Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(20)

"All of them didn't come out at once," I told her. Her question settled my nerves. It was Zee whose life was at stake here, not mine. Not just yet. I kept talking so she wouldn't ask why Zee had come out. The one thing I absolutely couldn't tell an outsider was the existence of the Gray Lords. "Zee only admitted what he was a few years ago, seven or eight, maybe. He knew that being a fae would keep people away from the shop. I'd been working for him for a couple of years and he liked me so he sold it to me."

I collected my thoughts, trying to tell her what she needed to know without taking forever about it. "As I told you, he called me yesterday to ask for my help because someone had been killing fae in the reservation. Zee thought my nose might be able to pick out the killer. I gather I was sort of a last resort. When we got to the rez, O'Donnell was at the gate and wrote down my name when we drove through - that is on record. I imagine the police will find it, if they think to look. Zee took me through the murder scenes and I discovered that one man had been present at each house - O'Donnell."

She'd been taking notes in a stenographer's notebook but stopped, set down her pencil, and frowned. "O'Donnell was present at all the murder scenes and you verified that by smelling him?"

I raised my eyebrows. "A coyote has a keen sense of smell, Ms. Ryan. I have a very good memory for scents. I caught O'Donnell's when he stopped us as we went in - and his scent was in every one of the murder victims' houses I visited."

She stared at me - but she was no werewolf who might rip my throat out for challenging her - so I met her stare with one of my own.

She dropped her eyes first, ostensibly looking at her notes. People, human people, can be pretty deaf to body language. Maybe she didn't even notice that she'd lost the dominance contest, though her subconscious would.

"I understand O'Donnell was employed by the BFA as security," she said, turning back a few pages. "Couldn't he have been there investigating the deaths?"

"The BFA had no idea there were any murders," I told her. "The fae do their own internal policing. If they had gone to the Feds for help, I'm pretty sure it would be the FBI who would have been called in, not the BFA anyway. And O'Donnell was a guard, not an investigator. I was told that there was no reason O'Donnell should have been in every house that there was a murder in, and I have no reason to doubt that."

She'd started writing again, in shorthand. I'd never actually seen anyone use shorthand before.

"So you told Mr. Adelbertsmiter that O'Donnell was the murderer?"

"I told him that he was the only person whose scent I found in all the scenes."

"How many scenes?"

"Four." I decided not to tell her that there had been others; I didn't want to tell her why I hadn't gone to all the murder scenes. If Zee hadn't wanted to talk about my trip Underhill with me, I thought it would not be something he wanted me discussing with a lawyer.

She paused again. "There were four people murdered in the reservation and they did not ask for help?"

I gave her a thin smile. "The fae are not fond of attracting outside attention. It can be dangerous for everyone. They are also quite aware of the way most humans, including the Feds, feel about them. 'The only good fae is a dead fae' mentality is quite prevalent among the conservatives who make up most of the rank and file in the government whether they be Homeland Security, FBI, BFA, or any of the other alphabet soup agencies."

"You have trouble with the federal government?" she asked.

"As far as I know, none of them are prejudiced against half-Indian mechanics," I told her, matching her blandness with my own, "so why would I have a problem with them? However, I can certainly see why the fae would be reluctant to turn over a series of murders to a government whose record for dealing with the fae is not exactly spotless." I shrugged. "Maybe if they'd realized sooner that their killer wasn't another fae, they might have done so. I don't know."

She looked down at her notes. "So you told Zee that O'Donnell was the killer?"

I nodded. "Then I took Zee's truck and drove home. It was early in the morning, maybe four o'clock, when we parted company. It was my understanding that he was going to go over to O'Donnell's and talk to him."

"Just talk?"

I shrugged, glanced at Kyle, and tried to decide how far I trusted his judgement. All the truth, hmm? I sighed. "That's what he said, but I was pretty sure that if O'Donnell didn't have a good story, he wouldn't wake up this morning."

Her pencil hit the table with a snap.

"You are telling me that Zee went to O'Donnell's house to murder him?"

I took a deep breath. "You aren't going to understand this. You don't know the fae, not really. Imprisoning a fae is...impractical. First of all, it's damned difficult. Holding a person is hard enough. Holding a fae for any time at all, if he doesn't want to be held, is near impossible. Even without that, a life sentence is highly impractical when fae can live for hundreds of years." Or a lot more, but the public didn't know that. "And when you let them go, they aren't likely to shrug it off as justice served. The fae are a vengeance-hungry race. If you imprison a fae, for whatever reason, you'd better be dead when he gets out or you'll wish you were. Human justice just isn't equipped to deal with the fae, so they take care of it. A fae who commits a serious crime - like murder - is simply executed on the spot." The werewolves did the same.