and two of our females died at that club,” he said out loud, “doesn’t mean they were killed by the same person. Could be or could not. What I need is information on those other two deaths—”
“Got it.”
Butch leaned forward to pour himself more Lag. “Got what?”
“The recording that came in about the death that happened eight months ago.”
Butch paused in mid-refill. “Wait, you found that call in?”
Without taking his stare off his monitor, V cocked the eyebrow by the tattoos at his temple. “Gimme a sec to finish buffering things.”
Butch whistled under his breath. “You are a genius.”
“I know.”
A moment later, Butch’s phone vibrated on the coffee table. Putting the bottle down, he snagged the cell and looked at the notification on the screen.
An email from Vishous with an audio attachment.
“You are totally forgiven for disrupting my scene,” Butch murmured to his roommate.
V lit a fresh hand-rolled, that huge body leaning back in his padded leather chair. “If there’s a next time, it will be handled differently. You have my word.”
“I hope there won’t be, but I have a feeling we are not going to be that lucky.” Butch fired up the voicemail on the speaker, entering numerical codes to get access and waiting through a preamble. “I don’t know how you waded through those hundreds of recordings.”
“Next up, I do more digging on that first human victim. The killer could have started with them and shifted over to us.”
Butch opened his mouth to say something further, but a female’s voice came out of his phone: I—I want to report a death. A murder . . . a killing. At Pyre’s Revyval downtown. It happened the night before last. A female. She—she was found on the lower level by friends. She was taken . . . out of the club by them . . . she was dead . . .
“Sonofabitch,” Butch muttered.
“What?” V said.
“It’s the same female. It’s the same one who reported the death last night.”
The following evening, Boone left the house at nine p.m. He had a good seven hours before his father’s Fade Ceremony, and there was one and only one place he was going to go. Dematerializing downtown, he re-formed by the parking spot where he and Butch had left the R8 the night before. With a limping stride, his shitkickers ate up the distance toward the front door of Pyre’s Revyval, the steel-reinforced treads of his boots punching a pattern in the fresh snow that had fallen during the day.
He would have broken out in a run. Except that would have meant he was desperate.
Actually, he already knew he was desperate—but that was the kind of thing he was more than happy to keep to himself, thank you very much.
Well, and then there was his ankle. Turned out he’d done more than stub his toe when he’d jumped out of bed and landed wrong on that pillow. But he was not going to let a little pain slow him down.
As he closed in on the club’s front entrance, he eyed the length of the wait line and thought of how many people were no doubt already inside. In costumes and masks. Milling around in the dark. At least he could try to locate Helania by scent. Although the larger question was whether she was going to want to see him. Still, there was an official reason for him to be in res, so to speak—and he’d told Butch he was heading over to monitor things.
He couldn’t live with himself if that female was the next victim.
God, he couldn’t get Helania out of his mind. Over the course of the day, as he had lain in his bed not being able to sleep—and refusing to jerk himself off, because that just seemed frickin’ skeevy—he had run their conversation on the phone back and forth, over and over again. As he’d replayed the I-saids and she-saids, he realized that her loss of her sister and his loss of his father made them a kind of kin: He and this stranger were united by the fact that they were both chained by grief. Self-doubt. Regret.
Even though his fellow trainees and the Brothers and fighters had all reached out to him, he experienced their support as an echo from sources far away, something on the other side of the valley, the mountain range, the Grand Canyon. And it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the texts, the voicemails . . . the RSVPs to the Fade Ceremony later