I had to think for a minute on how to best help Zee. Finally I decided that since he was actually innocent, the more truth that came to light, the better off he would be.
"You're consultant isn't worth squat," I told Tony. "Either she doesn't know as much as she says she does, or she's got her own agenda."
"Why do you say that?"
"There are no such things as gremlins," I told him. "It's a term made up by British pilots in the Great War as an explanation for odd things that kept their planes from working. Zee is a gremlin only because he claims he is."
"Then what is he?"
"A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I've done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I've never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I've seen him do it. I don't know if he'd have had the strength to rip someone's head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she's calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation."
"World War One?" asked Tony thoughtfully.
"You can look it up on the Internet," I assured him. "By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons."
"Maybe that's when he was born. Maybe he's where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy's planes."
"Zee is a lot older than World War One."
"How do you know?"
It was a good question, and I didn't have a proper answer for it. He'd never really told me how old he was.
"When he is angry," I said slowly, "he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original language - Zee sounds like that."
"I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German."
Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren't entirely useless. "English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages."
Tony made an unhappy noise. "Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you're telling me that he didn't do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn't know as much as she says she does. That O'Donnell was a murderer - though the fae will probably deny that any murders ever took place - but if I so much as ask about it, we're going to have the Feds breathing down our necks because now this crime involves Fairyland. All this without one hard, cold piece of evidence."
"Yes."
He swore nastily. "The hell of it is that I believe you, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how I'm going to tell any of this to my boss - especially as I'm not really in charge of this case."
There was a long silence on both our parts.
"You need to get him a lawyer," he said. "He's not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is innocent, especially if he is innocent, he needs a very good lawyer."
"All right," I agreed. "I don't suppose I could get in to get a look" - a sniff, actually - "at the crime scene?" Maybe I'd be able to find out something that modern science could not - like someone who'd been at one of the other murder sites.
He sighed. "Get a lawyer and ask him. I don't think I'm going to be able to help you with that. Even if he gets you in, you'll have to wait until our crime scene people are through with it. You'd do better to hire a private investigator, though, someone who knows how to look at a crime scene."
"All right," I said. "I'll find a lawyer." Hiring a human investigator would either be a waste of money - or a death sentence for the investigator if he happened upon some secret or other that the Gray Lords didn't want made public. Tony didn't need to know that.
"Tony, make sure you are looking farther than the length of your nose for a killer. It wasn't Zee."