“Did you eat or drink with Blume?” she asked.
Deegan furrowed his brow. She worried for a moment she had been too clumsy. “Not that I recall.”
“So you had head-blindness only when you drank with Gianni, Sinclair, or Sanchez.”
Anger colored Deegan’s body signature. “Are you implying something about my fellow officers?”
She gazed steadily at him without showing any emotion. “Am I?”
“I trust them with my life,” he said.
“Janice Crawford will be pleased to hear that,” Laura said.
Deegan leaned forward, essence sparking around him in fragments. Laura didn’t move. As Deegan loomed over her, she pushed more essence into her glamour, enhancing her eyes. The gaze of an Old One was not easily held. Deegan flinched. He hesitated in the silence, then leaned back in his seat. “They’re good men,” he said.
Laura cocked her head to the side. “You don’t seem particularly concerned about Crawford. It makes me curious about your loyalties.”
He sneered at her. “Race-baiting, Tate? That’s a human game.”
She leaned back and crossed her legs. “I was talking about loyalty to truth over comrades.”
He snorted. “I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you.”
Not quite a lie, but not the truth. He had suspicions about something or someone. She had angered him too much, and his body signature was distorted by emotion.
Laura stood, adjusting some pages that threatened to slip out of her folder. “When are you reporting for duty?”
“Not soon. Something important is apparently damaged. I’m still head-blind.”
She walked to the door. “That’s all the questions I have for now, Druid Deegan. I may contact you again as the investigation proceeds.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You mean you’ll stop by to confirm answers you already have.”
Laura threw a slow smile over her shoulder. “Don’t be too sure what I know or don’t know.”
She moved smoothly out of the room with a soft, rolling gait, knowing damned well that despite his anger at her, Deegan watched her ass. She wasn’t insulted. She often turned it into an advantage.
CHAPTER 11
MARIEL TATE’S OFFICE at the Guildhouse was a floor below Terryn’s, far enough away to avoid any persona conflicts for Laura yet close enough to help the transition between personas when necessary. Laura found Liam Wilson, the office assistant, working at his desk in the anteroom. “Hey, Mariel. I had a feeling you would be coming in.”
She liked him. Not many humans worked in the Guildhouse, and Liam was the only one that worked in InterSec. The fey had their fears and suspicions like everyone else, and having humans work in the heart of their U.S. diplomatic building was not desirable. Liam had shown knowledge of the fey world that impressed both Mariel and Genda Boone, the colleague with whom Mariel had been hiring an assistant. When his background check came back clean, he got the job.
He blushed when she smiled at him. “And why is that?”
He handed her a stack of pink slips of paper. “Phone messages. They always start piling up when everyone but me knows you’re about to show up.”
She took the messages and grinned. “Remind me to tell you about the restaurant in the Bahamas. You will love it. Is Genda in?”
Genda traveled as much as Mariel Tate, at least in theory, did. They both presented themselves as high-level consultants at diplomatic meetings. Laura suspected that if Genda performed undercover work for InterSec, it was minor. Industry news often reported Genda’s attending the conferences she said she did. As far as Laura was concerned, the lack of corporate espionage-to say nothing of dead bodies-in Genda’s wake validated her suspicion that the woman was nothing more than a diplomat.
Liam followed her into her office. “She’s at a meeting, but she’s in town. I have four other messages for you: a code call verifying your arrival, two from a police officer named Aaron Foyle, and one from someone claiming to be your mother, who I will not assume is the president of France, despite the accent.” The code call was a fake from Terryn. Since she didn’t recognize the phone number, wasn’t French, and didn’t know the French president, she assumed the other call was Cress joking around.
She slid into the chair behind the sleek black desk. The Mariel office was her favorite work space. In her other offices, she avoided personal trappings in order to prevent cross-contaminating personas, but Mariel’s space was her repository for souvenirs of world travel. The earth-tone colors of the room made a nice counterpoint to the riot of color in paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art. Pushpins of places she’d been or pretended to have been littered a map on a side wall. Red pins stood out even in the white of expanse of the North and South Poles, though she had been to only one of them.
“And here’s a sealed pouch.” He placed the leather envelope next to the messages and waited for her to touch it. InterSec eyes-only documents had several layers of spells on them. A courier chain spell registered the body signature of each person permitted to carry the pouch. Another spell rang softly if the pouch was moved more than a few feet away from whoever was supposed to carry it. Getting released from the spell happened when someone else with a registered body signature touched it. The idea that the pouches spent time in bathrooms and bedrooms creeped Laura out, and she thought about it every time she touched one.
The next layer of security was a simple quartz crystal embedded in the zipper pull keyed solely to whoever was allowed to open the pouch. Touching the crystal released the lock and simultaneously disengaged another spell on the papers inside. If someone other than a designated person opened the pouch, the pages disintegrated. Laura opened the pouch and removed the dossier Terryn had prepared on Sanchez’s FBI connection.
She pulled a notepad across the desk. “This is for your eyes only, Liam. Please call this Aaron Foyle back and tell him I need a conference room on-site in Anacostia.” She wrote a list, ripped the page from the pad, and handed it to him. “Tell Foyle I want to see these three people. I will arrive at 8 A.M. and meet with him first. Have a car pick me up at noon with something wonderful to eat that won’t spill.”
Liam wrinkled his nose. “Are you sure you don’t want to do this here?”
She acknowledged his sympathy with a knowing look. “Sure. But these folks have several investigators coming after them. I’d rather invade their space than make the diva demand right now. I have a meeting to go to this afternoon, but I’ll call if I need something, okay?”
He looked crestfallen. “You just got here.”
She put on an apologetic face. “I’m here for a bit, though. Maybe we can have lunch in a few days?”
“Great,” he said. She knew he meant it. Because of their shared love of food, Laura treated him to lunch at the better restaurants in town or “accidentally” left expense-account vouchers for him when she heard about a new place.
She had a hard time deciding whether Liam had a crush on her or not. The vibe coming off him was intense interest, but it wasn’t lust. In general, humans were hard for her to read unless their emotional state was high. She got along well with Liam, but she never thought of him as more than a nice guy. Humans didn’t interest her often. They tended to take a much shorter view of circumstances than the fey. The fey, of course, took the long view of situations. If they lived well and took care of themselves, some lived centuries. Laura wasn’t that old, but she already had a different, more circumspect, perspective on the future than humans, and she was prone to think more about long-term implications. Which was why her attraction to Sinclair surprised and intrigued her.
She flipped through her mail, separating out a few larger envelopes. Out of habit, she reached for her crystal paperweight without looking and instead grabbed nothing but air. She went through the stack of paper in the in-box and elsewhere on the desk, but the crystal wasn’t there. She glanced at the credenza beneath the map. If she didn’t purposefully activate her heightened memory-and she might not have for an incidental thing like moving a paperweight-she was subject to the same vagaries of memory as any human. Occasionally, she used the crystal piece as a resonator for a spell and might have left it in her hidden room. She made a mental note to check.