Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“But we haven’t,” I guessed.

“Oh, hell, no. Imagine the headlines. ‘Lowryland destroys family vacation by summoning the FBI.’ Disney would make hay while the sun shone on that one. No, we’ll keep fighting their requests, we’ll keep shoveling money toward the lawyers, and we’ll keep banking on Disney being a bigger, sweeter target. If they’re the ones who allow the government to start arresting guests, our stock will go through the roof overnight. Always stick with the people who seem to care about your privacy.”

I snorted. I couldn’t help myself. Lowryland only “cares” about the privacy of their guests as long as it impacts the bottom line. There are cameras in all the rides and public areas of the Park. There are even more cameras in the company resort hotels. Nothing happens on Lowry property that Lowry doesn’t know about thirty seconds later.

Realization hit me hard on the heels of that thought. My eyes went wide and my spine went stiff, my fingers not even heating up in the face of my shock. Sophie glanced at me and nodded, looking satisfied.

“Good,” she said. “We’re on the same page now—and in case you were worried, there aren’t any microphones in my car. The corporate overlords, long may they reign, will probably be bugging the rank and file long before they get around to bugging management.”

As a member of the rank and file, that probably shouldn’t have been reassuring. Somehow, it was, if only because her need to explain meant that they weren’t doing it yet. “How much did you see?”

“Not nearly as much as I wish we had.” Sophie pulled a sour face. “The cameras in front of the Midsummer Night’s Scream have been down since yesterday morning. A damn squirrel chewed through a wire. One of the electricians found the little bastard hanging off the transformer box, stiff as a board. They were supposed to get the cameras back on last night, and obviously, that didn’t happen.”

“Then how—”

“Ice cream.” Sophie shrugged, turning onto the freeway. “There’s nothing wrong with the cameras there. We have footage of you skating after Miss Conway, and then skating back alone, grabbing Miss Rodriguez, and exiting the Park. So my question for you is this: were you with Miss Conway when she found the body?”

I liked that wording. Sophie wasn’t accusing Fern of murder, just of covering up my part in the victim’s discovery. “What happens if I say yes?”

“I ask how confident you are that Miss Conway is going to stick to her current story, which is that she was by herself when she tripped and fell into the flowerbed, having already told her roommates to return to the apartment. Under normal circumstances, she would have been liable for any damage to the landscaping. Given she found a body that Security somehow missed on their initial sweep, we’re willing to let this one go.”

“Uh, yeah.” In that part of Fairyland, in that sort of flowerbed—surrounded by a low hedge which was often full of birds and the hands of curious children—the odds that our victim would have been discovered by someone under the age of twelve were extremely high. Talk about bad press. “So if I had been there, and if Fern were lying about that part, I would be very confident in her ability to stick to her story. I . . . I knew her before we came here. She and I were sort of in the same situation.”

Sophie nodded thoughtfully. “I understand why you ran.”

“You do?”

“Of course, I do. I wasn’t born yesterday, Mel.” Sophie sighed, shaking her head like this was the sort of burden she would rather push onto someone else’s shoulders, but was nonetheless compelled to carry on her own. “You still won’t tell me what that bastard finally did to make you leave, and that’s fine, I’m not going to push; you have a right to your privacy. That’s something I would never try to take away from you, especially not after what you’ve already been through. If you’d been with Miss Conway when she found that . . . unfortunate soul, the police would have questioned you. They might have taken your picture. I suppose the other thing I have to ask is whether there’s anything out there for them to find that might embarrass the company. Because you’re my friend, we did a shortcut on certain aspects of the hiring process and background check. Was that a mistake?”

“No, ma’am.” If Sophie had set Lowry’s lawyers to digging, the worst thing she could have discovered was that Melody West didn’t technically exist. Since we’d gone to high school together, shared locker rooms and buses and late-night pizza parties, she knew Melody existed. She would have written all that off as nonsense, an artifact of my dropping off the grid for so long. My fingerprints weren’t in any systems except for Lowry’s.

And the Covenant’s. That was what I needed to be worrying about. That, and Fern—and my job. I caught a glimpse of the dashboard clock and yelped.

“Sophie, I’m going to be late!”

“Don’t worry. Your manager has been informed that you’re needed in Public Relations, and your shift is being covered, with no black marks on your record.”

The inside of the car suddenly felt very cold. “I told you, I wasn’t there.”

“I know you did. We’re calling in everyone who closed in Fairyland last night, to make an announcement about what happened and hopefully squash wild speculation.” Sophie’s frown was fleeting. “Gossip is poison.”

“No argument there.”

Sophie sighed. “Do you ever miss high school? The squad? I cheered in college, but it wasn’t the same, was it?”

“You’re doing it again,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Fishing. You want me to say ‘no, it wasn’t,’ and then you’ll know that not only did I go to college, but I was on a cheer squad while I was there. Or ‘I wouldn’t know,’ and then you know at least one of those things isn’t true. I told you, I can’t—”

“Talk about the past, yes, yes, I know, but you’ll forgive me for being concerned?” Sophie frowned again, harder this time. “If that bastard shows up here, I want to know how hard I need to kick his ass.”

The thought of Sophie kicking Artie’s ass under the assumption that he’d kept me locked in a closet since college would have been funny, if I hadn’t been so sure she’d do it, and equally sure that the stress would make him lose control of both his empathy and his weird incubus mojo. Being whammied into falling hopelessly in love with my cousin probably wouldn’t do anything good for her as a person.

(Artie’s father, my Uncle Ted, is an incubus, which makes Artie a half-incubus, which means he’s been taking longer than normal to get the walking porn soundtrack that is his body chemistry under control. Since incubi are by and large very focused on consent and making sure no one is doing anything they don’t want to do, Artie spends a lot of time locked in his basement, avoiding the sort of girls who might accidentally decide they want to marry him and have his quarter-incubus geek babies. Which is all of them, barring close relatives and people like our Cousin Sarah, whose body chemistry is too far from the mammalian norm for pheromones to work on her. She’s in love with him because she loves him. Weirdo.)

“He’s not going to show up here,” I said.

“But if he does—”

“I will call you so you can come and help kick his ass.” I took a deep breath. “So if I had been there last night, and I had seen the body, I guess I’d want to know what happened.”

“Are you asking me to gossip?”