“That’s what I’m doing now, Doc,” Tresting answered, obviously trying to keep his cool.
“You found her and then you lost her! You knew where she was and instead you go chasing off after—”
“That ain’t what—” Tresting tried to cut in.
“She killed my husband!” she cried.
Oh. Leena Kingsley. “I thought you were supposed to be a diplomat,” I said without thinking.
Kingsley spun to glare at me with the full weight of her attention, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t lurch back a few inches from the fury radiating off her. I remembered belatedly that she’d seen her whole Foreign Service career come tumbling down in flames. Oops.
Kingsley rounded back on Tresting. “And as for bringing in someone else—”
“She’s another professional who had information—”
Nice of him to put that spin on it.
“California law expressly prohibits a private investigator from sharing any information related to a case without prior consent of the client!” Kingsley snapped.
“California law also prohibits PIs from trespassing on private property, or drawing firearms on unarmed citizens, or pretending to be anything other than a PI to get information,” Tresting said, crossing his arms. “Don’t believe you’ve expressed any displeasure with me before.”
I hadn’t known those laws. Wow, Arthur Tresting was one naughty PI.
“They killed Reg,” Kingsley spat, her voice trembling with fury. “Try to remember that. It may not be personal for you, but finding out what happened is the single most important thing in the world to me. Have you ever loved anyone, Mr. Tresting? If so, try to put yourself in my shoes.”
She spun on her heel and stalked out of the office. Tresting slumped into his chair, his head sagging.
I thought Kingsley was being a bit hard on the poor man. It was obvious to me he’d been driving himself into the ground investigating this. “Good thing you didn’t tell her you spilled about her case while we were pointing guns at each other,” I said.
“Shouldn’t have at all, really,” he admitted. “Everything’s gone upside down and backwards. The doc, too. First time I met her, she was the soul of diplomacy, thought I’d never see anything disturb that poise. And now she’s…”
“Unhinged?”
“It’s been a trying case,” he said.
“She’s very…dedicated,” I offered.
“That ain’t a tenth of it. You know, we both started getting death threats, anonymous, after this whole thing started—not sure if I should be insulted no one’s tried to follow through, by the by—and she always laughed. Said if someone killed her, they might start taking her husband’s death seriously.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Some guy even threatened her son once. She got him a bodyguard and didn’t look back.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Tresting leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “She’s a trip. Can’t even say she’s the craziest client I ever had, neither, though this is by far the craziest case. Glamorous life of a private eye, huh?”
“Speaking of, what does a PI license let you do?” I asked, curious.
“Huh? Well…loiter.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
I felt a strong urge to snicker.
“Though sometimes people see the license and think they have to answer questions,” Tresting amended. “Authority figure and all that.”
“That’s why I have a fake one,” I said.
“I didn’t hear that.”
I went to use the washroom, and took the time to splash water on my face and rinse out my mouth. When I returned, Tresting’s monitors were back on and he was talking to Checker. “Good timing, Russell,” he said.
“I think I’ve narrowed down your search,” Checker told me. “It fronts as a travel agency, which makes a good cover for tons of international calls. But the security on their intranets is ridiculously intense. It’s—”
“Did you crack it?” I interrupted.
He twitched. “I will. A little more time—”
“We know it’s the right office, though?”
“Statistically, the suspicious activity—”
“Yes,” said Tresting, over Checker’s annoyed squawk at being interrupted again. “That’s his way of saying yes.”
“Then let’s go.”
“I feel appreciated,” grumped Checker.
“Thank you,” I said to him with sweet sarcasm, and turned back to Tresting. “Now let’s go.”
Checker gave us a hearty middle finger and cut the connection.
“He’ll be standing by for when we get in,” Tresting assured me. “In case we can get him remote access. Shall we?”
“Can you get him to cut the security cameras for us first?” I wasn’t likely to forget how easily Checker had been able to find Dawna and me on the Santa Monica footage.
“Asked already. For some reason the building security system is down today. Been down for the last few hours.”
I studied his grim face. “You think they have something going down?”
“Only one way to find out. Mind giving me my gun back?”
Tresting drove; I sat in the passenger seat and tried to keep from fidgeting. I’d never gone into a place with someone else. It felt odd, itchy, like a variable I had no control over. I tamped down both that and my headache, which had reappeared with a dull throb as we drove—this wasn’t the time to be distracted. Fortunately, I’d had enough practice with hangovers to ignore headaches pretty easily.
Once we hit the right block, Tresting parked his badass truck on the street in favor of not being locked in a nine-dollar-per-hour garage, and we walked in the front door of the office building. An attendant in the lobby nodded at us with a mild frown—probably because we both looked like we either belonged to the same fight club or made a habit of walking into doors together—but Tresting nodded back in a friendly sort of way and went up to the directory as if he belonged there, and the attendant went back to his crossword.
We took the elevator up to the third floor, neither of us speaking, and found our way down a carpeted hallway of anonymous doors to suite 3B. I raised my eyebrows at Tresting and put a hand under my coat. We split to either side of the door and he reached out to open it.
The door handle refused to yield under his fingers. Locked.
We looked at each other. Clearly the travel agency wasn’t an active front, if potential clients couldn’t walk in. Tresting gestured for me to stay on my side of the doorway and raised a fist to knock loudly. “Building maintenance,” he called.
Nothing.
He tried again. Still nothing. I didn’t hear even a rustle of movement from inside.
I mimed kicking in the door. I’m excellent at kicking in doors. Tresting, however, held up a hand to stop me and pulled out a set of lockpicks. His way was less conspicuous, I’d give him that.
I stayed ready in case the occupants of the office could hear us and were quietly preparing. Tresting picked the lock with astonishing speed, almost as if he were inserting a key instead of some squiggly pieces of metal, and raised his eyes to nod at me. I nodded back, and he twisted the handle and pushed the door open.
My gun leapt into my hand, but I had nothing to aim it at. We stared numbly.
Someone who looked like she’d played the role of receptionist was sprawled just inside the door, her throat slit so deeply she was almost decapitated. Blood saturated the carpet in a massive, soggy pool around her.
Tresting had his weapon out, too, and we stepped into the room, covering every angle and carefully avoiding the soaked carpeting. Tresting elbowed the door shut behind him, and we crept into the office suite.