Chapter 16
As it turned out, Falin did let me out of his sight, and at his own insistence. He requested that I wait in the car while he ran inside his office, so I sat in my own car, in the mid-August heat, glowering. Granted, his reasoning was sound.
Letting on to Nori that Falin and I were friends probably wasn’t in anyone’s best interest, but I couldn’t help feeling that our very association was a secret he didn’t want his fae acquaintances to know. Hey, girls have feelings.
When he returned he carried only a single distressingly thin folder. It was my car, so I was driving, but with the case file so close, I was tempted to hand off my keys. I didn’t. I’d seen Falin drive before, and I didn’t trust him behind the wheel of my car.
“So what does it say?”
“I’m stil on the first page, Alex,” he said, his head bent over the file as I drove.
He tore two pages from the file, folded them, and shoved them in his pocket. I twisted in my seat, never actual y taking my eyes off the road, but only just barely.
“What was on those pages?”
“Court business.”
Right. As in none of my business. Why was he real y here? I didn’t know.
He’d finished reading the file by the time we reached the restaurant. I debated driving through to save time, but I wanted to get my hands on the file before he changed his mind and decided not to share. Folding myself into one of the uncomfortable particleboard booths that tended to the uncomfortable particleboard booths that tended to populate al fast-food chains, I pored over the file, barely noticing the chicken nuggets I ate while I read.
The main thing I learned was that Nori couldn’t document worth a damn, and unless she’d left out a lot—or the two pages Falin removed had contained the useful information
—her investigation had gone al of nowhere. Most of the events in the files were ones where I’d been present, and my firsthand experience was much more informative than her abbreviated write-ups. If she’d heard back from the ABMU about the spel s in the feet or the disk, she hadn’t included that information in her report. The only exhaustive record she kept was a list of fae who’d been questioned and relocated to Faerie, and that was a big, long list.
After flipping the last page, I shoved the file away in disgust and polished off the last of my fries. “Hey, agent in charge, I think your subordinate could stand to brush up on, wel , everything.”
“She gets her job done,” he said, which didn’t quite count as disagreeing with me, but he focused on his hamburger, obviously not wil ing to discuss the matter further.
As we finished lunch, John’s ringtone—the theme song from Cops—cut through the air. I dug in my purse and grabbed the phone as the song started its second repetition.
“John, did you get my message?” I asked by way of greeting.
“Good afternoon to you too, Alex,” he said, his deep voice ful of amusement. “I did get your message. I also heard some water-cooler gossip that you might have had some trouble this morning. Everything okay?”
I gave him the summarized version of the morning’s predawn events, then asked him the question no one seemed to be able to answer. “Has the ABMU turned up any leads on the spel s in the feet or the disks?”
“Definitely not on my case, but if you’re correct about the caster responsible for the feet being the same as the one caster responsible for the feet being the same as the one who sent the construct, I can probably make a case to get a copy of the results from the disks. If there are any results, that is. No guarantee, and I’m not saying I’l be able to pass it on to you, but I’l check.”
“I’l owe you one,” I said, and suddenly, sitting in the middle of a fast-food restaurant with John al the way across town, I felt the potential for imbalance grow between us. Damn. It’s going to take time to get used to that.
“Yeah, wel , I’m inclined to tel you to let the police handle this, but with the attacks targeting you, and with Hol y caught up in the middle of it, I know you won’t. Have you tried contacting Dr. Aaron Corrie?”
The name sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to remember why. “He was one of the founding members of the Organization for Magical y Inclined Humans, wasn’t he?”
I’d had to write a paper on him in academy. As wel as being one of the founders of OMIH, he was from a family that had been practicing magic generations before the Awakening and reputedly had one of the largest col ections of ancient grimoires in the world.
“Yeah, but did you know he was local?” John asked. “He consults for the police on occasion, and he likes puzzles, so he might help you for a modest fee. I’l give you the address.”