Nevermore (16 page)

“You wanna try and stop me, knock yourself out.”

“Lady, I don’t even know who you
are
.” McBain smiled sweetly. “Lemme give you a clue, brushy-top. I’m the only person standin’ between you and a couple uniforms from the Five-oh bustin’

your asses, runnin’ your face and prints through the system, turnin’ up a federal warrant for your arrest, and lockin’ you both up for the rest of your natural lives. You feel me, Dean, or you want me to call Sergeant O’Shaughnessy back and tell him I need backup?”

The two brothers looked at each other again, and seemed to come to a decision. McBain could swear they communicated telepathically.

Dean bowed slightly and indicated the door.

“After you.”

158 SUPERNATURAL

“Suddenly, you found chivalry?” McBain asked with a snort.

“Nah, it’s just—you got the fl ashlight.” That elicited another snort. McBain went in the door.

The entrance led right into a staircase. To the left, it went up to an open doorway. McBain shone the light up to see an empty room—expected in an empty house for sale. There was also a whiff of spice in the air. The last own er had been a cook for a fancy restaurant in Midtown, and obviously her skills were plied at home as well.

To the right, the stairs went down into the basement, which was the actual scene of the crime.

She quickly got to the bottom of the stairs, which creaked with each step all three of them took, so much so that she was grateful that it was late and there was a driveway and a wall between this house and the place next door. The fl ashlight illuminated bits of the room: a washer and dryer, wooden support beams, a hardwood floor that had been put in within the last ten years or so, and incredibly hideous wallpaper on three of the walls.

McBain also found a light switch, and fl icked it on. A forty-watt lightbulb dangling from a chain in the center of the ceiling lit up, making her think she was better off with just the fl ashlight.

The wall that wasn’t covered with the wallpaper Nevermore

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was made of brick, and it was even newer than the hardwood—less than a month, in fact. Based on the reports she’d read, that had made it fairly easy to break the wall down after both the neighbors and the real estate agency complained about the smell in the basement. Sure enough, there was a large hole in the brick, more yellow crime-scene tape draped across the gap.

Sam stood behind her, peering over her head into the hole. “You can’t even tell there was a body in there.”

“Reyes, the vic, he died of suffocation. And one way you could’ve told there was a body in here was that the inside of some of the

otherwise- brand-

spanking new bricks had scratch marks on ’em.

But they’re all at the lab.”

“Sammy, look at this.”

McBain turned to see Dean kneeling down on the floor. Sam moved to kneel next to him. Deciding to respect the boys’ need to do their own thing, McBain hung back.

Sam looked up at her. “Did the crime-scene report indicate any herbs found lying around?”

“Not that I can remember—but the woman who used to own this place was a gourmet cook.” Dean held up a small piece of greenery between thumb and forefinger. “I hope she didn’t cook with this. This is wormwood.”

McBain shrugged. “Well, you
can
cook with 160 SUPERNATURAL

wormwood—and make tea with it, for that matter—so I don’t see—”

“It’s also used in resurrection rituals,” Sam said,

“including the one this is part of.”

“This is a resurrection ritual?” McBain shuddered. “Hell. I ain’t exactly up on those.” Dean stood up. “What
are
you up on, Detective?

Are you a hunter, a cop, a pain in the ass, what?” Grinning, McBain said, “What, I can’t be all three? I don’t hunt that much, actually. Killed a vampire that was draining homeless folks for fun a few years back—and I gotta tell ya, takes
forever
to saw through a neck bone with a kitchen knife—

but mostly I just keep an eye on things, help out hunters who come through town, and make sure the mundanes don’t get word of it. I’m part of a network of cops, actually.”

“Are you kidding me?” Dean didn’t sound convinced. “A
network
?”

“Yeah, well, don’t be
too
impressed, brushy-top.

Right now, there’s all of four of us—me, a woman in Chicago named Murphy, and a guy in Eugene, Oregon, named Lao.”

“That’s three,” Sam said.

McBain smiled. “Well, you know the fourth.

She’s down in Baltimore. Kinda new, and she may not be a cop much longer.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “You mean Detective Ballard?”

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Nodding, McBain said, “She’s suspended right now, pending an IID investigation, and even if she comes out okay, she probably ain’t gonna be able to stay in Homi cide. Still, we reached out to her after she met up with you two, and she’s joined up.

We had another one, down in Mississippi, but she died in Katrina.”

“You’re right,” Dean said, “I’m not too impressed.”

“Well, just four of us was fine for a while,” McBain said. “Up until about a year and a half ago, things were cool, but—” She shuddered. “The spooky stuff ’s quintupled lately. Gettin’ harder to keep a lid on it.”

Sam and Dean exchanged another one of their telepathic looks, then Sam said, “How come almost all of you are women?”

“Can we play twenty questions later?” Dean asked. He started checking out the rest of the basement.

Sam gave McBain an apologetic smile and started checking the hole in the wall.

For her part, McBain checked the ceiling. She didn’t expect anything, but she also fi gured it couldn’t hurt.

“To answer your question, Sam,” she said as she got a good look at several cobwebs, “this ain’t exactly normal police work. Your regular police, he ain’t gonna buy this for a dollar. Only ones open to 162 SUPERNATURAL

the spooky stuff are people already on the fringe.

Usually, that’s us womenfolk.”

“And the one guy you mentioned was Asian,” Sam said.

McBain nodded. “My training officer used to say that an Asian cop is like a Jewish Pope. And while they ain’t
that
rare, they ain’t common, neither.” She let out a long breath. “So what resurrection ritual
is
this, anyhow? Like I said, that ain’t exactly my area.”

“It’s not,” Dean said. “It’s a fake ritual some jackass in the nineteenth century made up to scam people out of their hard-earned moolah.”

“Obviously,” Sam added, “somebody believes it’s real.”

Not finding anything on the ceiling, McBain looked back at the brothers. “So this ain’t just some fetish

thing—someone’s trying to, what?

Resurrect Edgar Allan Poe?”

Dean said, “That’s what it looks like.” He turned to Sam. “You owe me ten bucks.”

Sam looked outraged. “What?”

Holding up the wormwood, Dean smiled. “Cops missed the resurrection herb garden. You owe me ten bucks.”

“Call my lawyer,” Sam muttered, then turned to McBain and spoke quickly, probably to keep his brother from making a rejoinder. “Detective Nevermore

163

McBain, if you don’t mind my asking—how’d you know we’d be here?”

“Didn’t know for sure till I checked out the Five-oh—that’s the Fiftieth Precinct,” she added when she belatedly realized that they might not have been versed in NYPD lingo. “This house is in their territory. Anyhow, the call came in on you guys right when I got there.”

“Yeah, but how’d you know to check in the fi rst place?”

Dean, who was looking at some kind of funky contraption that McBain realized was a goofy-looking homemade EMF meter, said, “I was wonderin’ that myself.”

“Well, I’d been keepin’ an eye on the Poe thing from the

git-go—I mean, this

whole

bricked-up

thing screamed both ‘The Cask of Amontillado’

and ritual nonsense to
me,
so I figured a hunter or three might show up, and I thought it even more after the orangutan. Nobody here’s put it together yet, but the two murders are different precincts, and not everybody’s all
that
well read. I mean,

‘Amontillado,’ everyone knows that one, but ‘Murders on the Rue Morgue’ ain’t taught in most English classes, and most cops don’t even
remember
their English classes.” She smiled. “And then the Five-two got a call from Bronx Zoo security about two guys, a tall one and a short one, claiming to be 164 SUPERNATURAL

from
National Geographic
but not really being very convincing.”

The boys exchanged another one of their glances, though this one, she noticed, was a bit more guilty.

“Ain’t too many hunters that travel in a pair, and none’a the ones I know about match your descriptions, so I figured it was the pair’a you. Didn’t know for sure till I got here, though.”

“What would you have done if we were normal burglars?” Sam asked.

Shrugging, McBain said, “Busted you. And the Five-oh was gonna send backup if they didn’t hear from me in twenty. Trust me, after ten years’a this, I’ve gotten real good at coverin’ my ass. See, you guys can just leave town. Me, I gotta stay and clean up.”

Dean put away his EMF meter. “Nothin’. All right, listen, we gotta motor. I don’t think there’s anything else to fi nd here.”

McBain said, “You think this is part of a ritual?

I assume there’s more to it, and the next piece is gonna be Monday.”

Again the brothers exchanged glances. “Uh, yeah,” Sam said.

“I follow phases of the moon—kind of an occupational hazard.”

Sam quickly explained the ritual from some freak named Percival Samuels. “The next murder’s Nevermore

165

either gonna be on Webster Avenue near Beford Park Boulevard or at Fordham Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.”

Scratching her nose, McBain said, “Yeah, okay.

Tell you what, I’ll help out—take whichever location you two don’t.” Dean got a sour expression at that. “You got a problem, brushy-top?”

“A couple, actually. First of all,
please
stop calling me ‘brushy-top.’ ”

Sam broke into a wide grin at that.

“Secondly, I’m not sure I buy this whole ‘crusading cop who fights demons on the side’ crap—or that you knew Dad.”

In truth, McBain had expected this—both that Dean would dislike the nickname and that the brothers would be hinky about the fact that she knew their father. Having met John Winchester more than once, it didn’t surprise her in the least that he neglected to tell his sons about her. John wasn’t exactly big on sharing. Besides, she’d gotten word of some of Sam and Dean’s hunts, and while they hadn’t made a lot of mistakes, the few they did make were ones she wouldn’t have expected of John’s sons—unless he held things back from them.

“John Winchester,” she said, “white male, approximately fifty-three years old, six-foot-one, a hundred ninety pounds, dark hair, brown eyes, occasional beard depending on his mood, former U.S.

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Marine, wife Mary, deceased, two sons, Sam and Dean. Came to New York City on three separate occasions, once to hunt a golem in Brighton Beach, once to deal with a haunting on the subway—” Sam’s mouth fell open. “The phantom subway conductor?”

McBain smirked. “Sorta. This spirit prob’ly was the basis for that crazy legend.”

“What was the third one?” Dean asked.

“I swear to God, he slew a dragon. It was down in Chinatown—that was one crazy-ass case, lemme tell ya.”

Sam’s mouth fell even farther open. “Dad killed a
dragon
?”

Shrugging, McBain said, “Well, it was a small one.”

Attitude still firmly in place, Dean said, “And you helped him?”

“Tried to. Mostly he snarled and spit at me—

kinda like what you’re doin’ now, brushy-top—and told me to stay outta his way.”

“Did you?” Dean asked.

“Not the first time. After we almost shot each other, we came to an understandin’. He kept me posted on his movements when he came to town, I told him what I knew, and I kept an eye on him from a distance.”

Finally, Dean relented. “Yeah, that sounds like Dad.”

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“Listen, Detective, we’d better get going,” Sam said gently.

McBain reached into her jacket pocket and removed her cardholder, picking out two business cards. “Here,” she said, handing one to each of the brothers. “My cell’s on there. You need me, use that one. If either one’a you calls to MPU, there’s a record of it. The cell’s my personal phone, so it’s safer.”

“Thanks,” Sam said, pocketing the card.

The three of them went back upstairs, McBain switching the light off behind them, Dean closing and relocking the door once they were back out in the driveway.

After Dean clicked the padlock on the driveway gate shut and they were both standing at their respective cars, McBain said, “Listen, you two, be careful. I covered you this time, but it ain’t gonna be easy, especially if you’re gonna go pulling felonies on me.”

“We can handle the cops,” Dean said defensively.

“This ain’t no red-state sheriff ’s offi ce, brushy-top, we’re talkin’ the NYPD, and we’re talkin’ a federal warrant for multiple homi cides. I know you hunter types like livin’ on the edge, but right now that edge is pointed right at your balls, you feel me?

You don’t know me, you don’t trust me, you don’t like me, but right now, you need me. So don’t do nothin’ stupid, and we’ll all get outta this alive.” 168 SUPERNATURAL

Without waiting for either brother to reply, McBain got into her Saturn, turned it on, and drove off, heading toward Kingsbridge Road, which would take her back to the Major Deegan. That’d get her to the Triboro and back to her Queens apartment, where she’d get all of two hours’ sleep before having to head into One Police Plaza to report for her shift tomorrow. Right now she was on a Wednesday to Sunday rotation, but at least that meant she’d be free to help the Winchesters out on Monday.
If we’re
lucky, we’ll stop another poor bastard from getting
killed.