Bo laughed, a wicked-sounding cackle. “You think your relationship or lack thereof with Isabella Davis means anything to me? You know me better than that.”
I did indeed. Bo never did anything for free. A piece of the puzzle clicked into place. “Someone paid you to set me up.”
Her smile grew.
“Why?” I asked, more to myself than to the greedy, sheep-hoarding witch next to me. I hadn’t expected her to answer, so I was surprised when she leaned back against the soft leather and began to speak.
“I got a call a few hours before I contacted you,” she said.
“From who?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t recognize the voice. But it was a man . . . I think . . .”
“You’re not sure?”
Her lips flattened to an unflattering thin line. “The caller was disguising his voice. It sounded almost mechanical, like a computer.”
I considered how easy it was for Alice to use the intercom to affect Bo Peep’s voice. Was it that easy for the caller? I frowned. “What did the caller want?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. The caller wanted Izzy to find me with Bo. And that meant the caller knew my sheepish history with Bo Peep. I wasn’t sure what the caller had expected to happen. Maybe he—or possibly the mysterious blonde whom the Ferns saw, if she had disguised her voice—wanted to ruin my and Izzy’s partnership? As if a simple roll in the wool would have any impact.
“He wanted your girlfriend to find you in a compromising situation,” Peep said. “I told him it would cost him, and I named a price. Ten minutes later, my bank account had a nice chunk of change deposited, and I had a call to make.”
I shook my head, disgusted. “How much?”
“Ten grand.”
My eyes narrowed. That was a little more than a chunk of change. “That’s a lot of dough for a simple setup.”
She shrugged again. “Express charge.”
“What?”
“He wanted it done right then.” She frowned, shivering a little in the sunlit room. “Insisted on it, as a matter of fact.”
CHAPTER 38
“What do you think?” I asked Alice as we rode the elevator down to the lobby.
She glanced up from the small smartphone screen in her hand, the glare of electronic light flickering off her glasses. “Are you stupid? That woman is evil. Why would you pick her over Ms. Davis?”
I bit my lip to avoid shouting. Through clenched teeth, I growled, “I didn’t pick Bo over Izzy. I’m not involved with Peep.” Not anymore at least. “And Izzy and I are partners. That’s all.”
“Yeah, right,” Alice snorted. “Everyone at the office knows about you two. It’s the talk of the water cooler. Well, it was until I tripped and broke the damn thing. You should really think about installing skid-proof rugs.”
Or hire more coordinated employees.
“Shit,” I said under my breath as a sudden thought occurred to me. Whoever had set me up must work at Reynolds & Davis. No one else would be privy to the tempestuous relationship Izzy and I had shared over the last few months, let alone the fact that Izzy had my file at her place. I said as much to Alice, who looked at me and laughed. Loudly, I might add. When she quieted, I asked, “What’s so funny?”
She used the back of her hand to wipe away an affected tear. “You.” When my eyes narrowed, her amusement died, as did her insubordination. She shot me a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I thought we were bonding.” Since I didn’t bother with a response, she quickly added, “Guess not. Anyway, I merely wanted to point out that those of us”—she paused—“lucky enough to be employed at Reynolds & Davis, since it’s a great company to work—”
“Enough with the kissing up.” I stepped closer to her. “Just tell me why you think it’s not someone at the company.”
“Yes, sir.” She snapped to attention. “We’re not the only ones aware of your and Ms. Davis’s relationship.” She quickly went on before I could argue. “Or lack of relationship outside your very professional and not at all messy partnership.”
“Damn it,” I muttered.
“Sir?”
I shook my head slowly, as if reaching a long-overdue conclusion. “I told Izzy we shouldn’t hire you, but did she listen? No. Like everything else, I let her have her way, and now this . . .” Alice’s face paled, and I grinned. “I’m kidding,” I said when she looked ready to faint. “But you’re right.” Our employees weren’t the only suspects. Any number of fairies, as well as the dwarfs on the Fairy Council, had knowledge as well as a whole lot of motive to destroy Izzy’s and my partnership.
Electrical current spiraled inside me. I was no closer to solving the question of who was behind the fires and James’s murder than I was when Alice and I left the office an hour ago. Alice must’ve felt the rise in tension as well as the temperature of the elevator, for she cleared her throat to gain my attention. “We could always check the phone records. Maybe see where the call to Peep originated from?”
“Huh,” I said. “Guess you just might earn your paycheck after all.”
CHAPTER 39
Dusk had started to turn the pollution-riddled sky from bright orange to golden when Izzy knocked on my office door an hour later. She shot me a faint smile, nodding at the scorched fingerprints on the top of the brand-new desk she’d purchased that morning. “Making yourself at home, I see.”
I winced, swiping my sleeve over the burn marks. “Sorry about those. I was thinking about something Alice said earlier.”
“About the case?”
I licked my lips. “No.”
Izzy’s eyes narrowed as she took a seat across from me. Silk rubbing against silk whispered when she crossed her legs. “About what, then?”
“Us.” I kicked my feet off the desk and straightened in my chair. Our eyes locked, and the room heated as electrical current sparked through me.
Izzy frowned, her gaze darting to the city beyond the glass windows of my office. “How did your talk with Bo Peep go? Did she know who’s behind this?”
Annoyance flashed through me. I didn’t want to talk about the case, about the fires, about death and destruction. Not now. But the tilt of Izzy’s jaw told me we’d be discussing it come hell or three men in bathwater. “Someone hired her to set me up.” I pushed from the desk. “They wanted it done that day. As soon as possible.”
Her frown deepened. “I don’t understand. Someone hired Bo to sleep with you?”
“No,” I said sharply. “Someone wanted you to find Bo and me together.”
“That makes even less sense.” She stroked her chin between her thumb and forefinger. “I can see someone thinking you need a little help getting laid . . .”
“Funny,” I said. “But this is serious, Izzy. Someone thought”—I paused, weighing my next words—“for some reason, that you might be jealous—”
“No.” Izzy leapt from her seat, pacing back and forth. Before I could question her, Alice pushed open my office door. She still wore the same outfit she had earlier, but her hair now hung loosely around her face. A pen was tucked behind her ear. “I got it,” she said in a near squeal.
I rolled my eyes, annoyed by both her tone and the interruption.
Alice didn’t seem to notice; instead she flounced inside the office waving her arms. “The call came from within half a block.”
Whoopee. So the guy who called Peep was close to her. Big deal. “Alice,” I said in warning. “Do you have anything else? Something useful maybe? Like the name of the caller?” I knew I was taking my bad mood out on her, a girl who’d been nothing but helpful. A part of me felt bad too. But the rest damn well wanted more from her than a location that did us no good. Electricity crackled in the air.
Alice’s smile slipped an inch, eyes widening. “I’m sorry.”
I blew out a harsh breath. “No, I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault. None of it. Why don’t you take off. Go home. Get some sleep and we’ll investigate more in the morning.” Late morning, I thought, as I had plans t
o take a little trip to Fairyland. Since I hadn’t made any headway in finding the person responsible for setting fire to my office as well as Izzy’s brownstone, I decided to focus my energy on another, shorter case. The Fairy Council seemed like a good place to start kicking dwarf ass to get some answers about the possible fairy-nappings. Hell, even if I didn’t get any answers I’d feel much better after. I cracked my knuckles in anticipation.
“But, sir,” Alice said, “you don’t understand.”
I raised an eyebrow, both at her use of “sir” and at her comment. “What? What is it I don’t get?”
She glanced from me to Izzy, who was now pacing my office, her wings fluttering faster and faster. Izzy appeared lost in her own thoughts, oblivious to anything Alice or I said. Which was fine with me. Alice took two steps closer to me, her voice lowering to a near whisper, “The caller wasn’t half a block from Peep’s penthouse, sir. But here. Within a half-block radius.”
Her words smacked into me like lightning, causing electricity to flame from my fingers. I quickly jumped up, stepping on the errant strikes now sizzling my newly renovated office. All this time I’d figured someone wanted Izzy to catch me with Peep, but that wasn’t the case at all. Whoever had called had something less sinister in mind but a hell of a lot more twisted. “Aw, hell,” I said. “Izzy,” I called to my partner in noncrime, “we really have to get better security.”
CHAPTER 40
I filled a crystal glass to the rim with whiskey, the good stuff reserved for nights like this. Nights when everything I’d once believed now lay in shambles beneath my feet. Izzy sat in the chair across from me, my desk the only physical barrier between us. It might as well have been an ocean. “I don’t believe it,” she said for the fourth time since Alice had left my office after dropping the phone-call bombshell. “Setting you up with Peep seems like a lot of work for someone to go through just to get me out of the office.”
I nodded. She wasn’t wrong. The caller had gone to a lot of trouble. But I knew it was the truth. The caller had wanted something in our office, wanted something so badly that he or she had risked breaking and entering to get it, and when that didn’t work, said caller set fire to my office in hopes of either destroying whatever it was he or she wanted or hiding the evidence of the break-in. Either way, the caller had made one mistake.
Trusting Peep to keep quiet.
I let out a small smile. Hell, I almost sympathized with the bad guy, having been a victim of Bo’s less-than-high moral values.
So what was it this person wanted?
Izzy seemed to be thinking the same thing as she pushed to her feet and glared at me. “If what you think is true, what was it the intruder wanted?”
I shrugged. “Who knows?” Though I had a sneaking suspicion what it was, a suspicion that sent bolts of current along my nerves. I hoped—no, I prayed—I was wrong, that the caller had wanted something else, something far less personal.
But Izzy wasn’t buying my casual shrug. “Let’s not play games, Blue. It was your office they burned.”
“So?” I blinked up at her with innocence.
“So,” she growled, “they wanted something of yours. Something personal.”
I tilted my head. “Personal? What makes you say that?” Even though I’d come to the same conclusion, hearing Izzy say it aloud made it seem much more real.
And terrifying.
“The setup,” she said. “If they’d wanted a case file, they wouldn’t have arranged the setup. After all, why bother? The caller knew you.” Her lips curved into a frown. “Knew us. Our history. Your history with Peep.”
“Perhaps.”
“The file,” she whispered. “Your file. The same one that burned up last night at my brownstone.” Her eyes burned with anger. “They set fire to my place to destroy your file!”
I lifted my shoulders in a shrug.
“But how did they even know I had it?”
I shrugged again, but I worried I knew the answer and it wasn’t one either of us would like. Whoever was behind this was someone we knew, someone close to us. Someone who wanted my past buried, along with whoever got in the way.
“What’s our next move?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Our?” I paused. “Don’t you have your own super-secret case you should be working on?”
Her lips thinned. “I gave up on it.”
“Is that so?” I grinned, feeling much more satisfied than I should’ve. After all, it wasn’t like I was making headway on solving my current caseload. But it felt good to have Izzy back where she belonged, bossing everyone around and, for the most part, with the exception of nearly being barbecued alive, out of harm’s way.
“Don’t look so superior,” she said. “We have a lot of investigating to do. So I repeat, where do we start?”
I looked away, my eyes scanning the glow of the city lights. “We start at the beginning. On the day I was born.”
Thirty-one years ago a baby was born to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Months later I was found on the steps of an orphanage by a nun named Sister Mary. And now someone desperately wanted to keep me from finding out what had happened between my birth and the day I was found on the steps. Apparently this someone had even gone the extra murderous mile when cleaning up loose ends, and instead of killing me, the greatest loose end of all, like the assassin planned, he or she had killed James. The question was, why? The file held few leads, and none of them were any good. I should know. I’d been chasing them for years.
“Blue,” Izzy said as she stood up, reaching across my desk for my gloved hand and bringing me back to the present. Her fingers curled around the leather. “Please calm down. You’re vibrating with current.”
I nodded, taking a soothing breath and a fortifying gulp of expensive whiskey. “Sorry about that. I was thinking.”
She snorted. “I could see that. And if I had my guess, none of those thoughts were of fluffy bunnies and purring kittens.”
“Bunnies aren’t as cuddly as you think,” I said with a wince.
“I know you’re angry,” Izzy said. “And I don’t blame you.” She paused, her fingers gripping my hand tighter. “After all these years of searching for your parents—”
“I couldn’t care less about my parents.” I ripped my hand from her grip. “They didn’t want me. I get that.” I paused, tasting each word as it left my mouth. “I would’ve made the same decision.”
“That’s not true. You aren’t like that.” She came around my desk and grabbed the lapels of my jacket. I halfheartedly waved her off, but given that her house had burned to the cellar less than twenty-four hours ago, my heart wasn’t in it. “It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “What matters is figuring out who knew about the file in the first place.”
A half smile hovered on her lips. “You’re right.”
I frowned, feeling manipulated yet again, but for the life of me I couldn’t say why. I shook off the feeling, focusing on the matter at hand. As far as I knew, only three people knew about the file. Two of them sat in my office, and the other was dead. Since I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone about the file and Izzy wouldn’t share that kind of information, that left my barbecued intern, James. Sure, he had the convenient alibi of being dead, but what if he’d told someone else about the file? And that person or persons killed him to cover up the real intended crime?
Close, I thought. But not quite right.
There was a puzzle piece still missing.
I tapped my finger against my chin. Something about James’s murder bothered me. But for the life of me I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whoever had done it had wanted it to look like an accident. The killer had been almost meticulous about it—with the one small exception of the rock salt.
Why didn’t the killer scrub the scene clean after the murder?
Only one answer came to mind.
An answer that chilled me down to the blue hair on my toes.
The reason was simple.
I
t was too late. The killer was already dead.
CHAPTER 41
When I shared my theory with Izzy that James had planned to murder me that day but instead had accidently killed himself, she looked shocked, and then her expression grew murderous. “That little prick,” she yelled. “We gave him a job and he repays us by trying to kill you?”
I smiled at her outrage. “Not defending his actions, but in all fairness, we didn’t exactly pay him.”
“He was getting college credit!”
Apparently college credit and on-the-job experience hadn’t been enough for James. I suspected he’d taken to cold-blooded killing for cash as a way to afford the finer things. He must not have been very good at his murderous profession since he lived in the pigsty of a frat house in Fairyland. Not to mention his accidently electrocuting himself at my apartment.
I had to give it to Detective Locks after all.
James’s death really was an accident.
Just one that happened in the course of his attempting to murder me.
If what I thought was true, I needed to figure out who had paid him to kill me in the first place. The obvious answer was someone connected to my early life. Someone who wanted to keep my past in the past. James must’ve told them about the file, and when he failed to kill me, James’s benefactor had decided to take matters into his or her own hands, burning up my office and Izzy’s brownstone until he or she finally destroyed the file. Now I was the only obstacle in erasing the past.
I turned to Izzy, curious about how far this rabbit hole went. “How did you know I was with Bo Peep the day you found us?”
“Someone left a message with Doreen before she locked up the office for the night,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “It said something about you being in danger and gave me an address. Until I saw you and Peep, I had no idea it was hers.”
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