“No,” I said testily. “They’re mine. Holdovers from my days as a petty thief.”
“Did they get rid of the screening process in HR?”
“Can I help it that some of my criminal skills come in handy every so often? Besides, breaking and entering in the name of Good feels a whole lot better.”
“May I remind you that it’s still breaking and entering?”
“Not if we’ve got permission from the owner!” I fired back. “And we’ve got it.”
“I’d love to see you explain it to the cops,” Connor said. “It doesn’t matter if she gave us her permission, kid, since she’s dead.”
There was no love lost between the Department of Extraordinary Affairs and the NYPD. The NYPD resented us because they had been told countless times by David Davidson at the Office of Plausible Deniability that we didn’t even exist, and yet they were still supposed to cooperate with us.
“Irene’s not totally dead,” I reminded Connor.
I continued searching for the right combination of positions within the lock, but I was rusty with the whole lock-picking thing.
“She seems pretty dead to me, kid,” he said, leaning against the wall as I worked. “We’ll probably find pictures of her husband and kids in here, too. One big happy family. One big happy family who’ll come home in the middle of our breaking and entering, and demand an explanation as to why we’re in their apartment.”
“She’snot married,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.
“How do you knowthat?” Connor asked, but I met him with silence, under the pretense of being too busy working the lock. He wasn’t falling for it. “I knew it! Youare interested in her.”
I tried to ignore him and threw all my concentration into picking the lock-and was rewarded when the tumblers finally clicked. I hadn’t picked a lock in forever, wasn’t even sure I’d be able to until it happened just now, but I felt a little swell of pride at the familiar sound of a door giving way.
“I’m shocked,” Connor said with mock sincerity. He stepped back to allow room for me to stand up and swing the door fully open. “Does anyone at the Department know about your little transgressive skills?”
I nodded. “I think so. I bet the F.O.G.ies have already blacklisted me because of it.”
“You’ve only been with the D.E.A. a few months,” Connor replied. He pushed his way forward, crowding me. “Wait until you’ve been working there a couple of years. Even then, the F.O.G.ies are secretive and it’s almost impossible to guess who they’ll choose.”
“Well,” I said as I motioned for Connor to follow me through the door into the darkness of the apartment, “I doubt my criminal past would pass muster at the Fraternal Order of Goodness’s membership drive.”
“They took Inspectre Quimbley, kid, so I’m not so sure about that.”
I rolled my eyes, but the effect was lost on Connor in the darkened room. The Inspectre a troublemaker? He had been myHow to Distinguish an East Villager from a Satanist instructor during my initial three weeks of evening classes, and he didn’t seem the badass type despite the legends of his past honors. The Inspectre, an old-school rapscallion? I couldn’t imagine it.
“I don’t think that our befuddled Inspectre has any dark secrets to hide, Connor.”
As we moved farther into the apartment, the sounds of Connor fumbling in the dark came from off to my left somewhere, sounding not unlike a herd of elephants.
“Those old boysall have dark secrets to hide,” he said. “That’s probably half the reason F.O.G. exists, so they can have one collective burial ground for all their bad mojo.”
I shook my head, another gesture wasted in the darkness.
My arm bumped into something tall, slender, and lamp-like, and I groped around it until I found a switch. With the tiniest of clicks, a Tiffany floor lamp-much like the one sitting half unpacked back home-sprang to life, its stained glass dragonflies sparkling with color. Both of us gasped as the small pool of light lit up a section of the large room. We had expected spacious, which it was. I had expected elegant, which it was. Neither of us had expected for the place to be thoroughly and abusively trashed from floor to ceiling, which sadly, it was.
I felt like someone had sucker punched me in the stomach. The similarity to my place was so striking that it was like seeing my own apartment ransacked. Tasteful antiques littered the floor, many of them now broken or overturned. Irene’s tastes definitely ran in the same circles as mine. Seeing a broken Venini bowl, a midcentury George III card table missing a leg, countless scattered books, and a shredded seat cushion on a late-eighteenth-century Highback-it all drove the pain home.
Irene Blatt might have been struck down by a cab yesterday morning, but someone had gone just as medieval on her apartment. It would be foolish to assume that the two were not connected. “My God…”
Connor whistled, and stepped carefully through the disarray as he looked around. “I know. D.E.A.’s not going to like the overtime on this one.” We started poking through all the destruction. I was a bit confused about what I was supposed to be looking for, but when I asked Connor, he just said, “You’ll know it when you find it, kid,” so I didn’t feel too bad.
“And remember, even though we got in a little practice with your powers at the Antiques Annex, use them sparingly if you have to, got it? This clutter could probably overwhelm you psychometrically.”
I nodded, slipped my gloves back on, and started poring over the scattered books, smashed relics, and broken antiques in the living room before venturing farther back into the apartment. I slowly waded through the knee-deep clutter of books, papers, and boxes, looking for any kind of sign. Most of Irene’s possessions, although broken, gave me greater insight into the living person she had been. I found myself liking her more and more, especially when I unearthed the worn-out box cover of an old board game.Hungry Hungry Hippos. A woman after my own juvenile heart.
I couldn’t resist pushing my power into it. I took my gloves off and placed a tentative finger on the head of the yellow hippo. I tried to envision Irene as a child playing the game-or maybe I’d see that she had kids or a family that she played the game with. Either way, it might offer a clue to our case. Instead, my psychometry skipped all that and jumped straight to showing me the last person who had handled it.
In my mind’s eye, the apartment was only partly trashed, but a figure in a dark robe opened the game box warily looking for something-but what? He tore the contents of the box out, smashing the plastic tray and sending the four rainbow-colored plastic hippos flying. The bottom of the box held nothing and the figure threw the whole game against the wall in frustration before heading farther down the hall, which was where I intended to go as well.
I pulled out of the vision-slightly weary-and helped myself to more of my Life Savers before wading down the hall to the first room on my left. I could probably read half the apartment with my power, but all I’d get was mental footage of that figure trashing it. I decided to conserve my power for now and entered the room on my left.
Irene had definitely been a packrat in life. The room was filled with overturned boxes, and every last article, book, or meticulously catalogued item she had ever come across was stored in them. There were other doors farther along the back hall of the massive apartment, and I imagined more of the same behind them. Whatever manner these items had originally been organized in was now lost to reckless vandalism.
A cracked frame showed a picture of Irene against a background of Italian architecture. In it, she wore a thick cable knit turtleneck sweater. The photo, at last, confirmed for us that my ghostly friend was indeed Irene Blatt, and that this trashed mess had once been her apartment. I slipped the picture from the frame and slid it into my jacket pocket, wondering who had snapped the shot. A boyfriend or maybe just a passerby. This didn’t count as stealing, I told myself, but checked the door guiltily anyway.