Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  Chapter 2

  The type of assassinations that presaged the Council War—as the latest spat between Magi Families was being called—continued in the Metroplex. Members of Magi Families—even the youngest, least consequential members—were learning to travel with security guards and shields.

  And then there was the sabotage. While the war’s overt fighting was in a lull, there continued to be bombings—both mundane and magikal—of buildings and facilities on both sides. Magikal sabotage of electrical, hydrologic, and mechanical equipment—not to mention occasional other nasty tricks—were ongoing.

  So, while the soldiers employed by the various Families had time to drink, brawl, and whore, cops were knocking down overtime like crazy.

  Unfortunately, captains didn’t get overtime. We got something called “compensatory time.” That meant we could take extra time off some time after hell finished freezing over to make up for working twenty hours a day while we were still young enough to walk.

  Out of curiosity, I kept an eye on the old church. The demons finished gutting it, and the place stood idle—or so it appeared at first. Then, one morning, I noticed progress on new construction—someone had been working at night.

  That evening, after dinner with Aleks, I talked him into taking a detour from our normal route between the restaurant and his apartment. It was about ten o’clock, and we could see red light leaking through the cracks around the boarded-up windows.

  I swerved off the sidewalk and up the steps to the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Aleks asked.

  “I want to try and peek in. I’m curious as to what’s going on in there.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever vampires do at night when nobody’s watching.”

  “Vampires?”

  “Sure. Can’t you feel them?” Aleks was a spirit mage, the first one I had ever been close with, and I was still learning about his abilities.

  “No, I can’t. You can feel whether there’s a vampire or a demon or a mage in there? Through solid walls?”

  “Two demons.” He hesitated. “Twenty-three vampires, no mages.”

  “I’ll be damned. Can you tell the difference between a crook and an honest man?”

  He chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be great? No, and I’ve never heard of anyone who can. Even truthsayers can be fooled.”

  My curiosity still wasn’t satisfied. I climbed the front steps and put my eye to a place where the crack between the stone wall and the plywood covering the doorway was widest. I couldn’t see a whole lot, but it appeared as though the people inside were engaged in construction work. I leaned back and turned to Aleks, who had come up behind me.

  “Can you feel humans?”

  “Sure, but there aren’t any humans in there.”

  As we continued down the street, I thought about that. Vampires weren’t known as construction workers in the Mid-Atlantic, but I wasn’t sure about other places. I did know that they had cities and towns in their home dimension. They were somewhat civilized, by human standards. They had brought some of their animals across the Rift and were breeding herds in places such as the Russian steppes and the Argentine Pampas.

  “Who would hire vampires to do construction?” I asked.

  “Maybe they work cheap,” Aleks said.

  Maybe. But a church? Rifters were forbidden under the Compact to allow humans to worship in any Rifter religion. Some humans did, of course, but covertly. Sort of like being Catholics in sixteenth-century England, although I couldn’t see the attraction for demon worship.

  The following morning, I did a datanet search for vampire construction companies. I found two that said they employed vampires, although I had to do some digging to determine that. What they actually said was that vampires were encouraged to apply for jobs. Figuring out who owned those companies was even more difficult.

  Another hour of digging turned up that one was owned by the Rudolf Family, and the other by a partnership of Rudolf and Moncrieff. Karl Rudolf and David Moncrieff were both dead. David’s wife, Courtney Findlay-Moncrieff, was officially a wanted criminal, and her daughters were in Scotland in the protective custody of my grandmother, Olivia Findlay-James.

  I tried to call both companies, but their listed phone numbers had been disconnected. A check with the construction licensing authorities showed that both companies were in good standing in spite of the listed owners being deceased. Curiouser and curiouser.

  I spoke to my second-in-command, Lieutenant Mychal Novak, and to Carmelita, about the church, asking them to keep an eye on the place. But I didn’t have time to do much else as dispatch sent me an urgent message about a Magi murder.

  It was snowing outside, but little was sticking to the ground. The wind was the worst part, and the snow wasn’t falling so much as blowing sideways. The drive from Police Headquarters had been a joy, with streets more suited to ice skates than tires. It didn’t help that I wasn’t completely comfortable with the new car the department had given me. I decided I should add another set of stabilizers to the magitek devices I had already installed.

  I drove while Carmelita filled me in on the information she found on her laptop concerning the address that dispatch had given us.

  The Danner Family was one of the Hundred. Their headquarters was in Denver, but they had offices in the Baltimore-Washington Metroplex, just as most Magi Families did. They were loosely allied with Findlay, my grandmother’s Family, which put them on the side of the Western Alliance, which ruled what was left of the Magi Council.

  The Danners’ local trade representative, Fredrick Danner, lived in the Roland Park area of Baltimore, amidst other rich Magi. He was a younger brother of the Family head, married, with three children. The mansion was modest by the neighborhood standards, the grounds surrounded by a brick wall topped with spiked wrought iron.

  On one side of the large main house was a long, one-story building with multiple doors. A six-car garage was on the other side. The doors of what I assumed were servants’ apartments were all open in spite of the weather.

  The uniformed sergeant who met Carmelita and me at the front door said, “This is a strange one, Captain. I know we’re not supposed to jump to conclusions, but it looks like the whole damned family was poisoned.”

  He first led us to the kitchen, where the air was filled with the stench of burned bread mixed with the smells of sickness and death. A window was open, and the room was decidedly chilly. An open oven had half a dozen lumps of charcoal in blackened baking tins. A portly woman lay on the floor, her head in a puddle of vomit, and brown stains showing on the back of her dress.

  “She was baking bread,” the sergeant said. “Got sick, passed out, and the bread burned. Damned lucky the house didn’t catch on fire.”

  “Who called it in?” I asked.

  “The chauffeur. His room is over the garage. Said he was out with friends last night and didn’t eat here. The building next door has five small apartments for the servants. A body in each, one man and four women.”

  I sent Carmelita out to the servants’ quarters, while the uniformed cop led me upstairs to the third floor. “The family is up here.”

  “What about the security guards?” I asked.

  “Night shift didn’t see anyone. They took over at eleven last night, and the evening shift went home. All of them denied seeing any of the family after they came on shift.”

  Mr. Danner was in bed, and his wife was in the attached bathroom. Both showed signs of vomiting and diarrhea, and they were very dead. Down the hall, we found a man and a woman in separate rooms. Both looked to be university age and exhibited the same symptoms.

  In the woman’s room, I found Kelly Quinn, the Arcane Division medical examiner, crouched over the victim, who was half-sprawled onto the floor.

  “Initial impressions?” I asked.

  “Thallium sulfate poisoning. Possibly magikally enhanced,” Kelly said. “Dani, it would have been extremely painful.”

  “Time of poisoni
ng? Time of death?”

  Kelly shook her head. “Time of death, between midnight and three or four o’clock this morning for all the victims. I have some people going through the trash, cupboards, and refrigerators trying to identify any food that might have been consumed yesterday. I’m assuming the poison was delivered in either food or drink.”

  The servants’ quarters were visible from the bedroom window. “I haven’t seen the bodies outside,” I said. “Same symptoms?”

  “Identical.”

  “Then I would look at food. The servants wouldn’t be drinking the same wine as the family, but they would be eating some of the same food.”

  She nodded. “I’ll be able to tell you more once I can examine stomach contents.”

  “Looks like you won’t have to cut them open to do that,” I said, as I backed out of the room. All of the victims I had seen were violently sick before their deaths. It didn’t take a genius to understand why no one had called a doctor. Dealing with a phone while puking your guts out wouldn’t be easy for anyone.

  The sergeant and I headed out to the garage. “Tell me about the security guards,” I asked him as we walked.

  “Eight in total—contracted from Whittaker. Jeff Collins is their captain. Decent electronic security system, but mostly automated. The guards don’t live here, and their captain told me the night-shift guys bring their lunch or have it delivered sometimes.”

  “I’ll want to talk to their captain, and to each of them. Keep them separated from each other.”

  We entered the garage through a side door. One of the six slots for cars was empty, the others held a limo, a European sports car, and three expensive sedans. We took a set of stairs to the second floor.

  The chauffeur was younger than I expected. Mid-twenties and vid-star handsome.

  “Captain Danica James,” I said, flashing my ID.

  “Colin Murphy,” the chauffeur said. I noticed a hint of an Irish accent.

  I looked around. He had a small but comfortable apartment. Sitting room, kitchen with a table and chairs, bathroom, and bedroom.

  I took a seat on the couch. “Tell me what you did yesterday, where you were, who you were with, and what you found when you came home.”

  Murphy sat down in a chair across from me. The uniformed sergeant remained standing by the door.

  “Yesterday was my normal day off. I drove over to Delmarva to see a friend. We stayed the night at a hotel, and I drove back this morning. I discovered Martha’s body when I went into the kitchen about eight o’clock. The room was full of smoke. I opened the window and turned off the oven.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I called out, didn’t get any answer. When I checked upstairs, Lord Danner’s door was unlocked. I went in, and then I called the police.”

  “Did you touch anything? Any of the bodies?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Only the window and the oven, and I opened the front door. The smoke was all over the house.”

  “What about the security guards?”

  “I found Jeff after I called the cops. He went inside, but I stayed outside after that. I checked on the other staff and found them in their rooms.”

  “Who is your friend in Delmarva? And where in Delmarva?” The Delmarva Peninsula was a big place, and his description was rather vague.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  Considering the morning I was having, I wasn’t terribly sympathetic. I smiled and batted my eyes at him. “Sergeant, arrest Mr. Murphy on suspicion of murder.”

  “Wait! Look, her husband…” Murphy’s calm demeanor evaporated. Shaking his head, he leaned forward and said, “She won’t back my story.”

  I stood. “Sergeant, please have Mr. Murphy escorted downtown.”

  The look on Murphy’s face was priceless.

  Chapter 3

  “You arrested the chauffeur?” Carmelita asked. “What? They didn’t pay him enough or something?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think he did it, but he’s being uncooperative, and I’m not in the mood. I wanted to deliver a message not to screw with me. He gave me that tired old line, ‘I can’t corroborate my alibi because of her husband.’”

  Carmelita snorted.

  “At the very least, I can charge him with obstructing our investigation if he continues to piss me off,” I said. “Have we figured out where the other daughter is?”

  It was her turn to shake her head. “Julia? Nope. Bed not slept in. Guards say she left yesterday around noon and hasn’t come back. That was about an hour after the chauffeur left in his own car. I put out an all-points bulletin on the missing car.”

  She cocked her head and studied me. “This doesn’t feel like either the HLA or one of Akiyama’s assassinations.”

  The Human Liberation Army had carried out a series of terrorist bombings and assassinations in North America and Europe, but we had done a pretty good job of breaking up their network in the Metroplex. And the Akiyama Family and its allies had carefully targeted their covert assassination efforts. Killing women and children—not to mention servants—was something both sides in the war had avoided. No one wanted their own families harmed, or the war to turn into one with magitek-enhanced bombs decimating population centers. The war was over profits and control, and there wasn’t any profit to be made from a wasteland.

  “Yeah, I agree. I want you and Novak to tap into your country-club contacts and find out if anyone had a personal grudge. This strikes me as amateurish. No pro would plan this kind of collateral damage. And how would someone from outside manage to plant the poison?”

  “Deliveries of food,” Carmelita said.

  That made sense. “Call Luanne and have her come over here. We need to go through the household computer records with a fine-toothed comb.”

  Luanne Armstrong was my administrative assistant—a smart, young uniformed cop with good computer skills. I knew I could hack the Danners’ systems and give her access.

  I spent the next two hours questioning the guards and their captain. Except for incompetence and laziness, I couldn’t identify anything in their answers that aroused my suspicions. But no one could contact the evening-shift guards. I told dispatch to send uniforms to their homes.

  “Captain James?”

  As the guard captain was leaving, Kelly Quinn showed up at the door of the room I was using for my inquiries. She held a metal cylinder in her hands.

  “Hi, Kelly. Come on in.” I raised an eyebrow at the canister she put on the table. “What have we here?”

  “Salt,” Kelly said as she sat down, “heavily laced with thallium sulfate. White powder, odorless, tasteless. It’s slow acting, so in high doses, it usually takes three to four hours for symptoms to manifest.”

  I didn’t open the can. My natural curiosity didn’t extend to sampling causes of death.

  “Do you carry a mass spectrometer with you in the field?” I asked.

  She gave me a faint smile and wiggled her fingers. “After a manner of speaking. Shall we say that my magik is a lot more suited to being a pathologist in a police department than being a pediatrician.”

  “So, a cook could add salt to the soup, taste it, and then add some more when it wasn’t as salty as she expected. How much would it take to kill someone?”

  “And the person eating the soup might add a little more at the table. The salt in the shakers for the table contained thallium, too. A lethal dose is between one and three grams, depending on a person’s size. Half a teaspoon would kill all the victims, and I probably have ten or twenty times that much in this salt can.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “The cook’s and two of the dead servants. None on the shakers. They’ve been polished along with the rest of the silver.”

  I sighed. “So, anyone in the house could have done it. Family, staff, guards. Or a delivery driver.”

  Kelly nodded. “Or any visitors who wandered into the kitchen. But my guess is, it was done yesterday. We’re not talking about a slow poisoning
over time.”

  While we were talking, Luanne showed up. As always, she looked sharp, her uniform creased and immaculate, and her short afro gave her a military-like appearance. I had snatched her from Dispatch, where I was sure her smart mouth and offbeat attitude would have eventually landed her in trouble.

  I waved her in and pointed to the computer sitting on Fredrick Danner’s desk.

  “I need you to go through all the orders and deliveries for the past week. Pay attention to salt or any other white powder.”

  “Like sugar, flour, etcetera?” she asked.

  “Any white powder,” Kelly said. “We’re looking for thallium sulfate, which is sometimes used as rat poison, so deliveries to the gardener as well as the kitchen.”

  Luanne nodded. “Got it.”

  “Also,” I said, “when you finish with that, look through Mr. Danner’s business files and correspondence for any disputes, financial issues, or threats. After that, look at the emails of the rest of the family and staff. Any of the guards being blackmailed?” I took a deep breath. “Hell, Luanne, I’m grasping at straws. Even if you find a delivery of fifty pounds of thallium sulfate, I don’t have a motive for why someone poisoned an entire family.”

  By late afternoon, we learned from the security guards that a food delivery had been made the previous morning. However, when we asked Mid-Atlantic Produce, the company denied making a delivery that day. None of the empty wine bottles we found tested positive for thallium. The landscaping company that maintained the grounds denied ever using thallium, but we did find that vermin control companies in the Metroplex used it, mostly in areas near the Waste—where rats grew as large as small dogs—and in warehouses near the harbor. In other words, it wasn’t hard to acquire.