“Thank you.”
When she opened her eyes, he was sitting in the far corner of the sofa, long legs stretched out, sipping his wine and watching her over the rim of the glass, his eyes dark.
“So, without telling me anything about it, how do you feel about the new job?” he asked.
She took a gulp of wine. “Pissed off.”
“Why?”
“I was working on a case. It was important to me.”
An image flashed in her mind. A young girl’s naked body, wounds at her throat and wrists, her inner thighs. She was pale with loss of blood, her eyes wide and terrified. Suddenly, the image was overlaid with an older one. Faith’s mother. And something was behind Faith. Something that shouldn’t be there, something so terrible—
“Faith?”
She jumped as Ash dragged her back to the present.
“You know you could always tell them to go to hell and come work with us,” Ash said.
She’d thought about it on and off through the day. If this transfer was a long-term thing, then she didn’t know how she felt. Her whole life was the force. It was all she had ever wanted to do. But the thought of working day in, day out in that underground vault with a bunch of guys who gave her the creeps—well, it wasn’t a long-term option.
But first, she wanted to find out what they knew. Because while there was no way in a million years they were going to convince her that vampires had killed Julie Foster, she was certain that they had information that would help solve her murder.
Once she had that information, she would consider her future. If she had one.
She decided to ignore Ash’s question and ask one of her own. “How well do you know Rosamund Fairfax?”
He raised a brow at the change of question. “Roz? I know her very well.”
How well?
She didn’t like the reminiscent little smile that hovered on his lips. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you seeing her?”
“Hell, no.” He grinned, then shrugged. “We were close once but that ended a long time ago by mutual agreement.”
“Can’t have been that long. She hardly looks out of her teens.”
He smiled. “She’s older than she appears.”
For some reason that later photo of Christian Roth sprang to mind. Someone else who was older than they looked? Coincidence? As a detective, she didn’t believe in coincidences. CR International owned pharmaceutical companies; maybe they’d discovered some brilliant antiaging drug. She cast a quick glance at Ash and tried to estimate his age—early thirties maybe.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Maybe one day, I’ll tell you.”
“Hmmm? Evasive or what. So Roz works for Christian Roth?”
“Not really. She’s in a relationship with a business colleague of his, and she’s friends with Tara, Christian’s wife.”
She frowned at him. “You’re being very free with information.”
“You haven’t asked me anything I don’t want to answer yet.”
“Except your age. So what does she do—what is she exactly?”
“She’s a witch.”
Faith scowled. She should have known he wouldn’t tell her anything useful. “Thanks for nothing.”
“You don’t believe me?” He studied her, head cocked on one side. “Why are you so certain she’s not a witch?”
He was the second person to question her convictions that day. It was starting to piss her off. She was the normal one. She wasn’t chasing after make-believe monsters. “I just am that’s all.” Perhaps she should suspend disbelief and see how far he would go. “So what is a witch? What does she do exactly?”
“Roz? She finds things.”
“What sort of things?”
He raised a brow.
Was she being slow? She thought about it and it came to her. “She finds people.”
“Sometimes.”
Shit, she’d found Jessica Thomas. Faith thought back to the other times she’d seen Roz at Scotland Yard talking to Ryan. She’d once asked him who Roz was and he’d told her that she didn’t want to know and she wouldn’t believe him anyway. And he was right. If he’d told her he was consulting some sort of clairvoyant “witch,” she would have laughed in his face. But the fact was, they’d found Jessica after Roz had become involved. Prior to that, they’d had no clue. Roz had come to visit Ryan in the morning and by lunchtime they had a photo-fit of the perp. Ryan had told her it was an anonymous tip. But it had actually come from Rosamund Fairfax.
For a second, she seriously tried to consider the witch aspect, but her brain refused to cooperate.
Instead, she sipped her wine as she tried to put the pieces together in her mind. Maybe there was no “magic” involved. Maybe there was a much simpler explanation—that she’d known who had taken Jessica because that person was somehow associated with Christian Roth. And Roz knew Roth…
But that didn’t explain the earlier cases she’d been involved with.
Faith rubbed her forehead, then pressed her fingers to the back of her neck. Her headache was returning with a vengeance.