He slouched across the couch and frowned. “Why the hell would someone do that?”
Laura shrugged. “I believe someone thinks Sanchez said something to me before he died. If I had to guess, they think I told you something when you found me in the warehouse.”
He looked dubious. “They bug my apartment and try to run me off the road on the off chance you might have said something to me?”
She took a swig of beer. “I’ve seen people killed for less reason, Jono. Depends on the stakes involved.”
A flash of satisfaction passed over him when she called him by his nickname. She stretched her legs out, watching his eyes shift to them and back to her face. Flirting with someone to manipulate them was so much easier when she actually enjoyed the flirting. She sipped her beer again. “Do you know much about how your medallion works?”
He shook his head. “No. My grandfather made it and told me to wear it. That’s good enough for me.”
She pulled off her barrette and shook her hair loose. “Want to hear something funny? The listening wards are pointless. The medallion neutralizes them when you’re near them.”
He grinned. “Thanks, Gramps.”
“Have you had any houseguests since the raid?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “Are we at the point where we talk about past relationships?”
Laura rolled her eyes. “No, we’re at the point where I try and figure out if they’ve realized you have that dampening medallion. If you’ve been home alone, there’s been no reason to talk, so no reason to hear. With me here, they’ll notice if they can’t hear conversation.”
“Like now,” he said.
She nodded. “Like now. Only I just gave them the reason. They know a cleansing ward is meant to suppress other essence. Lots of fey like cleansed meditation spaces, so they shouldn’t find it suspicious they can’t hear. As long as they think the other wards are fine, they might not worry about the living room.”
“No one’s been here,” he said.
“We’ll have to be careful what we say when you’re not near the listening wards. They’ll pick up anything up to ten feet away, but not something near that obelisk and not if your medallion is near.”
“Got it.”
“Any word on what’s going down at the apartment complex?” she asked.
Laura caught herself noticing the way his widow’s peak curled off center, a satisfying quirk that broke the sharp planes of his face. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the couch. “The FBI shut us out. They’re claiming we stumbled into a European drug cartel they’ve been investigating, so they’re going with that.”
Laura nodded. “That’s become their standard excuse the last year or two.”
He grunted as he downed half his beer. “All drugs are connected to a cartel somewhere.”
“Is Foyle taking heat for the bad intel?”
She watched him hesitate, as if he were about to say something and changed his mind. “He’s been in his office with the door closed. I think he’s been sidelined. Are you going to be Crawford all night?”
She smirked playfully at him. “Who do you think is more attractive, Janice, Mariel, or Laura?”
He smirked back. “That sounds a lot like that who-do-you-love-more game parents tease kids with. How about you pick whoever you’re most comfortable with?”
Her impulse was to say Laura. That was who she was, physically. That was the face she put to the world, her real face without any artifice. Laura was her default, but in that moment, she didn’t think that meant the same thing as comfortable. Laura wasn’t a person anymore. These days, she was only someone when she was Laura Blackstone, director of public relations. By definition, she was a persona about presentation and image, not a fleshed-out human being with an existence outside her office.
She shoved the reflection aside and released the Janice glamour. Her hair lightened and face narrowed. Her body lengthened a bit and thinned, but the clothes remained the same black jeans and T-shirt. Sinclair showed little reaction at the transition except a slight lift to his eyebrows. His eyes shifted, as if he marked off something on a mental checklist. “I’ll get us more beer.”
She liked the way he walked, the way his jeans hugged his hips but hung loosely enough on the legs that she surmised he didn’t think much about it. Of course, like all elite cops, he had a gym body, the V-shape of his torso flaring to fill the T-shirt. His giant heritage showed in that, now that she knew to look for it, the height, the thick muscle, even the wheat blond hair.
Stop, she thought. Everything was complicated enough. She was lonely and tired and frustrated. He was handsome and smart and different. The wrong combination for her at the moment. He startled her by dangling a beer bottle in her face. Between her weak sensing field and the medallion dampening his fey nature, she didn’t know he had returned. Even that lack of warning intrigued her. She literally couldn’t see him coming.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“What?”
“You’re smiling. You’ve been aggravated all night, and now you’re smiling,” he said.
Tired, she shook her head. “Long day.”
“Liar,” he said, around the opening to his bottle of beer.
She lifted her head, a little too quickly, wondering if the jotunn had truth-sensing abilities after all. They were an enigma among the main branches of fey species, not so few to be considered solitaries, not so many that they posed a threat to anyone as a group. She knew few truth sensers other than herself. Jotunn were among the least studied species, which probably was another reason to be careful around Sinclair. And hybrids like him were even rarer and less studied. “I was just thinking you met Janice Crawford only a couple of days ago, and now anyone watching will have seen me show up here with an overnight bag. Makes you look like you take advantage of women who might be a little emotional about getting shot at.”
“Nah. Makes Janice look a little easy,” he said.
Laura surprised herself by snatching up a bottle cap from the coffee table and playfully flinging it at him. He pretended it came at him harder than it did, then tossed it back at her. She snatched it out of the air and took another deep draft of beer. “So what were you doing at Hornbeck’s hearing yesterday?”
The smile on his face went out like a light. Mood killer, she thought. “Foyle asked me to drive him. The overtime’s good. It’s interesting sometimes.”
She chuckled. “You must be the only person who thinks driving in D.C. is interesting.”
He smiled. “I meant it’s interesting to see what Foyle does when he’s not running the unit. I like politics.”
“Tylo Blume was at the hearing yesterday. Did Foyle talk to him?”
He nodded. “He owns Triad, one of the security contractors that Hornbeck recommended for a ceremony at the National Archives. Are we back to the interrogation already?”
She rolled her eyes and lied, “No. Lighten up, Jono. A subject we have in common happens to be related to an investigation. We’re not friends yet. This is called getting-to-know-you conversation.”
“You want to be friends?”
She shrugged a little. “Let’s say I don’t want us to be adversaries. I’m putting my ass on the line for you, and it would be nice to know if my gut is right.”
“Me, too. Tell me why you’re spying on the SWAT team.”
She rested the beer on her hip. “Fair enough. To be honest, I wasn’t this time. A year or so ago, Foyle needed a druid to fill in for Deegan when he was on sick leave. InterSec thought it might be beneficial to have someone on the inside there, so I created Janice. It didn’t go anywhere, but I got stuck doing Foyle a favor as a result. That was how I ended up on the drug raid.”
“You want me to take over that job,” he said.
Laura played with the label on her beer. “More or less. I’m stretched too thin to keep it up for much longer. There might be other things.”