“Yes.”
Kona stared down at her feet, her lips pursed. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. You don’t need me telling you what your job is, especially when you’re still working this case and not getting any credit for it. The fact is, Latrelle wanted you here, but strictly on ‘a consulting basis.’ His words. I’m not even sure what he meant, and to be honest, I don’t know how we’re going to make this work. But I shouldn’t have said it that way.”
I shrugged, still not looking at her.
“Pressure’s high on this one, partner,” she said. “This guy’s had our number for three years now, and that’s bad enough. But you add in the Deegans, and suddenly everyone’s on edge, you know?”
I could imagine.
“The damn FBI’s back in town, acting as though they never bailed on us in the first place, asking why we haven’t made more progress while they were gone.” Kona paused, exhaled. “Anyway,” she went on, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” And it was. I’d never been able to stay mad at Kona for long, or her at me. Our friendship-our partnership-had always been too strong. I raised my chin toward the door we’d come through. “You’ll apologize for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “And I’ll get that information to you as quickly as I can. I promise.”
I nodded. “I know you will.”
She glanced back toward the door. “Anything more you can tell me about what you saw in there?”
“Not really.” We started walking back toward 620. “It’s the same shade of red, but it’s fading faster than it used to. Otherwise it’s exactly like the other times. Mostly on her head and chest. No particular pattern, though it’s strongest around the eyes.”
“Nothing different at all?” Kona asked.
I shook my head, knowing where she was headed. “I don’t think he had any idea that this was Claudia Deegan. She was just another kid to him.”
“Yeah, well, that might have been true the other night. Not anymore. Things are about to get very hot for everyone involved in this case, including our friend with the red magic.”
We fell silent, and after a few moments I pulled out the list of protest arrests Kona had given me.
“Check on page three,” Kona said. “A bit past the middle.”
I read several names before I saw it. I stopped dead in my tracks and gaped at her. She stopped, too.
“Robby Sommer?” I said.
“Interesting, don’t you think? You’re trying to find the source of Claudia Deegan’s drugs, and look who gets his ass arrested at that protest Claudia put together.”
Robby Sommer was a small-time drug dealer who I’d busted several years back. He catered to high-end, low-volume buyers; rich college students for the most part. Kids like Claudia Deegan, although he wasn’t above selling to anyone he could find.
“You think he was connected to any of the other kids?” I asked.
“It’s possible,” Kona said. “A few of them were at the university; most of them were using.”
“But this is the first time we’ve-” I smiled self-consciously. “That you’ve had any kind of link between Robby and a victim.”
“Yeah. This is the first.”
We started walking again, and I stared at Robby’s name on that list. His address hadn’t changed since I arrested him. “I guess you should go see him.”
“Why don’t you?” Kona said. “Kevin and I have more than enough to keep us busy, and this is the type of thing you’d be doing for Wriker anyway.”
“All right.”
I expected her to remind me that since I wasn’t a cop anymore, I couldn’t push Robby too far, but she didn’t.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll do the same.”
“Thank you, Kona.”
We’d reached Washington again.
“No problem, partner. Talk to you soon.”
She continued back toward 620; I turned toward the City Hall parking lot, my chest aching. I’d never begrudge Kona her badge, but at that moment I wanted mine back more than I wanted anything.
Nobody would be surprised to learn that a drug dealer like Robby Sommer was a screw-up. What always amazed me about the kid, though, was how lucky he’d been. In the years since I’d arrested him, he had been hauled in at least three or four more times. But he’d only been convicted once, and then on a reduced count. Something always seemed to go wrong with Robby’s arrests-evidence was misplaced, procedures got fouled up. One time an assistant district attorney was found to have manufactured evidence in a number of cases-it was a huge scandal at the time-and while the evidence against Robby was completely legit, all of the perps in all of the assistant D.A.’s cases were released as a matter of course. This was the luckiest kid on the face of the earth.
I turned that thought over in my head as I drove to his place, amazed that this had never occurred to me before: What if Robby wasn’t merely lucky? What if the punk had access to magic? What if he had been hiding it from us all these years? Most of the time I could identify a weremyste on sight. They usually appeared to shimmer and waver, as if there were heat waves in front of them. A powerful runecrafter might look like little more than a blur. I’d never noticed anything like this with Robby, but maybe he wasn’t strong enough for me to notice, or at least hadn’t been the last time our paths crossed. I thought of that faint hint of beige glow on the door of the building where I had found Jessie Tyler. Could that have been Robby? Had luck saved him yet again?
Maybe. But with Claudia Deegan dead, with drugs found in her backpack and in her blood, and with some connection established between her and Sommer, it was possible that Robby’s winning streak was about to end.
Robby might have been thinking the same thing. As soon as I knocked on the door of his house, a small place on Hermosa, near the interchange of Highway 101 and U.S. 60, I heard a screen door fly open in the back. I leaped off the front stoop and sprinted around the house in time to see someone disappear over a cinderblock wall.
I went after him, knowing that I could clear the wall easily. But as I was about to throw myself over it, I felt magic. I stopped myself the only way I could: essentially by running into the wall. I didn’t go over it, which was good because flames had erupted from its top-just like the flames I’d seen earlier that day at the spark den. I gathered that fire was Robby’s attack magic of choice, which wasn’t so surprising. Fire spells were about the most rudimentary assailing magic a myste could use.
Three elements: the cinderblocks, Robby’s flames, and a magical blanket to snuff them out. The air around me hummed with the power of my own spell, and an instant later the flames on the wall died down. I climbed over, feeling the heat of the blaze still radiating from the stone. Once on the ground again, I ran on, following the retreating sound of Robby’s footsteps.
It was my turn for an attack spell. I didn’t try anything fancy; I wanted to slow him down, not kill him. My hand, his back, and a good hard shove.
I heard him stumble, then curse. Emerging from between two houses, I saw him scrambling to his feet half a block down the street. And yes, this time I did notice a faint blur around his face and neck. The son of a bitch was a runecrafter, albeit a weak one. He glanced back, took off again. I chased him across a couple of small yards, and followed him into another narrow alley between two ramshackle houses. This wasn’t exactly textbook police procedure, but Robby had never been a violent kid. Just a slimeball, and not a particularly smart one at that. He broke out into a second open street and I ran after him; by now I was only a few steps behind. He dodged a kid on a bicycle; I tried to do the same, spun, and fell, tearing my jeans and most of the skin on my right knee.
I was on my feet again in a second or two, but I was limping now, and I was pissed off. I might have lost him, but he turned down a second alley that proved to be a dead end. Did I mention that Robby wasn’t so smart?