Face Off

CHAPTER 31

INTEL FROM THE assassination attempt had begun to flow into the InterSec unit before Laura had returned from the White House. In two days’ time, the volume of material had grown exponentially. Her acting as Mariel Tate for most of the previous day had pushed the public-relations department into critical mode as requests for interviews and statements from the Guildmaster swamped the office. Saffin had done her best—and her best was an understatement—to keep things moving.

With her dual roles slamming into each other, Laura gathered files from InterSec and took them up to public relations. She didn’t like mixing the duties of the two offices, but troubleshooting the media had become a nightmare she didn’t want to leave Saffin alone with. By late afternoon, the pressure had shifted course, and she had to address the preliminary investigation as Mariel. In a moment of desperation, she flat out told Saffin to keep visitors away while she plunged into the InterSec material.

Saffin took the news as if Laura had told her she was going to lunch. Keeping silent about her double life in front of Rhys and everyone else at the Guild was difficult, and knowing that Saffin could be trusted made life a little easier. A quick knock sounded at the door, and Saffin slipped in. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Resha is on his way up again.”

“Again?”

Saffin folded her arms. “Third time. He’s getting suspicious about your door being closed. He almost opened it last time.”

Laura looked down at her desk. Inverni Guardian schedules and notices were spread everywhere. On her monitor, surveillance video from the assassination attempt played. “I’ve been trying to find decent footage that shows the location from which Draigen’s sniper fired. How much time do I have?”

Saffin raised her eyebrows and twisted her lips. “Minutes.”

She jumped up. “Dammit.” She stacked papers together and shoved them in folders.

Saffin rushed to the desk. “Yikes. Don’t do that in front of me.”

Laura paused. “What?”

Saffin neatened the folders. “Make such a mess.”

Laura bit her lip as she watched Saffin, then checked her watch. “Saf, I have to take care of something and can’t let Resha chew up my time. Can you hide all this stuff and pretend you never saw it?”

She shrugged. “Sure. I do that all the time with crap I don’t want to do.”

Laura picked up her bag. “You’re kidding, right?”

Saffin rolled her eyes. “Yes, Laura. Of course I’m kidding. Get going.”

“You’re the best, Saf,” she said as she rushed out the door.

“I know,” Saffin called after her.

Laura took the elevator down to the parking garage. In the lower lobby, she sidled into a blind spot of the security camera and activated the Mariel glamour. It was an old trick, one she used sparingly in case an attentive security guard noticed anything on the monitors in the bowels of the building. Taking a moment to leave her bag in her InterSec SUV, she walked out the exit ramp to the sidewalk.

Barricades along the sidewalk stood like accusations of failure, the chipped sidewalk a testament that the shooting had not been prevented. Draigen was alive, Laura reminded herself. That was what was important. The regent of the macCullen clan was alive and the only person who had died was the shooter.

Laura didn’t think it was over. Despite the failed attempt and the heightened alerts, chatter among security-agency channels had not abated. Rumors abounded of a trial run, that the assassination was meant to fail. The conflicting information came in from disparate sources that had never acted in unison before. Local U.S. interest groups and European political cells were rattled and excited. Yet no one claimed responsibility.

The building Sean Carr had fired on Draigen from was a long two blocks away. The walk was easy but did nothing to set Laura at ease. Bureaucracy had already set in at the building, and she had to work through four lines of security. The D.C. police held the front line, weeding out visitors who did not have legitimate business in the building or who were not law enforcement. After them, the Guild recorded names and photographed any fey who entered. Under the circumstances, that smacked of intimidation of Inverni supporters. The Inverni security staff themselves were next, a suspicious group that acted convinced everyone besides them was interested in destroying evidence. After the twenty minutes it required to meet their approval, Laura was happy to see the familiar black jumpsuits of the InterSec guards who had control of the top floor and attic space of the building. Not all of them knew Mariel Tate on sight, but they knew enough to read a high-level InterSec pass without causing an argument.

Finally alone, she trailed down a dusty hallway on the attic level, sensing body signatures. It was as much exercise as investigation. The hallway wouldn’t tell her much—too many people had passed through it since the assassination attempt—but sorting through the different trails helped her calm down and prepare for what she had come for.

Crime-scene tape stretched across an open door. As she ducked under the tape, the ozonelike odor of essence strikes tickled Laura’s nose. At least two major bolts had passed through the space. She wound her way through stacked chairs to a broken window frame with plastic sheeting fixed over it.

She picked up traces of her essence-bolt where Carr must have stood to make his shot at Draigen. Laura’s return fire had hit him and wrecked the window casing. She peeled back the sheeting. Without leaning out far, she had a clear view of the plaza in front of the Guildhouse two blocks away. Perfect line of sight. She pressed the sheeting back in place.

Slowly pivoting, she noted the pattern of scattered chairs. Her shot would have thrown Carr left, right where the chairs had been knocked askew. She crouched, sensing his body signature on the floor, but no telltale investigation markers to indicate his body had fallen there. Which meant that wasn’t where he died.

She stood. People in a panic used the most direct path available. She paced the open aisle through the stacked chairs to a line of storage boxes against the back wall. With her pocket flashlight, she swept a beam of light along the floor and under the chairs. Crime-scene investigators had been through already, but the chance they had missed something always existed. Maybe not in such a high-profile case, she thought. Before she reached the boxes, someone knocked at the door.

“Hey, someone said there was a crazy lady in the attic, and here you are,” Sinclair said.

Laura smirked over her shoulder. “I’m surprised you got through all that security.”

He frowned in curiosity. “Why?”

Crouching in front of the boxes, she flicked the light along the floor. “Your security clearance isn’t as high as mine.”

He tickled her on a shoulder blade, then stepped back, a subtle reminder that he remembered how she felt about mixing work and play. “It was a breeze.”

She glanced up, smiling. “Are you kidding me?”

He shook his head. “I knew the D.C. cops at the door. The Guild guys waved me along because they thought I was human. You left my name with the Inverni guards, and Eldin passed me in down the hall.”

“Eldin?”

Sinclair gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Skinny elf in the elevator? Works across the hall from us?”

Her eyebrows drew together as she tried to place him. “He does?”

“Yeah. He thinks you’re hot, by the way. They all do over there.”

She tilted her head up. “They? You know a ‘they’ over there? How do you know them?”

He shrugged. “Met them in the gym. We shoot hoops.”

She brought her attention back to the boxes. “Don’t tell me—you play center.”

“Nope. Forward. Galt from accounting plays center. He’s a frost jotunn. They’re kinda short for giants, but he’s at least a head taller than me.”

She shook her head. “You know someone in accounting, too?”

He peered over her shoulder. “Yeah. He used to give me the hairy eyeball when I picked up my check. I thought he might have been sensing my jotunn essence somehow, but turns out he couldn’t figure why Terryn was paying me out of a supplies account. I told him it was top secret, hush-hush.”

She smiled. “Paying you out of supplies, Jono, is an example of Terryn’s sense of humor.”

He leaned against a crate and waggled his eyebrows at her. “You know, I don’t mind being used as a tool sometimes.”

She leaned down as the light flashed on something. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“Sean Carr had two major wounds—one to the chest and one to the wing. The chest shot killed him. I’m a good shot, but I fired blind. The wing hit was mine.” She walked halfway up the room toward the window. “The essence evidence in here confirms it. My hit knocked him out of the window. Seeing this layout, it would have been virtually impossible for someone to deliver the deathblow from outside.”

“Virtually,” Sinclair said.

She leaned to the side to see beneath a chair. “Right. It’s possible, of course, but I was the only person to react to the gunshots and gauge the direction of their source. We didn’t have security this far up the street, so no one could have been on scene fast enough to deliver the shot without Carr’s being ready for it.”

“You did wound him,” Sinclair said.

“He probably couldn’t fly with the damage, but it wasn’t incapacitating. So he was trapped here on the ground. Which means that whoever killed him did it inside, and if it was done in here, there might be a body signature I can lock on.”

Sinclair pursed his lips. “Except probably a hundred people have been through here since the shooting.”

Laura stepped around a chair that lay sideways on the floor. She crouched again. The flashlight beam picked up a flash of pale yellow. “Ah, there it is.”

She stood next to an index card on the floor. “This marks where Carr’s head was when he was found. Judging by the position, I’d guess he got up from beneath the window and made his way down the main aisle. The impact of the kill shot would have thrown him back a few feet”—she shifted away from the index card toward the back of the room again—“which would have put him about here.”

Sinclair faced her, holding his hand out as if firing an essence-bolt. “So the shooter would have been about here.”

“Lower. You’re likely taller,” she said.

He dropped his hand a foot. “I don’t think the shooter was here. Carr would have been facing him directly and seen he was about to be fired on. He would have tried to defend himself.” He stepped to his left behind rows of chairs. “Line of sight is blocked on this side.” He moved to the right in front of the boxes, keeping his hand pointing at Laura. “Anywhere along here is possible. Carr wouldn’t have necessarily seen it coming from here.”

Laura moved along the main aisle. Dozens of body signatures flared in her senses, streaming colors of blue and white, yellow and green, indicating various fey species. She recognized a flash of a signature here and there, people she had known on the InterSec security teams or some she had met on the Inverni Guardian units. Aran macCullen had been in the room, which was no surprise since he had taken the lead in the investigation.

“It’s pretty contaminated,” she said.

She moved next to Sinclair and immediately registered three or four strong signatures. “Okay, this is interesting. I’m sensing a large pool of Carr’s essence, so he must have hung out back here waiting for Draigen’s scheduled departure. I recognize a druid from InterSec who works on crime-scene investigations. He must have sensed Carr’s essence, too, because he lingered long enough to leave a good imprint. There’s also another Inverni essence that shifts back and forth like someone was pacing.”

“Aran macCullen?” Sinclair asked.

She shook her head. “Not strong enough. It matches the signature I picked up in the morgue, though. If I know the person, I can gauge how old the signature is by how it’s degrading, but without knowing who was here, it could either be someone with Carr or someone watching the investigator work. I’ve got a good fix on this signature, though.”

“So now what?”

She grinned up at him. “We play poker.”