The Grendel Affair

And it was growing increasingly likely that I could be one of them.



I went to my desk in the far corner of the bull pen.



There’d been a decorative addition since this morning.



A toy model of a tractor sitting on top of a crushed model car.



Embarrassing news traveled fast.



I looked around for the culprit. As I did, clapping, whistles, and cheering came from every agent in the bull pen. I even got some standing ovations. So I did the only thing I could do. Smiled, waved like a gymnast after a successful dismount, and sat down.



I slunk down behind my computer monitor, but the smile stayed.



It was my second piece of coworker-supplied desk flair.



When an agent did something particularly memorable in the field—intentionally good or unintentionally mortifying—their fellow agents made sure their actions didn’t go unrewarded.



You weren’t truly a member of the team until you’d been gifted with desk flair.



My smile turned into a goofy grin. To paraphrase the immortal words of Sally Field: they liked me. They really liked me.



My first piece of desk flair had been a leprechaun figurine wearing a gold crown. He looked like the cute, little guy on the Lucky Charms cereal box—that is if you ignored the tiny pair of pants that someone had sewed that were down around his ankles—and the itty-bitty dangly bits someone had made out of Play-Doh. Multiply that leprechaun times five, and that was the event that marked my first time out in the field as a SPI agent.



SPI wasn’t normally in the bodyguard business, but as a favor to the local Seelie Court, a team of SPI agents had been assigned to escort a soon-to-be-married leprechaun prince and his bachelor-party buddies for a night on the town. Those three wishes the leprechauns would’ve been forced to grant if they’d been captured? They held unlimited power if they came from a member of the royal family. Wishes certain creatures of the Unseelie Court would’ve stopped at nothing to get. Hence the SPI bodyguard detail.



Well, the prince didn’t want bodyguards.



A fun fact to know about leprechauns: a human’s gaze can hold them prisoner. However, the instant the human looks away, the leprechaun can vanish. So where was the first place the prince and his roving bachelor party wanted to go? A strip club. SPI’s agents are highly trained and disciplined; but take five male agents into a strip club and tell them they can’t look?



The prince and his boys had flown the coop before the first G-string dropped.



Leprechauns are masters of disguise and can make themselves look like anyone. So we had five magically disguised leprechauns running amok and unguarded through New York’s adult entertainment establishments, and yours truly was the only SPI agent who’d been able to see through their glamours.



That night turned into a race against agents of the Unseelie Court as we hit New York’s strip joints, searching for a pack of horny leprechauns looking to get lucky.



We eventually found them in the Bronx. They’d gotten the munchies and staggered into a thankfully empty McDonalds.



The hobgoblin owner had met us in the parking lot, and while Ian got him calmed down, I went inside.



Bad call.



The leprechauns weren’t wearing glamours; and by this point, they weren’t even wearing clothes. Every last one of them thought that, like the Lucky Charms guy, they were “magically delicious.” His Highness even asked if I wanted to rub his charms for good luck.



After I’d Tasered him smack-dab in the Happy Meal, the others saw the wisdom in putting their pants back on.



For Tasering the happy parts of a Seelie royal, guess whose Taser-carrying privileges were revoked in the political poop storm that followed?



I eventually replaced my Taser with the tequila squirt gun when I learned that for ninety-nine percent of supernaturals (leprechauns being the exception), Tasers just tickled.



It was a hell of a night for my first day on the job.



• • •



I typed in my computer password and got to work. I opted to start with a Google search rather than going directly to the New York Times and the New York Post. The Times gave you the facts; the Post dished the dirt. I wanted both, but since I didn’t know whether Tarbert was a New Yorker like his brother, I opted to cast a wide net first.



I was pretty sure the rest of his family lived in New York—or had. I’d imagine that a Green-Wood family mausoleum with occupants dating back to 1851 was about as local as you could get. Nowadays, it didn’t matter where you had lived and died, your family could have your remains put on the next available flight back to the family plot. Or in the Tarberts’ case, the family mausoleum. I hadn’t seen one up close before, but I knew expensive when I saw it.



I kept seeing James Tarbert lying dead in a cherry Slurpee. Why would someone take out a hit on him? And why and how had his brother died only a month before? I glanced around the bull pen and up at the catwalks. I didn’t know where our Vulcan mind meld people had their cube farm, but I suspected they wouldn’t bring suspects here for questioning—unless they didn’t plan on letting them go. And Ian had said they’d be dropping Tarbert’s killer off at the Seventy-second after they were finished. Ian wasn’t one for volunteering information, but he’d never lied to me, either.



I Googled Jonathan Tarbert and got more than I’d expected—or ever dreamed.



For starters, Dr. Jonathan Tarbert wasn’t a medical doctor; he was the research and development/inventor kind. He graduated at the top of his class from MIT, then promptly vanished into the subterranean corridors of the government sector.



And he was a native New Yorker, all right. The Tarberts had provided their city with five generations of seamy, steamy, back-stabbing entertainment that read like a soap opera. As I sat back and scrolled through the more promising stories, I wished I had some of Kenji’s wasabi peas to pop while I perused all that juicy copy. Rich, beautiful heiress marries ambitious financier, and they have twin sons. The first is a brilliant scientist and gets snatched up by the government, but the only thing the second-born twin was brilliant at was getting his hands on other people’s money. Now both sons were dead, James murdered, and Jonathan was . . . I clicked on his obit in the Times . . . killed in a fire in his lab at GES, Inc. That didn’t sound like a government lab.



“Must be good stuff,” said Ian from directly behind me.



I squeaked, jumped, and knocked the tiny tractor off the little car, which bumped the danglies off my leprechaun.



Ian noted the tractor/car addition to my desktop diorama with approval. “That was fast.”



My two pieces of flair were cute. Ian’s vast collection looked like they’d come from horror movies and slasher films.



“Looks like you’ve got a decent start,” he said, indicating the info on my screen. “What’d you find so far?”



“The Tarberts are local, rich, and could’ve given the Borgias a run for their money—or their lives. And Dr. Tarbert was a government researcher, who doesn’t appear to have died in a government lab, who coincidentally had ‘Property of U.S. Government’ crates hidden in a secret room under his mausoleum.”



Ian pulled his chair over next to mine. “What department was he with?”



“Unknown. His last place of employment was GES, Inc.”



“Which stands for . . .”



“GES, Inc.”



“Generic enough.”



“Yep.”



“Know what they do there?”



I shook my head. “I haven’t gotten that far. I’m still on the ‘who did what to whom and for how much.’ The Tarberts knew how to make money—or at least how to get their hands on it. They were perfectly fine taking it from others, but apparently what they really liked was snatching it from each other.”



“Any fatalities from all that snatching?”



“At least once a generation one of them would off the other, sometimes twice if they were feeling ambitious.” I turned from my screen and looked up at him. “You thinking that James might have killed Jonathan?”



Ian booted up his computer. “I’ve called an old buddy of mine at the NYPD. He’s going to check if there were any suspicious circumstances surrounding Dr. Tarbert’s death. He’ll e-mail when he has something. While we wait, did you find anything on the newly late James Tarbert?”



“He was the second born, so Jonathan had the silver spoon, and it seems he also inherited the brains—and the family fortune. James barely graduated from Harvard with a degree in finance. That their dad was an alumnus and major donor might have helped. James worked at Enron, and then was let go from Enron. The last few years he’s been making the rounds of small investment firms as a consultant.”



“No trust fund?”



I shook my head. “The Tribeca address on his license is for a one-bedroom apartment. The senior Tarbert died five years ago. Jonathan got the money, and James got an allowance that’d be enough to keep a tasteful roof over his head, and if he wanted more, he’d have to work for it. The society pages were all over that.”



“I get the feeling James’s career goal was to work as little as possible.”



“And let everyone else do the work. None of his consulting gigs lasted longer than six months.”



“Married?”



“James, no. Jonathan, yes. Tia Sebastian. Divorced last year. That event also got a nice amount of coverage.” I clicked a few keys and brought up a photo from their wedding. “This is from when they could still be called ‘the happy couple.’”



“How much did she get after the divorce?”



“Nothing, courtesy of a pre-nup.”



“Ouch.”



“And seven months later, Jonathan’s dead.”



Ian’s computer dinged with an incoming e-mail. He rolled his chair over and opened it. “Looks like I owe Jerry a beer.”



“Jerry?”



“Precinct buddy.” Ian scanned the e-mail. “Hell, I owe him a beer and lunch. He came through in spades. Sent the full investigator’s report.”