Page 108 of Nothing More

“Cass,” Raven started on a sigh – and then leaned forward, softened. Sister-to-sister, despite the audience. “Can we please not do this now?” It wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, because Cass had a bit of a crush on every young, cute Lean Dog they encountered, but Raven wanted to spare her that reveal in front of all the others.

Cassandra folded her arms and glanced away. She pouted, but didn’t have any more outbursts.

From the back of the room, a delicate throat-clearing. Melissa stepped forward. “Not to run all over your, er, family moment. But this is important.”

Right. That. Raven sat up, smoothed her gown over her legs, and nodded. “Yes. I’m assuming if you’re here in person, it’s because you don’t havegoodnews.”

Melissa looked tired, face pale and drawn, hair falling out of its ponytail. She wore a thick wool coat, raindrops glittering on its shoulders. Her boots were of the sort Eden wore, sensible, thick-soled, made for walking. She’d come straight from work, then; had probably been up all night.

“Yeah, it’s not,” she said, crossing to Raven, pulling out her phone. “I have a friend – my old partner, actually – who works Homicide.”

Pongo made an unhappy noise at that, one she waved away, dismissively, before she turned the phone toward Raven. “I put a bug in his ear that I was looking for someone who might be involved in one of my cases, and he called just after midnight. A murder vic turned up by the harbor, battered pretty bad, his throat slit.” She tapped the screen. “The ID in his pocket, if it’s real, said his name’s Nikolai Bobrov.”

The screen filled with a photo of what she could tell right away was a dead body. Dark backdrop, glimmer of rain on algae-slick concrete. The harbor, Melissa had said. The man – boy, really – who lay on his back, hands spread by his head, had been washed pale by the phone’s flash, stark against the grimy backdrop. Amidst the swelling and fresh bruising on his face – purple smudges that wouldn’t darken further, that would never heal – she could make out a sharp nose, and a lean jaw dusted with dark stubble. Before he’d fallen backward, or been dropped, really, his slit throat had burst like a fountain all down his front, his shirt and jacket a ruin of wet crimson. A wisp of a tattoo was visible on the side of his neck, a fraction not covered in arterial spray, right at the start of the wide, gaping slice that had severed his carotid.

Raven wasn’t squeamish by nature, but death wasn’t pleasant to witness, not even through photos.

A stir of breath at her ear signaled Toly leaning over the back of the chair to get a glimpse of him.

“The maid, Antonina’s boyfriend?” Raven guessed.

“Nikolai. He’s the one we met with,” Tenny said, the smirking and stage-whispering given over to a businesslike demeanor. “We hadn’t gotten around to asking him about a girlfriend – he was too nervous for that – but the description matches the one Mrs. Newsome gave us.”

“Do you recognize him?” Melissa asked, and Raven realized she was asking Toly.

“No.” He sounded sure, and she didn’t doubt him.

Melissa pulled the phone back and slipped it into her coat pocket. “The post-mortem will tell us for sure, but based on liver temp, the ME on the scene put his time of death at around eleven last night.”

“Shortly after you met with him.” Raven glanced to Tenny for answers. “What did you say to the poor boy?”

Tenny’s sneer was more defensive than derisive. “Nothing that would get him killed. It was a standard approach. Textbook.”

“Except for the part where three bratva high-ups walked in and caught him talking to us,” Kat spoke up from the threshold that led into the kitchen. He held a steaming coffee cup in one hand, and with his hat turned around backward, his grim expression was on full display.

Tenny twisted around to throw his sneer at him. “An unlucky coincidence. And those tossers didn’t know us on sight.” Back to Raven: “If they killed him for chatting with us, it wasn’t his first infraction.”

“It gets worse,” Melissa said, and Raven saw Tenny’s lips compress. Saw Kat give a fast shake of his head.

Bennet was worrying his hands together and even Shep was unusually subdued.

Melissa continued: “Nikolai was found with several hairs wrapped around his fingers. Black hairs,” she said, meaningfully.

The news hit Raven like a physical blow. She hunched forward, elbows hitting her knees, chin falling into her hand. Her breath hissed out through her teeth and left her feeling deflated.

A man in a stolen jumpsuit; covered camera lenses; a fiddled-with drain in her shower.

“It’s not my hair, is it?” she said, woodenly, and knew that it wasn’t.

None of this had been about her. All of it had been a means to get to Toly, and while they’d been furiously, scrupulously guarding her, he’d been out there on the street, vulnerable, followed.

“We don’t know whose hair it is, yet,” Melissa said. “The lab will run it through the system, and the Homicide detectives will proceed from there.”

“But the assumption is always that it’s the killer’s hair in a dead person’s fist, right?”

Melissa made a face, as though reluctant, but nodded. “It’s never a sure thing, obviously – but it’s incriminating, yes.”

Raven’s vision had gone sparkly and sharp-edged. The room felt airless. There was no keeping the anxiety from her voice when she said, “Even if it’s Toly’s hair, he didn’t kill him.”

---