Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(21)
He crouched beside the body, careful to avoid the blood, and used his long reach to pat the pockets in the victim’s black denim jeans. In the first two he found nothing, but when he crossed to the man’s left side, he felt objects in both front and rear pockets. From the back he withdrew a leather wallet, also black, the leather already soaked and stiffened by blood. He held it up for Kylie to take while he investigated the front pocket.
She took the item gingerly, two fingers very carefully plucking it from his hand by the driest corner she could find. Stepping around the blood pool, she set it on the edge of a small table and flipped it open. “It’s him. Here’s his license. It’s got a picture.”
Dag grunted and withdrew a key ring and a folded piece of paper from inside the worn jeans. The objects had been spared the worst of the blood spatter, the note hardly smudged. Uninterested in the keys, he tossed them onto the table near Kylie and unfolded the crisp paper.
Sally’s
Alley 423
10:30 P.M.
Wile E. Koyote
He read the short note aloud and looked toward Kylie. She remained beside the small table, fiddling with the dead man’s key chain and frowning.
“That’s from last night,” she said. “I’m Wile E. It’s one of my online IDs, and that’s the place and time we were supposed to meet. I guess now I know why he didn’t show. And here I was mad at him for standing me up.” The corners of her mouth pulled down, and her dark eyes took on a haze of guilt.
“He was already dead,” Dag confirmed. He found himself trying to gentle his normally gruff voice. The female appeared distressed enough without thinking him annoyed with her. More annoyed than usual, that is. “We will have to find a new lead to pursue.”
Kylie nodded, not looking at him. Her gaze had dropped to the tangle of keys and baubles in her hand. Instead of setting it aside and joining him in leaving, however, she blinked and peered closer at a thin rectangle of black plastic. Her fingers fiddled for a moment, and a small but powerful light shone briefly from the narrow end.
She made an excited sound. She enjoyed artificial light that thoroughly?
“I have one of these,” she said, and attacked the complicated mass of metal and plastic until she had separated the miniature black flashlight from the rest. “I picked it up at a trade show somewhere. Some company had them for a giveaway. It’s a mini LED flashlight on this end—” She pressed a small button on the side and the light shone briefly once again. “But on the other end, it’s got a portable USB drive with a surprising amount of storage space.”
Dag shook his head. “I think this is where I ask you more questions.”
She gave a shallow snort. “It’s so weird to be talking to someone who doesn’t even get basic tech. I need to give you a crash course in digital living, big guy. It’s an electronic archive, basically. A small device that stores large amounts of data so you can transfer it between locations and devices.” She gazed up at him and lifted an eyebrow. “I wonder what was so important to Mr. Ott that he carried it around with him wherever he went?”
“Take it,” he said, glancing around the space. “I am unsure it will prove to have any significance, as I see nothing to indicate that he was deep in the inner workings of the Order. But no other item appears important to our investigation.”
Kylie looked dubious. “You can tell that just by looking around? Maybe he didn’t like early demonic apocalypse as an interior decorating choice.”
He wondered if he would ever get used to a human who questioned his every word or action simply on general principle. In the past, most of them cowered when they saw him, if they didn’t run screaming in terror. But not this female. She made him want to scream.
“The Darkness is a pollution,” he explained, struggling for patience. “Humans who have close contact with it over long periods of time are altered by it. They begin to carry it around with them like an illness, leaving traces of it behind. The places where they spend the most time are usually heavily contaminated with its stench.”
She wrinkled her nose. “All I can smell is blood and general stink.”
“Exactly. He was not working closely with the Order for long, if at all. He had certainly not participated in any of their darkest rituals. Those actions leave stains that cannot be disguised. Searching him out may yield us nothing we can use.”
“Hey, we had to start somewhere.”
“True, but we are finished here. Come. We should not continue to linger.”
Kylie approached the door, giving the body and the blood pool a wide berth. “What about him, though? We can’t just leave him here and pretend we don’t know anything. He may have a family somewhere, friends who care about him. They deserve to know he’s dead.”
He led her outside, engaging the lock on the knob before pulling the door closed behind him. “This dwelling has other occupants. They will begin to notice the smell soon enough.”
“Ew. It’s still winter. That could take days. Besides, that’s just wrong.” She shook her head. “I’ll send the police an anonymous tip when we get home. I can send an e-mail they won’t be able to trace back to me. It’s the least I can do.”
The alley beside the house and the street out front were deserted as they walked back to the vehicle, for which Dag felt grateful. He hated when his work caught the attention of humans, especially ones who believed they had some sort of authority over him. They had no grasp of what he fought against, and never possessed the necessary training or skill to defend themselves, let alone to face what he and his brothers had been summoned to face.