Speak of the Devil mk-4

by Jenna Black

  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 the 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 terribl
e 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.

  He knows I’m not stupid enough to stay in whoever you transferred me to, Lugh’s voice said in my head. I’m sure he figures I’ve gotten far away from you by now and it’s not worth his effort to question you. Besides, we’ve already established that time is on his side.

  Yeah, because eventually, I would die of natural causes—if I was lucky—and send Lugh back to the Demon Realm so he could be trapped in a new host and killed. I could have done without the reminder.

  “Thanks for the update,” I muttered under my breath. Adam raised his eyebrow at me, but I got the feeling he knew I wasn’t talking to him.

  “It does seem to be a strange way to attack Lugh,” Adam conceded. “But I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility. I’ll check and see if Hillerman has any known ties to the Spirit Society. And don’t forget the little gift you got in the mail.”

  The fact that I actually had forgotten all about that showed just what my life had been like lately. “You have any updates about that?” I asked, trying to act like it had been preying on my mind all morning. I doubt I fooled Adam, but he didn’t call me on it.

  “Nothing that’s going to lead us to who sent it, unfortunately. The only fingerprints on the bubble wrap were yours.”

  I swallowed my gorge as I remembered feeling that dead flesh against my skin. “And did you find out where the hand came from?”

  He nodded. “My guess was right: it was embalmed. When we polled the local funeral parlors, one of them came up with a corpse missing a hand.”

  At least no one had been killed specifically to spook me. “Do you think Barbie had anything to do with that?”

  He thought about that a moment, but quickly dismissed it. “Nah. If she’d done something that dangerous, she’d have been a lot twitchier when we talked to her. Breaking and entering is one thing, but grave-robbing and then sending something like that through the U.S. mail… That’s a whole different league.”

  “But Hillerman could still be behind it.”

  “I don’t know. It seems too violent to fit his MO. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’d say it’s unlikely.”

  “Are we going to confront him?” I asked.

  “Hillerman?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, Elvis Presley.”

  Usually, my smart-ass comments seemed to piss Adam off, but this time I could have sworn he was suppressing a smile.

  “We don’t have enough information to confront him yet,” he said. “The only evidence we have to tie him to any of this is Barbie, and that’s just not enough.”

  I knew he was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. “So we just wait to see what else he’s going to do to make my life miserable and hope he screws up enough that we can prove he’s involved?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  I felt like punching the glove compartment, but this was a sturdy car, and with the way my life was going, I’d probably end up with a broken hand.

  “Remember, Barbie’s looking into the origins of the photo, and I’m going to check for Spirit Society connections. It’s not like we’re doing nothing.”

  “It’s like I’m doing nothing,” I countered. “I can’t do my job because of the damn suspension, and I can’t work on rebuilding my house because the insurance company’s got its thumb up its ass. I can’t look into what Hillerman has against me…” I shook my head violently. “If I have to sit around and do nothin
g, I’m going to go crazy.” And sink into a black pit of depression, but I didn’t feel like mentioning that.

  “You can work with your attorney to try to defend yourself against the lawsuit. That ought to take plenty of time and energy.”

  I turned to look out the side window. I don’t know what my face must have looked like at the reminder that I was now beholden to Adam for my legal fees. I think the only person in the world I’d be less happy to take money from was Raphael. But Lugh had ordered him to do it, and he would always follow Lugh’s orders to the letter.

  We didn’t say anything else for the remainder of the drive back to my apartment building. I refrained from pointing out to Adam that, although I could, indeed, spend a lot of time and energy working out my legal problems, I wasn’t scheduled to see my lawyer again until the day after tomorrow. Which meant that as soon as Adam drove away, I officially had nothing to do.

  I had once again forgotten about my “bodyguard,” so when I stepped into my apartment and saw Saul sitting at my dining room table chowing down on some Chinese takeout, I nearly had heart failure. He raised his eyebrows, his only indication that he’d noticed my gasp of terror, then shoveled another bite of food into his mouth. I could have sworn I saw one of those sadistic dried red peppers they used to spice up Chinese food on his fork—you know, the kind of peppers you’re not supposed to eat if you know what’s good for you?

  When I approached the table, trying to figure out how to act around my unwanted guest, I took a closer look at his plate and another sniff of the air. I decided it wasn’t Chinese food after all; it was Thai. And if there’s any culture in the world that makes hotter food than the Thais, I don’t want to know about it. But Saul was putting away those dried red peppers like they were candy.