Gunmetal Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

floor.”
    “So you’re after the marble?” I asked.
    “Screw the marble. We’re after the copper plumbing. The whole structure had old-school copper pipes. Copper prices are through the roof right now. Even copper wiring is expensive. Of course, if you smelt the plastic off of it, it’s worth twice as much, but we won’t be doing that. The smoke is toxic as hell, even for us. There is steel, too, but the copper is the real prize. That’s why Raphael bought the building.”
    “He bought the building?” A few months ago when Raphael and I were together, he mostly did work for hire: the owners of various buildings would employ him to reclaim the valuables for a percentage of anything he recovered.
    Stefan grinned. “We can do that now. Playing with the big boys.”
    The tunnel kept going, lower and lower, burrowing down.
    “Why dig so deep under the building? Why not come from the side?”
    “The Heron is a toppler,” Stefan said. “It went over right above the sixth floor. And it never caught fire.”
    Magic took buildings down in different ways. Sometimes the entire inner structure collapsed and the building imploded in a fountain of dust. More often, the magic weakened parts of the building, causing a partial collapse until the whole thing crashed, toppling on its side. Topplers were valuable, especially if they didn’t catch fire, because anything underground had a decent chance of surviving.
    “We were trying to get into the basement,” Stefan confirmed. “There are fire-suppression and heating systems down there, generators, access to both freight and regular elevator shafts—that’s a lot of metal right there. And you never know, sometimes you can get computer servers out. Stranger things have survived a fallen building. Here we are.”
    Ahead the passageway widened. Stefan flicked the switch and the twin lamps in the ceiling flared into life. We stood in a round chamber, about twenty-five feet wide. Four bodies lay on the dirt floor, two men and two women. At the far wall, a six-foot-tall disk of metal thrust out, revealing a round tunnel filled with darkness—a vault door left ajar.
    “A vault?”
    Stefan grimaced. “It wasn’t on any of the blueprints and none of the building-related correspondence we had access to mentioned it. We were merrily digging our way up and ran into it last night. We screwed around with the door for about an hour, but we didn’t have the right tools for it, so Raphael posted two guards here and two by the entrance, and we cleared out. A locksmith was supposed to come in this morning and open the sucker. Instead we found this.”
    Four people dead, sprawled in the dirt. Last night they had hugged their loved ones before going on their shift. They had made plans. This morning they were my responsibility. Life was a vicious bitch.
    “Okay, let me see the log.”
    “The what?”
    “The crime scene log? The record of who’s been down here and at what time?”
    Stefan gave me a blank look.
    “Eh…”
    God damn it.
I took a small notebook and a pen out of my vest pocket and kept my voice friendly. “I tell you what, we’ll start one. Here, I’ll be the first.”
    I marked the date at the top of the page and wrote: “Andrea Nash. Time In: 8:12 a.m. Time out: ___________. Purpose: Investigation.” I signed it and passed the notebook and the pen to him.
    “Now you write yourself in. When people come to pick up the bodies, you make them write themselves in, too. We need to keep a record of who comes and goes down here.”
    I set my crime scene bag on the side, opened it, took out gloves and put them on. Next came the Polaroid Instant Digital camera and a stack of paper envelopes for crime scene photos and evidence. Other cameras took better pictures, but magic played havoc with digital data. Sometimes you’d get crystal-clear high-definition images, and sometimes you’d end up with a blurred gray mess or nothing at all. Polaroid Instant Digital cameras produced