My unreasonable heart didn’t care about a case, a murder, or anyone’s innocence. It wailed at me to argue with him, to tell him that I loved him, even though he was being a total idiot. Maybe I was too, but that was exactly the reason I was fighting so hard for him, whether he knew it or not.
But my heart didn’t get to run my mouth. That was all brain territory, and right now my brain was one-hundred percent cop.
“Then we have a problem. You won’t get your answers unless you tell me who you’ll be sharing them with. I, however, have ways to find out what I need to know without you. I will find out who cuts your checks, Ryder. If you want any kind of damage control in your life, in your job, in your innocence or guilt, you’ll talk to me now.”
Silence stretched under the weight of words neither of us could speak. Our secrets locked away all sound, smothered trust. That attraction between us wasn’t gone, but two tons of stubbornness had buried it deep.
“I’ll see you at the station,” he said like I had just asked him to have a nice day. As if this entire conversation had never happened.
“Fine.”
Ryder made it a point to walk around the couch and around me, so we weren’t even within each other’s reach. I didn’t know if that was to keep him or me from reaching out.
But just in case, I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged my ribs tight to keep from doing anything else I’d regret. The door opened, and I waited, back turned, until I heard it click closed again.
Chapter 10
I am not ashamed to admit I spent the next hour under the blanket on my couch trying to sleep while the conversation with Ryder played on endless loop through my brain.
What I had gained from our talk had to be separated into two distinct piles in my head. The case-related stuff, and everything else.
Ryder insisted he was innocent. Told me he was working for an agency that suspected, and now knew, there were vampires in Ordinary. An agency that apparently could take that revelation not only in stride, but also had a plan in place for how they wanted to contact vampires. That suggested to me that they were already in contact with vampires outside of Ordinary.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. What did he mean they wanted oversight? was that just a code word for nefarious experiments? Blackmail? Something worse? For all I knew that agency could be building an army of vampires, or be making sure that no one else could do so.
While I might trust Ryder, I was not dumb enough to blindly trust some secret agency.
Ryder all but told me those men he’d met in the bar were behind Sven’s death. Maybe one of them had been the hand in the security camera. He’d told me those men were hunting vampires but weren’t part of whoever he was working for.
So we possibly had two groups in town, at the same time, looking for fangers.
Why?
Rossi had said it was an invitation. That Sven’s death was a calling card from his past. Someone who he or Lavius had taught the ichor techne.
Someone who wanted Ryder blamed for the death.
Which could be someone in the opposing group of hunters. Or some other vampire. Or, hell, Old Rossi himself if he had decided the double-double cross was in his best interest.
There simply wasn’t enough hard information to go on at this point.
Maybe when Jean went through the video files she would come up with something solid we could pursue.
Until then, I had a meeting at midnight I didn’t want to be late for.
~~~
By the time I was done checking in with Myra, and Jean who was poring over the video and still hadn’t come up with anything more we could use, it was close to dinner time. So I drove to the diner to eat something while I waited for midnight to roll around.
Piper looked a little startled when I walked in, but quickly gave me a big smile. “Hey, Chief. One tonight?”
“Yep. Go ahead and stick me in a corner, if you have one. I’ve some paperwork to get through.” That was the partial truth. I was going to go through the stack of notes on the case, but mostly I wanted to be somewhere unobtrusive. Whoever had sent me that letter might already be here in the diner. I wanted to people watch for a while.
“This okay?” She stopped at the table in the far corner from the door, next to a window, with a view of the door and most of the diner.
“Perfect. Like you read my mind.”
Her smile faltered, eyes going wide for a half second before she recovered. “Well, I’ll be right back with coffee and give you a minute to check out our diner menu.”
I nodded and made a show of sorting out places for the file folder, my phone, and the wire condiment carrier in the middle of the table.
Something about Piper was tugging at my brain.
I hadn’t told her I wanted dinner, though I did. She’d mentioned the dinner menu. This was exactly the table I’d been hoping to sit at when I’d first walked in and she’d taken me to it without my prompting even though there were a couple other corner tables available.
Coincidence? Skills of a long-time waitress?
Maybe.
But now that I thought about it, she had known Myra, Jean, and I all wanted pie the other night, had brought us coffee, then poured two regular and one decaf without us asking.
I wondered if Piper was a precognitive, or if she had the ability to read minds. I knew she wasn’t vampire...her skin was the wrong tone, she wasn’t vamp-thin. Besides, Rossi would have told me about her when she came to town. She could be a witch, or part fae, or any number of other things, and I wouldn’t know it.
And while being a precog would make waitressing pretty easy, it seemed like there were other and better uses for that kind of talent.
But then, I’d watched gods and goddesses choose jobs for which they were wildly unqualified. Sometimes a person just had to take any gainful employment that was available to them.
And sometimes a person didn’t want their job to have anything to do with anything else in their life.
I made a note to check into her background, and watched her chat with customers. She refilled coffee, ice tea, and sodas at the perfect moment. She checked to see if the meal was all right at exactly the second when no one’s mouth was full so they could actually answer.
That right there was an unnatural talent.
She ducked down the hallway past me, grabbed a wooden highchair, set it next to a table that would seat four, then was at the door to greet a young couple followed by an older couple who were obviously their parents. The young woman was holding a baby on her hip.
The baby wore a tiny umbrella hat.
Sigh.
Still, Piper had known they were coming through that door before they came through that door. She hadn’t even glanced out the window. Definitely some kind of ability.
Creatures and deities were required to check in with any one of us Reeds, and usually Bertie when they first came to town. But mortals with powers, such as witches, telepaths, empaths, mediums, were a little harder to keep track of. So many mortals with powers either didn’t know they had powers, or spent their lives trying to hide them. Most of them probably didn’t even know that Ordinary was a gathering place of the weirdly-abled.