Chapter 5: Talk to the Hand
The hand was cut off just half an inch below the wrist, going through the forearm. Even in the diminishing light, where the world had a gray-blue filter on it, the skin on the hand was ... “tan” was the best word I had for it. It could have been any of a dozen nationalities or ethnic groups around the Mediterranean.
Sinead decided enough was enough and put away her camera. She pulled out her flashlight, illuminating the body part. “Tell me what you see.”
I frowned, looked to Father Freeman as if she was kidding. He just shrugged at me. I looked back at the hand. “Skin tone is ... neutral. Anything from Latin to light-skinned African, to Persian or dark Italian, to someone who spends a lot of time out in the sun.”
She nodded. “Continue.”
I crouched down so I could get a better look. My knees objected. At my age and my size, joints just started hating you. They didn’t need a reason. I looked at where the hand ended. There was something familiar about it, like I had seen a cut like that before.
“The cut is... clean. Eyeballing it, I’d call it perfect. Axe? Sword? So ... something that cut in one swift stroke.”
Sinead nodded. “Close.” She flicked her light around the sidewalk. “See any blood here?”
I felt like she was teasing me. “Obviously not.”
She flicked her light down the crater. “See any body parts down there?”
“Nope.” I frowned, trying to put the pieces together. “So it was cut off somewhere else?”
Sinead shook her head. “Not cut off. Burned off.”
I flinched, feeling stupid. “It looks like the sort of cut I leave behind when I use the angelblade.”
“Yes. It’s very similar to your lightsaber replica.” She clicked off the flashlight and looked at me. She pointed at the hand. “I’d bet that this guy didn’t make it out fast enough. I don’t know why they had to be on the grounds to blow it up, but this guy was a little too slow. But here’s the problem, and where you come in.”
I blinked. “I came in because I’m a cop.”
She rolled her eyes as she stood. She brushed off some dirt from her pants leg. “The flare we saw was green. Few things burn green. One is boric acid, or Borax. Since I seriously doubt that a soap-based bomb leveled this entire block so thoroughly, that leaves copper. Copper burns at over a thousand degrees Celsius—nearly two thousand Fahrenheit. Which makes sense insofar as the average crematorium burns at eighteen hundred degrees.”
I nodded along, following so far. “That explains why there’s no body except for the hand. It was consumed. I’m with you.”
Sinead shook her head. Strands of her black hair drifted in the breeze. The wind was picking up. “Not quite. Because one, being that close to the fire, the rest of the hand should show signs of damage from heat that intense. Two, the melting point of silica—and therefore the melting point of concrete—is five hundred degrees below that. To be accurate, around fifteen hundred and fifty. Twelve hundred, depending on the mix.”
Sinead clicked on her flashlight and reached it past the edge of the crater, the beam of light angled on the edge of the sidewalk. “Except this is pristine. There isn’t even a little melting. The fire was perfectly self-contained within the property line. Which, I hate to tell you, is impossible.”
I nodded, mostly to myself. “So it’s supernatural. I guessed that.”
She nodded. “Which leads us to something else.” She rose, and stepped over to the plastic bag. She dropped to one knee. “I had to bag these before the wind blew them away.”
With her light, she illuminated the contents of the bag.
They were finger tips... without any bones in them. “We have fingerprints,” she said.
I winced, fighting a gag reflex. Don’t ask me why, after all the horrors I had seen, the sight made me a little ill. Probably because I had just come from dinner. “Those weren’t cut off, were they?”
Sinead shook her head. “This is skin from the finger tips. Either someone cut off the fingers and pulled the skin off, or the guy shed them like a second skin. You don’t know any snake people, do you?”
I shrugged. “I know some lawyers.”
She looked at me with a deadpan look. Her voice was flat as she said, “Funny.”
I glanced back to the hand. “Speaking of fingerprints, how about the hand? Did you print that?”
She smiled. “With the app on my phone. No hits yet, so we’ll have to go through other databases.”
I looked around. “This guy can’t be new at this. No one starts with this level of destruction.”
“Really?” she said. “Did they ever rebuild that house in King’s Point?” she asked, referring to the headquarters of a death cult that had been destroyed when I had inadvertently called fire from Heaven. “Or is it still a giant hole in the ground?”
“Funny.”
Our office building was not far away from the crime scene. If you think that’s suspicious, good—so did I. I almost always figured at this point either God wanted me in the right place, or Hell brought the fight to me.
Either way, I was cool with that.
The office building was down the block from my home. Granted, it was one very long block; the other side of the street was two blocks long, so you get the idea. The building was just off the corner, receded from the street, almost hidden behind an apartment building. It was also uninspired and uninspiring. It was a multiple-story, hollowed-out block of concrete with some windows. Inside was nicer, even modern. I bought out the entire top floor.
Yes, I bought out the entire floor. Being insanely wealthy has been less about making my life easier and more about making my job easier. I never had to fight over a requisition form ever again.
The only problem was that it lacked an elevator. My knees, and most everyone else, never appreciated that I wanted everyone to get some exercise in the morning.
By the time I made it to the office, everyone else was at their desks. Alex was at the front. Behind him was an elevated platform for the other desks. On the other side of the railing behind him were Lena and Jeremy, their desks pushed together so they faced each other around their computers. Father Freeman was at his desk, his coat draped over “the FBI desks” (a running gag in the office, since the FBI agents that were to be assigned to the Joint Supernatural Taskforce never materialized).
I wasn’t even in my office, and my phone was ringing. I checked the caller ID before I answered. It was the FBI, and not the Manhattan office, but Washington.
I sighed. Time to make the doughnuts.
“Nolan,” I answered as I sat. I hadn’t even taken off my coat yet.
“Nolan!” said the director of the FBI. “Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
“It’s Sunday. I just got into the office,” I answered calmly.
“Your cell phone!” the director barked like a constipated Chihuahua.
“I’ve been coordinating a crime scene for the last...” I checked my watch. It was now nine o’clock Sunday night. “Four hours. I’ve been a little busy. What do you want?”
The voice on the other end informed me, “We have a team that’s going to come up there and personally handle the entire investigation.”
I paused for a moment to process his statement, and my answer. “No.”
The quiet on the phone was ominous. It lasted long enough that I thought we had lost the connection. I was going to ask when he finally replied. The Director’s voice was low and unnaturally calm when he said, “No?”
“Correct. No,” I told him casually, as matter of fact as I could sound.
The Director’s voice was tight with controlled anger as he said, “Nolan, you work for us, you self-righteous—”
“Self-righteous I may be,” I cut him off, “but I don’t work for you. I work for the New York City Police Department and the City and State of New York. I like to think I do God’s work, but He doesn’t sign my paychecks. Neither do you. Besides, you wanted me to handle all of the hinky cases, didn’t you? This is already shaping up to be as hinky as it gets. You want to do something? Send over one of your crime scene guys to look over our scene and the evidence we have so far. If he’s half as perceptive as my forensics expert, he’ll probably tell you to run screaming.”
The director growled at me. Literally. I didn’t think he was used to being told no. “Listen, Nolan, this is an obvious case of terrorism. It belongs to us. It’s going to be another high-profile case, and—”
“It’s still my wheelhouse,” I cut him off. I got the sense he wasn’t used to that either. I didn’t care. “So back off. We’ve gotten nothing from you DC dickheads for over a decade, why start now? No, correction. The only thing I’ve gotten from you is grief. You tried to screw us on the Luciano investigation, you saddled us with Chief Nolan from Texas, and you want to play games with this? Not on your life.”
Through clenched teeth, the FBI Director said, “I will disband your unit, cut off your funding, and see you in Hell first.”
I smiled, even though he couldn’t see me. “I’d like to see you try.”
The director sputtered for half a minute, trying to find the right curses. “Why you little—”
“I’ve been doing this for thirty years, you paper-pushing hack,” I barked. “You know what I did after Golden Chalice Studios fell, and all of their pet politicians were arrested? I fully backed the campaigns of every politician who ran for their seats. I’ve spent the last decade buying positions of power for good people who would do the right thing. Or haven’t you noticed that New York politicians are no longer stupid Communist parrots? So you want to try to shut me down? Try it. If the CIA agents assigned to me don’t have their people screw you over, my politicians will. All you jokers ever want is the credit for the arrest. I’m happy to give it to you. Take it. Send whatever fair-haired gunsel you have on staff you want to have the feather in his cap, and he can have it. Do what you do best: hold press conferences and take credit. But if I see one of your bozos at my crime scenes, witnesses, anything other than during the nightly news, I will shoot to kill, are we understood?”
Click.
I know what you’re thinking. Wow, Tommy, that seems out of character for you. Well, I was cranky. Yes, I had my reasons. Under the guise of Louis Luciano, six years earlier, Lucifer himself had infiltrated politicians, the FBI, and anything that might have been useful to him. While I had done my best to fill in the gaps during the fallout by supporting and promoting politicians who would also pass for good human beings, there were no guarantees that Lucifer wouldn’t corrupt or subvert more people, or that all of the corrupt in his sway had been cleared out.
But everything else I said was true. We’d never gotten support from the FBI. We barely had use of their resources. They barely wanted to touch the supernatural, unless it gave them good headlines. They were happy to take the headlines ... except, of course, when we had to bring down an entire Hollywood studio filled with sexual predators, pedophiles, rapists, and other influential people. Then I had to do that press conference.
Now, we were dealing with a supernatural weapon that could destroy a city block with ease. I wanted the FBI nowhere near it. Either it would eat them alive, drag their souls to hell, or send them screaming for the hills.
It also felt good to get that off my chest. The FBI director was just another politician, like every other FBI director. Had I been petty when I spoke to him? Absolutely, but I needed to talk to him in a language he could understand.
There was a knock on the door to get my attention. Jeremy cracked the door and stuck his head in. “If you’re done yelling at the FBI, we got a call in from the Gray Man at MI-6.”