She removed her cell from her briefcase and flashed another picture. This one was taken at the morgue. There wasn’t enough face left to compare so it was impossible to use that to verify whether the identity matched the first shot. But then Gardner tapped the image to indicate a tattoo of a skull with the words Et in Arcadia ego underneath on the dead man’s left wrist.
Frowning, I lifted the old picture again. Sure enough, the same tattoo was on Ferris Harkins’s “before” picture. “The tattoo’s the same. But that’s hardly conclusive.”
“True. However, as you’ll see in the file, the identity was also confirmed through fingerprints.”
I blew out a deep sigh. “Okay, so how did this guy”—I held up the first shot—“end up like this?” I held up a screen shot from the file that had been taken from my vest cam. In it Harkins looked like something from hell: a wild-eyed hellhound with bloodstained teeth.
“Four days ago, we sent Harkins to do a buy,” explained Gardner. “He was supposed to meet up with one of my agents an hour later but never showed. We’ve been looking for him since. At first we figured he ran off with the buy money, but then this.” She motioned vaguely at me as if I was the this in question.
My mouth fell open. “You gave a CI cash and then set him loose in the Cauldron? What the fuck did you think was going to happen?”
“Prospero,” Eldritch warned.
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “But what was the MEA doing setting up a buy in the Cauldron to begin with? And why didn’t we know about it?”
“Forgive me, Officer,” Gardner said, laughing. “I wasn’t aware the federal government had to ask your permission to run investigations in Babylon.”
I crossed my arms and sucked at my teeth to prevent more expletives from escaping. Eldritch wouldn’t meet my eyes at all—so much for support from that quarter.
“Your actions tonight have complicated the shit out of my case,” Gardner continued.
“Seems like you complicated it yourself when you lost your snitch, Special Agent.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “A few weeks ago, one of our agents working undercover in Canada reported that an illegal shipment of antimony was being sent to Babylon.”
Antimony is a common metalloid used in everything from cosmetics to the treatment of constipation to the manufacturing of ceramics. Gardner’s mention of a shipment was notable, however, because the element was also used in a lot of potions. In fact, it was so commonly used in alchemy that the government had started regulating its sale a decade earlier to try to limit street wizes’ access to it.
“I don’t suppose they gave you a delivery address?” I asked in a dry tone.
Gardner’s lips pressed together. Guess she wasn’t a fan of sarcasm. “No, but we got our team in place shortly after and have been watching things since. About a week ago, Captain Eldritch called to tell us there had been a couple of unusual assaults.”
“Nothing like what happened tonight, but pretty violent,” Eldritch said. “The victims had each been bitten multiple times.”
“Why didn’t you put it in the debriefing reports?” I demanded.
His face hardened at my challenge. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily.”
I swallowed my retort. If I had to bet, Eldritch hadn’t made the report official because then his precinct would have gotten some unwanted attention from the chief and the mayor, who was up for reelection. “So you told the MEA instead?”
“Ever since Abraxas went to Crowley, the MEA has been keeping an eye on Babylon,” Eldritch offered, “waiting to see who would step up to fill the power vacuum.”
I snorted. “No one would be dumb enough to do that while Uncle Abe’s still alive.” As I spoke I kept a careful eye on Gardner to see her reaction to my casually claiming Abraxas Prospero as kin. She didn’t even blink, which meant she’d known who I was before she walked into that room. Part of me was relieved not to have to explain the connection or how I’d walked away from Uncle Abe and his coven a decade earlier. In fact, the last time I’d seen him was when I watched his trial on TV with the rest of the city. During the testimony, he’d smiled at the camera like he’d been savoring a juicy secret. I shivered, shaking off the memory.
“So you figure whoever ordered that antimony is trying at least to consolidate the Votaries.” I crossed my arms and tried to sort through all the angles.
Votary is another name for wizards who specialize in an alchemical form of dirty magic. In the dirty magic food chain, Votaries are at the top, followed by the Os, who specialize in sex magic, and the Sanguinarians, who deal in dirty blood potions.
“That’s one of our theories.” Gardner was watching me carefully now that she knew I had criminal blood in my veins.
It had been five years since Abe earned his all-expenses-paid trip to Crowley Penitentiary. Before his downfall, he’d been the grand wizard of the Votary Coven and the godfather who’d kept all the other covens in line. Once he was behind bars, no one had the balls to come forward and declare themselves the new kings of the Cauldron, so the covens splintered, which resulted in lots of turf battles. If Eldritch and Gardner were right about someone’s trying to make a power play, we were looking at a lot more dead bodies piling up before this was all said and done. But that was a pretty huge if.
“Antimony has lots of uses besides alchemy, Special Agent.”
She crossed her arms and smirked at me. “That’s true, I suppose. But we’ve checked the official shipment manifests of every freighter that’s come into Babylon in the last month. No shipments of antimony showed up. That means whoever received it was trying to keep it off the record.”
“Look, even if you’re right and the antimony was used in the potion Harkins was on,” I countered, “it doesn’t mean we’re looking at consolidation of power. It could just be a new wiz who wants to make his mark.”
“You could be right.” She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons we sent Harkins to make a buy. We were hoping that once we knew who was dealing the potion we could convince them to flip on the distributor.”
“But he got hooked before he could report back to you,” I said.
She nodded.
“What’s the potion called?”
Gardner exchanged a tense glance with Eldritch, who’d remained tellingly silent during the exchange. No doubt about it. Special Agent Gardner was in charge. “The street name is Gray Wolf.”