I leaned my head against her shoulder. “I hope you’re right.”
She scrubbed her fingernails through my hair and hopped to her feet. “I am. Besides, in any given personal relationship, I have to be the crazier one. It’s a rule. Now, let’s go have lunch.”
I stood. “I want to go talk to Keeva and see if I can find out what’s going on.”
Meryl rolled her eyes. “Yeah, she loves to confide in you.”
I pushed playfully at her shoulder. “Hey, don’t underestimate me. I know someone who never thought she’d confide in me.”
She looked at her watch. “Okay. Go. If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m getting takeout.”
I took her hands, leaned down, and kissed her. She kissed me back with no games. I tousled her hair. She punched me.
Since I wasn’t officially in the building, I used the freight elevator, which was accessible in the basement but the call buttons on the upper floors were disabled. Which meant no guards riding them for routine security. The added benefit was it opened near Keeva’s office, so I could bypass the floor receptionist as well.
Keeva looked up from her desk when I knocked, and I immediately got her narrow-eyed, compressed-lipped suspicious look. “I don’t remember guards locking down the building. How’d you get in?”
I sat in her guest chair. “Nice to see you, too. How are things going?”
She didn’t change her expression. “Busy.”
I nodded. “Good, good. How’s Ryan?”
Her frown deepened. “Busy.”
I looked around the office, then brought my gaze back to Keeva. “You’re still wearing a glamour.”
She leaned back. “Why are you here, Connor?”
“I have a proposal for you. I have a piece of information you might find helpful. In exchange, I need a favor.”
She smiled. “It would have to be some very good information.”
I smiled back. “Is it a deal?”
She shook her head. “You know better than that. I’m not going to obligate myself without hearing the whole story.”
I nodded. “True. That’s smart, of course. How about this, if you use the information, you don’t have to do the favor if you think it isn’t equitable.”
She grinned. “This should be interesting.”
“I know what Sekka was hiding.”
As Community Liaison Director, Keeva saw all open case reports from the Boston P.D. She twisted her lip in dismissal. “Why should I care about a routine murder case?”
“Because it wasn’t routine, and I know you know that. Sekka was a Consortium agent, and macGoren has people trying to find what she had.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I know where it is.”
She swiveled her chair in a small arc. “Assuming this is accurate, and I’m interested, what’s the favor?”
“I want you to capture the leanansidhe,” I said.
Her suspicious look returned. “You’re not telling me everything. Assuming what you say is true about the Guild’s interest in Sekka, capturing the leanansidhe pales in comparison. Why are you offering something so important for something so not important?”
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Honestly,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Because the leanansidhe scares the hell out of me, and I don’t have the power or ability to bring her in. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if she’s left running free.”
Keeva’s jaw dropped in surprise. “Whoa! When you said ‘honestly,’ I wasn’t expecting . . . honesty.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, that’s how much I need you to do this, Keeva. In fact, to make it even easier for you, the leanansidhe has what Sekka was hiding. It’s in her cave.” I picked up a pen from her desk and pulled a sheet of note-paper toward me. “This is where she’s hiding.”
I handed Keeva a rough map of the tunnel route from the abandoned warehouse. She stared down at the scribble, then at me. “Do you want to tell me why you’re so scared?”
I smiled. “Do you want to talk about your glamour?”
She tossed the map on her desk. “Assuming your theory is correct—and I’m not saying it is—I’ll take your request under advisement. You need to leave now. I don’t want anyone seeing you in here if you’re not officially in the building.”
Keeva and I had a long history, not all of it good. We both had egos, and we had clashed often when we were partners. But at the end of the day, I thought we believed the other would do the right thing. Not necessarily what both of us thought was the right thing, but the right thing in some respect. Now, though, this gulf existed between us that I didn’t think we could bridge anymore. She worked for an organization I no longer believed in. I worked outside the chain of command in a way she couldn’t condone. And that was okay with me. She had a career to think about. If I didn’t think someday we’d see eye to eye, I wouldn’t have bothered talking to her. I gave her a wink and left without argument.
As I rode the freight elevator back to the basement, relief and regret fought in my stomach. The urge to make another visit to the leanansidhe bordered on overwhelming. Asking Keeva to do something to take that option off the table was the right thing to do. I didn’t like how the leanansidhe made me feel precisely because I liked how she made me feel. Keeva could get the leanansidhe into the Guildhouse, a controlled environment. Maybe then Briallen or Gillen Yor would have something to work with. If the leanansidhe held the key to the dark mass in my head, I would rather that someone other than her turned it.
27
The ring of my cell phone startled me out of a dreamless sleep. After leaving the Guildhouse the previous afternoon, I had gathered my resource materials and holed up in my living room in a fruitless quest to figure out a way to get rid of Uno. Squinting against the light in my living room, I pushed aside the nest of books that surrounded me as I groped for the phone. Uno rose from the floor at the foot of the bed, a physical reminder that my research had gone nowhere, the dry, academic prose of many of the books lulling me into a bored stupor. The dog vanished as my hand closed on the phone, probably fading off to Shay’s apartment again.
“I need you,” Murdock had said.
The man didn’t return my calls all day and night, then rang me at five o’clock in the morning like it was a perfectly normal time for either of us to be awake. Granted, I spent more of my waking hours in the middle of the night than most people, but I was surprised Murdock was up that early—so early that I had to take a cab down to the morgue to meet him because the subway wasn’t open.
I went around the back to the back of the OCME. The building was open twenty-four hours, but the main door was locked before 6:00 A.M. The loading dock, though, remained open for business twenty-four/seven. Dead bodies didn’t much care about regular office hours.
A morgue in the middle of the night is exactly how you imagine it would be. Dim atmosphere, cold light, dark corners, empty corridors, and dead bodies in freezers. Under normal circumstances, I would write off the notion of a dead person leaping out of a darkened room as the product of an overactive imagination. Boston after the Samhain catastrophe, though, made the idea not only plausible, but even likely.
The bright light from the cooling room cast a stark blue beam into the dark basement hallway. When I reached the door, Janey and Murdock looked at me with relief and irritation. They stood on opposite sides of an examining table—a large examining table—with Sekka’s body laid out on it. Her head had been placed above the neck.