Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(16)

Quickly, like before a trial could call more attention to the crime. Quickly, like a suicide with a note admitting guilt.

My phone beeped politely, telling me I had a second call.

"I assume you think that I can be a help?" I asked - otherwise he'd never have called me.

"We cannot come to his aid. He needs a good lawyer, and someone to find out who killed O'Donnell. Someone needs to talk to the police and tell them that Zee did not kill this scum. Someone they will believe. You have a friend on the Kennewick police force."

"O'Donnell died in Kennewick?"

"Yes."

"I'll find a lawyer," I told Uncle Mike. Kyle was a divorce attorney, but he would know a good criminal defense lawyer. "Maybe the police will keep the worst of the details out of their press releases. They're not going to be all that interested in having the press of the world descend upon them. Even if they just tell people he was beheaded, it doesn't sound so bad, does it? Maybe we can buy a little time with the Gray Lords if it stays out of the major papers. I'll talk to the policeman I know, but he might not listen."

"If you need money," he said, "let me know. Zee doesn't have much, I don't think, though you can never tell with him. I do, and I can get more if we need it. But it will have to go through you. The fae cannot be more involved with this than we already are. So you hire a lawyer and we will pay you whatever it costs."

"All right," I said.

I hung up, my stomach in knots. My phone said I'd missed two calls. Both of them were from my friend Tony the cop's cell phone. I sat down on the knob of a tree root and called him back.

"Montenegro here," he said.

"I know about Zee," I told him. "He didn't kill anyone."

There was a little pause.

"Is it that you don't think he could do something like this, or do you know something specifically about the crime?"

"Zee's perfectly capable of killing," I told him. "However, I have it on very good authority that he didn't kill this person." I didn't tell him that if Zee had found O'Donnell alive, he would most likely have killed him. Somehow, that didn't seem helpful.

"Who is your very good authority - and did they happen to mention who did kill our victim?"

I pinched the top of my nose. "I can't tell you - and they don't know - just that the killer was not Zee. He found O'Donnell dead."

"Can you give me something more substantial? He was found kneeling over the body with blood on his hands and the blood was still warm. Mr. Adelbertsmiter is a fae, registered with the BFA for the past seven years. Nothing human did this, Mercy. I can't talk about the specifics, but nothing human did this."

I cleared my throat. "I don't suppose you could keep that last bit out of the official report, eh? Until you catch the real killer, it would be a very good idea not to have people stirred up against the fae."

Tony was a subtle person, and he caught what I wasn't saying. "Is this like when you said it would be very good if the police didn't go looking for the fae as a cause of the rise in violent crime this summer?"

"Exactly like that." Well, not quite, and honesty impelled me to correct myself. "This time, though, the police themselves won't be in danger. But Zee will, and the real killer will be free to kill elsewhere."

"I need more than your word," he said finally. "Our expert consultant is convinced that Zee is our culprit, and her word carries a lot of weight."

"Your expert consultant?" I asked. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing to an expert consultant on fae that the Tri-Cities police forces had.

"Dr. Stacy Altman, a folklore specialist from the University of Oregon, flew in this morning. She is paid a lot, which means my bosses think we ought to listen to her advice."

"Maybe I should charge more when I consult for you," I told him.

"I'll double your paycheck next time," he promised.

I got paid exactly nothing for my advice, which was fine with me. I was liable to be in enough trouble without the local supernatural community thinking I was narking to the police.

"Look," I told him. "This is unofficial." Zee hadn't told me not to say anything about the deaths on the reservation - because he hadn't thought he would have to. It was something I already knew.

However, if I spoke fast, maybe I could get it all out before I thought about how unhappy they might be with me for telling the police. "There have been some deaths among the fae - and good evidence that O'Donnell was the killer. Which was why Zee went to O'Donnell's house. If someone found out before Zee, they might have killed O'Donnell."

If that were true, it might save Zee (at least from the local justice system), but the political consequences could be horrific. I'd been just a kid when the fae had first come out, but I remembered the KKK burning a house with its fae occupants still in it and the riots in the streets of Houston and Baltimore that provided the impetus to confine the fae on reservations.

But it was Zee who mattered. The rest of the fae could rot as long as Zee was safe.

"I haven't heard anything about people dying in Fairyland."

"Why would you?" I asked. "They don't bring in outsiders."

"Then how do you know about it?"