Limitless (2 page)

We lapsed into another silence. While that admission might have shut other, lesser men up for a good long while, Detective Inspector Webster was back at it relatively quickly. “So… you’ve been to London before?” It didn’t come off as much of a question.

I didn’t bust him on it, though. “Just the once,” I said. “It’s a beautiful city.”

“After we managed to dredge up the file involving the passports,” Webster said, shooting me a sly look, “I looked at some of the criminal reports filed around the same time as your friends’ departure from England.” He paused. “Saw something about a teenage girl in a traffic collision with a car up near Russell Square. She mangled it so badly that the engine dropped out.”

I kept a straight face. “I hope she’s all right.”

“Something in the same area,” he went on, “some sort of foot chase in a hotel nearby. A fracas in the National Museum a few days later—”

“Oh for crying out loud—” I muttered.

“There were an awful lot of murders that cropped up around that time.” He was probing. I didn’t even glance at him. “Lots of shootings.”

“Century—the people behind the war,” I said, “they hired armed mercenaries to wipe us out. It got messy.” That was an understatement.

“Maybe you can tell me all about it sometime,” he said, and he sounded genuinely hopeful.

“Sure,” I lied. I might have had diplomatic immunity now—maybe; I was a little fuzzy on how these things worked—but there was no way in hell I was going to revisit the good old days with a detective inspector. There was dumb, there was stupid, and then there was confessing all your sins to the local police. I was dumb and occasionally stupid, but I didn’t plan on sinking to the third level.

“Here we are,” he said, and we passed a sign that proudly proclaimed N
EW
S
COTLAND
Y
ARD
. Just like on the TV. Or telly, I guess they called it. I shook my head as we entered a parking garage.

I followed Webster into the building, on my guard but trying not to look it. He kept glancing back at me like I was going to bolt at any second. He gave me a reassuring smile each time, and I was practiced enough at social niceties that I responded in kind. In reality, though, I was feeling a little more like the cat in the dog pound after his discussion of unsolved mysteries.

“Right this way,” he said, holding a door for me as we entered a bullpen filled with activity. There were a lot of plainclothes police officers inside on phones, their accents so thick they melded together into a fascinating audio stew that even my practiced ear couldn’t sift through.

The smell of coffee lingered in the air, the cheap kind, brewed in a pot that had probably been around since the Brits had ruled half the world from their island. People were hunched over their desks, looking at paperwork, staring at computer screens. It was like any other office I’d been in, except for the atmosphere of tension that underscored it all. That wasn’t something you’d see in a copy machine repair shop. Unless massive layoffs were coming, maybe.

“Have a seat over here,” Webster said, guiding me over to his desk. It was clean and neat, not a file left out. There was a desk calendar and a computer monitor, both perfectly positioned. Nothing else inhabited the space, not a picture of family, not a school diploma, nothing. If he’d told me right then that it was a temp desk and he was only using it for now, I wouldn’t have questioned him.

I stopped short and took a seat in the chair alongside as Webster stripped his coat off, folded it in half and hung it on the back of his chair. I decided that the careless look of his hair had to require tremendous effort, and his otherwise natty appearance suddenly made more sense. The man kept things neat.

I leaned against the back of my seat as he sat down in his own. I watched him as he rolled it into place and shook the mouse to wake his computer. He slid out a drawer to reveal a keyboard and logged in, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he did so.

Did I mention he had angel eyes?

“Ah, here we go,” he said, causing me to look away. “Looks like the medical examiner has had his say on this.”

“Let me guess,” I said, dryly, “the cause of death was being fileted into tiny pieces.”

“Actually, it looks like a heart attack,” Webster said, focused on the computer screen. “I don’t know exactly how he made that determination, but it would appear the dismemberment happened post-mortem.”

“Wow,” I said, thinking that one over. “Chopping someone up just to dump their body in an alley—”

“Where it would almost certainly be discovered, keep in mind,” Webster said. He twisted his lips as he read the screen, and tapped one finger idly on his clean desk. “They didn’t even make an effort to dispose of it, and with it—him—in that many pieces, it would have been easy to at least try.”

“A public display of some sort,” I said, thinking it through. “But who would do something this messy…this brutal…?”

“I’m not exactly a profiler,” Webster said, sliding back in his chair, which squeaked as he did so. He regarded me in a posture that looked lazy, but his eyes were intent. “This mess, though, I mean… it could be personal, someone with a grudge, or it could be a serial killer…”

“Or neither,” I added. “Or both. Did your examiner find any DNA at the scene?”

“Not a bit other than the victim’s.” Webster shook his head. “The scene was short on blood compared to what you’d find in a human body, so the victim was definitely killed somewhere else and brought here.”

My head spun with the possibilities, but I kept myself upright in the chair. Personal score? Random killing? Disappearances of metas? I stared straight ahead as I considered it, then turned my head to meet Detective Inspector Matthew Webster’s brown, soulful eyes with my own. I could see he had some questions. I just had one, really.

What the hell was happening here in London?

Chapter 3

The old man screamed when he got cut, and that didn’t bother Philip Delsim at all. He took a leisurely path away from where the bastard hung upside down from his chained ankles and picked up his bone-white china teacup and saucer from the table they rested upon. He saw the red from his thumb smudge a bit on the saucer, and that drew a frown. He should have known better than to take a sip before washing his hands. This was a messy endeavor, after all.

The screams were a delicious sound; they caused him to prickle with anticipation all across his skin. They were a symphony of a sort, high and primal, primitive music that harkened back to the days of instinct. Philip had discovered early on that he liked the sound of this particular kind of music, though he’d rarely had a chance to listen to it in the last few years.

The world had changed, after all. Gone were the days of setting a leisurely pace of life. The digital age, they called it. Life moved frenetically, everyone feverishly scrambling to speed up. Philip took another sip of the tea, which hadn’t gone cold, fortunately. Not yet, anyway. He preferred to do things at a slower pace, take his time. Do the thing right.

Make them suffer.

The last one had suffered greatly, and for a long time, too. Why, he had barely remembered his name at the end of it. It was all wet croaks from a voice so strained it might as well have been broken. Philip took a sniff of the Earl Grey in his cup and found it quite the joy in contrast to the scent of blood and fear that suffused the room in which he stood.

“You know,” Philip said, placing the cup and saucer back on the table and turning, slowly, to face the old man hanging by his ankles from the ceiling, “I’m rather enjoying seeing you bleed.” He adjusted his glasses, wire-framed spectacles that he loved because they looked at least fifty years out of date. “Seeing you suffer. I could enjoy watching this for years to come.”

“You… would,” the old man croaked. It caused Philip to raise an eyebrow. Not many people could lose as much blood or skin as this fellow had and still remain cheeky.

Philip tried to recapture his sense of joy, though the subtle hint the old man had thrown at him nettled more than a little. “But I’m afraid I just don’t see a very long future for you.” He made a vague gesture with his hand, and the old man screamed again, this time from the pain. Philip had made him scream from terror at least a few times, and those were choice screams indeed, especially from a tough old bastard like this. “It’ll be memorable until the end, though. At least for me.”

Philip took a step closer and ran a hand down the old man’s chest. Knife work had exposed tissue to the air that was not supposed to be out and breathing. It was messy, really, but there wasn’t much to be done for it. He reached further up, came to the hip and thigh, where the damage done by yesterday’s handiwork had started to heal. “I can’t imagine you’ll enjoy it, but I can assure you that I’ll find the whole process immensely satisfying.” Philip smiled.

And then he jabbed a finger into the newly knitted flesh and started peeling it off in a long strip.

The screams followed, and that was all to the good. Philip found himself humming along with them, trying to match the pitch as best he could while he worked, tirelessly, on the old man, burying himself in his efforts and barely noticing the mess he continued to make.

Chapter 4

“So you have no knowledge of who might be behind this?” Webster asked me. I was getting a little chilly sitting in New Scotland Yard, but the faint hope in his eyes as he asked the question helped keep my disappointment at bay.

“Not a clue,” I said, giving him a short shake of the head.

“Is it possible—” he started, and I cut him off.

“
Anything
is possible,” I finished for him. “Absolutely anything at this point. Which is the problem, really. You could have a random act of violence. You could have a planned act of violence. A mugging and abduction gone horribly wrong, a revenge killing that—”

“Hang on a minute,” Webster held up a hand to stop me. “What if we operated from the assumption that this killing is connected to your friends’ disappearances?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “So what if we did? I guess at least then you’d have something to work on.”

“That’s the spirit,” Webster said and flashed me a smile. He turned back to his computer and pecked at the keys with one finger on each hand. I watched him coolly, pursing my lips. He glanced up at me and made a faint noise, an embarrassed guffaw. “Never have learned how to use a keyboard.”

“Me either,” I said, taking my eyes off of him and letting them roam around the bullpen. I caught a hint of interest as he cocked his head at me, waiting for further explanation. “They didn’t offer typing classes where I did my schooling.”

He returned his attention to his half-assed typing. With a sigh, I leaned over. “I think I’ve kind of reached the limit for how much help I’m going to be able to give you on this.”

His eyes flicked to me in surprise. “What about your friends?”

I felt my stomach rumble just a little. “I don’t know if you could call either of them friends. Acquaintances, co-workers maybe—”

“War buddies?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Whatever the case, you’ve got an investigation started and… frankly, I’m a little out of my depth here. I don’t think there’s going to be much I can do for you on this, and I’ve got a world of trouble waiting for me on my desk back in Minneapolis.” That was entirely true. I was presently inundated, working about eighty hours a week for less pay than I’d ever worked in my life. I mean, I was head of an underfunded agency that was in charge of policing metahumans across the United States, and while we were a small part of the population—about five hundred or so—we were not a quiet part.

Plus, a lot of the crap that flowed my way had nothing to do with metahumans, but I had to investigate to rule it out anyway. That was fun. I’d been called down to Ohio one time because of reports of some sort of fish-type meta living in a local pond. It was actually some weirdo who liked to take naked swims with a shark fin attached to his back. That image was forever seared into my mind; they didn’t make a mental bleach I could wash it out with, unfortunately.

Like I said: crap flowed my way. And that was one of the milder examples.

“I’ve got a list,” he said, and I heard a printer nearby spin to life, working on something. “Last known addresses for these people you dealt with—”

“Refugees,” I corrected. “We granted them sanctuary, after all, so really they were refugees.”

“Right, these people,” Webster said, and he scooted back in his chair just around the corner of the cubicle and returned a second later with a piece of paper clenched between his thumb and forefinger, “they’re out there.” He glanced at the paper. “They could be in danger.”

“I’m sure you’ll warn them,” I said warily. Wearily, too. Those two always came together for me somehow.

“I’ve got to talk to them all,” Webster said, making the paper dance as he held it out in front of me. I couldn’t decide whether he thought the way he was doing it was enticing or if he was just trying to hypnotize me.

“Yeah, we call that ‘canvassing,’” I said. “I’ve done it. It’s not the fun part of police work.”

“I could use some help,” Webster said.

I sighed. “Not to be an ass, but so could I. I’m one of two—count them, two—responders to metahuman threats for the entire United States.” I had really felt the “entire” part of it over the last two years. “I have a stack of investigations on my own desk about six inches thick that I’m supposed to be working on, and just about the time I get it down to halfway, the U.S. State Department sees fit to loan me out to some other nation whose metas were nearly exterminated so I can deal with whatever threat they’re facing. Which is fine, except that when I get back, my little pile of folders will have increased back to a full six inches or more.” I joked with my brother—the only other responder to meta threats at our agency—that our caseload was more prolific at breeding than rabbits.

And on the rare occasions when our folders turned out to be filled with something serious, it was usually hairier than rabbits, too.