It depressed me. It reminded me of just how much I wasn’t, even when I was at my best. I was a messy, sloppy, emotional maverick. I couldn’t color inside the lines even when I wanted to.
I helped Ella with the grunt work of restoring files to the cabinets, and as I did, I realized that most of the folders had to do with personnel. Detailed records of everything that we’d done, throughout our tenure with the Wardens. Ah, so thiswas where all those reports went to die… nice to know that all those hours spent typing on a keyboard actually had some kind of effect. I’d half suspected all my hard work just disappeared into the aetheric, where it got eaten by hungry demons. Or malicious Free Djinn.
About the fifteenth folder I picked up—and it was huge, papers spilling everywhere—had my name on it. I paused, startled, and flipped it open. The clips that held reports in the file were missing, and everything was crammed in at odd angles, as if it had been gone through fast.
The memo on top was signed by Paul Giancarlo, National Warden Pro Tem. It was an order to keep me under close surveillance for any suspicious activities related to fraud, blackmail, and illegal trading in weather control.
I felt a wave of cold rush over me, and in its backwash came another one of heat, burning down from the top of my head and taking up residence somewhere in my gullet. In the memo, Paul practically accused me of collusion with two other Wardens—one of them Bad Bob—in carrying out a scheme to steer tropical storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes toward certain areas of the coastline, where an outfit named Paradise Kingdom seemed to be making a business of building expensive resorts and condominiums, only to have them destroyed before opening by bad weather.
For the insurance money.
The score so far: storms four, ParadiseKingdom zero. They’d never actually opened a single property.
Paradise Kingdom. I remembered that name, and it came back with a jolt… the drive out along the coast. A dead dad and kids. Tornadoes twisting the under-construction hotel to wreckage.
I flipped pages. The photos showed shoddy construction, with detailed notes.
Substandard parts. Bad wiring. Reused materials. If the buildings had ever actually opened, they’d have been deathtraps—but the insurance records showed payouts as if the construction had been to the finest possible standards.
I’d never even heardof ParadiseKingdom, but I was starting to shake with fury and a little bit of fear.
The folder was snatched out of my hands and slapped shut. John frowned at me, handed it to Ella, who mutely began straightening up the papers inside it.
“Let me guess,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to see that.” Except Ella must have thought differently; she’d pointedly ignored the folder lying all by itself, and left it to me to pick up.
“You know I can’t talk to you about it.”
“Don’t I have the right to at least try to clear my name?”
“Nobody’s blackened your name,” he said, and crossed his arms. He looked tired.
There was more gray in his hair than I remembered. “Look, yes, there’s talk; there has been talk ever since Bad Bob died. Lots of people think you killed him to shut him up.”
“It was self-defense!” I practically yelled it. He nodded, arms folded; the body language of rejection. “Dammit, John, don’t you believe me? You knew that old bastard! He was a corrupt, scary old man—”
“He was a legend,” John said softly. “You killed a legend. You have to understand that no matter what he was, what bad things he did, nobody’s going to remember that now. What they remember are his accomplishments, not his flaws.”
He stuck a demon down my throat!I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. And it didn’t matter. John was right, Bad Bob was an untouchable saint, and I was the evil, scheming bitch who’d slaughtered a helpless old guy in his own home. No doubt the ParadiseKingdom scheme had been all his; it had all the hallmarks of his style. He’d probably involved a few other Wardens in it, for profit, but he hadn’t included me. He’d known that I would have busted him.
I could practically hear him laughing, out there in hell. I hoped it was extra hot and he was drinking Tabasco sauce to cool off.
“I don’t know anything about this,” I said. John gave me a funny look, then turned to Ella. She shot him another glance back, raised her eyebrows, and nodded toward the other side of the room. John walked silently away. His Djinn was standing there, fixing up a shattered desk with long, smooth strokes of his fingers over wood. Where it had splintered, it fused together seamlessly.
“John can’t say anything about this,” Ella said, “but I’ve only got a couple of years to retirement; I couldn’t give a shit what the Wardens do to me. Petal, claiming ignorance about ParadiseKingdom isn’t going to do you any good. You’d better come up with another story, fast.”
“What? Why?”
She straightened more papers in my file, reached for a bracket, and pushed it through the holes of the folder. Began systematically attaching reports to it.
“ParadiseKingdom’s owned by your boss, Marvin McLarty. Marvelous Marvin. You know, the ‘weatherman.’ ” She paused to give it air quotes and an eyeroll. “So you can’t exactly claim that you don’t have a connection to it. He hired you without an interview. You must have known him before you took the job.”
That bastard. That snake. That… horny, no-good little poodle! I couldn’t believe it. He was too stupid to be venal. Right? Marvelous Marvin, investing in property fraud schemes with Wardens?That meant he knew about them, in the first place… and she was right, I’d sent in a resume, and Marvin had hired me after giving me one look. I’d thought it was, well, for the cheesecake value, and I’m sure that made the deal sweeter for him. But it must have been something more.
Somebody must have told him to do it. Somebody, maybe, who wanted a convenient scapegoat if things got scary for them. Because on paper, I damn sure lookedguilty.
If Marvin was involved with Bad Bob, that explained a lot. His percent accuracy rate, for one thing, which would have been a source of amusement to somebody like Bad Bob. He’d have been able to pull it off, too, without attracting Warden notice. Bad Bob’s rating had been far higher than John Foster’s, and besides, he was a legend. Who questioned a legend?
Bad Bob Biringanine had been willing to sell his ethics and reputation for a nice house, a tidy bank account, and all the comforts of organized crime. But … Marvelous Marvin?Who could take him seriously as a bad guy? And maybe that was precisely the point.
Ella was watching me, waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one.
“Don’t you believe I’m innocent?” I asked her.
“Of course I do, honey. Don’t be ridiculous!” I saw her eyes stay fixed and steady on me, in a way that only happens when the answer is a flat-out lie.
“Even if you did do it, hell, the whole organization’s falling apart. It’s pretty much every woman for herself right now.” She kept staring at me.
And I realized something fairly significant. There was still weather manipulation going on, even with Bad Bob dead. If I took myself out of the equation, there was a pretty limited pool of suspects.
Not John. I shifted my stare to him, watching the way he talked with his Djinn, the way he listened attentively, the way the Djinn moved in such an open, easy fashion. No fear, no guarding, no resistance. John was one of the good guys; I knew it in my heart.