As the elevator touched down, my knees jiggled and, for a moment, it seemed as if the floor was about to vanish beneath my feet. A wave of exhaustion set my hands trembling.
I couldn’t deal with this. I was in over my head. Out of my league. Choose your cliché.
This was not my world. I fought this world. And now I was being asked to save it from imploding. Everything in me said “let it implode.” But if the Cortez Cabal crashed, the institution itself would not disappear. The jackals were already circling, ready to divvy up the corpse.
I stepped from the elevator and made a call upstairs.
“Members of the Nast Corporation will be arriving shortly. Please see that they are shown to the boardroom and served lunch. Have my cousin Javier attend to them during the meal and answer their questions, and I will be there within the hour.”
“I’m sorry, Lucas,” Sean said when I hung up. I knew he meant it. He might be a Nast, but he was Savannah’s half-brother and the only member of her family who acknowledged her, much less attended to her. Over the last few years, his loyalties had shifted away from his family business-he was still a VP, but he was only going through the motions, eyes on the horizon looking for other opportunities.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
I was about to say no, then glanced at the pad of paper still clutched in my hand. “The special dispensations department.”
“What about them?”
“Who are they, what do they do and what other department head could I temporarily put in charge?”
He smiled. “Can’t promise anything-the Cortez setup might not be exactly the same as ours-but I’ll give it a shot.”
I CHECKED IN with Paige before meeting the Nasts, an excuse to collect my thoughts. She gave me a brief update. Besides the glamour spell, she’d found only two explanations. Carlos could have been demonically possessed, which would explain why he denied being at the crime scenes. For Guy, the only answer was zombification, which would explain the use of cologne-to cover any stench of death. But a gunshot to the CNS would have meant he wouldn’t have been able to walk normally, no matter what a necromancer commanded.
While she returned to her research, I tried to put the pieces together, but they only slid farther apart.
The lab had found no trace evidence to indicate Carlos had been at any crime scene except the one with the young woman. When I finally wrested a story from him, he claimed that he hadn’t killed our brothers or attempted to assassinate our father. He’d never even been at Hector’s. Nor had he spoken to Troy, much less shot him. Why tell such obvious lies when we had eyewitness accounts?
The death of the young woman was one murder he wasn’t denying. He wasn’t admitting to it either, but seemed to presume his silence answered my questions. He said she’d been a half-demon he’d met a few times, and that she’d lured him into a trap. I was left to assume that he’d realized he’d been tricked, killed her while trying to extract information under torture and hid when the others came.
If he’d caught a glimpse of whoever came after him, he was keeping it to himself. Suspicious, yes. But knowing Carlos, he’d have panicked, been unable to muster the courage to climb out a window and hidden in the closet using a blur spell. He wasn’t about to admit to such cowardice…even if it might help find his brothers’ killers.
There was one piece of evidence that clearly spoke in his favor. The timeline. There was no way he could have traveled to all three locations in the time allotted, demonically possessed or not.
When I looked up from my notes, Paige glanced my way.
“I hate to give you one more thing to do, but have you called your mother?” she asked.
I must have winced, because she hurried on.
“I can do it. I just thought-”
“No, you’re right. It should come from me.” I really didn’t want my mother to hear about the death of my half-brothers on the news.
“Oh, and I spoke to Savannah,” Paige said. “She and Adam want to come down and help out.”
“I’d rather-”
“They stay put and mind the shop. That’s what I told them.”
“Thank you.”
I picked up the office phone to call my mother-I didn’t dare check my cell and see how many voice messages I’d accumulated during my ten-minute recess. Before I dialed more than the area code, I heard “Sir?” and glanced up to see a middle-aged man in the doorway, clutching a file.
“Yes?”
“Warren from the lab, sir. We’ve never met.”
“Warren?”
“Yes, sir. Warren Mills.”
Normally I would have asked more, learning something about him, but today, committing his name to memory was the best I could manage.
“You sent down blood and DNA from an apartment. Not the one from last night. This was from…” He glanced at his notes. “Jaz and Sonny?”
“Yes, right.”
“I think you need to see this.”
HOPE: SCENT MEMORY
We went first to Jaz and Sonny’s apartment. Karl didn’t explain, but I knew he had to be second-guessing his memory of the scent he’d picked up from Guy and wanted to return here, where we’d seen him two nights ago.
The apartment was as we’d left it.
Karl inhaled. “Someone else has been here.”
“I think Paige mentioned Lucas had techs come by and collect samples-DNA, fingerprints…”
He nodded and walked to the sofa where the jacket still lay.
“You said this was Sonny’s?”
I nodded.
He sniffed it, and I realized that was why he was here-reacquainting himself with these scents.
“Let me grab you something of Jaz’s.”
He protested that he could tell Jaz’s scent by elimination, but I hurried into the bedroom, eager to be doing something after a morning of following others around.
There were two twin beds in the room, and a laundry basket standing in for a hamper. At least 80 percent of the dirty clothes had made it in.
Lying on top was the shirt Jaz had worn after the sweet sixteen heist. As I lifted it, I saw him again, his eyes dancing with tequila, the fumes on his breath as his lips came toward mine, his hands pressed against my sides, eyes closing, inky lashes curling on his cheeks-
“Is that his?” Karl asked from the door.
I spun, raising the shirt as if to show it off, shielding my face. “It is.”