4

“EXCUSE ME?” LAUREN’S voice was sharp and hard. “Who are you?” She turned toward Calliope. “Do you know this—”

The figure in the doorway turned his head toward her. He spoke one guttural word that bounced off the dark paneling of the office; Lauren dropped to the ground like a puppet that had just had its strings cut. Her glass hit the floor with a thump and jumped sideways, spilling its contents over the thin carpet. The room filled with the stink of whiskey.

Calliope was standing before she realized it, and a wave of alcohol dizziness swept over her.

“The hell did you just—”

“You can’t take her with you.” The vagabond in the doorway stepped forward into the room, closer to Calliope. “You can’t.”

For a moment all Calliope could do was stare at the shadowed recess of the man’s hood, then she shook her head. “Okay, you’re obviously a little bit completely out of your mind, and I always try to be nice to the insane, but what the hell did you just do to her?” She made a sharp gesture with her hand as the stranger started to move again. “Stay there or I will kick your chest through your backbone. What did you do to her?”

The man made a dismissive motion with one gloved hand. “She’s fine. I wanted to talk to you. Didn’t want her around. She’s not part of this. You can’t—”

“Yeah, take her with me. I heard. I’m not planning to take her anywhere, dumbass, and you really need to get out of my office.”

“You don’t understand.” He took a step closer.

“Warned you,” she muttered under her breath. She vaulted over the desk and snapped the heel of her foot at the intruder’s chest.

Under normal circumstances, the kick might have missed. Calliope had been drinking and was, Josh’s frequent comments to the contrary, generally out of practice with such maneuvers. But she was also very angry and not a little frightened, and those two things together helped her succeed where she might have failed.

The kick landed square, the shock of impact riding up into her body. She landed in defensive stance, her skirt swirling around her legs.

Solid, she thought, he’s solid.

But not immovable. Caught by surprise, the vagrant tumbled backward through the doorway of the office. Rather than sprawling flat with the sort of sounds that Calliope found most satisfying in such situations, he rolled away and sprang up to his feet in a move that was both acrobatic and somehow comical. She caught a glimpse of pale skin beneath the hood and noticed, incongruously, that his shoes were unusually if not ridiculously long, which added to the odd pratfall feel of his recovery.

“I made a mistake here,” her visitor said from the outer office.

“Damn straight,” she said.

The hood seemed to nod toward her, and he was gone, the outer door easing closed behind him.

Calliope walked to the door, locked it, checked the street through the glass, and headed back into the office. About halfway there, the room began to spin.

Joshua White stops on the frozen gravel driveway. It is afternoon, and the sun is nearly done for the day—he can barely make out the outline of the porch and railing ahead. He looks down at his feet where the cracked cement of the front walk meets the driveway gravel. Crude chalk drawings, more bestial than childish, cover the concrete. He studies them for a moment, thinking of a rhyme from his childhood, then peers back up at the dark windows of the house.

“All right.” He steps onto the walk, and up to the door. “Ready or not, here I come . . .”

He will be dead in two days.

Pain pressed at the inside of her skull like an inflating balloon.

One of the reasons Calliope had chosen her office over Joshua’s when they’d first found the space was that its window faced west. Joshua’s faced east and was also larger. He’d joked on more than one occasion that the window meant he could work uninterrupted until noon, since Calliope tended to avoid natural light.

The end of the couch that Calliope was curled up on was the first part of Josh’s office the sun reached.

Groaning, she shoved herself into a half-sitting position away from the glare. In doing so, she came to rest on the feet of the couch’s other occupant. Remembering the blank stare on Lauren’s face the night before and her own struggle to arrange the woman comfortably before dizziness overcame her, Calliope slid toward that end of the couch.

The thick smell of spilled whiskey rising from the carpet made her head feel worse, but she saw that Lauren’s eyes were closed and that she was breathing normally, even snoring slightly. Shoving her way to her feet, she contemplated curling up in her own office chair away from the growing light of dawn—uncomfortable, but darker.

Someone knocked on the front door.

Calliope blinked for several seconds before checking the clock. Six thirty-eight. Shrugging, she shuffled toward the outer office. As an afterthought, she pulled Joshua’s door closed behind her.

The light coming in through the front door was a physical, painful thing. It was several seconds before she managed to relax her squinting eyes to the point where she could see. What she saw should have surprised her.

But then a crazy homeless man who can knock people out by speaking magical Hungarian attacked me, Calliope thought. It’s a bright new day.

She unlocked the door, opened it a crack, and said, “Our normal office hours are from nine A.M. to six P.M. Please call back.”

“Ms. Jenkins,” Detective Johnson said. “Have you been here all night?”

Calliope could only stare at the dark-skinned detective and the federal agent behind him. “Have I . . . ?” She shook her head. “Jesus, we both need some coffee, I guess. Come in.” She turned away and headed for the cabinet with the coffee-making equipment that Joshua had bought a few weeks after they’d opened their doors.

“Have a seat,” she spoke over her shoulder.

“Ms. Jenkins.” Detective Johnson showed no signs of irritation at repeating himself. “Have you been here all night?”

Calliope turned back to the men. Both were still standing. Johnson looked serious; Walker looked suspicious. “Yes, Detective, I have been here all night. I do not normally get to work this early in the morning, and on the rare times it does happen, I don’t look like this. Are there any other blindingly obvious questions you’d like answered?”

Johnson’s expression remained stern. “You’ll have to forgive me for asking, Ms. Jenkins, but Mrs. Hollis-White was reported missing this morning and we are checking out all her known acquaintances.”

“That’s smart,” Calliope said. “She’s in there,” she added, nodding at the closed office door and turning back to the coffee machine. “Do you want sugar?”

The silence that greeted her announcement was almost worth being awake so early.

“Don’t wake her up,” she added when she heard one of the two men head for the closed door. “She had a hard night.”

She heard the door open; a few seconds later, Johnson let out a sharp exhalation. “Pretty much drank it all, didn’t you?” he commented. Calliope turned back to him, leaned against the cabinet, and said nothing.

The detective looked over the room as best he could from the doorway, then pulled the door shut and turned back to her. “The two of you didn’t exactly strike me as drinking buddies.”

“We’re not.”

“Then this looks a little curious.”

Calliope met his gaze, ignoring the throbbing in her temples. “You want to tell a woman how to mourn her husband, Detective?”

Johnson raised his hands. “No arguments, Ms. Jenkins. It’s really none of our business.”

Calliope turned to fill three mismatched cups. “Have you found out anything about the answering machine message?” She turned back to the men with a cup in either hand. “I didn’t tell her anything,” she said in response to the question in Johnson’s expression.

The detective nodded as he took the proffered cup. “Thank you. Nothing yet on the recording; they told me they might have something by lunch.”

She nodded. “I should be back here by then.”

“You’re going back to your residence?”

“That’s the plan.” She reached back for her own coffee. “I take it you checked for me there first?”

Johnson rubbed at his jawline. “Your neighbors didn’t think you’d been home.”

Calliope’s lips pressed together, but she raised her cup to the detective. “That’s why they pay you guys the big bucks. Did you need anything else?”

Johnson glanced at his companion, who remained silent and hadn’t touched the coffee cooling in his hand. “No, I think that’s it. Everything here has been all right?”

Calliope tipped her head. “I looked through our files for something about Iowa, but didn’t find anything. Like I said, he must have taken everything with him.” She motioned toward Josh’s office. “I didn’t get a chance to check everything since Lauren showed up around eleven and we had to chase off a homeless guy around two A.M.” Johnson nodded, but Walker’s face grew taut.

“Homeless man? Does that happen often in this neighborhood?”

Calliope already regretted mentioning the visitor. “Not really, but I told him to leave and he did.”

“Did you get a look at his face?” Walker asked.

Calliope kept her expression neutral and masked her annoyance at sidetracking the conversation. “I didn’t. It’s pretty dark at two in the morning. Is this”—she glanced at each man in turn—“important in some way that I’m not understanding?”

It was Walker who answered; Johnson seemed as puzzled as Calliope. “An unidentified individual, possibly transient, was seen around the area where your partner was killed, Miss Jenkins.”

Calliope blinked. “And you see a connection? You couldn’t possibly drive from Iowa to here in twenty-four hours, and I’m pretty sure this guy didn’t have a car to begin with . . . or a plane ticket.”

Walker stared at her, his eyes hard and unreadable. Finally, he shook his head and attempted a smile that seemed to stretch his face in uncomfortable directions. “You’re right, of course. I apologize.”

Calliope didn’t reply. Detective Johnson stepped forward and set his cup down on the unused front desk. “We’re sorry to have bothered you so early, Ms. Jenkins. Thank you for the coffee. We’ll let you know what we find out from the answering machine.”

Calliope nodded acknowledgment, watching as the two men left.

As soon as the outer door closed, Josh’s opened. Lauren stood framed in the doorway, her face wan and her arms hugged tightly around her.

She glared at Calliope. “What answering machine message?”

 

Dammit.

Calliope resigned herself to an endless cycle of uncomfortable conversations with people she didn’t particularly like. She poured another cup of coffee and took it over to Lauren. “Josh left a message here a few hours after he called my place. Mostly static. They’re checking to see if they can get anything out of it.”

Lauren looked down at her coffee. “What . . . what did he say, that you could make out?”

Calliope felt a twinge of sympathy. “He mostly talked about you, actually. He said he was going to find a way to tell you what was going on.”

Lauren flinched.

“I’m sorry,” Calliope said. “I thought you should—”

“Could you get my jacket for me?” Lauren asked, walking past Calliope toward the front window of the office. “If I go back in there again, I’ll throw up.”

Calliope half nodded, half shook her head at her guest’s back. “Sure.”

The miasma of greasy pizza and spilled whiskey was stronger now, thickened and warmed by the morning sunlight. Calliope held her breath as she retrieved her and Lauren’s shoes, both jackets, and Lauren’s purse.

“Thanks,” Lauren murmured as Calliope held them out to her.

“No problem.” Calliope sat down and picked up her coffee. “You’re right about that room; it smells a little Sam Spade in there.”

“It smells like Sam Spade’s ass,” Lauren said. Calliope laughed out loud, and the other woman turned to her. “What?”

“Oh . . . nothing. You’re just a little out of character today.” She raised a hand at Lauren’s expression. “No complaints. You’re more than entitled.”

Lauren turned back to the window and knelt, working her shoes on. “Thank you, incidentally, for telling them off on my behalf. But why did you lie?”

Calliope raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me, Counselor?”

Lauren straightened, shaking her hair back into a semblance of order. “The vagrant. I don’t remember much about that, but I didn’t get the impression he was going to leave simply because you asked him to.”

“Okay, I kicked him in the chest and then I told him to leave and he left.” Calliope waved her hand. “Details.”

“They’re the police.”

“They’re people. That’s it. People doing a job, which right now is finding out what happened to Josh. Our visitor didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Agent Walker—”

“Admitted that a teleporting hobo is an unlikely suspect.” She eyed Lauren. “Let’s say I tell them everything and they think it might be a clue. So they waste two days on bullshit instead of working on the real case. Hell with that. It happened. I handled it. It’s done. None of their business.”

“But they’re the police. How—” Lauren pursed her lips and cut herself off. “I need to get home. My parents probably called them in the first place.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Calliope’s words hung in the air like a judgment.

Lauren ducked her chin rather than reply and walked out the front door. Calliope watched her cross the street to her car and swore to herself in the quiet of the empty office. After a few moments, she locked up and headed back to her house, replaying the morning’s conversations, the surreal exchange with the vagrant the night before, and finally the evening talk with Lauren.

“I don’t know why he broke up with you.”

In the middle of the drive home she pulled off onto the shoulder, crying too hard to see.