Denon laughed, but the two guys with the gurney hesitated and exchanged knowing looks. “It’s been ruled a suicide. You have no jurisdiction. The body is mine.”
Crap. We didn’t have anything yet, and if we didn’t find it, we’d look like fools.
“Until it’s been ruled a human didn’t murder her, I have all the jurisdiction I need,” Glenn said. “She has pressure marks on her wrists. She was held against her will.”
“Circumstantial.” Denon’s brown fingers reached for the drawer handle. Glenn didn’t back down, and the tension rose until Jenks’s wings were making a high whine.
I shuffled around in my bag and brought out my cell phone. Not that I could actually reach a tower down here. “We can have a court order in four hours. Your enthusiasm to destroy the evidence will be on it. Still want to release her?”
Jenks landed on my shoulder. “You can’t get a court order that fast,” he whispered, and sweat broke out on me. Yeah, I knew it would take a day, if I could get one at all, but I couldn’t just let Denon walk out of here with the body.
Denon’s jaw was gritted. “Pressure marks don’t mean shit.”
Jenks flew from me to hover over Vanessa. “How about needle marks?” he said.
“Where?” I blurted, crossing the room to look. “I don’t see them.”
The small pixy was smug. “’Cause they’re small. Pixy-size needles. Like fiber-optics. You can see the welt on the torn skin. Whoever drugged her tried to cover it up by tearing her arm as if it was a suicide. But they’re there. You’ll need a microscope to see them.”
A grim smile twitched Glenn’s lips, and together we turned to Denon. The word of a pixy didn’t mean squat in court, but knowingly destroying evidence did. The vampire looked ticked. Good. I’d hate to think I was the only one having a bad morning.
“Get her arm looked at,” he said brusquely, muscles hard with tension. “I want the report before the ink dries.”
Oh, God, I thought, rolling my eyes. Could he have picked a more trite analogy?
Glenn shoved the drawer closed, locking it before handing the key to Iceman. Jenks was hovering beside me, and I said nothing, smiling because I knew we were right and Denon was wrong, and the I.S. was going to come out looking like idiots.
But Denon chuckled, surprising me. “You keep pissing people off, Morgan, and before long the only people who will want to hire you are those homeless bridge trolls and miscreants dealing in black magic. It’s your fault she died. No one else’s.”
The blood drained from my face, and Jenks snapped his wings aggressively. Not only did Denon know she had been murdered and was trying to cover it up, but he was blaming me for it. “You son of a bitch,” Jenks seethed, and I moved my fingers to tell him to stay out of it. I couldn’t catch a pixy, but maybe a ticked vampire could.
Giving me a beautiful smile, Denon turned, as confident and power-hungry as when he had come in. Jenks was a blur of wings and anger. “Don’t listen to him, Rachel. This wasn’t your fault. It couldn’t have been.”
I looked at the covered corpse. Please, God. Let it have nothing to do with me. “Yeah, I know,” I said, hoping he was right. There was no way. My only connection to her was that fish, and that had been settled. She had been Mr. Ray’s secretary, not responsible for it at all. And besides, the fish hadn’t been Mr. Ray’s to begin with.
Glenn put a comforting hand on my shoulder, and we walked slowly to the double doors to allow Denon time to leave. The reception room held only Iceman and a fading conversation filtering in from the hall. I waited while Glenn exchanged a few words with the orderly, promising to come back for the paperwork after escorting me home. Vanessa’s body wouldn’t be released now until murder had been ruled out, but I wasn’t finding any satisfaction in it. The I.S. was going to be really ticked if I blew one of their cover-ups. Goody, goody.
Tugging my bag back up my shoulder, I waved to the edgy Iceman and headed out with Glenn. Jenks was silent. Glenn had my coffee in one hand, my elbow in the other. My thoughts were on Vanessa while he guided me unseeing through the upper levels of the building and back into the sun. I didn’t say a word all the way home, and the conversation between Jenks and Glenn lagged. In their silence I thought I heard agreement that I might have been responsible in some way for the woman’s death. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t have been.
I didn’t look up from the dash until I felt the soothing shade of my street. Jenks muttered something and slipped out the open window before Glenn brought the car to a stop. I glanced up then, finding the hazy morning slipping into the time of day I was usually just waking.
“Thanks for coming out with me,” Glenn said, and I turned to him, surprised at the honest relief in his eyes. “Officer Denon gives me the creeps,” he added, and I managed a smile.
“He’s a pushover,” I said, gathering my bag onto my lap.
Glenn pulled his eyebrows up. “If you say so. At least Vanessa’s body won’t be destroyed. And now I’ll have access to any record I want until human involvement is ruled out. I think I can take it from here.”
I huffed. “Then why did you have me come out, Mr. F.I.B. Agent?”
He grinned to show his teeth. “Jenks found the needle marks, and you distracted Denon and got him to back down. A court order?” he said, chuckling. I shrugged, and Glenn added, “He’s afraid of you, you know.”
“Me? I don’t think so.” I fumbled for the door handle. Crap, I was tired. “I’m still sending you a bill,” I said, checking the time on the dash’s clock.
“Uh, Rachel,” Glenn said before I got out, “I’ve another reason I came over.”
My motion to leave hesitated, and, looking unhappy, he reached under the seat and handed me a thick folder held closed with a rubber band.
“What is it?” I questioned, and he gestured at me to open it. Setting it atop my lap, I rolled the rubber band off and leafed through the file. It was mostly photocopied newspaper clippings and reports from the F.I.B. and I.S. concerning theft crimes spanning the entire North American continent and a few overseas in the UK and Germany: rare books, magical artifacts, jewelry with historical significance … I felt myself go cold despite the July heat as I realized that this was Nick’s file.
“Call me if he contacts you,” Glenn said, his voice with a curious tightness to it. He didn’t like asking me, but he was.
I swallowed, unable to look at him. “He went off the Mackinac Bridge,” I said, feeling unreal. “You think he survived that?” I knew he had. He had called me when he realized he’d swiped the fake Were artifact from me and I had the real one.
A band fixed around my chest and squeezed. Crap. That’s what Newt was looking for. Shit, shit, shit—this was why Vanessa was murdered? The I.S. knew I’d possessed the focus once, but they and everyone else thought it had gone over the bridge with Nick Sparagmos. Did someone know that it had survived and was now killing Weres to find out who had it? Oh, God. David.
“I want this one, Rachel,” Glenn said, jerking me back to reality. “I know it’s Nick.”
I felt like I was wrapped in cotton, and I knew my eyes were too wide when I turned to him. “I guessed he was a thief. I didn’t know until he left. I didn’t want to believe it,” I said.
Soft pity was in his eyes. “I know you didn’t.”
My pulse leapt, and I took a fast breath. Glenn touched my shoulder, probably thinking it was the shock of finding out for sure that Nick was a thief that had my hands shaking, not that I knew what Newt wanted and why Vanessa had been murdered. Damn it, she’d been drugged and then murdered because she hadn’t known anything about