“Do you think Al’s going to have any luck getting his clients to talk?” I asked Ian.
“He might. If he does, he might even decide to tell us what they said. I’m not going to hold my breath on either one, but I hope their survival instinct overrides their greed.”
“Greed? You’ve lost me.”
“If the families have gotten their hands on some Brimstone or the formula, they’re going to have a hell of a time getting the main ingredient.”
I was still confused, and apparently I looked it.
“She was not in meeting last night,” Yasha reminded Ian.
I blinked. “There was a meeting?”
“You were asleep.”
“You didn’t tell me this morning.”
“I was preoccupied this morning, and I’m telling you now.”
I sighed. “Go on.”
“While we still need a sample of Brimstone for the lab, we’ve got enough information now to have a good guess as to where it came from.”
“And?”
“The main ingredient was imported directly from Hell.”
Whoa. “Real, biblical hellfire and brimstone?”
Ian nodded. “In our dimension, brimstone is another, non-scientific, name for sulfur. What I found out from Marty last night is that our sulfur got the alternative name of brimstone because there’s an actual mineral, found only in Hell, that stinks like sulfur. He showed me several samples in his lab. It’s bright orange.”
I remembered yesterday at the coffee shop. “And Fred told us that Brimstone is orange.” Just like the portal I’d seen in Gedeon’s apartment and the parking garage.
“Exactly.”
“Okay, I have to ask. How did Marty get samples?”
“He said he gathered them himself on a field trip.”
“To Hell.”
“Wasn’t Hoboken.”
“I wonder if that was when he lost his eyebrows.”
“Nope. That’s an even better story. You’ll have to ask him. He tells it better.”
“So what does brimstone from Hell do besides stink?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. Marty said its chemical composition contains elements found in our dimension’s LSD.”
“So much for why man in restaurant saw monsters,” Yasha said.
“Before I got some shut-eye myself last night,” Ian continued, “I touched base with Fred. When the man was questioned about where and who he bought the drug from and for what purpose, he couldn’t remember. The NYPD has a vampire on the force who has a knack for lie detecting. The guy was telling the truth. He doesn’t remember a thing.”
“That makes absolutely zero sense,” I said. “What good is a drug that lets you see supernaturals and read minds, but then wipes your memory? I mean, it’s good for us; no one would remember seeing goblins and elves, but it’s bad for tracking down the source of this stuff. Well, besides Hell. Though that doesn’t make any sense, either. Marty told me that demons aren’t interested in humans on an individual basis. Why would demons provide brimstone as an ingredient to presumably a mortal drug kingpin—or queenpin?”
To say we were missing something here was the ultimate understatement.
Ian’s phone rang.
He looked down at the display. “Fred.”
“Speak of devil,” Yasha said with a grin.
I grinned back.
Ian spat his favorite four-letter word into the phone, and waved for Nancy. “We’ve got to go. Now. Would you put this on my tab?”
“Of course, sugar. Want some of it to go?”
“Love to, but no time.” He stood. “There’s been another murder,” he continued when Nancy began speaking to other customers three booths away. “Goblin by the name of Kela Dupari.”
I scooched out of the booth. “Drug lord?”
“Lady, one of the ‘queenpins.’ Her territory is the Upper West Side. This one’s worse.”
I suddenly wished I hadn’t scarffed down all that barbeque. “Worse than a heart cut—”
Ian shook his head. “No. The NYPD got there first.”
Yasha snarled the Russian equivalent of my partner’s favorite word. It sounded better in Russian.
“Then what do we have to do?” I asked.
“We’ll get there and then we’ll see.”
“See what?”
Yasha pulled the Suburban keys out of his pocket. “If we need to steal a body.”
14
I’VE had some strange things added to my job description since joining SPI, but I never imagined body snatcher would be one of them. Though technically it would be ambulance robber, or if we were going to get picky, ambulance hijacker.
Regardless of the semantics, I hadn’t signed up for any of it.
So I was more than relieved when we didn’t have to do it.
This was the NYPD we were talking about. Getting arrested—at least for me—wouldn’t be if it would happen, but how fast. I didn’t want Alain Moreau having to come down to whatever precinct they dragged me to and bail me out. It’d happened once, and I didn’t want it to happen again.
Ian had just gotten the call from one of our dispatchers that the medical examiner had taken care of extending the victim’s glamour for another few hours.
Dr. Anika Van Daal was the medical examiner. She was also a vampire and mage who had arrived in the city soon after it’d been taken from the Dutch by the British and the name changed from New Amsterdam to New York. That’d been in 1625. At that time, two-thirds of the island was still wilderness.