The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 (12 page)

“L
ittle Baby Blue,” Christine said, a smile on her lips. “Mr. Smith was quite shocked to see his son had bright blue hair. I remember the look in his eyes at the odd hue; it was as if someone had put a stake through his heart.” She shrugged. “Who could blame him? Neither he nor his wife had blue hair, so naturally, he must’ve wondered . . .”

I shook my head, suspecting poor old pops was a little more than shocked by his blue-haired offspring. At least I knew the truth now. I was born blue. This—I glanced down at my bluish arm hair—wasn’t a curse given to me but some kind of birth defect. A genetic mutation. A monster made from DNA. Which meant one thing—I would never be free from it.

“But you already know this,” Christine said.

I glanced up, confused.

But she wasn’t looking at me. Nope, her focus was directed at the chick in the doorway. My eyes narrowed on Izzy. She shrugged, lifting her shoulders with innocence.

I motioned between Izzy and Christine. “You two know each other?”

“She’s obviously confused . . .” Taking a few steps inside the room, Izzy took Christine’s hand in hers, patting her yellowed and wrinkled skin. “It’s okay. Tell us what you remember about Blue’s birth.”

“I . . . You . . . ,” she murmured. “My name is Christine Quick. I was a nurse.”

Izzy gave her a soft smile. “I know.”

“You’re a good woman,” she said to the younger fairy. “And he is the right man. I can see that . . .”

I frowned. “Who?”

Izzy rolled her eyes. “She means you, you big blue idiot.”

“Oh.”

She snorted. “Yep, I am one hell of a lucky woman.”

Christine wasn’t finished with her rant. “The way he looks at you, it’s like how his father looked at his mother . . .”

Izzy glanced down at her watch. “Well, would you look at the time? Blue and I have a meeting uptown, so we have to get going . . .”

My blue eyebrow rose. “We do?”

“Yes,” Izzy bit out. “If you’ll excuse us, Ms. Quick . . .”

“Not so fast, Isabella,” I said. “Christine, what happened to me, to my parents?”

“Blue,” Izzy said, her voice frosty with warning, as if she was scolding a schoolboy. A tone I’d grown used to over the last year.

But she wasn’t going to win this time. I had a mission to accomplish, one I would never forget. “No,” I said to Izzy, and then turned to face Christine. “She knows something about them. About me. I need to know whatever it is.”

“Do I know you?” Christine looked at Izzy and then at me, her gaze as blank and unfocused as a newborn baby’s.

Izzy placed her arm an inch from mine, offering comfort in her own way. I swallowed the lump in my throat and slowly nodded. Whatever secrets Christine held would stay locked inside her. At least I had a place to start.

The name Smith rang in my ears.

“No, ma’am,” I said as I turned to leave. “Thank you for talking with me.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Izzy said, her hand hovering inches from mine. “I know you thought Christine would have the answers you seek.”

I shook my head, staring out the grimy window of the taxi. Raindrops splashed against the glass, leaving streaks of dirt, like tears, running down the surface. “Why don’t you want me to find out the truth about my past?”

“What?” Her shock sounded real enough, and it sure as hell was loud enough in the small interior of the cab. “How can you say that? I traveled across town with you today. I spent the last year following up on every tip with you.” She paused, her eyes filling with tears. “I want nothing more than for you to get the closure you need. But it’s time to face facts,” she said quietly. “You need to stop searching for answers about your birth. The office fire was a sign. It’s time to move on with your life, to let go of the past.”

A sign? She thought the fire in my office was some kind of sign? I held back a laugh. If anything, the fire proved one thing: Someone was getting nervous that I was closing in on the truth. Why else burn up the only evidence surrounding the mystery of my birth?

“I’m worried about you, Blue,” she said. “Your life is in danger, and yet, you don’t seem to care. You’re keeping secrets from me and you’re using our company resources to track down ninety-year-old women.”

I snorted, deflecting her argument with a pretty damn good one of my own. At least I thought so, but by the way her lips thinned I doubted she felt the same. “I’m keeping secrets? You’re the one with the top secret case. Why don’t you tell me what it’s about, and then maybe I’ll be a bit more honest myself? How’s that?”

She wrapped her arms over her chest and let out a sigh. “You’re deflecting again, Blue. This isn’t about me. It’s about you and your trust issues. If we plan to make a go of . . . our business, we need to trust each other.” She stopped, her eyes hard on my face. “I need for you to stop looking into the past. Please, Blue, for us.”

How I wished I could say the words she needed to hear. To tell her the past meant nothing. But it hung around me like a cloud of lightning, pulsing with the promise of violence if I let it. I vowed never to let it. A promise, like quitting smoking, I wasn’t sure I could keep.

W
ith her words rattling around my brain, I paid the cabbie, watching as Izzy headed through the lobby of our office building. She walked with purpose, her high heels clicking against the floor in a quick rat-a-tat pattern. Everyone she passed, from the security guards to the janitor, paused to watch her walk by. It was more than just her wings; she had a presence like no other woman I’d ever met. Was that what Christine had recognized at the nursing home? Or was Izzy hiding something much darker?

I suspected the latter, which worried me. And that worried me even more. Was Izzy right? Was I projecting my own trust issues on our relationship? It wasn’t like she’d given me any reason to doubt her loyalty over the last year. But before that, she had been involved in the plot to rid the fairies of yours bluely. Was Izzy once again playing me for some unforeseen reason?

Trust be damned. It was time to investigate my own partner.

I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what I found. Her closet hid some secrets—of that I had no doubts. I just hoped it wasn’t full of skeletons too. Literally. I wasn’t looking forward to finding yet another dead guy.

 

I stayed in my wet, still a bit smoky office for the rest of the afternoon looking through a few cases without much interest. Mostly fluff cases with the exception of the missing fairies. But I was no closer to finding a single missing fairy feather than I had been a few days ago when Peyton first came to me with the case. I’d called every snitch I knew, but no one had a clue as to where the fairies had gone. Frustrated, I pushed the case file to the bottom of the stack of open cases on my desk. After two hours I’d solved three of the fluff cases and was working on my fourth when my office door opened, revealing the vivacious outline of my partner. “Blue,” she said quietly. “I’m heading out for the night.”

“Hot date?” I joked.

Her lips lifted in the corners and her eyes twinkled. “We’ll see.”

My stomach plunged and my chest gave another small squeeze as I pictured her with our VP, Clark Boyer. Great, I now had stomach problems to go with my heart disease.

“I . . . I wanted to say ... I’m sorry about earlier . . . ,” she was saying.

I raised a blue eyebrow. Izzy wasn’t the “I’m sorry” type. She did and said what she wanted, rarely apologizing for anything. It was one of the things I liked and hated most about her. I tilted my head to study her. “Which part?” I asked.

Her lips curved into a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Which part are you apologizing for?” I stared at her for a few seconds before continuing. “What you said? Or maybe what you haven’t told me?”

Her eyebrow, this one flame colored, rose. “Are you talking about my case again?” She let out a laugh. “You just can’t let it go, can you? You hate that I know something you don’t. That I’m just as capable of solving cases as you are.” Her laughter stilled, as did her body. “What is it? Are you afraid I’ll make a go of it on my own? That you won’t be able to compete?”

I snorted. “I’m far more worried that you’ll end up extra-crispy like our intern. You do remember him, right?” I swallowed hard, laying my cards on the table. “There are some very bad people in this world, Izzy,” I began, including myself, a mess of fairies, and probably tonight’s date in the bad-people category. “People who will kill to keep their secrets. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You get that, right?”

She nodded slowly. “I do. More than you know.” And with that, she turned on her heel and walked from my office, closing the door quietly behind her.

I stared at the closed door for a long time after she’d gone.

W
hen the last Reynolds & Davis employee left for the night, including my two winged bodyguards, who were now waiting downstairs in the lobby, I stepped from my office and headed down the darkened corridor. Izzy’s office was my target. Something was nagging at me about her “case.” It was like a splinter sitting under my skin. I wasn’t sure she was right about why I was so invested. I wasn’t afraid of a little competition, as long as I came out on top. And I sure as hell wasn’t worried that she was a better investigator. After all, I’d been in the game for a long time.

Unless she had help.

I pictured her and Clark, Jack and Jilling their way around the city. The thought left me cold. I shook it off as I twisted the doorknob of her office door and grinned. It was locked. Like that would keep me or really anyone with a vested interest out. I pulled a set of lock picks from my jacket and went to work. Ten seconds later the knob glided open under the pressure of my fingertips, and I pushed inside.

Izzy’s office was immaculate. Not an item out of place. Her desk was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. No paper files in sight, which annoyed me, as I was hoping to learn all of Izzy’s hidden secrets tonight. I moved across the room, settling into her office chair. The faint scent of fairy dust filled the air. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the rush of warmth through my body. Warmth I needed at the moment, because breaking and entering into my partner’s office, even though I had her best interest at heart, left me cold. Don’t get me wrong—I would do whatever was necessary to protect what we had.

Whatever that was.

The first thing I did after the dusty effects faded was to check her desk drawers. It was amazing what one could learn about people from the crap they kept in their desk. For instance, in my bottom desk drawer used to sit a half-empty bottle of whiskey, a handful of bullets for my .38, the file regarding my birth, and a faded picture of my younger self at the orphanage on the annual Adopt-a-Kid Day.

The hope in my gaze in the photograph had long ago faded. I was destined to walk my path alone. The kid in the photo had somewhere deep inside known that was true. Why else would I have, at the age of ten, electrocuted the one and only man and woman who’d every showed interested in adopting a blue-haired boy? I rarely thought of my time at the orphanage, and when I did, whiskey helped me to forget. But the photo was always there. A reminder of who I was. Of who I would always be.

Unless I found a way to end this curse.

I blinked a few times, letting go of the past in order to look through my partner’s things. Maybe I did have a few slight trust issues, as Izzy was fond of saying. Reaching into her top drawer, I pulled out a few ounces of dentin powder in a small black vial. Dentin was the lifeblood of all fairies. Without it a fairy would last a few days, a week, tops.

I thought of the missing fairies and swallowed hard. At this point, the odds that the missing fairies were still fluttering were slim to none. Which made me that much more determined to find out who was behind their disappearances and why.

A worry for another time. I had enough on my plate already with a dead intern and an arsonist/killer on my tail. I took a deep breath and went back to the matter at hand. As long as Izzy was keeping her secret case a secret, she was in danger. And her safety was my top priority.

Full of self-righteousness, I searched through the rest of the desk drawers without much success. Though I did find a molar stained with blood, a very familiar-looking molar. Much like the one I’d had ripped out last year by a psychopath. Maybe Izzy had saved it for good luck? Or much more likely she was planning to use it in some fairy voodoo spell.

Either way, I found her keeping it sort of sweet.

I glanced at my watch—the one Izzy had given me—and then moved to her laptop computer, still docked at her station. I opened it, waiting for the screen to come to life. When it did, the username and password box appeared. Her username was easy enough—IDavis. Now for the password. Thanks to our IT guy, the passwords changed every thirty days, so it was harder to crack than I’d first believed. I started at the top of the list of Izzy’s formerly known passwords, working my way through the names of every man, woman, and winged child connected to her. Arnold hadn’t worked. Neither had Clayton or Peyton. I tried her birth date. Her childhood pets’ names. Her street name and zip code. And even the word “password”; given that it was the most popular password, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

But I was very wrong.

The IT guy had been ready for just this sort of thing.

After my tenth try at cracking her password, the laptop froze and the screen went black. A tiny red light in the corner of her desk began to blink, alerting the building’s security staff of a possible intruder. Damn it. Just what I needed. The security guards had let someone burn down my office, but let someone forget their password and all hell broke loose.

With a very quick scan of the rest of the room, I gave up my search, hightailing it back to my own office before the gun-happy cavalry arrived. Two point six minutes later, the guards arrived, guns drawn. I stepped from my office. “Everything okay?” I asked innocently.

The guards, one about six feet tall and the other half that, with wings, swung their weapons my way. I held up my arms. “Take it easy,” I said in warning as electrical current rushed through me. “Jonas,” I said to the smaller, winged guard, “don’t even think about it.”

He sighed, lowering his gun. The other guard followed suit with some reluctance. I couldn’t fault the guy. It wasn’t every day that a rent-a-cop got the actual chance to shoot someone. “We had an alarm,” Jonas said, stepping in front of the other guard. “Someone was trying to hack Isabella’s computer. Badly.” He raised an eyebrow, easing some of the chubby wrinkles lining his face. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

I blinked innocently. “Of course not. Why would I hack Izzy’s computer? We’re equal partners. Always honest and up front with each other no matter what, just like you, Jonas.”

He snorted but didn’t press the issue. “So what are you doing here so late? You’re usually out of here by the time happy hour starts. When you come in at all, that is.”

“Working a case.” I shrugged, but my eyes bore into his. “You know how it is—bad guys are all around, lying in wait, sometimes right under our noses.”

He swallowed and then quickly covered his reaction with a stilted laugh. “Funny, I thought you’d gone soft and only took corporate cases now.”

Electricity sparked through me, but I didn’t take the bait. I wasn’t a corporate PI, and I never would be. That was Izzy’s thing, which got me to thinking. Whatever her secret case was, it likely had more to do with embezzlement than with murder. That had me sighing with relief.

“You can go now,” I said, waving toward the elevator.

Jonas looked at the other guard and nodded once, and then they left together, but not before Jonas got the last word. “I’ll be sure to mention the alarm to Isabella in the morning. I’d call her tonight, but she was going out on a date.”

As the elevator doors closed, a slow smile spread across my lips, replacing the frown pulling my features down.