35

CRACKPOT! I MEAN, JACKPOT!

Working for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner sucked. Working for the Knights Templar at the same time was extra trimming on the suck sandwich. But there was no getting around it. If Brendan Bowman hadn’t had Templar blood in his veins, he wouldn’t have gotten a job for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in the first place. Left to his own devices, Brendan would be a plastic surgeon, spending his life looking at live women’s breasts and butts in a way that wouldn’t be cheating. Or maybe a pediatrician or veterinarian. Kids and animals didn’t suck. But Brendan was what he was, and when he got a phone call at five fifteen in the morning, he took it even though it was a Sunday.

Brendan listened to the voice on the other end of the line, then told it to hold on and got out of bed. The absence of Brendan’s weight made the mattress sway like the deck of a ship—the extra twenty pounds Brendan was carrying around didn’t help—and Brendan’s wife, Angie, protested with a soft little grunt, but she didn’t wake up even after he leaned over and gave her a little smooch on the shoulder. Netflix had turned out to be pretty hard on Angie’s sleeping schedule. Brendan’s wife was the kind of person who couldn’t put down a book until she finished reading it, and now that binge watching was a thing, she had to be careful not to start any new TV shows until the weekend.

Brendan padded downstairs to make some coffee while his computer booted up, and to hell with his geas. Caffeine would make him more efficient, though he made it half-caff because of his asthma. That sucked too. But at least Brendan’s asthma had kept him from becoming a knight. Those guys were assholes, most of them, but Brendan saw what knights had to deal with up close. Sometimes, he had to dissect or cremate what knights dealt with up close. They were welcome to their lives and their deaths and their attitudes, thank you very much. Looking up the names of some people who had gone to the same high school and died in the last year was much more Brendan’s speed.

Thinking about knights made Brendan think about Denver, and these days, Brendan couldn’t think about his eight-year-old son without a rush of love and sadness and fear tensing up high in his left breastbone until he felt weak. Denver was so goddamned athletic and fearless. Brendan was terrified that one day, the kid was going to qualify for advanced squire training and get inducted into one of the private schools that transformed young men into killing machines. He had actually contemplated trying to sabotage Denver’s health on more than one occasion, but whenever Brendan considered it too seriously, his heart started to flutter and his pulse started to speed up.

He knew Angie felt the same way, but they weren’t talking about it yet. That conversation was waiting out there in dark waters on the horizon, the tip of it occasionally popping up like a shark fin. Maybe there was more than one reason Angie was having trouble sleeping lately.

Okay, wait, there it was. Brendan hadn’t needed to write down any names—that part of squire training had never given him any problems—and he was looking for signs of anything unusual, and one of the names Brendan had been given had never been officially examined by anybody. Cameron Shaw. Several eyewitnesses had seen Cameron jump off the George Washington Bridge at night. It had been in a blind spot as far as camera footage went, but since a Ford Focus in Cameron Shaw’s name had been abandoned at the same location, there was no reason to doubt anyone. The body hadn’t been recovered.

Scuba-diving for corpses in freezing water didn’t always take top priority in New York City. Sometimes, it was easier to just wait for the temperatures to rise and let decomposing gases do the rest. Spring didn’t just bring rainbows and roses; when the waters warmed up, the harbor patrols usually spent a couple of weeks fishing out the corpses that were popping back up to the surface like corks.

But Cameron Shaw’s body had never been officially identified.

“It’s good to see you again, Cristian,” Gloria Waterhouse said pleasantly. The last time Gloria had seen Cristian Ortiz, she’d been riding along with an ambulance staffed by geas-bound, and Cristian had just been bitten by a Mongolian Death Worm. Gloria had placed him under a small enchantment before moving on to the next paramedic crew—there had been too many wounded and too many witnesses and too much confusion to quarantine everyone or question them properly, so Gloria had asked the basic questions and then implanted a command for Cristian to find her at this closed-down South American café at five o’clock the next morning, and here he was.

Cristian sat down in the wooden booth, and Gloria arched her sixty-year-old back in a way that she probably wouldn’t have if she’d been thinking of Cristian as a person. Her breasts were a little bit large for her long spine, and they hadn’t gotten easier to bear with age. Black might not crack, but Gloria’s body had started making popping sounds lately. “How is your niece, Cristian? Noemi, wasn’t it?”

“She’s okay.”

And with that last pleasantry out of the way, Gloria led Cristian through it. He talked about having to watch Noemi carefully because she liked to put pebbles in her mouth. Talked about how many people were there, then started with the woman who’d been next to him, the divorced lady with the stack of papers who sounded like a teacher. Talked about their conversation, how the woman’s kids were playing that game where they couldn’t touch the ground because there were big snakes in it.

Gloria had been idly jotting down notes in a legal yellow pad, but she went from idle to overdrive in the space of a second. “What?!”

“What?” Cristian repeated.

Hold the breath in. Pause and reflect. “Tell me more about the children who were playing a game about snakes coming out of the ground.”

Cristian began talking again, but now that slow monotone was suddenly maddening. If Gloria’d had a fast-forward button, she would have been holding it down. Under constant prompting, Cristian told Gloria about the woman’s ex-husband, how the woman had said that the husband used to take the kids to the park and play this make-believe game where they had to cross the whole playground without touching the ground because there were big snakes under the pebbles.

“Do you know the woman’s name?” Gloria forced her voice to stay even.

“No,” Cristian said.

“But she was divorced and had two children? What were their genders?”

“Their what?”

“Were they boys or girls?”

“Two boys.”

“Did she mention their names?”

“Rafe and Jude.”

Anything Gloria wrote down, she remembered. She had been that way even before she went through merlin training. It was one of the reasons she went through merlin training. The woman’s name was Mary Keaton. She had sat across from Gloria in that same wooden booth three hours earlier, and somehow, the fact that her boys had been playing a game involving snakes hadn’t surfaced.

But the ex-husband’s name had. It was Cameron Shaw.

“I got a hit.”

I’ll give you a hit, Anson thought, and not for the first time. Wheelchair or no wheelchair, Anson could turn Jojo Huffman into a blood pudding anytime he felt like it. The kid’s forearms wouldn’t have any definition at all if it weren’t for gaming consoles and whacking off.

Jojo’d had the misfortune of being the first member of the hack factory that Anson had met, and some explosion had gone off inside Anson’s gut at first sight. He’d hated Jojo’s soft belly roll, the T-shirt that said some bullshit about some TV show that Anson had never seen, the weird unfocused way the kid peered around behind those big glasses, how Jojo couldn’t keep track of his keys but could call up all kinds of trivial nonsense that meant absolutely nothing to anybody who mattered. Anson looked at Jojo, and all Anson saw was how he’d lost so much more than the use of his legs to that motherfucking abaasy back in Arizona. Kids like this Jojo were Anson’s peers now. This soft, slug-fleshed twelve-year-old in a twenty-five-year-old’s body who had never actually risked anything for anybody and looked down on people who had. Who had no real understanding of how lives could hang on the information they were digging up.

“What kind of hit?” Anson asked.

“A palpable hit.” Jojo beamed muzzily through the haze of too many power drinks.

Anson looked at him and pictured driving his knuckles into a spot that would rupture Jojo’s liver and send toxins pouring into his bloodstream.

“You know, like in Hamlet.” Jojo faltered. “It’s that Shakespeare library, the Folger place. One of the people on that list you gave me is a member. Cameron Shaw.”