Bone Gods

said, giving McCorkle the same tone she used on the neighbor boy when he threw his transforming robot toys against the door of her flat.
    “Might’ve,” McCorkle said absently, turning the page. “You can wait, if you like.”
    Pete sat in Ollie’s chair and took one of the biscuits from his righthand top drawer, crunching it just loudly enough to overshadow McCorkle rattling the paper. “Where’d you come over from, McCorkle?”
    “Paddington Green,” he said. “Missing Persons.”
    “They all get found, then?” Pete flicked her crumbs onto McCorkle’s side of the desk. He looked at them as if they were live ants, then folded the paper away. In a stolid, Norse way, McCorkle was nice-looking, Pete supposed. His forehead was too thick and his hair was shaped vaguely like a blond wire scrub brush, but the crushed-and-reset nose and the bulky neck-deficient torso would do it for some women.
    “You know,” McCorkle told her, ruining any goodwill Pete might have allowed him by opening his mouth back up, “if even half of what they say about you is true, you have no business being in this room.”
    “Oh?” Pete wondered if she was going to have to punch somebody else in the mouth. Punching people got very tiresome. Sherlock Holmes didn’t have to go around smacking skulls together.
    “No business at all,” McCorkle said. “I may not have a dad who was Supercopper, but I did the training and the time. And I sure as Hell didn’t leak sensitive evidence to an informant and then quit the squad to avoid censure.”
    “Is that what I did?” Pete said. The rumor varied. Sometimes she’d bollocksed her last investigation, sometimes she’d joined a cult. Most times she’d simply quit because she couldn’t hack finding four children catatonic and never catching the man who’d done it. Officially. The truth was somewhat more satisfying, but Pete wasn’t going to try and explain hungry ghosts to McCorkle or anyone else in the Holborn nick. She didn’t owe it to them. They’d talk no matter what.
    “That’s what you did,” McCorkle agreed. “Makes you a shit cop. Always were one, to my way of thinking.”
    Pete forced an expression that was simply nothing, not anger and not agreement. “Why aren’t you throwing me out, then? You too much of a saint to soil your good cop hands?”
    McCorkle put his feet down and booted up his computer, scrolling over to the HOLMES database and beginning to type in case numbers. “Heath likes you, you get a pass. He’s a good bloke.”
    “He is,” Pete agreed, as Ollie backed into the squad room with two bags of takeaway. She leaned into McCorkle’s half of the desk. “I wager you and I will see each other some day when Ollie isn’t a factor,” she murmured. “And then perhaps neither of us will have to be so polite.”
    McCorkle raised his nearly white eyes to hers. “Perhaps,” was all he said.
    “Oi, Pete!” Ollie said, dumping the takeaway on his desk. “Fuck you doing here? Homesick?” He pulled the wrap off his plastic fork and threw it at McCorkle. “Freddy, go eat at the kid’s table or something. Pete and I need to have a talk.”
    Pete gave McCorkle a cheery wave as he grabbed his food and slumped away, pouting. Ollie sighed and opened his kebabs. “Fucking twat. Wasn’t bothering you, was he?”
    “On the contrary,” Pete said. “He’s a veritable ray of sunshine.” She listened to the trill of phones and the click of keyboards, the inspectors and their detective sergeants and constables going about their day. “I’m making progress,” Pete said, before Ollie could ask. He dabbed at a spot of brown sauce on his shirt.
    “You close to telling me why this bastard got himself topped? Because his life is a blank fucking slate. Good schools, competent at his job, no dodgy tax shelters, bank balance not even enough for a night at the pub with a discount prozzie. Lived with his mum, for Christ’s sake.”
    “That what you needed to talk about?” Pete said, helping herself to a cube of beef.
    “Right,” Ollie said. “It’s a bit too perfect. Somebody that boring, you either expect them to do themselves in with Mummy’s sleeping tablets, or have a dungeon full of Estonian teenagers hidden under the back garden. But I’ve turned up shit, and that bothers me, because shit means I’ve got shit on who’d want him killed.”
    “He was definitely arse deep in black magic,” Pete said. “The symbols are necromancy, but for what I