She arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I know where it is.”
She swiveled her chair in a small arc. “Assuming this is accurate, and I’m interested, what’s the favor?”
“I want you to capture the leanansidhe,” I said.
Her suspicious look returned. “You’re not telling me everything. Assuming what you say is true about the Guild’s interest in Sekka, capturing the leanansidhe pales in comparison. Why are you offering something so important for something so not important?”
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Honestly,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Because the leanansidhe scares the hell out of me, and I don’t have the power or ability to bring her in. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if she’s left running free.”
Keeva’s jaw dropped in surprise. “Whoa! When you said ‘honestly,’ I wasn’t expecting . . . honesty.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, that’s how much I need you to do this, Keeva. In fact, to make it even easier for you, the leanansidhe has what Sekka was hiding. It’s in her cave.” I picked up a pen from her desk and pulled a sheet of note-paper toward me. “This is where she’s hiding.”
I handed Keeva a rough map of the tunnel route from the abandoned warehouse. She stared down at the scribble, then at me. “Do you want to tell me why you’re so scared?”
I smiled. “Do you want to talk about your glamour?”
She tossed the map on her desk. “Assuming your theory is correct—and I’m not saying it is—I’ll take your request under advisement. You need to leave now. I don’t want anyone seeing you in here if you’re not officially in the building.”
Keeva and I had a long history, not all of it good. We both had egos, and we had clashed often when we were partners. But at the end of the day, I thought we believed the other would do the right thing. Not necessarily what both of us thought was the right thing, but the right thing in some respect. Now, though, this gulf existed between us that I didn’t think we could bridge anymore. She worked for an organization I no longer believed in. I worked outside the chain of command in a way she couldn’t condone. And that was okay with me. She had a career to think about. If I didn’t think someday we’d see eye to eye, I wouldn’t have bothered talking to her. I gave her a wink and left without argument.
As I rode the freight elevator back to the basement, relief and regret fought in my stomach. The urge to make another visit to the leanansidhe bordered on overwhelming. Asking Keeva to do something to take that option off the table was the right thing to do. I didn’t like how the leanansidhe made me feel precisely because I liked how she made me feel. Keeva could get the leanansidhe into the Guildhouse, a controlled environment. Maybe then Briallen or Gillen Yor would have something to work with. If the leanansidhe held the key to the dark mass in my head, I would rather that someone other than her turned it.
27
The ring of my cell phone startled me out of a dreamless sleep. After leaving the Guildhouse the previous afternoon, I had gathered my resource materials and holed up in my living room in a fruitless quest to figure out a way to get rid of Uno. Squinting against the light in my living room, I pushed aside the nest of books that surrounded me as I groped for the phone. Uno rose from the floor at the foot of the bed, a physical reminder that my research had gone nowhere, the dry, academic prose of many of the books lulling me into a bored stupor. The dog vanished as my hand closed on the phone, probably fading off to Shay’s apartment again.
“I need you,” Murdock had said.
The man didn’t return my calls all day and night, then rang me at five o’clock in the morning like it was a perfectly normal time for either of us to be awake. Granted, I spent more of my waking hours in the middle of the night than most people, but I was surprised Murdock was up that early—so early that I had to take a cab down to the morgue to meet him because the subway wasn’t open.
I went around the back to the back of the OCME. The building was open twenty-four hours, but the main door was locked before 6:00 A.M. The loading dock, though, remained open for business twenty-four/seven. Dead bodies didn’t much care about regular office hours.
A morgue in the middle of the night is exactly how you imagine it would be. Dim atmosphere, cold light, dark corners, empty corridors, and dead bodies in freezers. Under normal circumstances, I would write off the notion of a dead person leaping out of a darkened room as the product of an overactive imagination. Boston after the Samhain catastrophe, though, made the idea not only plausible, but even likely.
The bright light from the cooling room cast a stark blue beam into the dark basement hallway. When I reached the door, Janey and Murdock looked at me with relief and irritation. They stood on opposite sides of an examining table—a large examining table—with Sekka’s body laid out on it. Her head had been placed above the neck.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to talk sense to him for an hour,” said Janey.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Murdock rested his hands on his hips. “I was thinking the best way to find out if Jark was telling the truth about the night he died was to ask Sekka.”
I joined them at the table. “You want to reanimate her.”
“Exactly,” he said.
I opened my sensing ability and looked at Sekka. “I think we’re too late for that. Her body essence is long gone.”
“Well, then, where is it? You keep saying the Dead are here because TirNaNog is gone. If that’s true, where are the dead solitaries going?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have an answer for that, Murdock. But I do know that there is no more essence in this body, and without essence, there is no reanimation.”
Janey crossed her arms. “I already told him Jark killed Sekka.”
That surprised me. “He’s an eyewitness to his own murder. How do we refute that he said she killed him?”
Janey gestured at Sekka’s body. “Physical evidence. Jark left here with a city-issued coverall as clothing. He didn’t want what he was wearing when he died.”
“I don’t blame him. It did go through the sewer,” I said.
Janey nodded. “But that didn’t wash out the DNA evidence in his clothes. I tested it. They were soaked in Sekka’s blood and his own.”
I pursed my lips. “You’re suggesting he couldn’t have Sekka’s blood on him if she killed him first.”
“Right.”
“But if she was near him when she was killed, her blood could have gotten on him if she was close enough.”
Janey nodded again. “True. But if she killed Jark first like he said she did, she’d have his blood on her. It’s virtually impossible to decapitate someone and not get blood on you. I checked everywhere. The only blood on Sekka is her own. The blood on Jark is hers and his.”
“He killed her first,” Murdock said.
“Which leaves the Hound,” I said.
Murdock stared down at Sekka. “You’re sure this won’t work?”
I shrugged and looked at the clock. “Yeah, but we can wait until dawn if you want.”
He nodded. “I’d like that.”
Janey and I exchanged a bewildered look. Murdock usually deferred matters of the fey world to me. He never disputed the things I told him. For someone who had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, Janey seemed a lot more understanding than I was. As the only fey person on staff at the OCME, Janey was used to humans making odd requests and ignoring her expertise.
“Okay. We’re here, so we might as well,” I said.
Another twenty minutes would decide the issue either way, and waiting was a small thing compared to contributing to Murdock’s anger and frustration. I didn’t see the need to get into an argument about it.