at any rate, a real historical person, a noted political entity of the thirteenth century. He claimed that he'd been caught for seven years by the queen of the fairies, then allowed to return. He either asked the fairy queen for a sign that he could show his kin so they would believe him when he told them where he'd been, or he stole a kiss from the fairy queen. Whatever the reason, he was given a gift, and like most fairy gifts, it was more curse than blessingthe fairy queen rendered him incapable of lying. For a diplomat or a lover or a businessman, that was a cruel thing to do, but the fae are often cruel."
"Your point?"
She didn't sound happy. I guess she didn't like thinking any of the fairy tales were true. It was a common attitude.
People could believe in the fae, but fairy tales were fairy tales. Only children would really believe in them.
It was an attitude that the fae themselves promoted. In most folktales, the fae are not exactly friendly. Take Hansel and Gretel, for instance. Zee once told me that there are a lot of fae in the rez, if left to their preferred diets, would happily eat peopleespecially children.
"He was cursed to become like the fae themselves," I told her. "Most fae, including Zee, cannot tell a lie. They are very, very good at making you think they are saying one thing, when they mean another, but they cannot lie."
"Everyone can lie."
I smiled at her tightly. "The fae cannot. I don't know why. They can do the damnedest things with the truth, but they cannot lie. So." I sighed unhappily. I had tried to figure out a way to leave Uncle Mike out, but unfortunately there was no other way to tell this part. Zee and I hadn't talked since his arrest; that was a matter of public record. I had to convince her that Zee was innocent. "I haven't spoken to Zee yet, so I don't know what his story"
"No one has," she said. "My contact at the police department assured me that he hasn't spoken to anyone since he was arresteda wise move that allowed me to talk to you before I speak to him."
"There was another fae who went with Zeehe's the one who told me Zee didn't kill O'Donnell. He and Zee walked in and found the dead body about the same time the police showed up. The other fae was able to hide himself from the police, but Zee did not."
"Could he have hidden, too?"
I shrugged. "All the fae have glamour which allows them to change their appearance. Some of them can hide themselves entirely. You'll have to ask himthough he probably won't tell you. I think Zee did it so that the police wouldn't look too hard and find his friend."
"Self-sacrifice?" Maybe someone who hadn't been raised with werewolves wouldn't have seen the scorn she felt for my theory. Fae, she apparently thought, weren't capable of self-sacrifice.