I blinked at the snowy screen. “What the. . . .”
“Want to see it again?”
“I’m not sure . . . what happened? I mean he can’t have taken Edward out with a single punch. Vampires aren’t that fragile.”
“He didn’t; he stunned him.” Quinton typed and poked the mouse a bit until he had a close-up of a frame where Goodall hit Edward. Even through the white confusion of the electric arc, I could see the small black horns of the stun stick protruding from Goodall’s hand. Quinton advanced the frames so I could see the small device flung across the room. Then he zoomed in on it and tweaked the still a bit until it was a little more clear.
“That looks like one of yours.”
“Not quite, but similar. You know you can’t buy one in this state unless you’re an officer of the law or the court. If you need to back someone off, you have to use another method or make your own. So what I’m thinking is all that craziness in the underground with vampires zapping other vampires was Wygan’s guys experimenting to see what voltage they needed to use and what happened if they got it wrong. They didn’t steal any of my stun sticks; they just started working on the idea themselves—maybe they even thought they could blame it on me and you. Whoever’s building the stunners doesn’t know as much about the technology as I do, so they had to do a lot more calibration and experimentation. They probably had to find out if Edward really was immune—he always implied that he was—before they even tried it. It probably took a while before you left for Goodall to get that information. And as soon as he had that and confirmation that you were in England and too far away to help—bam!”
“And Edward’s reclusiveness helped cover up his absence. Why did Goodall come forward with the missing boss story at all . . . ?”
“Edward’s secretary reported it. Carol. The one who let us in. I called her. Edward had her phone numbers on the desk phone speed dial. All of them.”
I blinked and rattled the information into place in my brain. “Oh, that Carol. You call innocent secretaries in the dead of night to ask about their missing bosses?”
“I learn from the best: Get ’em while their defenses are down. Besides, she wasn’t sleeping and she’s not innocent. She’s an insomniac, which I think is how she met Edward in the first place, and she was his favorite blood donor until Goodall showed up. I guess they were ‘sharing the love,’ so to speak, after that.”
“She could be pointing the finger at Goodall out of jealousy.”
“She didn’t say much about him, actually. And that clip isn’t doctored that I can see. Goodall bumped him, all right. Also, I got the idea that something Edward does or something about the bite itself helps her sleep. She’s effectively addicted to him, but like any drug, too much would have killed her. So she didn’t mind that her . . . doses of Edward were smaller. But she did notice when he didn’t show up at all for a couple of days.”
“Did she tell the investigating officer?”
“Only that he’d been missing for a couple of days and that she normally saw him every day or two on business. She never claimed Kammerling had been kidnapped and she didn’t accuse Goodall of anything. She assumed he’s like she is: some kind of addicted donor. When she started working with the police and FBI on the disappearance, she started hiding things from them—the sort of things a vampire’s buddies usually hide from the daylight world—and finding a few herself, like doctored security logs for key access to this floor. My guess is that Goodall changed the logs and wiped or doctored the security recordings for the cameras and monitors in the room down here.”
“But not this one? How did he miss it?” My brain was sluggish. I felt I was missing something. . . .
“He didn’t. He tried to wipe it out but he’s not the hacker I am, and this recording is from one of Edward’s own backups, which Goodall didn’t have direct access to once the door locked and Carol had him taken off the security pass list. He tried to get at it through the remote backup system, but . . . he’s an end user and he doesn’t know how to really make a computer record disappear. And if it’s not wiped out in binary hash or physically destroyed, I can find it. Especially with direct access to said computer.”
I nodded and scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to shove away the muzzy feeling that had settled on my brain. Quinton pulled my hands down and kissed my cheek. He tucked me tight against him and pressed my head onto his shoulder. I wanted to fall asleep there.
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m trying to make things easier, but I guess I’m just making them more complicated. And here I am running off at the mouth about my end. . . . I don’t know what you’ve had to do tonight—don’t even try to tell me now—but it couldn’t have been easy or pleasant, what with Novak and the vampires and Carlos. You go to sleep and I’ll take care of this.”
“Take care of it . . . how?” I mumbled.
“I’ll get the files cleaned up and together, and Carol and I will take them to Solis in the morning.”
“No. You can’t go: He’ll arrest you.”
“For what? For supposedly being a homeless drug addict who’s cleaning up his act and being a Boy Scout? He won’t. He’ll suspect me of something, but not this. Solis is a fair guy. He’s the only one I can trust, but he’s not the point man on this case. He’ll need more than Carol’s word to believe the information is good and take it to the team. This is the evidence that can bring the case out of the darkness and into the real world. Carol will give it weight to keep me out of trouble. And it’s one less job for you to do, so you can sleep in while I’m talking to Solis. Then I’ll show you the Grey dampener I’ve been working on and we’ll take care of the rest of this mess tomorrow night.”
“Why you? Can’t you just give the recording to Carol and let her deal with Solis?”
Quinton shook his head. “Convincing the cops will take some technical expertise and that’s my bailiwick. If it works, the feds might arrest Goodall before Wygan can put the last of his plan into motion and that may buy you some time. It’s a little risky but trust me: It’ll work out.”
I made a grunt of protest; there was something wrong with what he was telling me and it would hurt him, I was certain, but I couldn’t put it together and I couldn’t keep my mind working against the pull of sleep to say so. I needed to tell him about tomorrow night and Carlos and all the rest, but it floated away before I could make the words. I tried to shake my head, but with me cuddled up against his chest, it just turned into a dopey nuzzle.
Quinton kissed the top of my head and stood up, keeping me clutched against him. He carried me to a couch and tucked me in to sleep under the blanket, and I don’t remember what he did next. It didn’t involve any naked snuggling, though, which was disappointing.
I know our bodies do most of their healing while we sleep. While we’re inactive, our brains sort through our activities and anxieties, making dreams and cleaning up the mental litter while the rest of the system goes into repair and restore mode. It’s also when most people die. Accidents and violence aside, it’s while asleep that most people shuffle off their mortal coil and leave the physical world for whatever lies beyond the far side of the Grey, where even the Guardian Beast doesn’t go.
It was well after noon when I finally woke up, and Quinton was gone. The buzzing voice of the grid pulled me out of sleep and I woke up, blinking, into a world ablaze. The colors of the grid had bled up into the world overnight, or I’d stopped holding them back, and everything I looked at was brighter than I could stand. As I walked across the floor, it seemed to ripple silver and blue under my steps, little waves breaking outward as if the surface of the world were a thin membrane stretched over luminous water. Every movement I made seemed to whisper across the burning threads of the grid. I might have been able to push them back, but I just didn’t care to expend the energy and find out. This was the state Wygan had pushed me toward for so long and I’d fought it once, but that had only left me weak and unable to use the state to my advantage. I didn’t care to be in that position the next time I was deep in the Grey—and I would be unless something in the current situation changed more than I could imagine.