The aquarium looked like a cylindrical grain silo—at least if a silo could be massive, made of glass and concrete and rise ten stories into the air. Once you got inside, there were very few staircases where the public was supposed to walk—from the entrance room, outfitted to look like something from Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with rusty-looking ship wheels and riveted panels on the walls, to the restaurant on the other end. Instead, it was all gently sloping floors.
"Surveillance system?" Kyrie asked, looking at the blank screens in the entrance room and wondering exactly what to do if there was one. After all, she was here with a policeman. But policemen—she was fairly sure of this—weren't supposed to break into the scenes of crimes, alone or with civilian friends, after everyone else had departed. She wondered how this would play in court, if it ever came to court. And that was supposing of course that the killer wasn't a shifter. Because, if he was . . .
She shivered. She didn't know what to do if the killer was a shifter, and she would bet Rafiel didn't either. You couldn't let a shifter be arrested and end up in a jail, where his secret would inevitably come out. Particularly not if he was the sort of wild, barely contained shifter who would kill without a thought. If you allowed him to be arrested, you might as well confess that you were one too, and let them come for you. Because once the existence of shifters was discovered, then the sort of accommodation, the sort of looking out for each other, covering for each other, that she and Rafiel and Tom all did, would become impossible. People largely failed to see them because they didn't expect them. If one of them were revealed, then all would be.
But what could they do, if a shifter were guilty? How could they prevent him from being arrested? Cover for him, and allow him to go on murdering? Or take justice in their own hands and kill him? Who knew? The last time, they'd killed the murderer, but that had been self defense, because he'd been trying to murder them. This time, they might have to make a dispassionate decision.
"Nah," Rafiel said. He'd barely looked at the screens. "First thing we asked was if they had a surveillance system. But they didn't. They said that they've never had issues with break ins or vandalism. Normally the restaurant is open half the night, you know. So there's people around."
He led her past various incredibly unconvincing concrete caves, "You can shift in the bathroom," Rafiel said. "The ladies room is there," and he pointed at a little artificial stone grotto amid which a small door opened with the universal symbol of the stick figure in a dress and the words shad roe. It was, Kyrie thought, very good that there was a picture, since she failed to know what either Shad or Roe meant. The only thing she could think was that Shad Roe was the Russian relative of Jane Doe.
She ducked into the bathroom—an utilitarian thing, with metal sinks and beat-up beige-painted stalls. Perhaps it was supposed to evoke a ship, she thought, and resisted an impulse to duck into a stall before shifting. There was no point at all. They were alone here, and besides, her panther self would be utterly confused, dealing with claws and a door lock.
"Right," she told herself, and concentrated. Shifting was hard, but she'd learned to do it volitionally in the last few months. As she felt her body spasm and shudder, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her eyes going slitted yellow, her features growing into a muzzle, her teeth into fangs.
She looked away from the mirror, as the image it reflected became a big, black-furred cat. It caught at the edge of her sense, the sweet-tangy scent that the human part of Kyrie knew meant a shapeshifter had been here, and recently too.