Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,33

and Stosser...

Did Ian know? Had Ben told him? My brain couldn’t even go there. Anyway, I wasn’t going to and he wasn’t going to and that had been decided already. And even if they handled it fine, I chose my partners, damn it. I didn’t need some mystical matchmaker shoving me.

I could hear J sigh, all the way from Boston.

We walked another block, but he didn’t say anything more.

“We need to fine-tune the organ-check spell,” I said, moving the conversation back firmly onto work ground, where we both knew what the hell was going on. “I knew that there was water in the lungs, so our DB definitely drowned, but the body’s already been released, which means no way to check what kind of water.” There was an organization that claimed fatae bodies when they ended up in the morgue, and disposed of them either through the breed representative, or on their own. Bad luck for us; this once they weren’t backed up. “Anyway, even if I’d thought of it... salt water from fresh? I’m not sure we can do that, the way the cantrip is structured right now.”

You had to be very specific when you were working with forensic magic; we’d learned that the hard way. Ask a vague question, and you got run over with too much information. Too much information was worse than none, because you couldn’t figure out what was important. But finding the right balance meant that it was harder to create a one-spell-fits-all cantrip; everything had to be more specialized than we’d thought.

That was where I excelled; fine-turning the details. But we couldn’t spare me from the field, not with two open jobs.

Venec nodded, accepting my assessment. “Do you want to work on it, or should I put it in the fishbowl?”

The fishbowl was exactly that – a glass bowl on a table in the smaller conference room, the windowless one that was best shielded for current-use. If you had an idea, or a problem, you wrote it down and tossed it into the bowl, and whenever someone had spare time and energy, they’d go fishing for a problem to solve.

“Fishbowl, for now, although I’ll keep poking at it. The body’s already been disposed of, so no way to go back and check.” I’d never asked what the fatae normally did with their dead; I suspected asking would be rude, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, anyway. J always said that sex and burial traditions were where most cultural misunderstandings happened.

We turned a corner, our steps almost perfectly matching. I wondered if he was aware of that.

“What’s your working theory?” he asked.

“On the drowning? It was either a personal grudge – ” the most likely explanation when dealing with the fatae, who tended to have short fuses and long memories “ – or money.” If it wasn’t some personal insult, it was money. The fatae just didn’t get het up about sex the way some humans did – at least far’s I’d ever heard. Money, though, they were just as wound up as any spending species. “Why else do you get dumped in the East River?”

“Drugs? There was a nice little trade in heroin a while back, nasty pure stuff that would kill a human in one dose.” Venec went thoughtful again. “The craze seems to have faded, but there could be a new joyjuice on the market. You might want to ask Danny.”

Danny Hendrickson, former NYPD, current P.I., and one of the few human/fatae crossbreeds I knew about. Danny was a good guy, and had helped us out before, so long as it didn’t interfere with his own cases. He was also fun to go drinking with, not that we’d had time to do that, much. I nodded. “I’ll call him when I get home. He keeps weird hours, I might be able to reach him, or leave a message.”

The fatae, being of magic but not using magic, could enjoy the benefits of modern technology like laptop computers, cell phones, and answering machines. I tried not to be too jealous.

“Do you think we might have a drug war among the fatae? Christ.” The idea kind of creeped me out. Fatae were scary enough on their own; they didn’t need drugs, especially drugs that led to violence, added to the mix.

Venec went from peer voice to Big Dog voice without blinking. “Don’t rule anything out until we know it’s not a viable theory.”

I winced. Okay, I deserved that. “Right. Drugs, or drug-trafficking.