Working Stiff

Chapter 9

The day passed. Bryn kept her e-mail in-box active, waiting for something, anything from her mysterious would-be supplier; nothing arrived. She’d fielded about twelve calls, eight of them certainly pranks, three legitimate customers, and one from her sister about dinner.

She was checking out a suspicious e-mail message when her phone rang again; the e-mail, it turned out, was legitimate, but trash.

The phone call was odd.

At first, Bryn thought it was a prank call; she’d gotten used to those fast. Lucy called them their sex-chat clients, and joked that they needed to start charging $9.95 a minute to make some extra money off of it; they usually started out with breathing and vague noises, and that was exactly what this was. Some kind of labored, wet gasp, and undefined sounds.

“Hello?” Bryn said, just to be sure. “Not funny. I’m hanging up now.”

Usually, that either brought some kind of obscene proposal, or a hang-up. She got neither, just more of the breathing. On reflection, it didn’t sound sexual. It sounded slow and tortured.

“Hello?” Bryn glanced at her phone. Caller ID had brought up a name, which was unusual for a sex caller.

And the name seemed familiar.

Bryn felt a sinking sensation, listening to that whispering breath. She tried again, but got no response to her questions.

She hung up and called Lucy on the intercom. “Lucy, can you look up a contact for a customer for me?”

“Sure. Which one?”

“Sammons, first initial V. I think someone was trying to call from her number and got cut off.”

“We get a lot of hang-ups, you know.”

“I know. But look it up, would you?”

“Just a sec.” Lucy put the phone down, and Bryn listened to keys clicking. “System’s always so slow— Oh, there it is. Sammons, Violetta. She wasn’t a customer, though. She was a client.”

“A client.” The difference, in Fairview terminology, was that customers wrote checks; clients filled coffins. “You’re sure about that?”

“Maybe somebody kept the number switched on? Could have been a relative; she had a husband who made arrangements. She only passed a couple of weeks ago, right before you arrived here. One of Mr. Fairview’s last personal preps, poor man.”

Personal prep. Fairview seemed to do personal prep only on his special clients.

The ones who kept on paying.

She couldn’t talk, Bryn realized. Violetta Sammons was too far gone to talk, but she was trying to ask for help. My God. She’s been without a shot for … how long? Why didn’t her husband try to call us?

The implications made her sick and light-headed. “Thanks. Can you read me the address?”

“Sure.” Lucy recited it, and Bryn wrote it down. “You need anything else?”

“No,” Bryn said. Her knuckles had tightened around the phone. “No, thank you, Lucy.” She hung up and rang Joe’s extension. He didn’t answer at once; when he did, it was clear the call had switched to his cell. “Joe? Where are you?”

“At Atlantic Memorial, waiting on a pickup with Doreen.” Doreen was the latest in this week’s parade of assistants. “She’s still with us.”

“The pickup?”

“Doreen. What’s going on?”

Her throat felt tight with panic. “I had a weird phone call. I think it was someone Fairview … you know. She’s in trouble.”

“All right, give me the address; I’ll send people.”

“No. Joe … Joe, she called me. She needs help. We’ve got supplies, right? I want to give her the shot.”

“Bryn, you can‘t. The syringes are ID coded. You know that.”

“Then come back and go with me.”

“You want me to leave Doreen here alone to do the pickup? Even if I did, I’m a couple of hours away.”

“This can’t wait, Joe. It can’t.”

“She’s not going anywhere, right?”

Her eyes were burning now with unshed tears. She couldn’t explain why she felt so oppressed by this; she couldn’t understand it herself. “She needs help now. I’m going.”

“Tell me where you’re going first.” She read him the address. “Seriously, wait for me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I can’t leave her like that.”

He was silent for a second, then said, “You know what you might have to do. She’s probably too far gone to dose.”

“I know,” she said. “I can’t let her suffer, Joe. That’s why I have to go.”

“As long as you know what you’re getting into. I’ll get Pat to meet you there; he’s not far. No arguments, boss. This is how it’s done.” The boss was ironic; Bryn was almost sure. She was no one’s boss, not even her own. He hung up before she could tell him not to call McCallister—not that he would have listened.

She hadn’t spoken directly to McCallister since they’d parted ways in that uncomfortable fashion at the mansion, and she wasn’t looking forward to it now. But mostly what she dreaded was what she was going to find at Violetta Sammons’s house. Where was Violetta’s husband? McCallister will have the shot, she thought. We can do this. We can make it right and figure it out from there.

I have to make it right.

She grabbed her preloaded removal bag from the locker room, added a few things, and took one of the mortuary vans—freshly cleaned out and smelling astringently of bleach. Either I smell like dead people, or I smell like cleaning products. Annie was right: boyfriends were probably out of the question at this point—presuming, of course, that she had any right to think about such real-life issues anymore.

She tried not to think about that, or anything, as she followed the navigation system’s directions to Violetta’s address up in the La Jolla hills. It was in a very posh neighborhood, with big, expansive houses and a breathtaking view. Not Patrick McCallister’s price range, but even the smallest of these properties must have gone for a couple of million.

No wonder Fairview had chosen Sammons for his scam.

Bryn parked the van and got out, carrying her black canvas bag, just as Patrick McCallister’s tinted black sedan closed in behind like a shark. He stepped out, and they looked at each other for a few seconds. His bruised cheek had mostly healed, and his suit looked clean and impeccable, as always.

He had a black bag, too. She didn’t think his held the same things hers did.

“Bryn,” he said, in a very careful, neutral tone. “What’s the emergency?”

“I think she’s one of Fairview’s,” Bryn said. “And I think she’s been without a shot all this time. I couldn’t just … I have to help. I have to. You understand?”

McCallister hesitated, then nodded. “Let me go first.”

“No,” she said. “I have to do this.”

“Not alone,” he said. “We do it together, then.”

That felt better, because she was terrified and trying not to show it. The house looked completely normal, nothing to sound alarms. Bryn rang the doorbell, then tried the front door, but it was locked.

“What now?” she asked. McCallister led her around to the side, to a kitchen door. She tried that one. “It’s locked, too.”

He stepped up and did something with a set of tiny tools—lock picks, she guessed. She expected an alarm, but when the door swung open, she didn’t hear a thing. A house like this, there had to be an alarm….

McCallister stepped inside and checked a keypad next to the door. “It’s off,” he said. “Come in.” He closed and locked it behind her.

She immediately caught the unmistakable smell of decomposition—ripe, sickly sweet, and dense. She wavered, and exchanged a wordless look with him.

“Bryn,” he said. “Let me do this. You don’t need to—”

She shook her head, waited to let her senses adjust, then went forward through a spotlessly kept white tile kitchen, down a hallway. The stench got more intense. She was achingly aware of McCallister sticking close beside her, silent now.

No turning back.

She expected a horror show, but there was nothing in the large, gracious living room, although a big-screen TV was still playing with the sound turned down. There was a glass of what looked like Scotch sitting on a coaster on the coffee table, and a book spread open, facedown, as if someone had put it away for just a moment.

McCallister touched her shoulder and pointed. She followed him out into the marble-tiled foyer. A curving staircase led upstairs.

The smell was worse here, and increased as they ascended. Halfway up, Bryn heard the first hum of insect activity. She hesitated just for a breath on the last step, gathered herself, and stepped over a busy line of ants that marked a trail right to where she had to go.

McCallister was right behind her, silent and solid. He was the only thing that gave her the necessary strength to keep going.

The bedroom door was shut, and Bryn touched the knob gingerly first, as if it might be hot. Instinct, trying to stop her from doing this. Seeing this.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.

The noise exploded in an angry buzz, and flies whizzed past her, heading out into the open air. She ducked. So did McCallister. He coughed and put his hand over his mouth; it was the first sign of weakness she’d seen from him.

Bryn stepped into hell.

The first thing she saw was the dead man, sitting in a deep armchair at the end of the bed. There was a bullet hole in one temple, and a giant exit wound on the opposite side. The gun still lay on the carpet next to his feet.

He’d been gone for days.

The woman lying on the bed wasn’t much of a human being anymore. She was covered in a moving blanket of flies, wriggling pale maggots popping through the slipping, discolored stretch of skin, and ants busily carrying away pieces for the good of the colony.

Her eyes were open. Clouded, discolored, decomposed, but alive.

Oh, God, still alive. They moved, very slightly, toward Bryn. The lipless mouth moved, but there was no sound, could be none. The phone receiver lay on the pillow next to her, and one desiccated finger was still resting on the redial button.

“Mother of God,” McCallister whispered behind her. He sounded shaken, stunned, more human than he’d ever seemed. Bryn, on the other hand, felt … remote. Unte-thered. That was shock, she guessed. Useful thing, shock, at moments like these.

“Give her the shot,” she said.

“Bryn—it won’t work.”

“Give her the shot.”

He shook his head, but he opened his bag and took out the syringe. She saw him hesitate, trying to find enough muscle to inject, and watched as he did his best.

The liquid oozed back out through her skin and soaked into the bedding.

They waited for long moments, and Bryn finally turned to McCallister.

“She’s too far gone,” he whispered. “End stages. The drug won’t help.”

Then there was only one thing to do.

Bryn dropped her canvas bag, opened it, and took out a gown, a mask, surgical gloves. She handed those to McCallister, then took a second set for herself. They dressed in silence. The mask didn’t block the eye-watering stench. There were ants crawling on her feet, over her legs, but Bryn didn’t think about that. Couldn’t think about that.

She took out a surgical saw.

McCallister took a step back. “What are you—”

Bryn didn’t answer, because she couldn’t. Talking required some kind of cognition she didn’t think she was capable of at this point. There was only one thing that was important, one thing that had to be done.

She had to stop the woman’s pain. There was no walking away from this, no choice. It had to be done.

She had to be the one to do it.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to what was left of Violetta Sammons, and stared into those clouded, desperate, terrified eyes for a second before she put one hand on the mandible of her jaw, pushed up, and exposed the rotten column of her throat.

It didn’t take more than three strokes. The saw was very sharp. As the head rolled free, Bryn saw the life desperately continue in those filmed eyes, and then dim … and then, finally, mercifully, depart.

Byrne dropped the saw, staggered, and put her back against the wall.

That’s me. That’s me on the bed. That’s me.

Not yet, but it was coming, as inevitable as death itself.

Across the bed, Patrick McCallister stood frozen, watching her. He finally reached down and grabbed the canvas bag, retrieved the saw, and took her arm. “Out,” he said. “Come on.”

Leaving that room was like walking out of a grave, and Bryn ripped the mask away from her face and gulped in deep breaths. She’d thought the air out here tainted before, but it smelled sweet now. Sweet as roses.

Her legs had gone numb, but McCallister helped her down the steps, past the line of ants, past the silent living room with its TV still playing, Scotch waiting.

Outside, into the clean breeze, and the sun.

Bryn collapsed against him, put her arms around his neck, and wept as if her heart were breaking. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, my God. I had to do it; I had to. I had to.”

And Patrick McCallister held on just as fiercely. “I know,” he whispered back. “It’s all right. It’s over.”

“No.” She gasped, and fisted her hands in the collar of his suit. “That was me. Going to be me.”

“No. Bryn, you’re alive; hear me? And I won’t let that happen to you. I won‘t. I swear it.”

“What if—”

“Don’t.”

“You saw; she could still feel—”

His voice turned fierce. “I won’t let it happen. I will never let you suffer, Bryn. Believe that, even if you never believe anything else about me.”

She did believe him. She believed that if he had to, Patrick McCallister would take up that saw and end things for her, once and for all. He had the strength of will.

She’d never thought she did. Not until the moment when she’d had to choose.

That terrified her, the fact that something like that was hiding inside her—something so strong, so cold, so capable. She didn’t want to know that about herself.

She didn’t want to know what it was going to be like in the end, either. She’d looked into her future, into the ruined, screaming eyes of Violetta Sammons.

McCallister held her until his security team arrived to sanitize the scene of the crime, and she was glad he did.

Fifteen minutes after they’d started the … removal proceedings, McCallister stepped back into the house. He donned an extra pair of coveralls stored in Bryn’s go bag, a ball cap, a thin Windbreaker that had the Fairview Mortuary logo on the front, and said, “I’m going with you. You shouldn’t be alone.” His team had their orders. They also had come in disguise as renovation workers, with their own van, tools, coveralls—they even put a sign out by the curb. Anyone looking out would see nothing but normal life, although what was going on was far, far from sanity in there. “We need to get the van out of here. It’ll raise questions.”

The Fairview logo was small and discreet, but he was right; it was visible to anybody who really looked. Bryn, who’d finally gotten feeling back in her arms and legs, started to unlock the driver’s-side door.

McCallister took the keys from her. “No. I’m driving.” She didn’t feel able to argue the point. It felt good to let someone else take charge, at least for the moment. Maybe the protocols are kicking in again. But she didn’t think so. It was just shock, and the drugged exhaustion that followed extreme emotional stress.

“Is it safe for you to do this?” she asked in a remote, tired voice as he piloted the van back toward Fairview. “What if he’s watching?”

“He probably is. And yes, it’s risky. But you go through staff quickly at the assistant level, so new faces aren’t unusual. I’ll keep my head down.” He glanced her way. “You still with me, Bryn?”

“Yes.” She could hardly keep her eyes open, but when she tried to let them drift closed, she saw jolts of images. Ants. Maggots. Flesh. Eyes. “I think I need a drink.”

He laughed softly, and a little shakily. “That, Miss Davis, is a vast understatement. There has never been a single moment in my life when I more needed a drink, and I wasn’t the one—” Holding the saw, Bryn finished silently. He let it go. “I heard your sister is staying with you.”

“I thought you’d be angry.”

“I was. It seems a little beside the point right now.”

“Annie’s okay,” Bryn murmured drowsily. “She’s just a kid; that’s all. And we push her too hard.”

“We?”

“The fam. Especially Mom, and my sister Grace. Grace is kind of a bitch. Not as bad as George, though.”

“George is a girl?”

“George is a pissy little bitch of a man. He’s not gay, which is too bad; he’d be a lot more fun that way. He’s just a jerk. He runs a pharmacy in—” Her brain finally caught up to her mouth. “You already know all this. I told you all about them, in the car.”

McCallister shrugged. “I like hearing you talk about them.”

“Remember Kyle?”

“The one who’s three years into a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery?”

“Kyle is still more fun than George.”

“Ouch.”

Her brain was waking up. Small talk, it seemed, did wonders. “Anyway, Annie just wanted some space, so I’m letting her stay a few days. It’s not a big deal, and I won’t tell her a thing.”

“She’s a walking, talking security breach, and you should have run it by me, but what’s done is done. I’m just concerned for your safety.”

“From Annie? She grew up wanting to be a fairy princess. She’s not exactly dangerous.”

“That’s what I’m concerned about.”

She couldn’t work that out, tired as she felt, so she let it lie. “You got me to talk about my family,” she said. “But you never return the favor.”

He glanced over at her, frowning, and shook his head. “It’s not the time, Bryn.”

“Come on. Humor me.” She needed something else in her head besides … that. Besides the smell, the insects, the desperation in Violetta’s eyes. The rasp of the saw. “Tell me about your brother.”

“I can’t.” He paused, then let out a sound—not a laugh, more of a sigh. “Can’t. That doesn’t sound right either, considering … it’s just words. All right, if you really want to know. Jamie was … different. My parents couldn’t see it. He was a charmer, but he was cold inside. A sociopath with no real empathy or connection to anyone else. Including me. And I was his favorite target.”

“You.”

He shrugged. “I learned to cope. I had to. Jamie’s little games were often meant to maim or kill. I couldn’t complain; when I tried, he blamed it all on me, said that I was the bully. They believed it.”

“My God.”

“By eighteen, I wasn’t going to let it go on anymore. I went to my father, but he didn’t want to hear it. So I left. I went straight into the marines, enlisted as fast as I could, and got the hell away from the whole family.”

“You told me Jamie … died.”

“By the time I came home, eight years had passed. I think he was truly surprised. He fully expected me to die in the line of duty.” McCallister’s eyes were unfocused now, looking into something far away and not at all pleasant. “He was out on his own by then, with his own house out in the country. I came back from deployment and intended to just stop in and try to mend fences with him, as much as possible. But when I got here, he was … He’d found a new hobby. One that suited his personality.” He swallowed, a visible bob of his Adam’s apple above his collar. His hands gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly. “I found out later that he’d made a business of it, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that when I went looking for him, I found him upstairs in one of the rooms with cameras and a victim. I shot him. I had to, to save her life.”

“What was he—”

“No,” he said. “Don’t make me tell you. Please. We’ve had enough today” He let the silence fall for a moment before he continued. “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m just sorry that I let him walk away when I was eighteen. It would have saved lives if I hadn’t been … weak.” He smiled, but it looked painful and false. “My mother was already gone by then. My father passed on soon after that, thinking I was a murderer. Thinking that I’d set Jamie up and killed him in cold blood. I was written out of the estate, of course. I didn’t really mind.”

Bryn thought about her own family, with all its problems and squabbles; she might not totally love many of her siblings, but at least they weren’t sociopaths. And, although he wasn’t saying it outright, murderers. It brought back the haunting question of what had happened to Sharon, all those years ago. Maybe she ran into another McCallister. The wrong McCallister.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for making you tell me that.”

“No,” he said. “No, you needed to hear it. And I guess I needed to say it, too. It’s all right. Now it’s done.”

McCallister drove in silence the rest of the way, parked the van, and walked with her into the mortuary through the back entrance. He kept his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. It was as much cover as possible, but she still felt an uncomfortable, probably imaginary weight of eyes on them until they were safely inside.

Joe and Doreen weren’t back yet from the hospital run, so Bryn took McCallister directly to her office, locked the door, and opened up a locked drawer in her desk. She set up six miniature bottles of liquor: Scotch for McCallister, vodka for herself.

“Did you raid the minibar somewhere?” he asked, but didn’t turn down the tiny servings. He unscrewed the first and downed it in two gulps, then opened the second.

“Certainly not at the Hallmark Motor Court Inn.”

That got her a shadow of a smile. He saluted her with the bottle, downed it, and sat down. She concentrated on the soothing fire of her vodka as it slipped over her tongue, down her throat, clearing away the taste of rot and despair. Somehow, she managed to drink her third before McCallister had properly started his, but then, as he hadn’t quite said, she’d been holding the saw.

“So,” she said, and leaned her head back against the leather of the chair. “Did you sleep with your boss?” Silence. She opened her eyes just a slit. McCallister continued sipping his Scotch without comment. “You’re really not going to tell me.”

“Is this the question that comes to your mind right now?”

“Evidently it is.” She was starting to feel numbed again, but in a slightly better way.

“Do you have any more of these?” He held up the liquor mini. She opened the drawer, pulled out two more, and pitched him one. “This is bourbon.”

“You’re really going to complain?”

He upended it while she sucked down her fourth vodka. This one was lemon-flavored. Nice. “If I say yes, what does it matter to you?”

“It doesn’t.” It did. It did, and he knew it, the bastard. Why it mattered to her was a mystery she didn’t care to explore at the moment; her emotions were confused, raw, and horribly tangled. “Was it good?”

“With her? Not likely.”

She almost choked on her drink. “So you did do it.”

“I didn’t say I did. If such a thing had happened, for which there is no evidence and no admission, now or ever, then it would not have been a good time. Just … maintenance.”

“Of your low reputation and your alibi.”

His lips twisted into a brief, unhappy grimace. “Something like that.” McCallister got weirdly funny and precise when he drank. If he felt anything like Bryn, he had to be at least slightly tipsy. Overcompensating, probably. “It’s not all fun and games in my business.”

She had a nauseating flashback, and suddenly she realized that she reeked of dead flesh; it had soaked into her clothes, her skin, her hair. The whole office stank with it.

Fun and games.

Violetta Sammons’s disconnected head rolling free.

The rasp of the saw vibrating in her hand.

The vodka rushed up on her, and Bryn barely made it to her trash can before she threw up. Between the convulsions, she gasped for breath and sobbed, and McCallister came around the desk and silently handed her tissues, then helped her back into her chair as she covered her face and tried to muffle her wild, uncontrollable sobs.

He stroked her hair, very softly. He didn’t say a thing.

Finally, she was able to shut it off, just enough to gather her voice together. “I have to shower,” she said. Her voice was uneven and broken, but he nodded as he looked down at her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ll be there after you’re done.”

She grabbed another set of clothes and went into the locker room at the end of the hall; Riley was in there, changing into jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt with her hair still clinging damply to her face. She looked up, surprised, as Bryn dumped her stuff on the bench.

“Everything okay?”

Bryn didn’t want to talk, but she had to try. “Bad one,” she managed to say. “Major decomposition.”

Riley nodded and opened her locker. She tossed Bryn a bottle. “Try this,” she said. “Best I’ve found. Use it four times, you should be okay.”

Bryn didn’t even wait to thank her. The urge to get clean was so overpowering that even after she was standing in the hot spray, soaping herself from head to toe, she couldn’t stop gasping and shaking from the pressure. Two passes with the shampoo and she still felt filthy. By the third she was calming down, and by the fourth she felt almost normal. Her skin tingled from the scrubbing, but that was a good thing; the greasy, horrible stench seemed to have finally rubbed off.

Bryn threw her old clothes into the incineration biohazard bag and dressed in the clean ones, dried her hair, and was just finishing when there was a knock on the locker room door, and McCallister looked in.

He looked rough—pallid, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He’d stripped off his coat and tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “All right if I come in?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very selfish for taking up the shower for so long.

“It’s all yours,” she said.

He nodded thanks and opened a locker—Joe Fideli’s—and took out a pair of blue jeans and a clean white T-shirt. “We’re about the same size,” he said. “At least I won’t look like I’m going for gangster style.”

She passed him Riley’s shampoo. “Four passes,” she said. “It works.”

He smiled, faintly, and said, “Good.”

He was already stripping off his clothes before she closed the door, and in those fast, ruthless motions, she sensed that McCallister, too, was on the edge of losing control.

She let him do it in private.

Back in her office, Bryn turned on music, something soft and soothing, and nibbled some crackers to settle her still-restless stomach. Her skin and clothes smelled clean and fresh, but it was hard not to imagine the ghost of that stench still hanging around. She cleaned out the trash can, then used disinfectant spray around her chair and on her shoes. Probably too much.

Finally, she sat down and closed her eyes.

A soft chime made her open them again.

She had e-mail.

Oh, God. She’d actually forgotten all about it.

Sitting in her in-box was a new message from one of those throwaway account services, with the ominous moniker of deadman. There was no subject line, and the message was just an address and a time of day—ten p.m.

McCallister came back, still glistening with drops from the shower, and saw from her expression that something was up.

She mutely spun her computer around and showed him. He leaned over the desk to read it. “Can your tech wizards trace that?” she asked.

“Probably not, but we’ll try it. That is the e-mail equivalent of a burner phone, and if he’s got any sense at all, he hid his IP address through a randomizer.” McCallister already had his cell out and was dialing.

“Don’t you need my account password?”

“Already have it,” he said, and got up to turn his back and talk to his resources.

Proof, once again, that there was nothing secret in her life anymore. Nothing sacred. She’d expected to feel some sense of burning betrayal, but instead, she felt … tired. And, weirdly, a little reassured.

McCallister stayed on the phone a while longer, and she contemplated opening up another set of drinks, but that seemed less like a necessary safety valve and more like a crutch, at this point. Bryn shut and locked the drawer, and looked at the clock.

It was coming up on six o‘clock.

Four hours to get the money and deliver it to the address—or else what? Lose their potential chance at the supplier.

If they did, Bryn had no doubt whatsoever that Irene Harte would pull the plug on the project, and her, with pleasure. It was that, as much as anything else, that made her step back from the comfort of the booze. I’m not giving you the excuse, she thought. Not you. You don’t get to kill me.

But it wouldn’t be Harte, she realized. When it came to the end, it would come from the man pacing the floor on the other side of her office, talking quietly into his cell phone. He’d be the one told to withhold her drug, reduce her to that decayed, rotting shell. She’d be eaten alive. She’d beg for release until eventually the last of the nanites faded and died….

Or until he dismembered her, out of sheer horrified mercy.

No. He promised. He promised me he wouldn’t let that happen. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths and tried to think of something, anything less painful. He’d promised, and he’d meant it. He wouldn’t let her linger on and rot.

McCallister finished the call. “I have a car and driver coming, and I’m on the way to pick up the money,” he said. “Joe is five minutes out. Stay here, and he’ll take you home. I’ll come by here at eight thirty to pick you up for the rendezvous.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asked, and she held his eyes until she saw that he knew. “I meant what I said, Bryn. I won’t let that happen.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.” She stood up and hugged him. It was an impulse, and she didn’t mean anything by it except gratitude, until she was in his arms, and then … then it was something else entirely. “Tell me you didn’t sleep with her,” she whispered, very quietly.

He didn’t ask what she was talking about. “I didn’t,” he said, and something brushed her forehead, very gently. It might have been a kiss. “Stay safe.”

And then he was gone.

Bryn arrived home at six thirty, feeling exhausted and not up for family drama of any kind. Luckily, she didn’t get any.

The apartment was spotlessly clean, Mr. French was happy to see her, and the air smelled like rich Italian food.

“Hey, sweetie!” Annie said brightly from the kitchen. “Hope you’re hungry. I think I cooked enough pasta for the complex!”

I can’t do this. Bryn dropped onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands. In a few seconds, she felt Annie’s weight settle in next to her, and her sister’s arm went around her shoulders. She didn’t look up.

“Hey,” Annie said. “Hey, what did I say? You don’t like Italian anymore?”

“It’s just …” For an extremely unsettling second, Bryn thought the dam might just collapse inside her. If she said anything, she’d say everything, everything that she’d promised to keep secret. And that would unburden her, but doom her sister. McCallister’s people were always listening, and someone was always listening to them. “It was a bad day. Really bad.”

“Sorry, honey. Hey, does it have anything to do with the hottie who was here with you before?”

“No! Why would you even assume that?” Bryn looked at her sister finally. Annie cocked an eyebrow and shrugged. “It’s not all about my love life. Or lack of one.”

“I’m just saying, he’s hot.”

“What about married did you not understand?”

“There’s married and married, in my expert opinion.”

“Expert?”

“Honey, I work in a bar. I am an expert.”

That was … a good point. Bryn let it pass. “It’s not about Joe, and it had nothing to do with … It was work. Bad day at work.”

“Oh. So … it was disgusting, right?”

“Very.”

“I think I’d rather talk about your lack of a love life. Seriously, there isn’t anybody you’re interested in? Come on, Bryn. Humor me.”

“Nobody,” she said, but then she sighed and shook her head. “He doesn’t care about me. Not that way.”

“Is he male?”

“Obviously.”

“Is he straight?”

“As far as I know.”

“Then he cares, sweetie. You don’t have any idea how sexy you are, do you?”

Bryn laughed, and it sounded a little wild, a little despairing. “I am so very far from sexy right now, Annie. And how did we get on this subject again?”

“Because you wouldn’t discuss dinner?”

“Well, I’ll discuss it now. I don’t have much time, though. I’m sorry, but I have to go out tonight. An appointment. I need to be there by eight thirty.”

“Cool.” Annie squeezed her and let go. “We can go out tomorrow night. I made bruschetta and pasta primavera; I walked over to the store and stocked your fridge. You’ll love it.”

And Bryn did. For the first time in a long time—since before that awful moment when her whole life had ended and restarted—she tasted food, really tasted it. Crisp, nutty bread, fresh chopped tomato, basil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, oil … and the pasta, perfectly cooked al dente. Annie offered wine, but Bryn refused, on the grounds of driving. They talked. They laughed. They mocked each other. They did dishes and splashed each other, half out of spite, half out of joy.

Sisters.

Bryn felt the darkness and horror slip away, just for a while.

It all passed in far too short a time. By eight, they were sitting on the couch again, and Annie was flipping channels on Bryn’s TV. “What time do you think you’ll be back?” she asked. She flipped her hair back over her shoulders. She’d showered, and her hair had fallen into golden brown ringlets, perfectly shaped. When Bryn was ten and Annie was eight, Bryn had given her sister a deliberately awful haircut with a pair of safety scissors out of sheer envy—and in truth, she still hadn’t quite gotten over coveting those curls.

“Why? You going to wait up?”

“Are you going out on a date?”

“I wish. No.”

“Are you going to be draining body fluids out of some poor dead person?”

“No, and God, you are morbid.”

“Me? You’re the one with the job in the death business.” Annie made air quotes around it. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to judge, but it just seems really weird to me.”

“It’s not weird. It’s …” Bryn remembered Riley’s words, back in the prep room. “It’s something sacred, in a way. We’re the last people to touch someone in this world, and that’s important. We’re all going there, in the end. Wouldn’t you like there to be someone there to care for you?”

Annie turned toward her, eyes wide. She didn’t speak. Finally, she settled against the cushions and refocused her attention on the TV. “So you don’t know when you’ll be back.”

“God, Annie, are you planning on throwing a party while I’m gone? No, I don’t know. A couple of hours, probably. Stop questioning me.”

“You always ask me these things.”

“I’m your older sister. I’m supposed to.”

“So who are you meeting? Your mystery man?” Annie nudged her with her shoulder. Bryn nudged back, harder.

“None of your business.”

“Oh, come on. If I’ve never met him, what does it matter?”

“He’s … complicated,” Bryn said slowly. “And very … complicated.”

“You are the worst. Okay, just answer this. Is he hot?”

“I don’t know.” She didn‘t, honestly. He was; then he wasn‘t. She didn’t know how to view Patrick McCallister objectively at all. “I suppose so.”

“What’s his best feature?”

Annie probably wanted her to say his ass, or his abs, or his eyes, or something like that, but Bryn thought for a second and said, “His certainty.”

Her sister laughed outright. “You are insane—you know that? No wonder you can’t get yourself laid properly.”

For answer, Bryn grabbed the remote and put on a reality show she knew her sister hated, and as Annie breathlessly chased her around to grab the remote, she knew, deep down, that it was all going to be okay. Somehow, it was all going to be okay.

It had to be.

Eight thirty came far too soon.

By nine thirty, sitting with Joe Fideli in his black sedan, she wasn’t so sure of a positive outcome. McCallister was in the backseat, hidden behind the tinted windows; he’d changed the white tee for a black knit shirt, but kept the jeans. She’d expected him to be … different, but from the moment she’d entered the car at the mortuary, she’d sensed that McCallister’s armor was back up, and in full force. He was polite, but cool and slick as glass.

“I don’t like this,” Bryn said. “What if he wanted me to come alone?”

Joe shrugged. “I think it’d be more suspicious if you didn’t bring your bodyguard. If he’d meant for you to come alone he’d have said so. After all, you’re a woman, no offense to your self-defense skills, and this is a nasty part of town at a dangerous time of night. You brought backup. That’s acceptable behavior to him.”

“You act like you know him.” She meant it as a joke, but as soon as she said it, her brain fired off into wild, improbable directions, and she took in a sudden breath.

Joe interpreted all that flawlessly. “You think I’m the leak from Pharmadene?” He laughed outright. In the backseat, McCallister echoed it. “Way to think out of the box, Bryn, but no. No way I could pull it off, and I got no use for anybody who’d make money this way anyway. Patrick knows that.”

“You know the system. And you could rip off the drugs; don’t tell me you couldn’t,” she said, obscurely offended. “You’d probably get a kick out of doing it, too—stick it to the evil corporation and all.”

That sobered him quickly. “Pharmadene’s got some rot in it, no question about that, but it’s also full of smart, idealistic people. They save lives, Bryn.”

“I saw today what they do. It’s hideous.”

“This thing, this drug … it’s not what they do. Or did. Returné was an accident that came up while they were trying to find a way to nonsurgically remove cancers. Now it’s like a cancer of its own inside the company, eating away. And I—” He stopped himself—or, more accurately, McCallister’s hand clamping down on his shoulder stopped him. Joe swallowed the rest of it. “I just think Pharmadene’s got some good in it,” he finished, which she was sure wasn’t what he’d intended. “I think you should give it a chance, Bryn.”

“You really think I have a choice?” Bryn muttered. “So am I doing this or not?”

“Yes,” McCallister said from the backseat. “It’s time. All you need to do is get out, walk into the building, and leave the bag in the first open place you see, then come right back. I don’t care what you see or what you hear, you leg it back here as fast as you can. If you take more than two minutes before you’re back in our field of vision, Joe goes in after you.”

“Guns blazing,” Joe added. “And nobody wants that. Gets real messy. On the upside, if I shoot you, it really doesn’t matter.”

“I thought you were on my side.”

He winked at her. “Good luck.”

Bryn took a deep breath, nodded to both of them, and got out of the passenger side. She retrieved the black canvas bag full of cash and began walking. She’d dressed practically—dark pants, dark sweatshirt, running shoes, her hair tied back in a sloppy knot at the nape of her neck—but even so, she suddenly felt very exposed, very vulnerable. Her gun was under the sweatshirt, one zipper pull away. And as Joe had so not-kindly said, she could take a bullet if she had to and survive.

So why was she so damned nervous?

Because I feel like a mousetrap tester, she thought. And I’m the mouse.

Not all of San Diego was shiny and tourist friendly; this area was inky dark, very few lights, and most of these feeble security lighting trying to protect what was surely a losing investment for some poor real estate company. Everything was graffiti covered, weed overgrown, and littered with trash and broken bottles. She felt the crunch of ground glass under her feet as she walked.

The address from her e-mail was on the right, behind a rusty chain-link fence with a No Trespassing sign on it. The sign had been defaced, mangled, and shot three times, and right below it someone had chopped a gash in the links big enough to squeeze through, if you were reasonably small and didn’t care too much about tetanus. Bryn sucked it up and scraped by. The fence snapped back with a dry rattle, and a random breeze pushed trash past her feet in a postmodern snowdrift of cups, plastic bottles, and torn paper.

The building she was facing had started life as some kind of a factory for a product probably made with great success now in Asia; signs were long gone, and the paint was faded and covered in a thicket of colorful but also fading neon tags.

Bryn watched her corners, just the way they’d taught her in urban combat training, and kept walking toward the dark hole of the entrance. It used to have an accordion gate across the doors, but the doors were gone, and the security barrier was ripped off and dangling by one hinge.

Bryn heard a stirring inside the building, and paused at the threshold. This wouldn’t even be a third choice for the homeless, but she still felt stiff with tension. Rats, she thought. This place was probably a playground for them.

Now that she’d stepped into the mouth of the beast, there was no particular reason to stay stealthy; she switched on the penlight she’d brought with her. The narrow, stark white beam didn’t make her feel any better; if anything, it only increased her anxiety about what was in the ink-black edges of her vision. In and out, she thought, like a mantra. Get in; get out.

The clock was running.

The main entry room was large and had four doorways leading out. There was a metal desk left abandoned in the approximate middle of the room, bolted in place. It listed to one side like a sinking ship and was covered with rat droppings, trash, empty bottles, broken syringes … the typical treasure trove of an abandoned building. Everything stank like a molding sewer.

Bryn put the bag on the desk and turned to go.

“Hey,” said a soft voice from the shadows.

She spun, pointing the flashlight, but the voice echoed weirdly in the empty room, and she couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from.

“Hey,” the whisper came again, closer.

Screw it. Bryn unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled her gun. The weight of it made her feel less off balance, less vulnerable, even though she knew that was an illusion; she’d seen comrades chewed up by small-arms fire even through ballistic nylon vests. Human beings were always vulnerable.

Not that she was legally considered human anymore.

The voice seemed to come from behind her this time, startlingly close. “Hey, sugar, where you goin’?”

Bryn spun, gun in a firing stance, just as something lunged at her from the darkness on her left. The man skidded to a stumbling halt, the muzzle pressed to his face.

“I’m leaving, sugar,” she said. “Sit your ass down on the floor, cross-legged, hands behind your head. Now.”

He sank down and complied without another word. Homeless, she guessed, and definitely high, from the way his pupils failed to contract in her flashlight beam. He was wearing faded surplus military khakis under layers of coats and dirt-stiff scarves. ‘“Sup?” he mumbled. “Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

“Yeah, I can see how friendly you want to be by the bulge in your pants. Just your way of saying hi? Stay down.” Bryn took three giant steps back, and then paused. She was leaving a hundred thousand in cash sitting there with a homeless would-be rapist. If she turned her back, he and it would surely be gone. “Okay, I’m going to need you to get up. We’re going to take a walk.”

“A walk?” He went from menacing to pathetic in the blink of an eye, and raised his hands over his head. “Please don’t kill me; I didn’t mean nothin’!”

“I’m not going to kill you. Stand up. I can’t leave you here.”

“It’s my place. I got stuff. I leave it, it gets took.”

“Get up, now, or I promise you won’t need stuff ever again.”

He scrambled up, awkward with fear, and she knew this wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him. His head was tucked down, his hands trembling, and his posture was totally submissive.

“Walk,” she said, and circled around so that his path was clear and not within grabbing distance of her.

Her captive shambled out, hands raised, and she followed, careful not to close the distance as he slowed down. “Move. Head for the fence.” He glanced back, and she noticed something strange about him.

His eyes. They didn’t look right. Still dilated, but …

Contacts. He was wearing some kind of costume contacts.

This was him. The one collecting the money. Maybe even the mystery caller himself. It was a great disguise, and she’d almost completely fallen for it.

“Wait,” she said, but that tipped him off that the game was up, and he dodged, blindingly fast, out of the beam of her flashlight.

She lost him.

Bryn switched the light off—had to, to use the starlight effectively—but it took time for her eyes to adjust to the change, and in the second or two required, he just … vanished.

Bryn backed up toward the building, then plunged inside and turned the penlight on to illuminate the desk.

The bag was gone.

The whisper came again, raw and amused. “I think I like you, sugar. You can handle yourself.”

“Show yourself!” she yelled. “I don’t do business with jackasses in clown makeup!”

She got nothing in reply but echoes, but she heard a scrape from a side passage. Her blood was pounding in her head, and she knew the smart thing to do was withdraw, regroup, wait for backup … but he was going to get away clean if she did. I had him, she thought. I had my gun in his face.

She also knew that she’d never be able to identify him. She’d seen what he wanted her to see—the filth, the straggly hair, the clothes, the contacts hiding his real eye color. First rule of disguise was to distract, and he’d done it brilliantly, right down to the submissive body language.

There was another scrape, behind her, and she whirled with her gun ready and braced. She wasn’t going to take another chance, not this time….

And she barely stopped herself from putting a bullet center mass in Joe Fideli’s chest.

He held his hands out to the sides, his gun pointed up, until she came off the shooting stance. She started to speak, but he shook his head, and she fell back into military hand signals to show him where their suspect had gone. He pointed at the penlight, and she clicked it off, and for a moment she felt claustrophobic, swarmed by the dark, until her eyes adjusted enough to make out shadows and shapes.

Then Fideli went in the direction she’d indicated. He moved like the very best combat soldiers she’d worked with, or watched—smooth, calm, no wasted motions. He had some kind of extremely advanced training, whether it was Army Rangers or Navy SEALs or Marine Recon…. Bryn felt unavoidably clumsy next to him, but she kept up as he glided through the hallway, stepping over and around obstacles and trash as best she could. There was a faint clink from somewhere up ahead, off to the right—a bottle rolling? Fideli held up a clenched fist, and she stopped, nerves crawling. After a few seconds, he indicated for her to wait, and he glided a few more steps ahead, checking the exposed point where the hallway emptied into the next room.

Gunfire shattered the glassy silence. Fideli hit the floor, return-firing from a prone position, and Bryn decked it, too, to avoid any ricochets. It was over in a couple of seconds. Her ears were still ringing from the hammer blows of the shots, but she heard running feet somewhere beyond.

Fideli stayed in firing position, but he keyed a throat mike and said, “He’s on the move, heading for the north fence—” He coughed, and rolled over on his back. “And I took one,” he added. “Call nine-one-one, Bryn.”

She saw the dark stain of blood on the filthy floor, and for a second she couldn’t react at all—and then it all snapped together, and she flung herself across to him and pulled his jacket back, then ripped open his shirt.

“Be gentle,” he said. “Got to”—a pause for an ominously wet cough—“explain to Kylie later—”

“Shut up.” Bryn fumbled for her phone and hit the programmed button for McCallister. He answered on the first ring. “Fideli’s down; he took a round in the shoulder but I think it bounced; he’s got a lung wound.” Time was of the essence; she knew that. Depending on the size and location of the puncture to the lung, it could collapse quickly or slowly, but it was bound to happen. “Get in here.”

“I can’t,” McCallister said. He sounded way too calm. “Calling nine-one-one now.”

“But—”

“Handle it, Bryn. Keep him alive until they get there.”

“Wait!” But McCallister had hung up on her, damn him. She dropped the phone and began ripping up the clean portion of Fideli’s shirt to make a pressure pad for his shoulder; it was freely bleeding but not pumping, so it was unlikely the bullet had hit an artery. Internally was another matter; the bullet could have done terrible things on the bounce. No way to tell.

His color was fading, but that was a normal shock reaction. She pressed the wadding of cloth into place, and he winced, turned his head, and spit blood. Not much, though. Not as much as she’d feared.

“Pat call nine-one-one?” he asked. His breathing sounded labored and damp, but not yet critical.

“Yes. I thought he was your friend.”

“He is. But he’s got a job to do.” Another hitch in his breath, but it might have just been a pain reaction; she felt him stiffen, then relax a little. “Should have worn a vest.”

“Yes. We both should have.”

“Next time, eh?” He coughed and reached up to pat her hand where it pressed against the wound. “Good job, Bryn.”

“What, getting you shot?” Her heart was hammering now, and fear was creeping in. “Don’t die on me, Joe. I don’t want to face your kids.”

“Ought to be more afraid of Kylie,” he said, and coughed. This time, there was a lot of blood—oh, Jesus—and she heard distressed breath sounds in his right lung when she pressed her ear to his chest. “Going to be one of those damn tension pneumo things. Check jacket pocket.”

She did, fumbling quickly, and pulled out … a silver tube with a seal. Her drug, which he kept with him in case of her distress. “Joe? Do you want me to give this to you? Will it help?”

“No,” he whispered. His lips were starting to turn blue where they weren’t dark with blood, and his breathing was hitchy and painful. “Drain it. Use it as a needle tube.”

“Is that safe?”

“Safer than dying—ah, God—” His back arched a little, and when his next breath came, she heard nothing from his right side. The lung had collapsed. Fideli’s breathing was shallow and fast.

She ripped the tube open, slid the syringe out, squirted the contents onto the ground in a silvery stream. Well, there goes a few thousand, she thought, stupidly, and filled it with air to push out again, just in case. A drop of liquid hissed out, and then the syringe was clean, or as clean as she could get it. She ripped the handle out to leave a jagged opening for air. She checked his other pockets and came up with a rubber glove; she pricked a hole in one finger and jammed it down over the syringe.

Bryn held the penlight in her teeth and counted off ribs, hoping her years-old emergency field medicine still held true. She pressed on the area, took a deep breath, and pushed the needle home. There was a pop as she went through connective tissue, and then a sudden hiss as air pushed out, inflating the finger of the glove as it escaped. Fideli took in a sudden gasping breath, and the glove deflated, preventing air from flowing in to compress the lung from outside. She couldn’t do anything about the blood in the lung, but that seemed to be less of an urgent issue.

About thirty seconds later, she heard the advancing wail of a siren, and took Joe’s hand. “Hey,” she said. “Looks like I won’t have to get beaten up by your wife. Much.”

He smiled with those pale lips and gave her a thumbs-up, but didn’t try to speak.

One minute later, she heard shouting, and left him to lead them back inside. The police came first to secure the scene, and then let the paramedics in. They immediately threw out her makeshift needle arrangement and inserted a catheter, scooped Fideli onto a gurney, and ran off with him, leaving her in the position of explaining … everything.

Bryn was, of course, promptly arrested. After all, two people with guns, one shot … it looked bad. McCallister didn’t show up to make it better, either. She presented the police with a somewhat ridiculous story about checking out the building for a possible investment, along with her bodyguard, and being fired on by an unknown assailant. The facts would actually support that, as it happened, and her gun hadn’t been fired. The detectives hated the story, of course, but couldn’t argue too much with the evidence that mounted in her support. After six hours in the interrogation room, and another four in very boring custody, she was finally released to her lawyer—someone she’d never seen before, a brusque, harried woman who handed her paperwork and hustled her out to a waiting yellow cab at the curbside.

Patrick McCallister, unshaven and almost unrecognizable in a cap and sunglasses, was driving. He nodded to the lawyer, who tossed an envelope in the window. “There’s my bill,” she said. “Don’t call me again.”

McCallister said nothing, just pulled out into traffic. Bryn was monumentally unsurprised to see him, but she was mildly curious about the disguise. “Who was that?”

“Old girlfriend,” he said. “Best I could do without ringing someone’s bells.”

She let that pass. “How’s Joe?”

“Out of surgery. You saved his life. The bullet bounced and did some damage in his chest wall; he’d have suffocated before help got there if you hadn’t acted. He won’t be able to come back to duty for a few weeks, though.”

“Not my biggest concern.”

“It should be,” McCallister said. His face looked exhausted and pale beneath the thick growth of dark stubble. “Round one went to our friend, and he’s proved he’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Not some rogue accountant with a side business; he’s way too good for that. We’re rerunning every single employee, but he’s hidden this long, and he’s going to stay hidden unless we get very lucky. You’re still our very best option to uncover him.”

“You really think he’ll get back in touch. After this.”

“This didn’t go badly for him. He made off cleanly with a hundred thousand in cash, and took out your protection. You’re alone now, and vulnerable. He’ll like that.” McCallister’s mouth was very tight, and his eyes very dark. “I have to leave you in place, alone. He’s watching us. Closely.”

That was, Bryn assumed, why she was in the back of a cab. Maximum cover for their meeting. Things were getting too hot for him to risk being linked to her directly.

“Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I doubt it, but I can try. He was good. If it hadn’t been for his contacts, I wouldn’t have suspected a thing, and that was only a trick of the light and the angle.”

“He can’t disguise his height that much.”

“That’s not a lot to work with.”

“I know, but it’s what we have to work with, until he gives you something else.” McCallister hesitated. “Bryn, we’re running close to Harte’s deadline. So far, I have nothing to show for it but two hundred thousand lost and a man down. She’s not going to be happy. I’ll do what I can, but we’re almost out of time.”

What he meant was she was almost out of time. And Bryn knew that. She felt it in every aching muscle. “I’ll keep trying,” she said. “You know that. I want to live.”

He pulled the car over and parked, then reached in his coat pocket and took out a silver tube. As he unshipped the syringe, he said, “Shoulder.” She leaned forward and bared skin for him, hardly even wincing at the needle and afterburn this time. You could, indeed, get used to anything. “Tomorrow, you leave the office for lunch and head to a place called La Scala Ristorante. Be there at one o’clock. There’s parking in the back. Inside the back entrance there’s a men’s bathroom. Go in. I’ll be in the last stall to give you the shot before you sit down to eat.”

“The men’s bathroom.”

“It’s less obvious than my going into the women’s room. You can always say you made a mistake. Act embarrassed enough and anyone watching will buy it. Oh, it helps if you’re on the phone as you walk in. The restrooms aren’t clearly labeled, so it’s a simple mistake.”

“You think of everything.” She sighed, and closed her eyes. She felt deathly tired. “I need to go to the mortuary.” Riley’s words came back to her. People never stop dying. There were no days off, no breaks from death. Every day was someone’s most emotional moment.

“Make it an early day,” he said. “Conserve your strength.”

The car was making turns, and she recognized the neighborhood. They were close to her apartment. Her phone, in silent mode, vibrated again. Annie was trying to get hold of her, probably frantic with worry.

“I wish I could have a normal life,” she said. “Just pretend to have one, anyway.”

McCallister thought for a moment, then said, “Liam did mention he’d like you to come to dinner on Thursday night. He’s making beef Wellington.” Somehow, he managed to make it sound as though it were the butler’s idea, and not his own.

“I see. And will I be dining with Liam?”

“Of course, if I can get him to sit down long enough. Otherwise, you’re stuck with me.” He was looking away as he said it, checking over his shoulder for any sign of trouble. “I’ll tell him you said yes.”

“You may have noticed I didn’t actually say that.”

He turned and looked at her, and all the pretense just … stopped. “Come to dinner,” he said. “You just said you’d like to pretend to have a normal life.”

“Did you phrase it that way to see if the protocol inhibitor is still working?”

That woke a very faint smile. “Partly.”

“All right. Can I bring anything?”

“Anything but your sister,” he said. It sounded heartfelt, and she found herself smiling.

“Wow. You sound as if you’d actually met her.”

“I wouldn’t mind meeting her, except that you already have enough to explain. It would take a lot more to produce a boyfriend with a Bruce Wayne mansion that she’s never heard of before. I’m using hypotheticals, of course.”

“The mansion is hardly hypothetical.”

“I was speaking of the boyfriend part. About our relationship.”

“I wasn’t aware you thought we actually had one.”

That cued him to look away again. “Of course we do. I’m your handler.”

“That doesn’t sound as sexy as it ought to.”

He let out a snort that was remarkably like her dog’s, and the brakes eased the taxi to a stop. “You’re home.”

Bryn made no real effort to get out, other than putting her hand on the handle. She said, “You could have come in to save Joe. You didn’t. I know you had your reasons, but it makes me wonder: what if it’s me next time? You said you wouldn’t let me suffer. I need to count on that.”

“You can,” he said. “Always.”

Bryn stepped out and watched the taxi glide away. Her phone vibrated again, and she let out a tired sigh, jammed her fists in the pockets of her hoodie, and went upstairs to explain things to Annalie.

It didn’t go well.