Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [50]
“Damn right, I did,” he said. “The department figured it was the easiest way to keep me from suing their asses off after that Roenberg mess.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I told him, and meant it. Pete was one of those steady humans, the kind who radiated stillness and competence. They were the only kind I could be around for extended periods of time.
“Me too. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
The garage was still hot and made my eyes water from the noxious smoke, but the fire department pronounced it safe to enter. Pete’s team members swarmed around the smoking hulk of the Jaguar, taking pictures and bagging debris that had been thrown everywhere by the blast.
I saw a piece of car embedded in the concrete wall of the garage and flexed my shoulder. I really had been damn lucky.
Pete flashed his light over the Jaguar’s interior and the charred corpse of Patrick O’Halloran, wincing at the barely recognizable shape. “Someone knew what they were doing,” he murmured. “Hot and fast. No chance of survival. Get a picture of that,” he instructed the tech with the camera, pointing at the wall behind the car. Aside from the surface concrete being blown off, it was intact.
“Something there?” I asked, examining the scene as best I could in the smoky half-light.
“Not there,” said Pete. “The garage is still intact, which means the tower above it is still intact.”
“So?”
“So this bomb wasn’t meant to bring down the structure. It was meant to kill.”
I coughed, trying to clear my parched throat. “Who’d want to kill Patrick O’Halloran? He’s a figurehead. Wouldn’t it be smarter to go after Seamus?”
“That’s your area,” said Pete. “I’m here to find out how they managed it.” He touched the frame of the car experimentally and then climbed through the mangled passenger door and examined the interior. “Huh,” he said.
“See something?” I asked.
“That’s the problem,” said Pete. “All that’s here is car.” He clambered back out and illustrated with his penlight. “Fire follows the path of least resistance, right? It blew through the windows and the vents to the engine compartment, which caused the gas line and the tank to blow as secondary charges.”
“Where’s this going?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer by the grim expression on Pete’s face.
“For the explosion to follow that path, the bomb would have to be planted under the front seat.” He offered me his flashlight and I leaned in, trying to ignore the obscenely sweet smell coming from the cooked body in the driver’s seat.
The seats and dashboard were intact, charred and melted but still retaining their shape. I pulled my head back and gave Pete a puzzled look.
“Shouldn’t there be more, I dunno, exploded parts?”
“There shouldn’t be anything left of the inside of that car,” said Pete. “For all intents and purposes, this could have been a freak accident. If it wasn’t for the point of origin, I’d say his gas tank ignited.”
“But it didn’t…” I murmured. Something tickled at my consciousness, the birth of a theory that wouldn’t quite come clear. “Pete, how do you kill a witch?”
He goggled at me. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“You can’t,” I said. “Because any witch worth his blood won’t let you close enough to do the job.”
“Something come to mind?” Pete asked carefully, because I was pacing back and forth like a caged beast. How would you kill a powerful caster witch on his home territory, surrounded by workings and ward marks and protected by his own power?
You wait until he’s in the one spot with no wards, I answered myself. And you blow his face off.
“Detective?” Pete said anxiously.
I dug in my jacket pocket and found my car keys. “I’ll be back. Don’t let anyone in here except the CSU team—not firemen, not the medical examiner—no one.”
Running for the Fairlane, I belatedly realized that this was a bad idea and that also my car was probably totally trashed. I’d only parked about fifty feet away from the explosion.
The thought made me jog faster, because in the ten years I’d owned the car I