We made it back to The Vault thirty minutes before the daily task force briefing, and I followed Simon to Salt's office, not even detouring to the basement to set my things down. Hamilton would give me a hard time about "being too good for all of them now" if he found out, but there was no help for it.
Supervisory Agent Salt was on the phone when we arrived, but she waved us inside. While she finished her conversation, I looked at the commendations on the wall. She'd been part of every major operation I could name over the past twenty years. If she was dirty, she would have the experience to hide it.
"I look forward to seeing that. Let me know if you need help." Salt hung up the phone. "And no, I won't do your work for you," she added under her breath. I was pretty sure we weren't meant to hear that. She typed something on her computer, then dropped her hands from the keyboard and looked up. "Someone has it out for the two of you."
Seated side by side, Simon and I looked at each other. If we made this decision, there was no going back. I nodded.
He set his laptop down on Salt's desk. "Yes." Angling his screen so she could see it, Simon started the security video showing our encounter with the two Seattle agents before getting on the elevator.
Frowning, Salt said, "What's this?" She pulled the laptop closer and restarted the clip.
"That," Simon said, enunciating carefully, "is Agents McMair and Sharpe trying to kill us yesterday."
There was twenty seconds of silence as Salt watched the clip again. "I was told," she said slowly, watching it yet again, "that there had been a hardware glitch that had erased the recordings."
"The FBME has a problem," Simon said. "And we finally have proof."
"You didn't bring this to me earlier." Salt leaned back in her chair and narrowed her eyes at us. "Is there some particular reason I ended up on the suspect list?"
Her voice hadn't changed, but suddenly I would have given anything to be anywhere but that office. If I'd accepted Delia's job offer, I could have been downstairs packing up my personal belongings.
Before Simon could respond, I blurted out, "There was an FBME agent in Evan Maguire's apartment before we found him. A woman. Vampire."
Her gaze pinned me in place. "And you assumed that was me."
I was still frozen, so Simon took over. "It was a possibility. But we just talked to a second witness who identified Haley McMair."
"And the first witness?"
"Missing."
Salt's face took on a calculating look as she stared at us, though I couldn't tell if she was thinking about the case or merely whether she could fire me without going through the hassle of a personal improvement plan. Finally, she sat up. "Okay. I'll start quietly looking into who in the FBME is involved. You two need to stay far away from that investigation. This stays with us for the moment."
From her top drawer, she took out a pen and notepad and then jotted something down. When she was done, she looked up. "Everything up to yesterday can be explained by you two being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but yesterday, you were targeted. Why?"
Simon looked at me to see if I had recovered my wits yet. I swallowed and said, "My PhD dissertation was on an alternate theory for the cause of the second vampire plague. Not many people study that field, so anyone doing research would have come across my name. I think what's happening with the vampires now is related." Having already gone through this with Simon, my two-minute summary of why I thought mages had been transformed to vampires was reasonably coherent.
By the time I was finished, she was staring out the window, her gaze unfocused. She sighed and looked back at us. "You know, if I'd taken the transfer to Bangor last year, this could have been somebody else's problem." Then she shrugged. "But then I'd have to deal with snow." She sighed again and straightened her shoulders. "Okay. We have a theory and no evidence. But if the two of you repeat your performance from yesterday morning…"
Her lips twitched, the first sign I'd seen of any sense of humor. "The part where you ignored communication protocol and sent your report to everyone, not the nearly dying part." She sobered again. "Write up your theory and send it out to the same group. Hopefully that will make you less of a target, though I'd stay away from elevators. And for pity's sake, get a bag that zips closed," she added, looking directly at me. "You're a pickpocket's dream." She glanced at her phone. "Is that it? I have to prepare for the briefing."
Simon didn't budge. "Perkins has an idea to track down who's involved. A spell that would alert on anything that has the other half of the…" He stopped and looked at me.
"Puzzle lock," I said. And for once, I didn't have a problem keeping myself from explaining everything about the concept.
Salt snorted in disbelief. "The two of you are determined to get yourselves killed." She held up a hand before Simon could speak. "No, no, it's a good idea. But we'll need to be very fucking careful about how it gets implemented." She blinked and rolled her shoulders. Then she pointed her pen at Simon. "You write that report. Work on it after the briefing and get it out as soon as possible." The pen moved in my direction. "And you design that spell. If anyone asks, you're working on a ward to deploy against those damned pterodactyl spells."
Setting down her pen, she said, "Nothing about other agents being involved gets written down anywhere. Do you understand?" When we nodded, she waved a hand. "Good. Now get out of my office so I can prepare for this briefing."
After the task force morning briefing — an uncomfortable affair during which I tried not to stare at McMair and Sharpe sitting among the rest of the agents in Seattle — I went down to my desk in the basement to work on the spell. Simon offered space in his office, but all my reference books were downstairs and I doubted anyone would try to kill me within the FBME building.
Someone had left a plastic dinosaur on my desk. I held it up so everyone in the room could see it. "Very funny."
Hamilton laughed. "Shouldn't you be out kicking down doors or something?"
"Nah. I might break a nail." I scanned the books on my shelf. "Have you seen my Sung & Franklin?"
He waved a hand toward the far side of the room. "Cottell was asking if anyone had a copy yesterday. Check his desk."
Cottell was in the break room loudly arguing sports with Stenberg. The book in question, 1001 Spell Combinations for the Modern Mage, sat on his bookshelf, despite my name printed in black ink on the spine. For a law enforcement organization, it was shocking how many people regarded all books as communal property. Back at my desk, I sat down and flipped to a new page in my work notebook.
To head off complaints from my boss, I brought up one of the reports in my work queue and typed random characters every minute or so. Bambury monitored the program to see who was logged in and active, but she couldn't see what we were typing. As long as I hit at least one key every minute, it looked like I was working. Hamilton had taught me that trick in my first week after the third time Bambury had stomped over to complain that she wasn't paying me to scroll on my phone, only to find me concentrating on my task.
During my time in academia, I'd created spells regularly, some to explore concepts in classes and others for projects I'd been involved with. But since coming to work for the FBME, I'd only worked on documenting existing spells and safely disabling the dangerous ones. So it was kind of fun to work out what I would need in order to alert someone they were near the other piece of a puzzle lock. Sung & Franklin gave me a few ideas, but I glanced through a stack of other texts.
The lockbox Hamilton had been working on last Thursday was slowly making its way around the room, accompanied by shocks and muffled swearing. When a particularly loud yelp echoed around the room, I looked over at Hamilton. "You warned everyone, right?" The FBME had recruited some fairly powerful mages, and if the lockbox reflected their full strength back at them, someone might lose an eye.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." He raised his brows at the books I had spread out on the desk. "What do they have you working on now?"
I picked up the plastic dinosaur and waved it at him. "Live through one pterodactyl attack, and suddenly you're the expert." There. It wasn't a lie, exactly. "How about you?"
He nudged a box filled with evidence bags. "We're redoing the forensics on all the Seattle victims' personal possessions."
"Sounds fascinating."
"I'll save you some if you want."
The ringing of my desk phone cut off our conversation. The display said it was the guard at the front desk, and I wondered what my coworkers had ordered that required me to go up front — a singing telegram by people in dinosaur costumes, maybe? Hopefully not a male stripper. I didn't want to have to deal with HR on top of attempts on my life. Lifting the handset, I said, "This is Perkins."
A bored man on the other end of the line said, "There's a Maya Perkins here to see you. Says she's a relative."
I frowned at the phone. "Who?" I didn't know anyone named Maya. My mom had a second cousin named Maria who had visited once about twenty years ago, but she wouldn't know where I worked. Plus, her surname wasn't Perkins.
Then I realized who it had to be. I hadn't even known her name. "I'll be up in a minute." After disconnecting the phone, I closed my eyes.
An unexpected wave of anger hit me. How dare she come to my work? I shouldn't have to deal with this while trying to maintain a professional face.
But even as I thought that, I knew why she had come here. How else would she get in touch with me? My father didn't have my current address, and I wasn't in any city-wide directory. In fact, it was pretty impressive she'd tracked me down just from seeing the FBME logo on our gear.
And she was just a kid. No matter what had happened, none of it was her fault. I opened my eyes and stood up.
Hamilton was looking at me with concern. "You okay?"
Plastering a smile on my face, I said, "Yeah. Family thing. Don't let Cottell steal my books while I'm gone."
"What's it worth to you?" he asked, but I was already at the door and didn't bother with a reply.