Free Ghosts & Echoes by Lyn Benedict Page B

Shadows, campus security recalls seeing your truck on that day. You’re no student.” He flipped through the folder, showed Sylvie a picture of the woman. Sylvie felt her upper lip curl, restrained any other response. Murderess.
    “Campus is open to community,” she said. She traced a chip in the table’s laminate, pried at the edge of it with her fingernail. There wasn’t any point in denying her presence there. Her truck was noticeable, had been ever since the dire hound—her very first monster—had clawed six long furrows through the red paint to expose the metal beneath.
    “These are the people who killed my boy, right?”
    “You’re the detective,” she said.
    “What happened to them?” Suarez said, his voice strung tight. “Did they run from you? Where are they, Shadows?”
    Sylvie sank back in the seat, folded her arms. “I wish I could tell you.”
    Yeah, this was a change of routine, and an unpleasant one. She wondered how the hell he had gotten the cultists’ names when she hadn’t been able to.
    Hadn’t needed to. The god of Justice had done her scutwork.
    While Adelio Suarez didn’t have preternatural help, Sylvie should have realized that grief, determination, and the resources of an entire police department were enough. Look what she managed with attitude and a gun.
    He pressed his chair back to two legs, stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and dropped it down again with a thunk that made the table vibrate. “You wish you could tell me?”
    “I don’t have any answers,” Sylvie said. “Does that make it clearer?” She stared him down; after werewolves, succubi, and gods, one overworked night-shift detective was barely a blip on her radar.
    He dropped his gaze. “Tell me this one thing, Shadows, one thing. Do you think they’ll ever resurface?”
    Sylvie grimaced. Maybe if he hadn’t been asking her in the middle of a police station, maybe then she’d be tempted to give him the answer he expected.
    “Look, Lio, I’m sorry about Rafi—you know I am—but I don’t have any answers for you. And that’s a client of mine you’ve got cuffed out there. He’s got nothing to do with anything.”
    “They never do; you take them down with you, anyway.” Suarez stood, turned away, facing the door. His shoulders slumped.
    Sylvie was grateful for his weakness. It hid her own, the quick tears that burned her throat and filled her eyes. He was right, of course. Demalion was only the most recent, most graphic example of that. The Furies had shredded him down to his soul for doing what she had asked him to do. She reached out blindly, put her hand on the gun, finding familiar, cold comfort.
    “Can I go?” she said.
    “When you answer one question more for me,” he said. His voice was ragged, as if he’d been fighting to control his breath.
    Sylvie groaned, put her head on the table, smelled greasy laminate and the lingering scent of gun oil. “I should have stayed at the beach.”
    “Explain to me why you and your client were passed out at a crime scene. Or did you not know the Bayside Mall was the latest in a string of robberies?” Suarez leaned over the table, forced her to look at him. The sunlight creeping through the barred window was unkind to him, pointed out the fatigue tint to his skin, the silver in his stubble, and blanked those remarkable eyes.
    “Motherfucker,” Sylvie muttered, the heels of her hands pressed tight to her forehead. “That’s why I was there. To prevent it or find out who was doing it.”
    “Your Chicago beat cop hired you to worry about south Florida robberies?”
    “Ever heard of multitasking?” Sylvie said. “He’s not my only client. Just the most needy.”
    “The robbery?”
    Sylvie shook her head. “I didn’t get a good look.”
    He waited, leaning pointedly against the hallway door. She growled, but forked over her list of the car plates, the long one with all the cars in the lot, and the new additions nicely circled for him. She