Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(23)
Author: Nalini Singh

A lanky teenage boy with the same facial structure as Tony, but a foot more in height and skin several shades darker, appeared behind the older male. “Yes, Pa?”

“Show the lady the photos.”

The teenager took out his phone, touched the screen to bring up his photo files, then handed it to Ashwini. “I watch the crime shows . . . but I never expected to see anything for real.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I made Pa wait a minute to take her out. I helped him then, even though I knew we shouldn’t.”

Gripping his father’s hand as he must’ve done as a younger child, Coby blinked rapidly, added, “She was just thrown away. I didn’t know people did that for real. I thought they made that stuff up for TV.” His voice shook.

Ashwini met a lot of bad people in her line of work, mortal and immortal. A few were plain stupid and violent, others evil and cruel, a percentage selfish and narcissistic. Then she met people like Coby and his father and it renewed her faith in the world. “Thank you.” Forwarding herself the photos from the boy’s phone and deleting his copies so Coby wouldn’t have to do it himself, she said, “Do you usually put out the garbage around the time she was found?”

Tony Rocco nodded after putting his arm around his son and hugging the teenager to his side. “Yes. We clean up for the next morning and—”

“It would’ve been around eleven,” Coby said when his father broke off, the older man’s voice swallowed up by grief.

“Anyone else use this Dumpster?”

“Street people Dumpster dive now and then,” Coby said, “but we try to give them leftovers so they don’t have to.” Another jagged swallow, but the boy kept going. “It’s so cold now that they don’t come around at night anymore. Mostly it’s us and the place next door, only they were closed today.”

Coby’s father pointed a shaking finger toward the black garbage bags on the ground beside the Dumpster. “Who does that?” Making his hand into a fist, he thumped it against his heart. “Who just throws a human being away?”

Ashwini had no answer for him. “Did you come out here earlier in the day?”

“I did,” Coby said. “I do the cleanup after the lunch rush. It would’ve been maybe two thirty, three at the latest.” He rubbed his hands over his sweater-covered arms. “She wasn’t in the Dumpster and I didn’t see no one hanging around.”

Ashwini made a note to check for surveillance cameras anywhere nearby, the cops having already ascertained that the restaurant didn’t have one. She didn’t have high hopes; the area wasn’t wealthy enough for cameras to be an automatic add-on, but not crime-ridden enough that surveillance was a prerequisite for insurance. Here, neighbors looked out for one another, but most places would’ve closed at least an hour before, and while this restaurant butted up against the Vampire Quarter, it wasn’t on a popular pedestrian route for clubgoers, making it doubtful she’d be able to locate any eyewitnesses.

It all added up to tell her that the person who’d chosen this Dumpster knew the area well; he or she was either a local or lived nearby. Unfortunately that left her with a massive pool of suspects. Meeting Coby’s dark eyes, then Tony’s, she said, “Do either of you remember if there were other footprints in the snow when you came out tonight? Your own from before?”

“No, there was fresh snow, with only a cat’s paw prints,” Coby answered. “I remember, ’cause I stood in the doorway and thought about how it would make an awesome decoration for a cake, tiny paw prints on white icing, maybe a cat sitting on the edge.” He began to smile, but it faded a heartbeat later. “That was before . . .”

His father reached up to pat his boy’s face. “No, you don’t let anyone steal your dreams, especially some piece of scum who’d hurt a woman that way.” Pulling down his son’s face with weathered hands on his cheeks, Tony said, “We’ll go bake that cake and we’ll share it with our guests tomorrow, celebrate this woman’s life, give her something better than the ugliness of her death.”

Waiting until his son had nodded in response to his empathetic words, Rocco looked at Ashwini. “If she doesn’t have family, we’ll take care of her funeral, make sure she’s treated right.”

“Thank you,” she said, conscious it would be a monetary sacrifice for what appeared to be a small family business. “I’ll contact you once we know her circumstances and the details of when the pathologist will release her remains.” It would be as ashes, the state of the woman’s body too explosive to risk further exposure.

Tony nodded and led his son away. “I’ll leave the door open,” he said over his shoulder. “Anyone needs coffee, you come in.”

The older cop accepted his offer on behalf of herself and her partner, both of them having been out here for over an hour. Shaking her head when the cop stopped in the doorway to check if Ashwini wanted some, she walked over to Janvier and showed him the photos Coby had taken. “She was dumped sometime between two thirty in the afternoon and eleven at night, when the boy discovered her. We can narrow that down if we find out when it snowed in this area after two thirty.”

Janvier handed back her phone, his anger an icy film over the green of his eyes. “Before we do anything else,” he said, his voice rigid with control, “we have to make sure news about the condition of the body won’t spread. She deserves better, but this could affect an entire territory.”

Ashwini normally had no time for politics, but this particular political situation could quickly turn deadly—the archangels were all watching New York for any signs of fresh weakness. More, as Janvier had pointed out earlier, the city had only just started to heal from its losses. One more kick could tear the wounds open again.

“The senior cop told me she didn’t radio in any details, only the fact that they’d found a deceased female.” Ashwini had serious respect for the officer and her quick-thinking response in contacting the Guild by using her phone rather than the radio. “With this location, anyone listening in would’ve assumed she was a honey feed who serviced one of the fringe clubs. The media aren’t going to respond to anything as ‘routine’ as a honey feed death.”

The honey feeds—male and female—were part of the gray world. Light didn’t penetrate that world and it was one that “ordinary” people didn’t like to think about. Once lost, the people in the gray were forgotten, and that was both sad and an ugly indictment on society.