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.”