Devil's Bargain

Chapter 8

S he’d seen the picture of Lowell Santoro, and it was a good thing she had, because otherwise she’d have completely missed him. By the term “film producer,” she’d have been expecting a flashily dressed, heavily bling-blinged guy, probably driving some overmuscled, over-priced convertible.

Lowell Santoro had on walking shorts, a staid-looking Hawaiian shirt and drove a Toyota. His sole concession to Hollywood seemed to be the sunglasses he wore, which were pretty fine, and made Jazz wish she’d thought to pack some, because the morning light was pretty fierce.

From the coffee shop across the street, she watched as Santoro parked in the lot of his office building. She sipped a pretty damn excellent coffee as he locked up his car and plodded up the walk to the front door of the lobby. She noted the time on her PDA, finished her coffee and got another to go. She went back to her rental car—an economy-class Ford, nice and clean, tons more comfortable than most copmobiles she’d ever used for stakeouts. Her small video camera and digital still camera lay on the seat beside her, along with her cell phone and her collapsible baton. Add some CDs, and we’ve got a party, she thought, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel to the radio, which wasn’t half-bad, really.

She’d parked to be in the shade, with a kitty-corner view of Santoro’s car and a clear shot to pull out in a hurry if necessary. Not that she figured it would be necessary. This was her second day of surveillance, and she’d already gotten the clear sense that Lowell Santoro was a man of rigid habits.

She plugged in the last piece of equipment, using what was labeled as a “utility power outlet” instead of the time-honored cigarette lighter, and flicked on the tiny LCD screen on the palmtop.

It had taken some trial and error in the dead of night, and some real skills, to enter Santoro’s offices and set up the video feed, but she was patient and thorough, not to mention careful. Lucia had given her a solid two-month course in electronic bugging and breaking and entering…apparently, all useful skills taught by government agencies with three letters. Jazz had been a good student.

She watched as Santoro’s tiny little video figure crossed to his desk with a full coffee cup in his hand, exchanged some words with his assistant—indistinct in Jazz’s earpiece—and began to open up his mail. All very normal. This was going to be another of Borden’s “your presence prevents it” things, she already knew it. They’d had two before the debacle with Wendy Blankenship, besides the near-drive-by back in K.C. while she’d been recovering. One of them had been an all-night stakeout in a Denny’s, watching a waitress who hadn’t done anything but yawn, give bad service and drop a plate of food. The other hadn’t been that exciting.

I shouldn’t be doing this. Then again, this would bring in cash, and Jazz was in favor of that. She’d never been a small-business owner before. Having people like Pansy depending on her for rent money made her nervous and greedy.

Santoro’s phone rang. He had a conversation about an upcoming film he was producing, and against her will, Jazz thought that was kind of cool, because they were talking about casting actors she actually recognized. The assistant came and went, bringing him stacks of correspondence once the incoming mail had been disposed of. Santoro had a pair of lungs on him, and from the language he used talking to an MGM executive, he had a pair of brass balls, too. Jazz found herself liking the guy. He called his wife and talked with her, and it sounded nice, too. Comfortable. The kind of conversation adults had who could bicker a little about what color the new refrigerator was going to be, and whether or not the kids needed summer camp or not, but still end with a love you that sounded heartfelt.

She never had conversations like that. Her arguments always felt so damn important…even when they weren’t.

Santoro seemed like a good guy. Someone you’d want for a friend. Which told her something about Borden, too—because, not only was he friends with somebody warm and generous like this, he cared. Borden had a decent heart.

Around an hour and a half later, the assistant broke into his routine to remind him he had some kind of set visit, which marked the end of the administrative portion of the day, and Jazz gulped down the last of her coffee as Santoro tidied up and prepared to depart.

Apart from having heard half of a conversation—the wrong half, unfortunately—with Johnny Depp, she hadn’t accomplished a damn thing, really. She hadn’t spotted a single person tailing him, watching the office or home, or any suspicious activity whatsoever.

She picked up the still camera and shot a couple of angles of his car while she was waiting for him to emerge from the building.

Her cell phone rang. She flipped it open without taking her eyes from the entrance.

“Anything happening?” Borden. She actually felt a little electric tingle at the sound of his voice, caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and realized that she was smiling. That kind of smile. She wiped it off her face and glared at her reflection, as if it was to blame.

“Not a damn thing,” she said. “Your friend’s doing fine.”

“That’s good.” He sounded relieved. “How about you?”

“Not a damn thing happening to me, either,” she said, “except that I’m about to OD on caffeine. You know the biggest problem about stakeouts without a partner?”

“No conversation?”

“No bathroom breaks,” she said. “Gets pretty difficult.”

“I can imagine.”

“You at the office?” Because he’d have to be, it was almost noon in New York.

“No. I was in court earlier. I have the rest of the day off.”

“Do you ever work, Counselor? All I ever see you do is stroll around your office looking sharp, taking meetings, and fly around bugging the hell out of me.”

“It’s a filthy job, but the compensation’s pretty good,” he said blandly. “So I look sharp, eh?”

“Don’t get cocky.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

She checked the monitor. Santoro’s office was empty, except for his assistant cleaning up the coffee cup and restraightening piles of paper. He hadn’t come out of the front door yet.

“I’m going to have to go,” she said to Borden.

“Anything wrong?”

“No,” she said. “Go help a corporation hide its ill-gotten gains in an offshore account or something. I’ll call later.”

Maybe Santoro had stopped off at the bathroom. Hell, she was starting to regret the second cup….

Another full minute passed. No Santoro. No activity in his office.

Jazz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel again, this time more from nerves than any enjoyment of the pop jingle on the radio. She watched the digits crawl on her clock.

He was taking way too long.

“Dammit,” she whispered, and got out of the car. She grabbed her still camera—nothing odd about a tourist with a camera in L.A. — stuck her collapsible baton in her back pocket, covered by the windbreaker she threw on, and moved quickly toward Santoro’s office building.

She kept expecting him to pop out at any moment, as she got closer, but all remained quiet. Something tingled at the base of her spine, like a gun pressed close. She walked faster, took the three short steps up to the glass doors and walked in.

No security in the lobby. There was a desk, but it was empty. She checked the elevators. Nothing was moving. Santoro’s office was on the fourth floor, and both elevators were on the ground. If he’d come out here, he’d have walked out the front. There weren’t any other places for him to have gone.

Except for the stairs.

Jazz cracked the door to the stairwell and listened, and heard a dull scuffling noise. Grunts of effort.

She shoved the camera in a pocket, grabbed the baton and snapped it out to its full length as she ran up. She took the steps three at a time, feeling the burn in her thighs and a sharp twinge in her side, but if she was right, there wasn’t time to take it any easier.

She burst around the third-floor landing and saw, on the flat halfway point to the fourth floor, Lowell Santoro being strangled.

He was still alive, barely—face congested dull purple, eyes bulging, mouth open and tongue protruding. Fingers still scrabbling weakly for the cord around his throat that had dug in so deep she couldn’t even see it. The cord was all that was holding him upright.

Jazz yelled—she didn’t even know what—and the sound bounced and echoed sharply from the concrete all around her.

The man standing behind Santoro, both gloved hands twisting a black rope, met her eyes. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type—something missing in the eyes, a kind of animal vacancy that marked a bad life and a worse end coming. He was tall, blond, California-pretty, with an off-kilter nose that had seen somebody’s fist close up in the not-too-distant past.

He let go of Santoro and let him pitch forward, right into Jazz as she bounded up toward him. Santoro’s weight—she didn’t dare think, dead weight—bowled her over, and the world became a confusing, hurting blur as they fell. Jazz landed flat on her back, Santoro half-crushing her, and saw California Guy heading back up the stairs, fast.

She rolled Santoro over. His eyes were blinking, and he was whooping for breath. His mouth was bloody. He’d bitten his tongue.

“Stay here!” she shouted at him, and lunged to her feet, digging her cell phone out of her pocket as she started up the steps in pursuit. She yelled out the office’s street address to the 911 operator, craning her neck to try to see where California Guy was on the stairs. She paused to listen.

No sound. Either he was waiting, or…

She hung up on the operator, who was trying to get her to give her name, and took the next few steps slowly, quietly, feeling cold sweat slide down her back. She wished for a gun, or at least a good coating of Kevlar. California Guy might like to use his hands, but that didn’t mean he was a conscientious gun objector, either.

She had an unpleasant flashback of her blood glittering on asphalt, of the strange liquid feeling of being shot, and shook it off to ease up one more rising step. She was scared, she realized. Scared of being hurt.

California Guy was waiting for her around the blind corner. Or rather, California Guy’s powerful kick was waiting for her, and it caught her squarely in the stomach and slammed her back against the concrete wall, seeing stars and out of breath. She hung on to her baton, somehow, and saw a black flash coming at her; she ducked, and heard his fist make hard contact with the wall, followed by a loud, yelping grunt of pain. Since she was safely braced, she yanked up a knee, missed his crotch, kept going and planted her foot flat against his chest and uncoiled with a shout. He went stumbling backward.

She blinked the last disorientation out of her eyes and took a surgical swing with the baton. Whap. Right in his undefended ribs, which she felt crack. As he hunched over in reaction, she gave him a hard smack to the side of the head, too.

His knees buckled, but instead of falling down unconscious, he lunged from a kneeling position, got hold of her and slammed her back against the wall again. Her head impacted with a dull thud. She tasted blood and damn, that hurt. She could barely get her breath, but his hands were yanking at her waistband, fumbling for a gun she didn’t have, and then he pulled her off balance and down, his weight on top.

He liked to use his hands. Jazz didn’t particularly mind that. She grinned at him, spit blood in his face and slammed the heel of her palm up into his crooked nose just before he managed to get a grip on her neck. It didn’t drive bone up into his brain, but it certainly rearranged cartilage with a satisfying crunch and made him yowl in pain. Blood spattered her, warm as tears, and she used her leverage to flip him off.

This time his head hit the wall.

It was lights out, sweetheart, and he slumped sideways, breathing heavily through his mouth as his rebroken nose leaked a steady stream of red.

Jazz crawled to him, yanked him forward and zip-tied his hands behind him before letting herself collapse to a weak sitting position on the steps. The place looked like a war zone. She dabbed cautiously at her face and sniffed. Yep, she had a nosebleed, too, not to mention a split lip and a ringing bell of a headache. Her side felt tight, protesting the action. One of her knees registered as hot and uncomfortable.

Not bad, considering. Not bad at all. She’d had worse after an interesting night of barhopping.

She patted down California Guy and came up with no ID at all—not even a bus pass—but a fat wad of cash and a letter.

She paused as she slid it out of his pocket, staring, because it looked…familiar.

Big red envelope. Like a Hallmark card.

She didn’t have a proper evidence kit—hadn’t thought she’d need it—but this was no coincidence. Killers didn’t stroll around with birthday cards for their girlfriends in their jackets. She tucked it into her windbreaker just as she heard sirens echoing up the stairwell. Heavy treads on the steps, coming up.

“Victim’s on the third-floor landing,” she called down. “The perp is up here. He’s secured.”

They came carefully, not taking her word for it. She sat against the wall, hands up, as two uniformed officers rounded the blind corner with guns leveled. When they were sure the situation was under control, she got searched. The baton got confiscated, along with the camera and cell phone.

California Guy was still out cold, bleeding all over the concrete. “Jeez,” the bigger, older cop said, bending over him. “I thought you looked like you’d had a rough time, but this guy needs a plastic surgeon. Good thing he’s in L.A. We’ve got more of them than gas stations.”

The atmosphere got more congenial, when her bona fides were vetted. Ex-cops got a little more respect than bloody-faced regular citizens armed with batons, although the out-of-town private investigator status didn’t necessarily win points. She went through statements to the uniforms, then another round with a blank-faced detective who didn’t seem to be listening but probably was, and a third time to another detective who focused on her like he planned to marry her later. By that time, the aches were kicking in. She’d washed the blood off, but desperately needed a nap and coffee, in that order. Her cell phone kept ringing. That was probably Borden, checking in and getting worried because there was no answer.

“Look,” Jazz pointed out the fourth time it rang, “if you don’t want to have the FBI down here poking around looking for me, you might want to let me answer it. I’m not operating in a vacuum. I have a partner, and I have a lawyer.”

Whatever they thought of that, they let her have the cell phone, and when she answered, sure enough, it was James Borden on the other end of the phone.

But what he said wasn’t what she’d expected.

“He has an envelope,” he said. No preamble. “Get it. Don’t let it out of your sight.”

“Oh, hey,” she said with grim cheer. “Yeah, I’m fine, by the way, thanks for asking. Your friend’s in the hospital. I don’t know much about him, but he was still breathing when they carted him away.”

“I know,” he shot back. “But you have to keep hold of that envelope, do you understand? Don’t let it out of your sight.”

The cops had taken it but hadn’t evidenced much interest in it. She’d said it was a card for her niece; they’d returned it without comment. It was currently a thick square reminder poking a corner into her ribs under the jacket.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Thanks for the advice. Any ideas about who my dance partner was today?”

“He doesn’t matter.”

“You know what? He did to me. And I’ll bet he did to Santoro, too.”

One of the cops got called from the room for a whispered conversation at the door, nodded, and came back. Jazz’s eyes tracked him, watching body language. She didn’t much care for the change. He was boring a hole in her with his stare. She hunched her shoulders a bit as she paced the small, dingy room. It was a standard interrogation room—a battered industrial table, some sturdy chairs, a camera in the corner and an observation window.

“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “I should be there in a couple of hours.”

She swallowed a sudden surge of relief, and said, “I’m sorry. Sorry for all of this.”

Another hesitation from him. “You tried.”

“I said I wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”

“You saved his life.”

That was it. No hearts and flowers, not even a fruit basket, just a quick disconnection. She stared at the cell phone for a second, then shrugged and handed it back to the hard-eyed detective, who—from the way he was watching her—must have talked to somebody back in K.C. with a less-than-glowing opinion of her. Probably Stewart. Somebody who’d filled his head full of crap about corruption and murder and drug running, probably. And cited Ben’s trial to back it up.

“Who was that?” the cop asked, weighing the phone in his hand.

“Wrong number,” she said, and smiled as brilliantly as she could, under the circumstances.

It didn’t get more pleasant as the day went on. She got another phone call, this one from Lucia, who was coldly furious and torn between kicking LAPD ass or Cross Society hiney. That felt oddly bracing. Jazz had quite a time convincing Lucia not to come flying to the coast, and in the end had only succeeded because Borden was already on his way and Lucia was convinced she was about to break the industrial espionage case within the day.

Toward the end of the day the cops finally informed her that Lowell Santoro was resting comfortably. He wouldn’t be giving any speeches soon, but he’d narrowly avoided a fractured hyoid bone and a nasty death. His trachea was seriously bruised but intact.

She’d saved someone. She’d actually, finally, saved someone.

Not that you’d know it from the continuing barrage of questions from two increasingly unfriendly LAPD detectives named Weston and Cammarata. Weston was thin and dressed in old, unfashionable suits; Cammarata was more the dress-slacks, snappy-tie, crisp-white-shirt type. He could have walked the halls of corporate zombiedom and looked utterly in place, if he’d taken off that clip-on badge from his belt and stuck a business ID in its place.

Of the two, she found she preferred Weston, who was at least honest in his dislike. Cammarata kept trying to make her think he liked her. She kept reiterating facts to them, stubbornly refused to reveal who’d hired her, and finally reverted to the old standard, “I’ll wait until my lawyer gets here.”

Borden arrived looking, well, like a lawyer. A damn fine one, too. Navy blue tailored suit, crisp off-white shirt, power tie, shiny shoes, a briefcase that looked expensive and was probably worth twice whatever she would guess. He looked L.A. spiffy, in a New York kind of way.

And he had her out of the police station in forty-five minutes, which she figured had to be a new world record for intimidation in a town that had more or less invented the fast-talking lawyer.

“So,” she said as he walked her down the steps to a waiting black chauffeured car, “you don’t do criminal cases. Because you seemed to do that all right, Counselor.”

“Shut up,” he said darkly. She could already tell he was in a towering bad mood, which was weird, because after all, she’d saved his friend. Weird, starting on annoying.

“Is that legal advice?”

He firmly directed her into the car—backseat—and walked around to climb in the other side. He’d gotten another limo for a reason, she saw—better leg room. Not so critical for her, but his knees were an absurdly long distance from his hips.

He flicked the locks, engaged the privacy screen between them and the driver—evidently not a Cross Society insider—and without looking at her said, “You could have called the police instead of going in.”

“Oh, please, what’s the nine-one-one response time in L.A. when you call and say, hey, I’m on stakeout and my subject hasn’t come out of the building yet? I’m guessing it’s twenty-four to forty-eight hours, if they don’t laugh you off the phone.”

“You could have called them when you knew something was happening.”

“By that time, your friend was about ten seconds away from choking to death on a broken throat. Look, what do you think you sent me here to do? Knit doilies? Run and hide when the going gets tough?” She shrugged. “Borden, you know me better than that. If there’s a fight, I’m in it. That’s who I am.”

“I didn’t send you here to stage the first annual Stairwell Smack-down and nearly get yourself killed. Again.” His voice sounded tight and grim, and as she stared at him, she saw the tension in his shoulders. In the hard line of his jaw. “You like this, don’t you? The adrenaline rush. Kicking ass at every possible opportunity.”

“You think I did this for fun?” she asked, and felt her hands trying to make fists.

“Tell me what was going through your head, then.”

“The subject went out of the range of electronic surveillance,” she said. “The subject didn’t reappear on schedule. I went in to check it out, which was exactly what you knew I was going to do. And if you think maybe I should have checked on him, discovered him being choked to death and gone back to the car, well, maybe you don’t know me very well.”

Borden raised his head, finally, and looked straight at her. “I know you better than you think,” he said. There was something odd in his eyes. “I’m not the only one. Take out the envelope.”

She didn’t. She looked at him, frowning, and then reached into her windbreaker and pulled it free.

“Open it,” he said.

She slit it with a fingernail and pulled out the letter folded neatly inside.

“Read it.”

She didn’t want to, suddenly. It felt as if something was wrong, something was very wrong, indeed, and if she just slid this letter back in the envelope…put the genie back in his bottle…then maybe things would be different.

Instead, she unfolded the crisp paper, and saw the letterhead of Eidolon Corporation. It was a bold red logo, a world in an hourglass. It read in neat typewritten lines:

To Jasmine Callender,

Should you read this, you will have taken matters into your hands that would have been better left to others. We have no choice but to take steps. In acting today, you have forfeited what little protection the Cross Society could offer you. Inform them.

She read it through twice, numbly. There was no signature. She finally looked up mutely to stare at Borden.

“It says—”

“I know what it says,” he interrupted her. “Laskins got a fax two hours ago and read it to me on the plane. Jazz, you were just another Actor before, but they know what you are now, and you’ve proved a real threat. They’ve moved you up to the top of their hit list. You’re not safe now.”

“But they addressed it directly to me,” she said. The words felt strange in her mouth. “How the hell could it be to me, when I took it from the other guy? Why—?”

“They must have known there was a chance you’d do this. I think—” He paused, licked his lips and looked very, very sick. “I think the Society knew, too. They…”

“Let me guess,” she said. “You heard Santoro was on the hit list. They decided to let him get taken out for strategic reasons, and you decided to act on your own. You didn’t fly out to deliver an assignment from Laskins. That’s you. You decided to produce the paperwork and bring it to me in a red envelope, just like the rest of them. And they told you not to do it.”

He didn’t answer. He was pale to the lips.

“Did they fire you?”

“Not yet,” he said, and she saw some of the stiffness leave his shoulders. He slumped against the window and closed his eyes. “Santoro—he’s a good guy. He does good things. His wife and kids—”

“So we saved him,” she said. “I’m not upset about that, believe me. I don’t believe all this fortune-telling horse-shit anyway.”

He reached out and touched the unfolded Eidolon Corporation letter still in her hand. “No? Then why does that have your name on it, when you took it off a guy you’d never met who was trying to kill you?”

“People try to kill me all the time,” she said. “Not like it’s new.”

He hit an intercom switch and said, “Let’s go,” and the limo glided into motion. “There’s somebody I need you to meet.”

She groaned. “Not more of this crap. Look, Borden, just let me go home, okay? I have things to do.” The photos. McCarthy, waiting for freedom. Every day he sat behind bars now was another day that she couldn’t take back, and could only regret. If anything happened to him…

“If I let you go home, you’re dead,” Borden said. “I realize that might not mean much to you, because you think you can win any fight, but I’m not as brave. Not with your life.”

He looked tired. As well he should, she realized; he’d come all the way from New York, and for all she knew he’d done it on little or no sleep.

“Borden,” she said. He opened his eyes, which had drifted nearly shut. She wasn’t sure if he was even aware of it. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said, and there was a gray leaden weight to his words. “I did this. I made the decisions. I changed the rules, and now you’re a target. I need—I need to find out how to fix it.”

“So we are going to see somebody from the Cross Society.”

“Not exactly.” He turned away and looked out of the smoked-glass window. “Not exactly.”

She realized, belatedly, that he hadn’t even asked if she was okay. That pissed her off to an unreasonable extent. She glared at him and read the letter again, silently. It was dated for today. She’d pulled the envelope out of Surfer Killer’s jacket herself, and had hardly let it out of her sight since. It was dimly possible—dimly—that one of the cops might have switched it while they’d been holding it, but she didn’t think so.

She rubbed her aching forehead, folded up the letter and jammed it back into the envelope. Too late to worry about fingerprints or any other useful forensics.

It has my name on it.

That was a whole new level of creepy. The Cross Society was way creepy enough for her tastes; she felt out of her depth in dealing with them. This was…

This was crazy.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Borden didn’t answer. After a few seconds, she looked over and saw that his eyes were shut, his breathing light and even. He couldn’t be asleep, could he? No, he was just trying to piss her off.

He was succeeding brilliantly.

It was a long, long drive, and L.A. traffic was everything everyone had always said it would be. Being in a limo made it palatable but boring. Jazz stared out at the unmoving traffic. People in other cars were checking out the limousine’s tinted windows, trying to imagine what celebrity was hiding within. She’d have been right there with them, imagining George Clooney or Meryl Streep.

Borden actually was asleep. Ridiculous as that seemed. She’d been on the verge of shaking him awake to shout questions at him, but the truth was, she didn’t think it would do any good, and she had an odd little soft spot for watching him this way. He had a lock of hair falling over his forehead, and her fingers itched to do something with it. Yank it by the roots, maybe. Or move it gently aside, light as a feather. The jury was still out and deadlocked.

She was off balance, leaning forward to see what was available in the minibar—because, what the hell, how often was she actually going to be in a limousine and have unrestricted access? — when the limo moved forward, then jerked to a sudden stop. She ended up being pitched forward across Borden’s knees.

Well, that was embarrassing.

She slowly straightened up without looking at him, although she could feel the sudden tension in the legs under her hands, which meant he was wide-awake.

“Something you wanted?” he asked neutrally. His voice sounded rough and tight.

“Yeah,” she said. “Soft drink.” She straightened up without actually looking at his face.

They negotiated over brand names. He clinked ice into a crystal glass better suited to holding Scotch or bourbon and poured her a short little can of cola. He handed it over without comment. She drank, grateful for the syrupy rush, the liquid on her dry throat, and for something to do with her mouth other than get herself in even more trouble.

Borden, awake, was much less readable than Borden, asleep. He looked at her from time to time as she drank, and stared out the windows. They hit smooth sailing after about fifteen more minutes, and Jazz made her drink last as long as possible before passing him the empty glass and last few melting cubes. He stowed it away without comment.

“It’s not your fault,” she said to him.

“No?” He sounded so damn neutral. “How do you figure that?”

“If somebody above me had said, no, you need to lay back and let your friend get horribly murdered? Guess what. I would’ve been forging documents and persuading you to help me, too. And I don’t think you were wrong to do it. It’s never wrong to save a life.”

“No?” he repeated. “You’d pull, say, John Wayne Gacy out of a river and start chest compressions.”

“It’d be easier if I didn’t know he was a crazy murdering bastard, but yeah, that’s pretty much the size of it.”

“You’d do it even if you knew. Even if you knew he was killing people.”

“If I knew that, I’d revive him and slap handcuffs on him before he could figure out what I was doing,” she said. “I’m—I was a cop, Borden. I never tried to make myself judge, jury and executioner. That’s a responsibility I don’t want, and nobody should have unless they have checks and balances. That’s what scares me about your dear friends in the Society. How do you know what they’re doing is right? How can you really tell? Save that guy, let that guy die—” She shook her head. “I don’t care what they think they know, I can’t really believe they’re ready to play God.”

He shook his head. “I’m not feeling guilty about saving Lowell,” he said finally. “I’m angry at myself that you had to put yourself in danger to do it, and I’m scared that this saving one life is going to cost me another, and I–I’m not ready to play God, either, Jazz. And if you die because of what I’ve done—”

“Hey,” she murmured, and reached over to rest her hand on top of his. His fingers twitched, but didn’t move to caress hers like they had in the car on the way to the airport in Kansas City. She missed it. “I’m a big girl. Even if I’d known it would paint a target on my butt, I’d have done it. You understand that, right?”

He shook his head and didn’t answer at all. But he didn’t move his hand from under hers for a long moment, either. When he finally did, when he folded his arms into a touch-me-not kind of defensiveness, she settled back in the opposite comfy corner and watched scenery flash by in silence. Desert. Lots of desert.

She wanted to sleep, but something wouldn’t let her. Borden didn’t doze, either. She shot him looks from time to time, but his eyes were on the horizon, his face utterly blank and composed. Nothing to see here, move along.

She saw a road sign flash by as the limo exited the freeway, and turned back in a futile attempt to be sure she’d gotten that glimpse correct. “Borden? We’re going to a prison?”

“Yes.”

“Federal or state?”

“Federal.”

“Do I have to do the animal, mineral, or vegetable part of this quiz, too, or can we jump to the part where you tell me where the hell we’re going and who we’re going to see?”

Borden looked at the blank screen dividing them from the driver, evidently decided it was okay to talk, and said, “We’re going to see Max Simms.”

“Simms?” she echoed. “Max Simms, the serial killer?”

“No, Max Simms, the interior decorator. Why the hell do you think he’s in prison? Yes, he was convicted of being a serial killer.” Borden looked angry and ever so slightly sick. “I helped defend him, remember? He’s not guilty. I know he’s not.”

She had a flash of sitting across from Ben McCarthy, separated by scarred Plexiglas, staring at his weary face and saying, It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, and knowing that it wouldn’t be, knowing that every day he was behind bars was another day he’d risk his life, his body, his mind. She felt responsible for that, and it hadn’t been remotely her fault that he was imprisoned. If Borden felt the same, if he really believed Simms was innocent, that was a kind of slow, endless torture that she couldn’t quite imagine.

“Do you think you lost the case? That it was really all your fault?”

“No. Anyway, I was second chair. Laskins lost the case, if anybody did.” Borden’s tiny shrug went for casual and missed by a mile. “Truth is, I don’t think anybody could have gotten him acquitted. The evidence was too good.”

“But you still think he’s innocent.”

“I didn’t then,” he admitted. “I do now.”

“Because…?”

“I’ve seen things,” he said. “I know things. I know how easy it is for events to be manipulated to someone else’s gain, and I’ve seen how ruthless Eidolon Corporation is. Simms was involved in a power struggle for control of the company. And he lost.”

She frowned, watching him, but he didn’t have any more light to shed. The limo glided on until it braked to a smooth stop, and the door opened on golden sunset.

The air held a tang of bitter sage and dry air, and as Jazz stepped out, dazzled, she had to shade her eyes from the glare. Everything looked bleached here—the sand, the pale uniforms on the guards, the buildings. Unlike some of the older prisons, no attempt had been made to make this one look like anything more than what it was: a big, solid concrete block to hold people inside. The exercise yard—a big flat paved expanse radiating waves of heat—was deserted, and a basketball roamed aimlessly around the tarmac, pushed here and there by swirling winds. The fences were chain-link topped with at least two feet of razor wire, with guard towers at regular intervals manned by snipers. Jazz hoped they had air-conditioning up there. The heat down here on the ground was murderous.

“This way,” Borden said, and led the way to a gate manned by two armed deputies. They viewed her impersonally and checked a list for names, then buzzed her and Borden into a claustrophobic walkway. More chain-link and razor wire. Even McCarthy’s prison didn’t seem this daunting, but then, he was a state inmate, not federal.

Two more checkpoints, and they were inside a dim, cool room that smelled of industrial cleaner and sweat. Three more deputies on duty, one a petite black woman who gestured Jazz over to one side. Jazz, without being asked, emptied out her pockets. The deputy lifted an eyebrow at the baton but said nothing. The pat-down was fast and professional. Jazz risked a glance over her shoulder to see Borden receiving the same treatment from a guy big enough to qualify for a Russian weightlifting team; he didn’t look as if he was enjoying it much. His briefcase didn’t make it. Neither did the contents of his pockets, or his cell phone.

They joined up on the other side of a gate, where another deputy led them along rows of silent, darkened cells.

“What’s with all the empty space?” Jazz asked. “Or are you telling me crime’s actually down in California?”

The deputy—his name tag read Manning—gave her an unreadable look. “Most prisoners have already been moved out to another facility,” he said. “Upstate. We’ve only got two active pods right now. Your guy is in the second one.”

They weren’t heading to the cells, though. The deputy turned them to the right, through an open iron-reinforced door, into a visiting room.

Jazz felt a definite creep along her back. The place was deserted. It even smelled deserted. A soft-drink machine glowed and hummed at the far wall, but the lights were at half power, and the kids’ area at the far side of the room with all its grimy, battered plastic toys lay silent and abandoned. The deputy grunted softly and flicked on a switch; fluorescents snapped on overhead, blindingly white.

“Where?” Borden asked. He looked informal. She couldn’t figure it out for a second, then realized that his tie was missing. Were they expecting him to hang himself? Or her to strangle him with it? Granted, the second part of that wasn’t out of the question.…

The deputy gestured widely toward the cubicles. There were six of them, all doors gaping open. All empty. “Whichever,” he said. “Go on in. Press the button when you want out.”

Meaning that once they were inside, the door locked behind them. Jazz forced a smile and headed for cubicle number one. It didn’t feel too bad until Borden crowded in with her, and then it was instantly too small, his heat too vivid against her skin. Their knees bumped as they tried to jostle their cheap plastic chairs for position. He muttered an apology as he elbowed her. She glared back.

They both froze for a second as the lock snapped shut behind them, and their eyes darted into a shared gaze. In his, Jazz read the same undertone of panic and frustration she felt. She deliberately forced herself to relax, nodded at him and folded her hands in her lap.

They sat in silence, waiting. The Plexiglas was scratched and warped, muddy with fingerprints. Some woman had kissed it at some point and left a smudged hooker-red imprint; Jazz itched to clean it. And if I want to clean it, she thought, this place really must be filthy.

“Jazz,” Borden said.

“What?”

He was looking down at his right hand, which was curled into a loose fist on his knee. The top two buttons of his shirt were open, cotton hanging loose and limp around his long throat, and the skin there looked exposed and sleek and vulnerable. “I got angry with you, before. I’m sorry.”

Her lips parted, but nothing came out. She just stared at him.

“You need to quit doing this to yourself,” he said. There was a strange tension in his voice. “Hurting yourself. Jazz, you keep putting yourself in danger, and there’s no reason for it. You throw yourself in the way of every speeding truck hoping to get run over, and sooner or later, you’re going to—”

“You think I’m suicidal?” she asked, astonished. His loose fist tightened.

“I think you blame yourself,” he replied. “For McCarthy either being innocent in prison, or being guilty in prison, and that’s a no-win scenario. I think you don’t see a way it isn’t your fault, and that’s bullshit. You need to quit assigning yourself the blame.”

She felt anger fill her up like boiling water. “Look, Counselor, you don’t know me, and I don’t need your Psych One-oh-one crap about what I do or don’t feel. You don’t know Ben McCarthy, you don’t know anything about—”

“What makes you think I don’t know Ben McCarthy?” he interrupted, and met her eyes. Held them. “What makes you think I don’t know you?”

She had no defense for that. She resorted to pure fury, to reaching out and grabbing a handful of his jacket lapel and pulling him closer, but then the heat from his body washed over her and the smell of that warm, edible cologne, and the gentleness in his eyes…

“Jazz,” he said, and she’d never heard anyone say her name like that, with such infinite tenderness. “If you hurt me again I’m going to have to hurt you back. So please. Don’t punch me, okay?”

She felt herself flush. “I’m not—I wasn’t going to—” She let go of his jacket, but they were still too close together, alarmingly close, and her heart was racing so fast she could barely feel individual beats. “Back off, Counselor.”

“You use that like a shield,” he said. Still low and calm. “My title. You can use my name, you know.”

“Borden—”

“I’ve got another one.”

“Fine, James. Back the hell off.” But it didn’t sound right, even to her ears. It sounded weak and fragile and oddly uncertain. “Don’t do this to me. Not now.”

He was so close his breath was stirring the hair around her face. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his freshly shaved face pale with exhaustion.

His smile, when it came, looked wounded. “Do what? Worry about you? Care what happens to you?”

“James—” It slipped out before she could stop herself. Counselor and Borden, those were things she flung at him to keep him at bay. James was a name that felt intimate on her lips, and from the sudden flash in his eyes, he knew it. “I don’t need your help.”

“I know,” he said, and it was almost a whisper this time. “You never need anybody’s help.”

It was utterly insane, but she couldn’t stop herself. She moved forward, a bare three-inch lunge, and kissed him. She felt him tense in surprise, then deliberately relax, and those lips she’d been staring at for the past long minutes were warm and baby soft and damp against hers, and the heat she’d been feeling that she thought was anger was turning into something else, a white-hot flare that burned down her spine and melted bone along the way. She started to pull back, but then Borden’s lovely manicured hands slid up her arms and ruffled her hair and cupped the back of her head and, oh, my Lord, his mouth opened and his tongue, his tongue like hot velvet stroking her lips, then sliding inside…

Somewhere on the other side of the Plexiglas came the harsh clang of a metal door slamming open.

Jazz gasped and jumped back, shaking, tingling all over, staring at Borden, who looked just as stunned and ruffled as she felt. His lips were damp, still parted, a little swollen and red. She wanted to touch them. No, she wanted to devour them. Again.

She swallowed hard, looked away and moved as far from him as it was possible to get in the narrow confines of the tiny cubicle. She heard him pulling in deep breaths, and out of her peripheral vision making fussy, nervous movements, smoothing his jacket, his shirt.

I can’t believe I did that.

It already seemed like a strange daydream, and she might have convinced herself it hadn’t happened at all, except that she could still taste him, still smell him on her skin and, oh, that felt so…good.

“Later,” he said quietly.

“In your dreams,” she shot back. Unsteadily.

“Yeah, I’m almost certain that will happen, too.”

On the other side of the barrier, she heard jingling metal. Shuffling shoes. And then saw a shocking orange blaze of a jumpsuit—Jazz thought irrelevantly that Ben McCarthy was wearing the same color, right now—sidle awkwardly into the frame of the window.

The legendary Max Simms had arrived.

Where McCarthy filled out his prison garb in flat planes and intimidating angles, Simms was entirely different. Slender, lost inside the ill-fitting outfit, with giant blue eyes and wispy white hair and a face that looked gentle and sensitive and old before its time. He stood maybe five foot five, at most, and his shoulders were stooped like an arthritic ninety-year-old. It looked like his restraints weighed more than he did.

He fixed those mild blue eyes on Borden, who had risen to his feet, and nodded. Borden returned the gesture and settled back on the very edge of his chair…and then Simms turned his attention to Jazz.

It was like having all the air sucked out of the room. Like being in the center of the brightest spotlight in the universe, a beam so bright that she felt one instant away from combusting, so bright that there was no hiding in any corner because there were no shadows left, anywhere.

Simms blinked, mild as milk, and settled into a plastic chair that a deputy thumped down on concrete for him on the other side of the glass. He rested his elbows on the table and flicked on the old-fashioned intercom on his side of the barrier.

Borden reached over to turn on the one on their side of the glass.

“Mr. Simms,” Borden said. “Thank you for seeing us, sir. How are you?”

Simms nodded slightly, still staring at Jazz. She no longer felt that appalling rush of—of what? Focus? Intensity? — but she could feel herself shaking from the aftermath. “It’s good to see you again, James,” he said. He had a pleasant, quiet voice, nothing remarkable. A little deeper than she’d expected. “I see you brought Ms. Callender with you.”

“Had to,” Borden said. “There was a letter—”

“Yes, I know,” Simms said. “May I see it? Just flatten it against the glass, if you don’t mind.”

She fumbled it out of the envelope in her pocket, unfolded it and slapped it against the barrier for him to read. He had fussy little reading glasses that he fished out of his jumpsuit pocket and placed far down on his nose. His pale blue eyes moved in short jerks down the page.

“Ah,” he murmured, and removed the glasses as he sat back. “That’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“The part about me getting killed? Yeah. I think it’s pretty damn fascinating,” she said, and folded the letter back into the envelope. “Thanks for agreeing with me.”

He smiled. It looked like a nice, kindly sort of expression. “I like you,” he said. “Why do you think I had them hire you?”

“I don’t understand how a guy who’s behind bars for killing five people has the right to hire me to do anything,” she said. “And furthermore, you don’t pay me, so far as I know.”

“I set up the Cross Society,” Simms said, eyebrows raised. “Where did you imagine that money might have come from? Investments I made, with my own funds. So in a way, you continue to be paid by me, but you’re quite right in legal terms. I haven’t hired you. I have no assets, no rights, no existence beyond these walls, Jasmine. I rely on the friendship and goodwill of others.”

He sounded like the worst kind of con artist, the religious kind, the one bilking Ma and Pa Kettle out of their farm money while diddling little Ellie May out behind the barn. “You don’t get to call me Jasmine,” she snapped, “and I’ve got no friendship and no goodwill for you, so let’s cut to the chase. It was a long drive out here, I’m tired, and I got myself pretty well beat up today, so if you don’t mind—”

Simms looked up sharply, and the image she’d been forming of him dissolved under the force of that gaze again. What the hell was that? It was like a storm in her head, a white-hot merciless laser boring right through everything she thought, everything she was….

“Do you understand what an eidolon is?” Simms asked, and didn’t wait for her answer, as if he already knew it. “It’s the essence of a thing put into another form. The Greeks thought it a god made flesh, but it doesn’t have to be a god, it can be anything that acts as a god. An avatar of power.”

“Eidolon Corporation,” she said. “You named it that.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I hired incredibly smart people to do research. To put some scientific framework around what I already knew to be true. I set the agenda, I directed the research, and I created a monster. A monster which turned on me, as you might have guessed.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “What does that have to do with me?”

He blinked at her. “You mean nobody’s told you?”

“Told me what?”

Simms’s blue eyes took on a liquid shine, something eerie and strange.

“That you are one of the two people that I believe will bring down the beast. Bring down Eidolon, before it’s too late.”

She cocked her head, shot a look from him to Borden and back. “Too late for what?” She was sure she was going to be sorry she’d asked.

She wasn’t wrong.

“Too late to stop the end of life as we know it,” Simms said, as if that made all the sense in the world.

Crazy. This was crazy talk, and she felt trapped in this tiny airless room with Borden and this crazy man across from them. She ached all over and wanted to go home, crawl into bed and forget all of this. Give back the damn money, call it a day—

“How?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” Simms shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t prove, Jasmine. If it happens, then there are no witnesses to testify. If it doesn’t, well, no one can ever be certain I wasn’t crazy.”

Crazy. Even he had the word in his head—or maybe he’d picked it up out of hers. Maybe he really was some sideshow freak mind reader. “Humor me,” she said.

“Very well.” Simms leaned his elbows on the table on his side of the glass, and the light slid over his pale, thin skin. She could see the cold pulse of blue veins underneath. “I suppose you expect me to say something very movie-of-the-week, the new hot disaster terror in all the tabloids. Ebola, or some such. In fact, it’s much more prosaic than that. War.”

“War won’t destroy life as we know it. It might kill a large number of people, but—”

“Forgive me for my inexact description,” Simms interrupted her, “but I meant the destruction of human civilization. The world, of course, will continue. Damaged, fragile, but certainly not shattered beyond repair. But humans? It will take thousands of years to recover. Or, if there is another catastrophe, never.”

“War,” Jazz repeated flatly. “That’s it? Just war?”

“You forget, Jasmine, we live in a time when killing has become a matter of engineering as much as brute force. We are only a few years from the implementation of machines capable of slaughter on a scale undreamed of fifty years ago, which was a quantum leap forward from the slaughter of fifty years before that. We live in an age of rapid acceleration.” He shrugged again. “I told you, it doesn’t matter. Either it will happen or it won’t, but in any case, it won’t matter to the course of this conversation.”

Borden, next to her, was still and quiet and steady, as if he’d already heard all this. Maybe he had.

“Okay, then,” Jazz said. “Tell me something concrete. Tell me why Lowell Santoro had to take one for your team. That’s what it was, right? The Cross Society decided he was expendable. That’s why Borden had to get me to help.”

“Mr. Santoro’s role is a bit complicated to explain, but I’ll try. In six months, he will be instrumental in the making of a motion picture that changes the course of political campaigns in certain key states. That means that there will be increased funding in those key states to the military suppliers. Those suppliers will develop the weapons that I’m speaking of. And so on.”

Jazz leaned back in her chair, staring at him. “You’re willing to kill a guy over a movie? Why not just kill the movie?”

“I understand the concept of Actors and Leads has been explained to you?”

“For all that I believe in it, yeah.”

“The movie itself cannot be stopped. In every permutation of timeline that I have examined—and I have examined a vast number of them—the movie exists. What changes is the credibility of the movie. The people associated with it. And Santoro is the key to forming that group.” Simms leaned even closer to the glass. His eyes looked almost transparent now, at close range. “Understand me, Jasmine, I would have done it differently if I could have. We researched this for years, growing more and more desperate. Nothing changed. Santoro couldn’t be separated from this project, nor it from him, with anything but lethal force.”

Jazz opened her mouth, but Borden beat her to it. “So you got the opposition to do it for you,” he said. “You manipulated them into killing him.”

Simms didn’t reply. He didn’t even look at Borden, whose voice was low and tight with anger. He seemed fascinated by Jazz’s stare.

“I manipulate everyone, my dear counselor,” he said. “It’s all I have, you know. The power of suggestion, and responsibility. So yes, I did manipulate them. If you’d left well enough alone, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but…” Simms smiled, and there wasn’t anything really kindly about it at all. “But I thought you might do something like this. The odds were low, but definitely present. The others didn’t see it, but I did. And that’s a great pity, you know, because now Jasmine will pay the price. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

He leaned back, eyelids lowering to hood his stare.

“You’re saying—” Borden began.

“I’m saying that you’ve ruined years of work,” Simms said, “and I’m not pleased, James, not pleased. There are ways it can be fixed, but they’ll cost me. I’m not at all looking forward to the work.”

Jazz stared at him for a few seconds of silence, then reached up and pressed the red button. Somewhere, a buzzer went off. She stood up, banging her chair into Borden’s knees, bringing him upright with her.

“What are you doing?” he blurted, frowning. Simms merely looked at her, placid and unmoving, on the other side of the glass.

“Getting the hell out of here,” she said. “I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. This guy is talking about seeing the future. Are you getting that, or does he have you so brainwashed you believe everything he says? Because frankly, Counselor, you seemed like a smarter guy than that to me.”

She slapped the red button again, impatiently. The buzzer continued to rattle somewhere outside.

Simms said, very quietly, “Don’t be foolish. I knew where to find you, Jasmine. I knew where you would be when you didn’t know you were going there. I know things about you that even your closest friends don’t know. I can recite them to you, but I doubt you’d want Counselor Borden to be privy to—”

She slapped the button again, rounded on him and leaned on the table to put her face close enough to the glass to fog it with her breath. “Save it, asshole, I’m not buying your sideshow crap. You had somebody follow me to the bar. Hell, for all I know, you had somebody switch envelopes on me just now at the police station. It’s all crap, all right? And you’re not going to convince me otherwise—”

“At precisely ten-oh-two tonight,” Simms said, “Flight eight-oh-two, the plane you will be flying back to Kansas City, will suffer an engine failure. There will be two possible outcomes. One, the plane will rapidly lose altitude and crash into a row of suburban tract homes just short of the runway. There will be two survivors, a blond woman named Kelley Walters and a businessman, Lamar Qualls. Kelley will be traveling to visit her sister in Kansas City. Lamar will be visiting the city on business, to sign a contract for a grocery-store supply chain.”

She froze, staring at him. His eyes looked pellucidly clear. Sky blue. If he was lying, he was the best liar she’d ever seen in her life. “Bullshit,” she said. But she wondered if it was. It was too specific, too definite. Liars liked to talk in generalities, not specifics that could be checked and disproved.

“Two,” Simms continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “the pilot will be able to compensate for the loss of the engine and land the plane safely, without incident. There is an eighty-two percent chance that will be the case. I hope you find that comforting.”

“So you’re giving me a doom-and-gloom prediction that won’t come true,” she said. “How convenient for you.”

“I’d say it’s more convenient for you, actually,” he said, “considering that if I’m wrong, you won’t be one of the two survivors being carried out of the wreckage.” He shrugged. “I’m not a fortune-teller. When I tell you these things, I’m simply relaying what I know to be true based on my survey of possible futures. You can act on them, or not act. But altering the future is a delicate thing. If I send someone right now to the airport, for instance, and remove a certain mechanic from duty who is about to forget to tighten a bolt, then the engine problem doesn’t occur at all. However, that sends events down another path, and I can’t always see the consequences clearly from where I stand. Sometimes changing things makes them worse.”

“What’s worse than a plane crash?” she asked.

“I assure you, you don’t want to know,” he answered, and craned his neck. “Weren’t you leaving?”

The buzzer shut down abruptly outside, and she felt a change in pressure and cool air on her back as a deputy yanked open the door behind her. It would be the easiest thing in the world to stalk out of here, leave Borden twisting in the wind.

“Don’t you know what I’ll do?” she asked him.

Simms smiled. “There are a very few people in this world who are blank slates to me,” he said. “Those people bring random action to the game. You are one, or rather, you are one now. I predicted your actions somewhat accurately up until the night Laskins sent Borden to you with the offer, but unfortunately, you have grown more opaque since then. Your decisions drive events, Jazz. Yours, and Lucia’s. That’s why we call you Leads.”

“Why?” she flung at him. “Why us? We’re not important, are we? We’re just—”

“Pawns?” Simms’s mouth stretched in a wider smile. A much more unpleasant one, to Jazz’s revulsion. “Pawns win games, you know. And I’d call you…knights. Perhaps one of you might even prove to be a queen, before this game is over.”

She balled up her fists on the cold, cracked Formica of the counter. “If you’re playing a game, who are you playing? Why can’t you stay ahead?”

“It should be obvious to you by now that I have an opponent,” he said. His eyes flicked to focus behind her. “I believe Officer Sanchez is waiting on you.”

Behind her, the deputy said, “Yeah, I am. In or out, miss. I’ve got things to do.”

She allowed herself to relax back into the chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll stay. For a while.”

She felt the guard’s shrug. “Not going anywhere,” he said, and the door clicked and locked again behind her.

Bad decision, she thought instantly, and wondered from Simms’s crazy point of view what kind of futures had just imploded or expanded. What factors had shifted.

Which was just…nuts, wasn’t it? To believe in a thing like that?

“You think you’re playing Eidolon Corporation. Right?”

Simms glanced at Borden, who leaned elbows on the narrow table beside her and said, “When Simms started trying to change the course of futures that he thought were dangerous, some people at Eidolon disagreed. Some of them for idealistic reasons, some for practical economic reasons. Eidolon is an inside-trader’s dream. When you know the course of events, imagine how much profit there is to be made…but Simms didn’t agree. So when push came to shove, Eidolon needed to lose Simms but decided that Simms’s abilities were too valuable to let go. They found somebody as backup. Somebody with similar, ah, abilities.”

“His name is Gilbert Kavanaugh,” Simms said. “Gil for short. You’d like him, he’s actually very amusing, for a psychopath.”

“And let me get this straight. You claim to be able to see the future, and you didn’t see it coming when he, what, framed you for murder?”

Simms nodded, a neat, economical motion.

“I told you. Certain people—”

“Yeah, blank slates, yadda, yadda. You can’t read his future?”

“No.”

“Or your own, I’m guessing.”

Simms’s smile was thin and discomforting. “No.”

“Or mine.”

“Not at present. There are times yours is clear, and at others, not. Like Mr. Borden’s. Like Lucia Garza’s.”

“Explain to me why you want to hire people whose actions you can’t predict. Assuming this isn’t a giant steaming pile of crap, of course.”

“Of course. Because,” Simms said very calmly, “the ones I can predict cannot change anything. Their fates are set, for better or worse, unless one of the random pieces acts. I have gone to considerable trouble to hire all that I can, but of course Eidolon has deep pockets, as well.”

“You’re delusional.”

“No.” Simms shrugged. “But I do think it is a wonder I’m not insane, don’t you?”

“Five bodies buried in your backyard say different.”

Simms stared at her for a long, long moment, and she had that sensation again, as if a floodlight had swept over her and illuminated every cell in her body, every dark thought, every secret. It made her dangerously angry.

“Take her home, Counselor Borden,” Simms said. He sounded suddenly tired, and not at all happy. “I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day, and I believe Gil is going to attempt another clever move before bedtime. I will need all my concentration to undo the mistakes of today.”

Borden reached across Jazz and punched the button. She knocked his arm away, rose to her feet and leaned both palms flat on the table, staring at Simms’s small, pale face. “I think you’re full of crap,” she said. “We make our own choices, and you’re just a con man and a murderer.”

Simms didn’t smile this time. He looked thoroughly exhausted, as if the life was draining out of him. “Part of that is always true some of the time,” he said. “And part of it is true all of the time. I leave it to you to decide how to divide the statement. It’s been lovely to meet you, Jasmine.”

“It’s not mutual,” she said, and turned toward the door as it opened behind her. Moving into the larger room with its harsh fluorescent glare and empty ringing silence felt like escape, as if she’d been under some threat she hadn’t identified.

She looked back. Borden was still standing there, speaking softly to Simms. As she watched, Simms nodded, stood up and shuffled away with a deputy at his side.

Borden looked grim and angry, and he didn’t say a word as they followed their own deputy back past empty cells and through sally ports. They both spoke in monosyllables as they signed papers and collected their belongings again, then were escorted back into the harsh desert sunshine. The car was still waiting, idling in the falling darkness.

When they were back on the road, Borden clicked open his briefcase, rooted around in it for a second, and then handed her a plane ticket. Flight 802. Los Angeles to Kansas City.

“He didn’t know,” Borden said. “I didn’t tell him we were flying back tonight, and there’s no way he could have known which flight we were on. Think about that.”

She gave him a long, considering look, and said, “And if I were a half-decent con man, I might know how many flights there were to K.C. from LAX in a day, if my mark was heading there. I might make a pretty educated guess as to which one she’d be on, given the time of day. Looks like magic. Smells like crap, Counselor. Sorry. No sale.”

He shook his head and avoided her eyes. She licked her lips and suddenly—shockingly—remembered the warm pressure of his mouth, and felt something in her plummet again, lost and liking it. It’s a long ride back to L.A., some part of her whispered. She tracked it down and throttled it into silence.

Borden said something under his breath that sounded like, “He said you’d be like this,” and they spent the entire ride back in silence.

Not touching.

To Jazz’s well-concealed disappointment.