A Local Habitation
Page 38

I considered the value of running after her and shouting. It didn’t seem likely to do any good. “You people and the walking blithely into certain danger. It’s got to be something in the damn water.”
Terrie stared after her. “What?” She turned toward us, repeating, “What?”
“Peter’s dead,” I said, walking over to get a cup of coffee. Gordan moved to a table and sat, burying her face in her hands.
“But—what—when? How?”
“During the blackout,” said Quentin.
“They cut the power, killed the generators, and then killed him. Probably to get our attention.” I sipped my coffee. “They got it.”
“Oh,” whispered Terrie, eyes wide. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I know what dead looks like.”
“Oh, Maeve, Peter . . .” she said. “He was such a wonderful engineer . . .”
I opened my mouth to snap, and stopped as I saw the look on Quentin’s face. He was watching Terrie with utter adoration, caught up in her pain. That made even less sense than my anger. He’d been temperamental but sane through this whole ordeal, facing everything with calm equanimity. So why was he getting involved now? They’d flirted, but they hadn’t had time to fall in love, and something in his expression reminded me uncomfortably of my own when I was looking at Alex.
I was saved from following that thought to its logical conclusion when the door swung open and Jan and Elliot stepped into the room. Elliot was shaking and glassy-eyed. At least his voice was steady: he answered when I asked if they’d seen anything in the hall. They hadn’t. Not a damn thing.
Explaining what we knew didn’t take long; there wasn’t much to tell. Elliot crossed the room and put his hands on Gordan’s shoulders, but didn’t interrupt. Jan nodded, confirming my story, then offered some useful information—I hadn’t thought to check the generators for loose wires, or realized that their internal systems would record and time stamp the power outage.
Elliot, Quentin, Jan, and I went back to the generator room, leaving Terrie and Gordan behind. Even with the power on, the knowe didn’t seem any friendlier. Some kinds of darkness have nothing to do with whether there’s light.
The wards on the generator room were undisturbed. Quentin released them, and I stepped inside, taking a moment to study the scene before I let the others in. Peter was still intact; the night-haunts weren’t coming. The forensic tests I could perform—checking for footprints, tracks, and blood trails, noting the wounds and their locations on Peter’s body—took only a few minutes. Jan ran the tests on the equipment; there were no loose wires, and the generators time stamped the power outage at 7:49 PM—not exactly the witching hour. No leads there.
I looked to Jan, frowning. “Could he have turned the generators off as he fell? Could this have been a coincidence?”
“No way,” Jan replied. “You have to trip three breakers and press a button on the back of the main generator if you want to shut the system down. Failsafes.”
“Why do you know that?” She’d rattled off that chain of actions a little too glibly for my tastes.
Tiredly, Elliot said, “Jan does a lot of our hardware maintenance, especially now that we’re on a skeleton crew. She has to be able to kill the power in case of an emergency.”
“Plus, I designed a lot of these systems,” Jan said.
Elliot smiled wearily. “That, too.”
“Right,” I said, raking my hair back with both hands and sighing. “So it was intentional.”
“Looks like it,” Jan said. “Unless a dying man knows what fuses to pull.”
“Okay. Let’s get moving.”
The four of us wrapped as much of Peter’s body as we could in a sheet, careful not to break his wings, and we carried him down to the basement, clearing off a counter before laying him down. Elliot shuddered the whole time. He was starting to look rumpled; I was worried that our Bannick was going to pieces.
“What do we do now?” he asked, not looking at me.
“Now we hunt,” I said. I looked to Jan, expecting an argument, but she nodded. “Elliot, you’re with me; Quentin, with Jan. If you see anything, don’t investigate. Just run.”
“All right,” said Quentin. And we were off.
The halls of ALH were snarled like Möbius strips, bending back on themselves in strange and implausible ways. Some rooms were brightly lit, while others were illuminated only by the dim light lancing in from outside. We searched room by room, hunting through closets and cubbyholes and finding more secret routes than I wanted to believe. Tracking anyone would have been a nightmare, but tracking a native—and that was what we had to be looking for—was going to be all but impossible. Thanks to the recent personnel losses, I couldn’t even be sure that the person we were looking for was one of our known suspects.
We found nothing. And I kept thinking of Terrie’s exaggerated mourning and Gordan’s too-clean hands.
Elliot and I had just stepped into the reception room when Quentin and Jan came around the corner. They stopped when they saw us.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Quentin.
“Right.” Whoever killed Peter was cocky, and the cocky are frequently good; that’s how they live long enough to get that way. Unless our killer could walk through walls, we were finished. “Come on, Quentin. We’re going back to the hotel.”
Elliot stared at me, eyes shell-shocked and pleading. “Can’t you stay?”
“Stay in groups. No one’s been attacked when they weren’t alone. Quentin and I need to go back to the hotel and get our things.” Mainly, we needed to get my weapons. “We’ll be back before dawn.”
“Be careful,” said Jan.
“We will,” I said. Somehow, I couldn’t be angry with them anymore. Their world was falling apart, and they knew it. “Quentin, come on.”
We walked into the cool night air together, letting the door slide closed behind us. We were halfway to the car when Quentin said, “Toby?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we coming back?”
“Yes, we are. We have a job to do. Are you holding up okay?”
“I’m scared.” He said it like he expected me to yell at him.