“You give them a simple task, they accomplish it. Book and Snake uses them as messengers to and from the other side of the Veil. They’re too violent and unpredictable to really be good for much else.”
Except for making a girl look crazy and maybe shutting her up permanently.
“So Book and Snake is on the board,” said Turner. “Motive unknown. You realize none of this is evidence, right? We can draw no credible connections to these societies beyond what Tripp told you. I don’t even have enough to get a warrant to look inside those forestry greenhouses.”
“I’m guessing Centurion can pull all kinds of strings with his superiors.” A shadow crossed Turner’s face. “Except you don’t want to pull strings.”
“That isn’t the way things should work. And I can’t just go to my captain. He doesn’t know about Lethe. I’d have to go all the way up the chain to the chief.” And Turner wasn’t going to make that move unless he was sure that all of their theories added up to more than some lunatic scrawl on a whiteboard. Alex couldn’t blame him. “I’ll pull the LUDs for the liquor store near Tara’s apartment. It’s possible they were using the store’s phone to do business. Kate Masters wasn’t in Tara’s cell or Lance’s. Neither was Colin Khatri or Blake Keely.”
“If Tara and Lance were using the greenhouses, then they were working with someone at the forestry school,” said Dawes. “Warrant or not, we should try to find out who.”
“I’m a student,” said Alex. “I can walk right in.”
“I thought you wanted me to start pulling strings,” Turner said.
She had, but now she was thinking better of it. “We can handle this on our own. If you go up the food chain, someone might tell Sandow.”
Turner raised a brow. “That a problem?”
“I want to know where he was the night of the murder.”
Dawes’s spine straightened. “Alex—”
“He pushed to make me stop looking, Dawes. Lethe is here to keep the societies in line. Why did he yank so hard on the reins?”
We are the shepherds. Lethe had been built on that mission. Or had it? Had Lethe ever really been intended to protect anyone? Or were they just supposed to maintain the status quo, to make it look like the Houses of the Veil were being monitored, that some standard was being kept to without ever really checking the societies’ power? This is a funding year. Had Sandow somehow known that if they looked too closely, they’d find connections to the society rosters? Bones, Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Manuscript—four of the eight societies responsible for funding Lethe. That added up to half the money needed to keep the Ninth House alive—more since Berzelius never paid in. Was Lethe that precious to Sandow?
“What kind of salary does Dean Sandow get from Lethe?” Alex asked.
Dawes blinked. “I don’t actually know. But he has tenure. He makes plenty from the university.”
“Gambling?” suggested Turner. “Drugs? Debt?”
Dawes’s spine seemed to straighten even more, as if she were an antenna being adjusted to receive information. “Divorce,” she said slowly, reluctantly. “His wife left him two years ago. They’ve been in court ever since. Still—”
“It’s probably nothing,” said Alex, though she wasn’t at all sure that was true. “But it couldn’t hurt to know where he was that night.”
Dawes’s teeth dug into her lip again. “Dean Sandow would never do anything to hurt Lethe.”
Turner rose and began to collect his folders. “For the right price, he just might. Why do you think I said yes to being Centurion?”
“It’s an honor,” protested Dawes.
“It’s a job, on top of the very intense job I already have. But the money meant I could pay down my mother’s mortgage.” He slid the folders into a messenger bag. “I’ll see what I can find out about Sandow without tipping him off.”
“I should do it,” Dawes said quietly. “I can talk to his housekeeper. If you start asking questions, Yelena will go to Sandow right away.”
“Do you feel up to that?” Turner said skeptically.
“She can handle it,” said Alex. “We just need a look at his schedule.”
“I like money as a motive,” said Turner. “Nice and clean. None of this hocus-pocus bullshit.” He shrugged into his coat and headed for the back door. Alex and Dawes followed.
Turner paused with the door open. Behind him, Alex could see the sky turning the deep blue of dusk, the streetlamps coming on. “My mother couldn’t just take the check,” he said, a rueful smile on his lips. “She knows cops don’t get bonuses. She wanted to know where the money came from.”
“Did you tell her?” asked Alex.
“About all this? Hell no. I said I hit a lucky streak at Foxwoods. But she still knew I’d gotten myself into something I shouldn’t have.”
“Mothers are like that,” said Dawes.
Were they? Alex thought of the photo her mom had texted her the week before. She’d had one of her friends snap a picture of her in the apartment. Mira had been wearing a Yale sweatshirt, the mantel behind her crowded with crystals.
“Do you know what my mother said?” Turner asked. “She told me there’s no doorway the devil doesn’t know. He’s always waiting to stick his foot in. I never really believed her until tonight.”
Turner pulled up his collar and disappeared into the cold.
23
Winter
Alex trudged upstairs to retrieve her boots from the armory. The crucible had healed her wounds, but she was short on sleep and her body knew it. Still if she’d had a choice, she thought she might take another brawl, even with a bruiser like Lance, rather than face the salon tonight, classes tomorrow, and the day after—and the day after that. When she was fighting for her life, it was strictly pass/fail. All she had to do was survive and she could call it a win. Even sitting in the parlor with Dawes and Turner, she’d felt like she was keeping up, not just playing along. She didn’t want to go back to feeling like a fraud.
But you are still pretending, she reminded herself. Dawes and Turner didn’t really know her. They never would have guessed at what Darlington had learned about her past. And if the new-moon rite worked? If Darlington returned two days from now and told them all the truth, would anyone speak for her then?
Alex found a stack of clothes on her bed in the Dante room.
“I brought them from my apartment,” Dawes said, hovering in the doorway, hands curled into her sleeves. “They’re not stylish, but they’re better than sweats. I know you like black, so…”
“They’re perfect.” They weren’t. The jeans were too long and the shirt had been washed so many times it was closer to gray than black, but Dawes hadn’t needed to share her closet. Alex wanted to soak up every kindness while she still could.
As she set out for Belbalm’s house, Alex felt jumpy. She’d wound her watch tight in case the gluma was stalking her, stuffed a jar of graveyard dirt into her satchel, placed two magnets in her pocket, and studied the signs of warding needed to close a portal temporarily. They felt like small protections. The list of suspects in Tara’s murder had become a list of possible threats, and they were all packing too much magical firepower.
Belbalm lived on St. Ronan, a twenty-minute walk north from Il Bastone, not far from the divinity school. Her house was one of the smaller ones on the street, two stories high, and built of red brick covered in gray vines like an old woman’s hair. Alex entered through a garden gate beneath a white lattice arch, and the same sense of calm she’d felt in Belbalm’s office descended over her. The garden smelled of mint and marjoram.