“Someoneinsisted I put on pants, and then I…” Cal trailed off as he slipped into the room. He stood behind the two of them for a moment, then went to Benny’s other side. “You have something.”
Ray turned to consider the papers directly in front of him, the messy tape jobs and scrawled notes in Cal’s handwriting. He recognized what the documents were, but not much more than that. The things he had linked to Cal in his own mind were interesting and potentially terrifying. Fairy tales didn’t matter. But these did. Ray had squirreled away these breadcrumbs and left them for Cal, and that was enough to have banished them from his mind.
“I saw it,” Benny explained. “Iseeit,” he amended a second later.
“You do?” Cal asked excitedly. “Ray, do you realize you… wait. Benny, go on first.”
Ray scowled at the sheets directly in front of him. Cal had arranged the information—apparently moving it the night before while Ray had been asleep—so that things were linked by location. Ray was looking at part of an old map of the city, and the first page of a lease agreement, and some pages of crime stats for recent years for everything in those four or five blocks.
“It’s just information, right?” Benny gestured at it all. “Tons of it. Cal has been moving it around to give it some sort of order, and it’s almost there. See?”
Ray did not see. For once, Cal didn’t seem to, either. “The hell, Bens?”
Benny made a frustrated sound and pointed at the top right corner. “Look. That’s the nicer part of town. That is, it’s stuff relating to the boutique shops and high-end restaurants that serve residents of the bluffs and the other fancy districts. Except that’s just where Cal put it. If this were rearranged to match a map of Los Cerros, it would be, roughly, down and over here.” He waved elsewhere. “Where Cal put that article about the cost of the repairs to the plaza from a few years ago, and some stuff about the new high rises that are supposed to help the housing situation. Ha. A joke.”
“Ray’s case with the house and the elf.” Cal leaned in to tap a different section. Then another. “This is City Hall. It should be over there. Sure. I accept that this doesn’t work as an actual map. So?”
“I don’t think the map literally has the answer.” Benny stepped back. “But look down on the city. I mean, if I arranged it to be the whole city. Obviously, we have way more papers to do with the village than anywhere else. But it’s the rest of them that you need to think of in terms of a map. Like a transit map. Ray has been to all of these places. Ray spends a significant amount of time at some of them.”
“Well, yeah. Ray goes all over the city…” Cal went silent except for the hum of his wings as he caught Benny’s point. “It’s the connections. The idea. Raymond.Ray!” Cal jabbed a finger toward the section that was City Hall and its environs, which was quite large. “Point of view: You are Ray. You are a werewolf. The detectives and regular cops and office workers around you are talking. About nothing, maybe. Nothing that seems important at the time. Their lives. Their divorces. Their cases. Their debt. Their kids going to college. Their moonlighting jobs, whatever. All those nights spent watching over empty properties, displacing the unhoused population, that sort of thing. Things they may or may not like doing, but are still doing.”
Ray let out a short growl to remind him that he was waiting and not a genius like them.
Cal clucked his tongue but carried on. “You are Ray. You are at City Hall. You have to testify, you’re visiting Lex, whatever. You hear lawyers talking. Defenders. Prosecutors. You see what’s on the docket.”
“I’m right here.” Ray bared his teeth.
“Yes!” Benny pulled one of the papers off the wall, from a different group. “You are Ray and you are m—with Cal, who is friends with Benny. And you hear them talk about their work and you help them when you can. You listen to what Cal says about the changes in the city, in the village. You visit him at the Rainbow Wings center. You overhear things while you are in the lobby.”
Benny turned to Ray. After a moment, Cal did too.
Benny made his voice softer. “And you start to note more and more who is talking and what they are saying. What things they have in common. Rent. Mortgages. Evictions. High rises. Those guards for the empty buildings. And increased vitriol to the beings who are trickling out of the village, to the queer humans and the nonwhite humans who live there who are speaking up about their history, who are married to former state senators, et cetera. And you know what dangerous words can lead to.” Benny paused there. “We need a better word than dehumanization, since not everyone in the village in human.”
“Pin in that for later,” Cal agreed, before picking up the baton. “You are Ray, and you notice things. You cannot help but notice things. And the flood of complaints and maybe shady comments is getting worse. People outside the village say it’s all in our imaginations but, sorry, Ray, you know a dogwhistle when you hear one. Maybe the comments are not about you, but about others. And there is other evidence before you anyway, every day at work, an increased department budget, the fancier armor, the weapons, what thosemean, all the news stories and the angles they take on each arrest or issue.”
Cal stopped, the continued, slower and more careful. “So you start to look into it. Maybe hoping you’re wrong to be suspicious. But you’re still suspicious enough to keep it a secret from Penn. Possibly because the price tags on even a vacant lot now are astronomical and people have killed for much less. You decide, consciously, not to tell us, not to tellme, because of the danger andthatis why you didn’t remember the drive. Without proof, you wouldn’t risk us. Even with it, you would hesitate until we were safe.”
“What all these papers have in common, initially, is just you, Ray. We should have thought of that earlier. That’s why you hadn’t narrowed it down yet. You were still collecting information as it came to you. Stuff you could explain away as harmless, maybe, if anyone asked.”
Ray exhaled heavily. “If someone or something at City Hall attracted my attention, it means this is established and old. This is multiple parties working their own evil for… decades or longer. It’s a pattern since the Nineteenth Century at least,” he realized out loud. The library books made more sense now.
“Right!” Benny turned back to the makeshift crime board that was their living room wall. He didn’t have glitter but he was practically sparkling. “So you take what you have and decide to try digging deeper in only one or two places, maybe. You’re just one person, after all, with a day job. But you have all this information that you know must mean something, so you keep it, and you keep pulling data and saving it there. Who works for these security companies. Old property values compared to new ones. Boundary lines. Ancient laws never taken off the books. You save them and you keep them, even if you aren’t willing to admit why. And then you go into work every day like nothing is wrong, even though it had to feel like the ground was giving way beneath your feet.”
“Ray Branigan compartmentalization hell.” Cal gave Ray a stern look, then was drawn back to staring at the papers. “As my father would say, vast conspiracies don’t succeed, or at least, can’t stay secret. Too many parts. Too many players.”
“We have a paranoid and increasingly insular police department encouraged to ignore or actively harm those from the village. Even one of their own.” Benny stopped.
Cal didn’t. “Officers there who are also in need of extra money. Higher ups who want fancy homes. City officials who want to keep theirs. A combination of things, like the files Ray saved. I bet we dig in here and we find a bunch of small conspiracies and a lot of deliberate inaction or personal greed. All of it complicit in one big mess that Ray sniffed out. I mean, it’s one thing to say, ‘Things in the village are tense.’ Or, ‘Housing in the city has gotten ridiculous.’ It’s another to realize those two things are related and do something about it, even if he was in a sort of denial the whole time.”
“I don’t think a small conspiracy would lead to this,” Ray objected. He didn’t mention the rest of what Cal had said, or implied. “One or two properties, yes. Encouraging the trouble in the village? That requires power and the ability to think bigger.”
“Maybe notsmall,” Cal allowed, “just not a citywide one. Most of those in the PD aren’t out to destroy you, they just don’t care or won’t care, which is all a bad actor needs. Is that City Hall? Some of City Hall? A corporation paying off one council member? Do some of the council members own these companies or have an interest in them? I bet they do. Either kickbacks or a legal interest. It’s not like anyone is going to notice the conflict of interest of senators or council members having stock in one of the companies building all over the city. But that’s where the answer is. An officer in a corporation could pay for a spell like this. A city council person with family money could pay for a spell like this. And both would have influential friends in the department who could give the order to look the other way… and the bigotry is already there, making them more inclined to believe their bosses, less inclined to listen to you.”
“The history of the city.” Ray picked up one the papers that had been removed from the wall. A move that had been denied, at least initially, to rezone the area along Oro Creek to residential only. What businesses like Mami’s would do if that ever happened, Ray didn’t want to imagine. “It hasn’t all been fairy parades and human civil rights movements.” There was a reason they had needed John Summers in the first place. “It’s land grabs and fights over water. Half of those Victorian mansions were built by people who took the land from original owners by whatever means necessary. The court system was not, is not, your friend if you don’t speak English. The robber barons let a plague destroy part of the city, then burned it down and claimed it as empty land so they could build on it and make another fortune. The village wasn’t needed except as a convenient place for servants and the working class to live, and for readily available sex workers, so they ignored it until now.”
Cal and Benny were both staring at him.
“I’ve been reading about it,” Ray explained. “Since I couldn’t be on a computer for long.”
