by Jenna Black
Good question, he answered.
Adam knocked on the door, and Barbie told him to come in. She had her back to us when we walked in, her nose buried in a battered metal filing cabinet. Her office itself looked a little better than the hallway, though it didn’t exactly scream of astounding financial success. At least it was neat, and the furniture, though no doubt secondhand, didn’t look like it had been stolen from a Dumpster.
Barbie stopped messing with the filing cabinet, shoving the drawer closed with a good bit of muscle. Even so, it got stuck about six inches short of fully closed. She gave it a bang with the heel of her hand, but it didn’t budge.
“Damn thing,” she muttered under her breath, then finally turned and saw Adam and me.
Her baby blue eyes widened in surprise as she looked back and forth between the two of us. “Ms. Kingsley, Mr. White. What a surprise.”
“I’ll bet,” Lugh said, adopting my hostile conversational style.
She blinked innocently. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked.
Her poker face was a hell of a lot better than mine. If I hadn’t known better, I might have believed she had no idea why we were here.
“I’m sure you’re aware, Ms. Paget, that breaking and entering is against the law,” Adam said.
Adam has an uncanny ability to intimidate, and it looked like his juju was working overtime with Barbie. Her face paled and her mouth dropped partway open. So much for the poker face.
Adam laughed. “Come now,” he chided. “How can you act so surprised? If you’re going to brag about evidence you found in my house, it should come as no great shock that I know you broke in.”
With a shudder, she moved to the chair behind her desk and slowly sat. Her face had not regained its color. She glanced up at Adam’s face, but couldn’t seem to hold his gaze for more than half a second. She shook her head.
“How exactly did I brag about the evidence?” she asked, her voice shaky.
Maybe she was a really great actress, but it sure seemed to me she was genuinely surprised and distressed by Adam’s accusation. Lugh and Adam shared a look, and I remembered that I wasn’t currently in control of my body. I wanted to peer into Barbie’s face, looking for evidence of a lie. Not that I’m that great at telling when someone’s lying to me, but still…
Lugh reached into my pocketbook and pulled out the letter Brian had received, handing it to Adam, who handed it to Barbie. Annoyingly, Lugh still didn’t look at Barbie, so I couldn’t see her reaction. He seemed inordinately fascinated by the potted fern that languished in one corner of the office.
“Where did you get this?” Barbie asked.
Lugh was still examining the fern, and I felt the first stirrings of real irritation. What’s so fascinating about the damn plant? I asked.
Lugh didn’t answer.
“Are you sure you don’t know?” Adam asked Barbie.
Damn it, Lugh, turn your head!
“I didn’t write it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
It finally occurred to me that Lugh was studiously refusing to look in Barbie’s direction for the sole purpose of pissing me off. It was working, too. Sometimes, his ability to push just the right buttons is downright scary. I didn’t particularly want to be roused from my funk, but Lugh knew just how to goad me out of the soothing numbness.
I hated the fact that Lugh had manipulated me into this move, but I started to rally my mental forces to kick him out.
“But you know who did,” Adam said, and Barbie didn’t answer.
I wasn’t shocked that Lugh resisted my attempt to wrest back control. Damn him, he was going to make me fight for it. Feeling a bit like a marionette on his strings, I struggled harder to shut him out of my mind.
“Ms. Paget,” Adam said, “I found a long blond hair lying on the floor near the whip mentioned in the letter. What do you suppose the chances are it’ll match yours and help convict you?”
I was sure Adam was bluffing about that; otherwise, he would have mentioned it to me earlier. However, Barbie couldn’t know that, and Adam sounded pretty damn sure of himself.
Still, Lugh wasn’t letting me take control back, and a little of my habitual panic was seeping into my efforts. I wanted Lugh out of the driver’s seat, and I wanted him out now. Trying to still the panic while drawing energy from my anger, I visualized slamming the doors of my mind shut, then double-locking them to keep Lugh out.
His resistance faded as if it had never existed, and I was back in my own body, my pulse beating frantically in my throat. My stomach lurched unhappily with my now habitual post-control-change nausea. Thanks a lot, Lugh, I thought as I struggled not to toss my cookies.
I turned to look at Barbie, and she looked as panicked as I had felt a moment ago. Her hands had clenched in white-knuckled fists around the letter, and she was panting like she’d just finished doing push-ups.
“You’ll go to prison, Ms. Paget,” Adam said. I saw that he had taken a seat in front of her desk and was lounging in it casually, his long legs stretched out in front of him, a smug expression on his face. “Probably not for long, but you’ll still lose your PI license, and you won’t get it back. Ex-cons have a lot of trouble finding work, you know. You’ll be lucky to get a job flipping burgers.” He made a mock-regretful face. “And you can forget about keeping Blair at The Healing Circle. But don’t worry. There are some excellent nursing homes for the indigent.”
Barbie’s eyes closed in pain, and when she opened them again, I saw the glimmer of tears. If she hadn’t just ruined my life, I’d feel a lot sorrier for her. Still, it wasn’t just her we were threatening, it was her helpless, innocent sister.
I was all ready to step into the “good cop” role, but before I figured out what to say, Barbie spoke up again.
“What do you want?” she asked, and I could hear the tears in her voice even though she hadn’t let any fall. “If you were planning to arrest me, you would have done it already.” She glanced briefly up at me. “And you wouldn’t have brought Ms. Kingsley with you.”
Adam shrugged. “That wasn’t my initial plan, but don’t fool yourself into thinking I won’t arrest you if you don’t cooperate.”
She drew in a deep breath and sat up straighter in her chair. The tears had vanished, and she looked grim and determined. “Tell me what you want.”
“I’d like you to tell me how you ended up working for Jordan Maguire—because, frankly, this doesn’t look like his kind of place—and what, exactly, he’s hired you to do.”
Barbie shook her head. “I don’t work for Jordan Maguire. I was hired by Jack Hillerman, Mr. Maguire’s attorney.”
“A technicality. My question still stands.”
She squirmed, then looked up at me. “I’m very sorry,” she said, and she sounded sincere. “When I first took the job, I had no idea…” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze dropped to her scarred desktop.
I should have hated this woman, but either my emotions were still muted, or I recognized Barbie as a victim. I took the seat beside Adam, and we both waited in silence for Barbie to continue. She took another deep breath, then folded her hands on the desk and looked up.
“Mr. Hillerman originally hired me to dig up dirt on Ms. Kingsley,” she said, addressing her answer to Adam. “I was to follow her and try to find incriminating information for the lawsuit. He offered me a more than generous retainer.” She grimaced. “I should have known something was fishy, but I just couldn’t turn down the kind of money he was offering.”
“And how did Hillerman end up hiring a second-rate PI to investigate for a client of Maguire’s stature?” Adam asked.
Her eyes narrowed in a glare. “I’m not a second-rate PI! I happen to be very good at my job.”
Adam swept the office with a contemptuous look. “Yeah, I can see you’re the pinnacle of success.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Appearances can be deceiving. I could rent a fancy office in a better part of town, or I could give my sister t
he best care money can buy. I decided my sister was more important than my office.”
I could tell from Adam’s expression that he was going to continue growling at her. I didn’t think that was going to get us what we wanted, so I interrupted.
“You may be real successful,” I said, “but it still seems unusual for a guy like Hillerman to hire you. He’d have taken one look at this place and turned right back around. Assuming he’d even bother to come after finding your address.” Like I said, this was one of the seedier sections of Broad Street, and Hillerman would have known that.
“He said I’d been recommended by one of my former clients.”
Adam and I gave her twin skeptical looks.
She raised her chin. “Yes, I wondered why he was hiring someone like me when I’m sure he has investigators he uses regularly. But I couldn’t afford to turn down the kind of money he was offering.” Her shoulders slumped. “I should have known it was too good to be true.”
“It must have been quite some paycheck to inspire you to break into the house of the Director of Special Forces,” I commented.
“That’s not how it started,” Barbie said. “At first, it was just ordinary, tedious investigation. Then Mr. Hillerman convinced me to follow some leads in rather, er, unconventional ways. I managed to get some financial and medical information through less-than-legitimate sources. I didn’t think it was anything very helpful to the case, but my client asked for it and was willing to pay a premium for it, so I did what he wanted.
“When I learned that Ms. Kingsley had spent a couple of nights at your house, and I shared that information with my client, he asked me to search the house for any kind of proof of an affair. I refused.”
“Oh, really?” Adam asked, his voice laced with sarcasm.
Barbie returned his gaze calmly. “Really. I’d been willing to bend the law a bit for the kind of money he was paying, but I drew the line at breaking and entering.” She sighed heavily. “But he’d been setting me up all along. I don’t think he really cared about that financial or medical information—he just wanted me to do something illegal so he could use it against me. He said if I didn’t search the house, he’d turn me in.”
I frowned. “But since he’s the one who paid you for the information, wouldn’t he incriminate himself if he turned you in?”
“Yes. But, as he pointed out, I had a lot more to lose. All he had to do was disrupt my ability to work, and I wouldn’t be able to afford to keep Blair at The Healing Circle. He’s got enough money he could retire right now if he wanted to, so even in the worst-case scenario, he’d come out all right. It wasn’t anything he would go to prison over.
“Besides, how could I prove he ordered me to do it? He wasn’t stupid enough to give me written instructions. Hell, he wouldn’t even give me instructions over the phone.”
“But now that he sent the letter to Brian, he’s blown everything out of the water!” I said.
“Has he?” Adam asked. “We can’t prove he sent the letter.”
I motioned at Barbie. “She can testify that she gave him the information.”
“And he’ll deny it. Right now, we have her word against his. And he’s a very respectable attorney who has nothing to gain by sending information like that to Brian.”
That made me frown. “Neither does she,” I said, once again motioning at Barbie. If she objected to being talked about in the third person, she didn’t say anything about it. “But let’s back up a step. You said Hillerman had nothing to gain by sending that shit to Brian, and you’re right. So why did he?”
Adam looked as puzzled as I felt. When we’d been assuming it was Maguire himself behind the letter, it had made a twisted sort of sense. But for it to be Hillerman…
“If things go south for him, he could ruin his whole career over this,” I mused. “Why the hell would he bother?”
We both turned to look at Barbie, who shrugged.
“I don’t know what it’s all about,” she said. “I didn’t ask very many questions. What I do know is that he has some kind of personal grudge against you.”
That knocked me for a loop. “I don’t even know the guy! How can he have a personal grudge?”
“I don’t know. He tried to pretend he was just looking out for Mr. Maguire’s interests, but I could tell it was personal. He’d get this look in his eyes when he talked about you…” She flashed me an apologetic smile. “I don’t know what you did to piss him off, but it was something.”
“But I’ve never met him!” I said again. “The closest I’ve come to having contact with him was when he left a message on my answering machine telling me not to try to contact Maguire.”
Adam gave me a meaningful look, but I had no idea what he was trying to tell me. I tried to convey my cluelessness with my own meaningful look.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said firmly. “Right now, we have something else to discuss.” He turned toward Barbie, a feral glint in his eye.
She swallowed hard. “So you’re going to arrest me, after all.”
“Give me one good reason not to.”
I could tell she was thinking furiously. And I could also tell she was too worried about her fate and that of her sister to figure out what Adam was getting at.
“Maybe you’d like to do some pro bono work for us,” I suggested.
Relief washed over her face. “I’d be happy to. I know I’ve made some terrible mistakes, but this,” she grabbed the letter and tossed it back across the desk to us, “is not something I ever thought I’d be a part of. If there’s something I can do to make up for it, all you have to do is ask.”
“There’s no way you can undo the damage you’ve caused,” Adam said. He pulled the photo out of the envelope and handed it to Barbie. Her eyes widened.
“I didn’t take this!” she said immediately.
“I know,” Adam answered. “It’s been doctored somehow, because that never happened. How about you start by trying to find out who created the photo and get them to admit it’s fake?”
Barbie looked at him steadily. “Is it really fake? Or are you asking me to find someone to lie about it?”
“It’s fake!” I said, my voice near a shout. I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Adam and I don’t have that kind of relationship and we never did. Forget what you think you know, because you don’t know jack shit.”
She held up the picture and gave it a thorough once-over. Then she nodded. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. I’m presuming if I find the party who made the photo, you’d like me to get evidence to link them to Hillerman.”
“Naturally,” Adam said.
I had a few other assignments I wanted to put her on, stat, but Adam gave me another of those damn meaningful looks. I still didn’t know what he was trying to tell me. Except for the “shut up” part. That, I got.
“Did you arrange to have those blood samples analyzed?” Adam asked Barbie.
She shook her head. “I just gave the stuff I found at your house to Mr. Hillerman. But considering the faked photo, he could have just lied about matching the blood. He knew he could make plenty of trouble without having genuine evidence.”
“True,” Adam conceded. “Just focus on the photo right now. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that Morgan and I were never here.”
She nodded briskly. “No, you don’t.”
“And, of course, you’ll let us know if Mr. Hillerman has any other assignments for you.”
She didn’t look too happy about that suggestion, but she nodded again anyway. “I suppose it would be hypocritical of me to worry about client confidentiality at this point.”
I couldn’t help but agree. Leaving Barbie to her work, Adam and I headed back out.
Chapter 11
I held my questions until we got into the car, but the moment Adam closed the door behind himself, I turned to him.
“So, what were you trying to convey to me with all those pointed glances?”
He buckled
up and pulled out into traffic. “You seem to have come back to life.”
“Leave my mental state out of it and just answer the question.”
“Of course, you’re obviously not at the top of your game yet, or you’d have figured this out already.”
I reminded myself it would be a bad idea to smack Adam while he was driving. “Are you going to answer the question, or are you just going to kick me while I’m down?” I’m not usually one to play the guilt card, but sometimes you’ve just got to play the hand you’re dealt. From the corner of my eye, I saw Adam’s lips tug down in a mild frown. I guess he didn’t feel all that guilty.
“You’re forgetting that there’s more than one person in your body,” he said, eyes on the road. “If a man you don’t know suddenly seems to have it in for you, chances are good it’s not you he’s after.”
Adam slammed on the brakes suddenly and just avoided crashing into a guy who apparently forgot you’re supposed to look to see if someone’s coming before you pull out of a parking space. Adam cursed and leaned on his horn.
“Lucky for him I don’t feel like being a traffic cop today,” he muttered under his breath.
“And lucky for all involved you have a demon’s reflexes,” I said, my heart thumping from yet another near-death experience.
We resumed our normal pace, and I rolled Adam’s suggestion around in my brain for a bit. I understood where he was coming from, but still …
“The people who are after Lugh want him dead, not stuck in a heartbroken host. If gathering dirt on my supposed relationship with you is meant to be a strike against Lugh, then it’s pretty feeble. Besides, if the bad guys knew I still had Lugh, we’d be fending off assassins right and left.”
As far as Dougal and his people knew, I had transferred Lugh to another host when the shit hit the fan. I still had a target on my back, seeing as I might be a bread crumb in the trail leading to whoever was hosting Lugh right this moment, but so far, Dougal didn’t seem to think questioning me was a high priority.