Face Off (16 page)

CHAPTER
27

A LIGHT DRIZZLE
fogged the air as Laura waited for Sinclair. Halfway up the block, two Guild security agents stood in front of Terryn’s apartment building. At the far end of the street, she had spotted a brownie watching the street from a car. As the drizzle turned to rain, she moved into the shelter of the awning over a deli door. Sinclair’s body signature moved up behind her. Laura wore a long raincoat with a hood, but he didn’t need to see her face. He sensed the shape of her essence, something he claimed did not change despite whatever glamour she wore. “Okay, now I’m confused. I thought you would be Mariel, not Laura,” he said.

“I was worried someone might be watching for Mariel. Laura Blackstone isn’t well-known to the Guild investigative branch,” she said.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She watched the street. “I don’t know. Cress agreed not to leave her apartment without Guild permission, and Terryn’s suddenly out of InterSec on leave.”

“What’s that got to do with stuff in my office?”

She leaned into the rain. “I don’t have a good feeling about it. If Terryn still has you off record, then we should keep it that way until he says otherwise, so I removed any trace of you.”

He dropped his voice into a saccharine tone. “You did that for me?”

She glanced at him impatiently. “Why do you read something into everything I do?”

He grinned. “I like to read. So far, you’re a good book.”

Dumbfounded, she stared. “That has to be the most corny pickup line I’ve ever heard. I think I’m in pain here.”

He pouted playfully. “Can we turn the page? I don’t like this chapter.”

She resisted the urge to laugh. “Jono, this is all nuts. They put Genda Boone in charge while Terryn’s on leave.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And, what, you’re pissed it wasn’t you?”

She poked him in the shoulder. “No. I don’t want to be in charge. I’m pissed because Genda has no idea what she’s doing, and that’s a dangerous thing in our line of work.”

“So what are we doing here?”

She turned her attention back to the street. “I have to talk to Terryn or Cress and find out what’s going on. Cress isn’t responding to my sendings.”

Sinclair peered up the sidewalk, rain glistening in his hair and on his face. “I’m getting interference. Probably a shield of some kind.”

“You can sense that far?” she asked.

He smiled. “Is that a conversational question, or are you taking notes?”

She elbowed him gently. “No games. I’m worried. You know
leanansidhe
are hated. I want to be sure Cress is safe.”

He shook his head. “I can’t sense anything beyond the shield. Why is she under guard?”

Laura followed his gaze up the street. “Because she’s a
leanansidhe
and an easy target for Rhys to make points. If she hadn’t agreed to the guards, he probably would have gotten the feds to detain her for trumped-up national security reasons.”

“She saved his life at the Archives,” Sinclair said.

“Gratitude isn’t one of his strong points,” Laura said.

A woman stepped out of the building and opened her umbrella. She hesitated when she saw the Guild agents, then walked between them.

“Why don’t we knock on the door and see what happens?” he asked.

She pursed her lips. “Because they might be looking for Mariel Tate to do that. Rhys is intent on discrediting Terryn. If he can take out another member of Terryn’s InterSec team for some bogus reason, he’ll do it. I don’t want to give him an opportunity.”

The woman from Terryn’s building passed them and continued around the corner. Laura took Sinclair’s arm. “Follow me.”

She pulled him along the sidewalk, moving fast enough to catch up to the woman. “You dropped something, miss,” Laura called. The woman turned and looked down. Laura muttered in Gaelic and tossed a pinpoint of essence at her. “Sleep.”

As the woman’s eyelids drooped, Laura grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sinclair asked.

Laura cast furtive looks in either direction to see if anyone had seen her. “Take her other arm and help me get her coat off,” she said.

Sinclair did as she asked with a concerned look on his face. “This is technically assault and battery, you know.”

Laura shrugged out of her raincoat. “Good thing you’re not a cop anymore. Put this on her.”

She slipped on the woman’s coat. It was snug, but it wouldn’t matter in a moment. Rummaging in her own pocket, she pulled out a small garnet ring. Touching the woman’s cheek, she sampled her body essence. With a brief chant, she wrapped her own signature around it, pushed it into the ring, and slipped the ring onto her finger. Her features blurred and shifted.

Sinclair looked her up and down. “Wow.”

“How close am I?” she asked.

“Pretty close. You look like a cross between you and her.”

She shifted in the snug coat. “That’s good enough. I don’t have time for precision. I doubt those agents spent much time looking at her. Keep her out of the rain. I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for a reply, she grabbed the woman’s umbrella and walked around the corner, lowering the umbrella to obscure her face. The rain accommodated her by falling more heavily. As she reached Terryn’s building, she pulled keys from the woman’s pocket. One of the security agents tilted his chrome helmet toward her, and she rolled her eyes dramatically. “I forgot my phone.”

They gave her room to enter through the unlocked outer door. In the close quarters of the vestibule, she hid her fumbling with the keys behind the open umbrella. She found the right key, closed the umbrella, and let herself in. A static prickle danced on her skin as she walked up the stairs, evidence of the shield spell Sinclair had sensed. She reached Terryn’s apartment and listened at the door but heard nothing.

Cress, it’s Laura. Are you alone?
she sent.

The door opened a few inches, one of Cress’s whiteless eyes peering through the gap. She pulled the door open all the way, and Laura hurried inside. “I don’t have much time. Are you all right?”

In the dim light of the apartment, Cress looked small and forlorn. “They haven’t hurt me.”

“Where’s Terryn?”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “With Draigen. He’ll be back tonight.”

“What happened? Why did he take a leave?”

Cress lowered herself on the couch. “He didn’t. They suspended him, too. The Guildmaster agreed to say it was a leave because Draigen threatened to accuse him publicly of harassing her family.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on.”

Cress lowered her chin and frowned. “The Guildmaster accused InterSec of endangering the Guildhouse by granting me security clearance. I’m suspended while they investigate. I think I’m fired.”

Laura hugged her. The
leanansidhe
’s essence flared a moment, purple tendrils flickering out of her skin before she pulled them back in. Suppressing a shudder, Laura released her, trying not to appear as if she were pulling away. She knew the reaction was instinctive, but it made her uncomfortable, even if Cress didn’t absorb any essence from the contact. “You’re not fired. This is all Rhys’s political posturing while Draigen’s here.”

A sad smile creased Cress’s face. “I don’t have your confidence in that, Laura.”

“The Guild doesn’t dictate to InterSec. You’ll be cleared. Rhys is going to have to live with the fact that you are a good person.”

She compressed her lips. “Thank you for that.”

Laura squeezed her arm. “You are, Cress. Don’t let what other people think make you feel any different. The only opinions that matter are your friends’.”

A smile tweaked at the corner of her mouth. “Do I get to count you as more than one friend?”

Laura laughed. “I’ll be as many friends as you need me to be. Right now, though, you need a lawyer.”

“Resha is taking care of that,” she said.

Laura cocked her head. “Resha? I didn’t know you knew him.”

“He watches out for all the solitaries in the Guildhouse. He was the first person I called after Terryn,” she said.

Impressed, Laura shook her head. The seemingly inept merrow surprised her in interesting ways. “I’ll do whatever I can to help him.”

“You should go. Your glamour is fading,” Cress said.

The body signature was weakening, but she didn’t realize Cress could sense it. “Tell Terryn to call me as soon as he can.”

Cress placed her small hand on Laura’s forearm. “I need you to do something for me, Laura, that has nothing to do with any of this. I finished the autopsy on Draigen’s sniper before they escorted me out of the building but didn’t have time to write the report. There’s residual body essence on the corpse, but I’ve never met anyone who was at the arrest, so I couldn’t identify the signature.”

The Inverni Lord Guardian team had made the arrest. “I have.”

“That’s what I was thinking. You need to examine the body. Without me there, I don’t know how long the stasis field will preserve the body signatures. We need an imprint,” she said.

“I’ll have someone make the imprint, Cress, as soon as I get back,” she said.

Cress gripped her arm. “No! You need to do it. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was banned from the building. They didn’t bring someone else in when they detained me. Something’s wrong there.”

Laura leaned forward and kissed Cress on the cheek. “Okay, I will, then. Call me for anything, and tell Terryn I want to see him ASAP.”

“I will,” said Cress.

Laura pulled the door closed behind her and hurried down the steps. She pushed more essence into the glamoured ring, but without a firm template, she had nothing to anchor the woman’s essence. Outside, the rain had turned into a downpour, and she exited the building by opening the umbrella into the nearest security agent’s face. “I’m sorry,” she called, as he twisted away from it. As she swung the umbrella to hide herself from them, the glamour faded.

Around the corner, Sinclair and the woman waited where she had left them under the awning of a small café. Without speaking, they swapped the raincoats and maneuvered the woman back onto the sidewalk. Wrapping the woman’s hand around the umbrella handle, Laura released the sleep spell. Sinclair slipped his hand into the crook of Laura’s arm and held his umbrella over them. The woman swayed. Laura steadied her. “Are you okay?”

She startled at the torrential downpour. “Wow, that came up quick.”

Laura held out her keys. “You dropped these.”

Surprise and relief crossed the woman’s face. “Thank God, you saw them. I’m lost without my keys.”

“No problem. Have a nice day,” said Laura.

“Everything go all right?” Sinclair asked, as they walked the block to Laura’s car.

“Yes and no. Cress is okay, but things are moving in directions I don’t understand. With any luck, Terryn will be able to clear it up for me. Do you need a ride?”

He shook his head. “I need to get back. I don’t think a limo driver showing up in a tricked-out Guild SUV would be good for my image.”

She chuckled. “Good point. We’ll talk later.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Dinner?”

She twisted her lips into an amused smirk. “Okay, dinner. I’ll call you.”

She leaned toward him on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Jono.”

He smiled in surprised. “For what?”

Her hand closed on the notes in her pocket, but she didn’t give them to him. “Just thank you.”

CHAPTER
28

MORGUES WERE ALWAYS
in basements, Laura thought as she stepped out of the elevator. The dead didn’t need sunlight. The living didn’t want to be disturbed by their presence. Between the InterSec offices and the local Guild crime-liaison department, the Guildhouse’s morgue was larger than other fey facilities. The Guild and InterSec used separate staff to perform autopsies and forensics. What redundancies the situation created was balanced by less friction over who had priority on research staff.

Laura Blackstone had never had a reason to be seen in the morgue, which made transitioning to Mariel Tate necessary after returning from seeing Cress. Mariel didn’t attract undue attention there by her mere presence. Part of her job was following up on deaths. People did look at her, though. That was one of the points in making the Mariel glamour so attractive—to distract from whatever she was doing. It worked most of the time.

She pushed open the door to the cool room. That late in the day, no one was working, and the lights were dimmed. As she moved toward Sean Carr’s locker, she stopped. Her mnemonic memory worked on several levels, recording body signatures, data, events, and places. Things like places logged themselves into her memory like subroutines, something she didn’t consciously do and didn’t pay attention to most of the time. When she entered the cool room, on a subconscious level, her awareness noted several changes, changes that were filtered as normal and disregarded. Gurneys had been moved. Counters cleared. The lights, of course.

Except one thing flared out in her memory as out of place. In the kick space in front of the cooler sat a small granite plate. To the casual eye, it appeared innocuous, a forgotten piece of discarded stone on the floor and swept out of view. Laura saw it for what it was: a listening ward. Someone was keeping tabs on who entered the room. If that was the case, she didn’t want anyone to know she was looking at the body.

She retraced her steps and texted Sinclair to meet her. As she lingered near the elevators, she used her PDA to catch up on public-relations emails until Sinclair arrived. He made a show of looking up and down the hallway. “Not the dinner spot I was hoping for.”

“I need your help with something,” she said.

He feigned surprise. “My help? Me? If this is about changing a lightbulb because I’m taller than you, I’ll be very disappointed.”

She led him down the hallway. “Not a lightbulb, but I’ll keep that in mind. Follow me.”

“Anywhere,” he said.

Her fear that he was able to mask his truthfulness through some ability she didn’t know warred with her desire to believe him. The desire was winning out over the fear more and more lately. She was starting to think that wasn’t a bad thing. She stopped shy of the door to the examining room.
Can you pull out your medallion for me?
she sent.

He waggled his eyebrows. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

Although it wasn’t the time for jokes, she realized that it was the perfect time for Sinclair. His joking was a mask, she decided, a way of glossing over the seriousness of a situation. She, of all people, knew about masks. She glowered playfully and held her fingers to his lips.
There’s a listening ward in the room,
she sent.

Sinclair threaded his medallion from beneath his shirt. The metal held an odd coolness, unwarmed by his skin. Essence burned both hot and cold depending on how it was used. Laura didn’t understand the spell that suppressed Sinclair’s fey essence, but she had been able to enhance it before. She pushed essence into the medallion. Her skin prickled as the spell expanded to cover her, too.

Sinclair smirked. “You made it bigger.”

Ignoring the comment, she released the medallion. “I need you to stand near the listening ward to dampen it.”

She opened a door in the wall of coolers and rolled out a long metal shelf. Sean Carr lay on the shelf, a thin white sheet covering him to the waist. Cress’s stasis spell surrounded him, already weakening. Laura estimated it would be gone within a day and with it any trace of essence-related evidence.

The spell prevented his wings from curling inward. They lay flat to either side, a tattered hole in the left one near the shoulder. A cratered burn mark on his chest splayed out like a bloody star against his pale skin. Laura lifted her gaze to see Sinclair’s reaction. He leaned against a counter on the opposite side of the table, posture relaxed, arms folded against his chest.

She lifted the shroud, the stark white overhead lamps accentuating Carr’s pale skin. Carr might have been a failed assassin, but Laura still respected the dead. Playful banter with Sinclair could wait. She pulled on latex gloves and handed Sinclair a pair. “Can you hold up a wing for me?”

The thin appendage draped over his fingers as Sinclair lifted the soft folds. Laura scanned the drab mauve surface, searching for anomalies. Fairy wings were resilient to incidental injuries, but essence could damage them.

“What are you looking for?” Sinclair asked.

“Cress wanted me to get body-signature imprints before they faded.”

The dead man’s body signature shone as Inverni a day after his death. Not a surprise for a member of a powerful group, even if he was from a subclan. She gestured for Sinclair to move closer. “Do you sense anything here?”

“Just the guy’s shape. There are layers of other essence on him, but they mean nothing to me.”

She moved her hand along Carr’s body, sensing residual essence. “They’re multiple body signatures, likely contaminants from the way he was brought in.”

“Sounds like poor procedure to me,” said Sinclair.

Laura sensed her own essence on the body. “Agreed. This wing burn is mine. I’m getting a nice strong tag on the kill shot. That will help identify the killer once we have someone in custody.”

As Sinclair released the wing and adjusted it along the rolling slab, Laura started to push the body into the locker but paused. This close to the body, her sensing ability picked up nuances in Carr’s body signature. The strength of the field didn’t surprise her. As an Inverni, that was a given. She leaned closer. Still nothing. “There’s nothing there.”

Laura lifted Carr’s hands and scanned them. “There’s gunshot residue from firing at Draigen, but there’s no residual essence concentration in his hands. Essence-fire pools on the skin surface before it discharges. It leaves a ghost image behind, like gunshot residue. There’s no afterimage in these hands.”

“So?” asked Sinclair.

“He didn’t fire essence at whoever killed him, Jono.”

Sinclair met her gaze. “Which means he was either surrendering or wasn’t expecting to be fired on because he knew the fey who shot him.”

Laura pulled the shroud back over Carr and pushed the slab back into the locker. “Either way, Jono, it means he was murdered.”