It was after seven P.M. on Devil’s Night, which meant hundreds of thousands of people were either at parties or lining up for the parade, many wearing costumes that could easily fit into your back pocket. Meanwhile, the Suits were having a grumpy argument around a conference table. Zoey imagined they were locked in an angst submarine floating through an ocean of drunken carousing.
“That’s what I keep sayin’,” said Budd. “I’ve dealt with actual antigovernment insurgency groups that were chattier than this. There is zero talk about your kitty cat leaking out of the Hub.”
“But we know where they’ve taken him,” said Zoey, “or where they’re going to take him, right? To the Screw. Wouldn’t they do this where they live?”
“Maybe,” said Will, “but someone posted this about fifteen minutes ago.”
He brought up a poor-quality photo onto the monitor. It was a young man in a dress or, at least, the person had the build and posture one would associate with a young man. The dress had little cartoon cat faces all over it and the guy had stuffed key parts with pillows to make it bulge out. A black-and-blue wig completed the ensemble: it was, in fact, a Zoey Ashe costume. The possibility of someone dressing like her for Halloween hadn’t occurred to Zoey until just now, but she guessed she should have expected it. People here went for darkly funny costumes above all else, and to these guys, her mere existence was both horrible and hilarious.
In the fake Zoey’s right hand was a plastic pet carrier. Its rear was to the camera, but the slits in the plastic showed tufts of white fur. The caption on the photo was OFF TO GO WIN THE 10K AT THE ICC. DIDNT THINK I’D FIND A CAT BUT WE MANAGED LOL
Zoey first went cold, then felt a wave of relief. The carrier was proof they’d kept Stench Machine alive and from what she could sort of make out from the slots, he was standing up. So his legs worked.
“What’s the 10K ICC bit about?”
“The $10,000 Inappropriate Costume Contest,” said Echo. “It’s being held in the park at ten.”
Zoey studied the photo. “What’s his name? It is a guy, right?”
Budd sat up. “Ah, we don’t know yet. Will only spotted this picture because it was tagged by several of the ringleaders.”
Zoey gave him a brutal look. “Why don’t you know?”
Echo said, “The framing, the angle, and the costume make it impossible do anything other than estimate height and build. And see how blurry it is? That’s a filter, intended to hide details in the background. Whoever took this is very aware of the identification techniques we’d be using.”
“Remember, this isn’t a leak,” said Will. “It’s a public post, one they knew we’d see. That would suggest that they want you to know, or at least to think, that your cat is going to be at the costume contest in the park.”
“So they can do, what? Let me snatch the crate from the guy and find out it’s empty? Then they all get me on Blink while I start crying?”
“That’s the best-case scenario, that this is just The Blowback doing whatever they can to milk the game a little bit longer.”
“Milk? Did you intend to use that phrasing?”
“Yes.”
“Nice.”
“Worst-case scenario, they did this on Chobb’s direction and he’ll have an army waiting to get even for Dirk Vikerness.”
“Well, the plan’s the same either way. We go to the park and snatch this guy up. If he’s got my cat, great; if he doesn’t, well, then we’ll have the guy and I bet he won’t hold out long under interrogation. At the same time, we need a second team at the Screw. If this dickhead turns out to be a diversion or bait, then that’s where my cat will most likely be. We’ll just be ready to extract him from either place.”
Andre said, “Chobb and his puppet mob will be anticipating both moves.”
Zoey nodded. “And we are anticipating their anticipation. I’m on the costume contest team. If this is our guy, I want to be there, handle it personally.”
Andre looked to Budd. “What do you say you and I go out to the Screw, try to stealth the cat out of there, if it turns out that’s where he is? We’re not gonna outnumber ’em anyway, might as well see if we can finesse it.”
Zoey turned to Will. “Do you want to say some perfunctory thing about how I should stay here and let you people do the dangerous part?”
“Well, if they’ve found a hole in the estate’s security then it’s not safe here, either. If they can get your cat, they can get you.”
“Right, everything is terrible. I’m getting discouraged, Budd, tell me a joke.”
Without hesitation, Budd said, “A pirate walks into a bar. He’s got a steering wheel sticking out of his fly. Bartender says, ‘That looks uncomfortable’ and the pirate says, ‘Yarrgh, it’s driving me nuts!’”
“I don’t get it.”
“There’s one more thing,” said Echo. “I’ll, uh, let Andre explain.”
Andre looked up. “What? Why do I have to do it?”
“It will sound better coming from you.”
Zoey said, “What?”
Andre, in a strangely apologetic tone, said, “Shae LaVergne, the hostage girl? She just bought a house for her and her momma in Salt Lake. Put half a million in cash on a down payment. She’s moving her momma in from Tampa, where they’re from. But right now they’re both on vacation in Ixtapa, at the Cala de Mar. For two weeks.”
“So what? She’s spending our payoff money.”
“Well,” chimed in Budd, again looking uncomfortable. “That’s the thing. We didn’t give her any cash. She agreed to reimbursement for moving and that we’d cover some to-be-determined education or job training, but that’s it. This is new cash that we are unable to trace.”
“It seems like we’re unable to trace a lot of things these days.”
“And whatever the source,” said Echo, having judged it safe to join the bad news delivery, “she’s covering it up. Budd has talked to everyone in Shae’s social circle, plus three of her extended family back in Florida. The mother is telling everyone Shae won the money in a lawsuit against the owners of the Night Inn, because of the hostage situation.”
“But that’s not true, right? I feel like I’d know, since I am said owner.”
Will said, “Not only is it not true, but Shae waived the right to sue when we made our deal.”
“Okay? Somebody is paying her off, and it isn’t us. Why is everyone acting like it’s a funeral?”
Zoey noticed that Will looked genuinely puzzled, which on his face was an expression like he’d put cash into a vending machine that refused to dispense his drink. It always chilled her when Will looked like that. Both times.
“If it was Chobb who paid her off,” said Will, “and I can’t think of who else it would be, that would almost imply that it’s to shut her up. Like maybe she had detailed knowledge of the Tilley situation that he didn’t want getting out.”
“How would she know anything?” asked Zoey. “We don’t even freaking know and we’re supposedly experts at knowing things. And not just knowledge of Tilley’s murder, but detailed knowledge that Chobb is willing to pay seven figures to keep quiet?”
No one wanted to say it, so Zoey finally said it for them. “Wait. Are we seriously back to Shae LaVergne having had Tilley murdered out of vengeance? I mean, under what other circumstances would she have this information, unless she hired Chobb’s people to do it?”
“Maybe she didn’t do it out of vengeance,” offered Echo. “Maybe just to ensure her own safety.”
Andre said, “So, hypothetically, let’s say a few weeks after her hostage ordeal Shae decides screw it, I want Tilley taken out. So she reaches out to somebody, and somehow Titus Chobb gets involved. Chobb sees this as a prime chance to screw with us, so he has his henchman Vikerness spend hours cuttin’ out Tilley’s organs. Then he starts spreading the rumor that Zoey was behind it, backed up with a large amount of anonymous money put up as a bounty. So then Shae gets a guilty conscience, maybe she sees all the mess it’s created for Zoey, and she says she’s going to confess the whole thing. So then Chobb pays her some equally large amount of money to not do that.”
Echo said, “It’s … not implausible.”
Will said, “In the grand scheme of things, does it actually matter?”
Zoey looked at him, incredulous. “It matters because it would mean Shae LaVergne is the murderer. Regardless of who took the contract, she’d be the one who ordered it done. She did the crime that a hate group then pinned on me, and she is apparently fine with the city descending into open war over it. Yes, it matters.” To Budd, “Can we reach Shae in—where did you say she was?”
“A resort in Ixtapa. Mexico.”
“We need to talk to her. Oh, and what about the other theory?”
Echo said, “Other theory?”
“That Titus Chobb is a cannibal who eats the young to preserve his youth.”
“Zoey…”
“I actually did follow up on that,” said Budd. “Asked a lot of my sources, people who’ve got their pulse on the streets, plus some influencer types on Blink, like Chopra. They hadn’t heard it. I instructed them to ask around, and to have others ask around, too. It’s curious, I came back an hour later and suddenly you could find quite a few people who’d heard the rumor, and some were citing it as gospel. Everybody’d been asked about it enough that they just assumed there was fire under the smoke. Curious how that works.”
“But you got no actual information. Fine. All right, we’re wasting time. We need to stage a cat rescue operation and, on very short notice, I need a Devil’s Night outfit that hides my face. How quickly could we get a convincing costume-slash-disguise together, complete with some kind of makeup or mask that’ll let me walk through a crowd without getting abducted or pelted with rocks?”
Will said, “The amount of time it takes you to pick something out from the disguise closet.”
“The what?”