“These were your female’s.” She smiled in that cold way of hers. “I can scent her on them. Such a little artist she is, but she wasn’t drawing you. Disappointed?”
As the pages were turned around, Lucan came forward and didn’t bother hiding his intensity.
The head of the guards’ satisfaction was like the bloodstains on the floor, something that penetrated the space around her: “Seems like she wanted to remember exactly what the layout of our facility is.”
Taking the papers from her, he frowned. They were, in fact, line drawings, floor by floor, of the sanatorium. Every room, staircase, hallway, and connector that Rio had been through. Down to the scale. And the head of the guards was right. The paper had Rio’s scent on it.
She had done these.
“But she’s not here anymore, is she,” the other female said. “Because you told her she better save herself—too bad humans can’t dematerialize, isn’t it.”
When he remained stonily silent—because that was what you did when you discovered someone was using you—the female filled the void with conversation.
“Why did you bring her here to the prison camp. And do not lie.”
“She needed to see the production.” He shrugged like he didn’t care. “It’s a big order. She said she wanted to make sure we could handle it.”
“Why be so secretive?”
“She’s a goddamn human.”
“The Executioner wasn’t going to jeopardize the funds flow. She was safe. Why hide her.”
“I don’t trust anyone inside these walls.”
“Not even your Kane?”
Lucan glanced over to the bed. Apex was curved over the other male, as if he were trying to breathe for the aristocrat by will alone. The fact that his own face was bruised and there was blood on his mouth didn’t seem to be something he even noticed.
“Kane is not mine,” Lucan corrected.
In retrospect, José had cursed himself.
That was what he decided as he finally left the homicide division’s bullpen and hung a louie to head down the empty corridor to the chief ’s suite. When he got to the outer door, he wasn’t surprised to see that the window to the waiting area was dark, but he had permission to go in so he tried the door handle.
Fortunately, things had been left unlocked and the motion-activated lights came on as soon as he put a foot inside. No doubt Stan had told Willie to leave things open because he’d been expecting the updated report on Leon Roberts sometime after she left for the day.
José certainly hadn’t thought it’d be this late before he’d finished his typing—he glanced at his watch and cursed. Nine frickin’ p.m. He’d had to call home twice. Once at six, when a tip on a cold case had come in, and then again at 7:30, to let his wife know he needed to stay and do write-ups.
There had been a great deal to add to the report, and not just in terms of the autopsy or ballistics. Lot of people were calling with leads on Roberts’s death. José had fielded them all afternoon long. He didn’t think anything was going to materialize from any of it, but you never knew. So he and Trey had returned thirty-three calls, all of which he’d logged manually into the system from notes he and the kid had scribbled.
Not that Trey was a kid.
And now he was here, giving Willie’s empty desk a wave in the darkness and going over to the glass door to Stan’s crib, feeling like he was a hundred years old.
The wave thing was pure habit, really. Every time he came in here, he walked by Willie’s desk, waved at her, and went to open Stan’s door. She never stopped him, no matter what Stan was doing—even if there was a meeting going on or the chief was on the phone.
Willie always said he was the only one allowed to interrupt like that.
So there was no hesitation as he passed by. Like the trained seal he was, he followed his greeting routine and went directly to Stan’s inner door. It wasn’t until he started to turn the knob that his tired brain woke up and pointed out that this entry was absolutely going to be inaccessible after hours—
Things opened no problem.
“Of course you don’t lock your door,” José murmured as he entered and overhead lights came on automatically.
Stan was such a product of the eighties, when battening down the hatches the second the sun went behind the horizon for the night had not been a thing. Then again, this was the police station, so everyone was getting checked in as they came into the building itself. And there were cameras everywhere.
Well, out in the hall there were cameras. Not in here.
“Whatever.”
José walked across the red-and-blue carpet and then stood over the piles of paperwork on the desk. Man, compliance would have a fit if they knew all this . . . departmental shit, whatever it was . . . was unsecured. But that was the way Stan was. Too trusting. Then again, who could find anything in this—
The sound was so quiet that, had José not been standing still as he contemplated where he should put the report in the midst of the mess, he never would have heard it.
And if it had not repeated, he wouldn’t have bothered to do anything about it.
But the soft noise was a phone. A cell phone on vibrate.
Setting the report down on the corner of the desk, not that there was any rhyme or reason to that particular location, he followed the brrrrrr’ing, brrrrrrr’ing to the door to Stan’s private crapper.
“You forgot your phone, Stan,” he said as he pushed the door wider.
The sound was still muffled even as he leaned into the sacred space—and then, before he could zero in on the where, things went silent. He glanced around the counter. Nothing there, out in the open. And on the back of the toilet—only golf magazines. And he wasn’t going into the guy’s drawers—
The sound started up again.
José bent down. Bent farther. The phone was vibrating in the lowest of the cabinet’s drawers.
He pulled the handle slowly, sliding things open. But for godsakes, he’d known the guy his entire professional life. What was he going to find other than toilet rolls—
There was a button-down shirt wadded up in the drawer. Blue-and-white-checked. No doubt another mustard casualty.