“Forty-two.”
I went to the couches and sat. Minutes trickled by, slow and boring.
A quiet creaking of plastic wheels rolling came from the hallway. A man emerged—Latino, late fifties, early sixties. He pushed a bright yellow industrial mop bucket and he walked slowly, his eyes tired, his shoulders sloping forward. Probably part of the night cleaning crew, wrapping up his shift. As he passed the counter, the receptionist cleared her throat.
He glanced at her.
“There is a mess in the second-floor kitchenette,” she said. “Someone spilled coffee.”
“My shift was over half an hour ago,” the man said.
She stared at him. My opinion of Anapa’s reception staff plummeted. How difficult was it to clean up your own coffee spill? Get a rag and mop it up. If the man’s shift was over, let him go home.
He heaved his shoulders. “Fine. I’ll get it.”
I watched him roll away. The building lay quiet again.
I studied the stone tile: golden brown with slight charcoal and russet undertones. Beautiful. Raphael had a similar type of tile installed in his place. I could never understand the man’s aversion to carpet. His house looked like a castle: stone tile on the floor, beige and gray wall paint, Azul Aran gray granite countertops. He’d actually hired an artist to come in and paint stone blocks on the foyer’s walls. Cost him an arm and a leg, but it looked awesome, especially once I bought him a pothos vine and installed some tiny hooks to keep it growing in the right direction. He also hung bladed weapons on the walls.
I could picture him as a hidalgo, ruling some grand castle like Alcazar, dressed all in black. My imagination conjured up Raphael, his muscular body hugged by a black doublet, leaning against a stone balcony, a long rapier on his waist…with a seven-foot-tall blond bimbo by his side.
I had to stop obsessing. It was like my mind was stuck on him—every moment I wasn’t actively thinking about the case, my thoughts went right back to Raphael. Sometimes I plotted revenge, sometimes I felt like hitting my head against the wall. These bouts of feeling sorry for myself and daydreaming ways of making him regret he was ever born had to stop.
My ears caught the sound of distant footsteps. I rose. Three people strode out of the hallway, a trim woman in a beige business suit in the lead. She wore glasses and her light brown hair had been braided away from her face. Her clothes and hair said “business.” Her posture and eyes said “combat operative.” A man and a woman in tactical gear and dark clothes brought up the rear, holding cop batons. Each sported a sidearm on the hip.
“Good morning, Ms. Nash,” the woman said, her voice crisp. “Mr. Anapa sends his regrets. His schedule is full and he’s unable to see you.”
“I’m investigating murders on behalf of the Pack,” I said. “I only have a few questions.”
“Mr. Anapa will be very busy this entire week,” the woman said.
“He isn’t a suspect.”
“Whether you suspect him or not is irrelevant. You’re no longer a member of law enforcement. You’re here as a private citizen. Please leave our premises.” She turned, squaring off with me.
If I’d still had my Order ID, I’d have made her swallow those words. I considered my options. I could go through the two guards, but the faux secretary would provide a problem. The way she kept measuring the distance between the two of us telegraphed some sort of martial arts training, and her stance, square and straight on, said law enforcement experience. She was trained to wear body armor. Most shooters would blade their body sideways, minimizing the target area. People in bulletproof vests tended to face the danger.
Law enforcement meant she knew the rules and understood exactly what I could and couldn’t get away with. If I made a scene and got in to see Anapa, she’d sound the alarms and the cops would be on me like wolves on a lame deer. I could see the headline now: “Shapeshifter terrorizes local businessman.”
A part of me, the bouda part, wanted to do it.
I had to back off. She knew it and I knew it. “I’ll be back,” I told her.
“Bring a cop with a warrant,” she said.
I reached the door.
“Ms. Nash!” she called.
I turned. The “secretary” smiled. “This lobby isn’t big enough for the two of us, Ms. Nash.”
I shot her with my index finger. “I’ll remember you said that.”
Outside, the cloud cover had broken. I squinted at the sunlight and turned to examine the building. Anapa didn’t want to be questioned, but that didn’t make him guilty. It might just make him an ass. Except that I’d questioned hundreds of suspects over the years and this was far from a typical reaction. Usually when you walked up to a place of business and told the employees that you were investigating a murder, natural curiosity took over and everyone gathered around to find out more. People are voyeurs and most of us are fascinated by morbid things. You tell someone, “I’m investigating a murder,” the next question is usually, “Who died?” Anapa’s receptionist had asked no questions. Neither had Anapa’s knight in beige business armor.
The beige business suit woman must’ve taken the time to research my background to punch me with that “you’re no longer a member of law enforcement” bit. True, the Order had retired me, but before that my career was distinguished and nothing in my resume indicated that I gave up easily. She didn’t strike me as the type who missed details. It would have been so simple for Anapa to chat with me for ten minutes and clear his name. He would be off my suspect list and I would go away and stop bothering him. But he used his security people to chase me off instead. All sorts of alarming flags popped right up. Why all the secrecy?
When I was training, my instructor, a grizzled and scarred ex-detective named Shawna, taught me to eliminate suspects rather than look for them. Look at your suspect pool, pick a most likely one, and try to prove that he didn’t do it.
Right now that process of elimination had excluded only Bell. Anapa still remained on my possible perp roster, and now he had managed to bump himself right to the top of my suspect list.
I surveyed the building. Barred windows, surveillance cameras—which would work only during tech—and, if the rest of the security was anything to go by, probably really good wards on the windows. As a shapeshifter, I had a natural resistance to wards, but breaking one would really hurt and create enough magic resonance to make anyone in the building with an iota of magic sensitivity scream bloody murder.
I circled the building. On the north side, a small window three floors up had no bars. The security cameras were also conveniently positioned to cover other approaches. I stood for a while and watched them turn. Sure enough, the pattern of the cameras offered about twenty seconds of undetectable approach to the building. They’d built a trap into their defenses. I chuckled to myself. Clever. Not clever enough, but it would fool your average idiot.
I had to get close to Anapa. He refused to see me, his building was well defended and likely booby-trapped, and I didn’t have the legal leverage to force him to meet with me.
The door opened and the older Latino man exited, minus his mop bucket. He squinted at the sky, a long-suffering look on his face, sighed, and started toward the street. I followed him at a discreet distance. We passed through the stone arch, turned onto the sidewalk, and I sped up, catching up with him.
“You need something?”
I held up a twenty. Stuck in your investigation? Don’t have a badge? Offer people money. That’s just how we roll.
“Tell me about Anapa and his office?”
The man looked at my twenty. “I’d take your money, but there isn’t much to tell.”
I nodded at the small restaurant on the other side of the street, with a sign that said RISE & SHINE. “It’s raining. Let me buy you a breakfast and a cup of coffee.”
We got inside and sat in a booth. The waitress brought us hot coffee. I ordered four eggs and my new friend ordered some doughnuts. We both stayed away from sausage. Unless you knew the restaurant well and trusted the cook, ordering ground meat was a bad idea, because for some places “beef” was a code for rat meat.
The coffee was fresh, at least.
“So tell me about Anapa.”
The man shrugged. “He isn’t there much. He comes in and out when he feels like it. I only seen him three or four times. Good suit.”
“Where’s his office?”
“Third floor, north side. There isn’t much there. I clean dust from his desk once a week.”
Interesting. “What about his employees?”
The man shrugged. “There are about twenty or so of them. It’s a sham.”
“What do you mean?”
“The company is a sham. It’s like a bunch of kids got together, bought good clothes, and pretend to play at being businesspeople. They sit, they talk, they drink coffee and have lunches. Once a week, when the boss shows up, they all line up by his office to make him feel important. But not that much work is getting done.”
The waitress brought our food and left. It started raining again outside our window.
“How do you know?” I asked.
He bit his doughnut. “Paper. They don’t use any. A working business like that makes paper waste. You know, copies, notes, shredded documents, empty boxes from office supplies they order. I work for a janitorial company. I have other clients on my route that have staff half Input’s size. They make three, four times Input’s paper waste. I go into Input’s copy room, their waste bins are empty. Two-thirds of the time I don’t have to touch them. This week was my biggest trash haul to date for them, and that’s because they sent a memo out about Anapa’s birthday.” He finished his doughnut. “They do send packages to his house sometimes by a personal courier. I’ve seen receipts from it in the receptionist’s trash. Thanks for the food.”
“Thank you for the information.”
He left. I ate all the yolks out of my eggs and poked the eggs whites with my fork. If the man was right, then whatever business Anapa actually did took place from his house. Well, there was one way to check on that.
