And then Aniruddha left, checking his clipboard for the next item on his to-do list.
Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea, going for a walk. But I wasn’t hungry. I was still jazzed from all the energy potions I’d been mainlining for the last few days and my stomach had cramped into one hard knot.
I headed down to processing instead. It was the office where they tagged and organized evidence before filing it away in a warehouse for the rest of eternity.
I’d only ever seen one woman working the desk there. Ivy was older than dirt but sharper than shale. She worked in a cinder block room in the basement of the OPA office. Its high windows were barred. There were three aisles of tables with evidence waiting to be filed. Everything was tagged with slips of pink, yellow, blue, and green paper.
I’m sure it seemed organized to Ivy, but it looked like insanity to me.
She snapped her fingers when she saw me come through the door and said, “Case File 4457-A. I’m on top of it.”
“Thanks, Ivy,” I said.
Ivy went searching for my case file number, shuffling between the tables, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, muttering to herself.
A CD on the table next to me caught my eye. It was sitting in the sunlight label-down and casting a rainbow on the wall. It was tagged with green paper.
“What’s green mean?” I asked.
Ivy didn’t even look at me. “Evidence seized by the union .”
“It gets mixed up in here too?”
“Oh yes. That’s a good way of putting it. ‘Mixed up.’ I swear to you, if they would just take care to label things before sending them to me…” Ivy sniffed delicately. “The union is the worst about it, too. I just had two boxes of evidence from Costa and Dawes brought to me, and it’s like they were deliberately attempting to obfuscate their evidence! It’ll take days for me to review and sort through it all. Days.”
The disc had been taken from Eduardo and Joey? While Ivy was still distracted, I flipped the disc over. It had been printed with a time and date—the day before Erin’s murder. And Ivy was right about obfuscation. Someone had blacked out the case number with marker.
I grabbed it. Tucked it into my pocket.
Ivy turned around, setting a box on the table in front of me. It had a pink label. Why did the union get to be green when Magical Violations was freaking pink? “The personal effects taken from your apartment will take longer to return. We need to seize them from the LAPD. Everything you need to do your job should be in here, however.”
I took the box from her. I managed a smile.
“Thanks.”
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I went home to check out the CD in privacy.
It was the first time I’d taken my work-issued laptop back to my apartment. I sat at my kitchen table as the disc drive whirred to life, nursing a tall glass of chocolate-flavored protein powder and almond milk. It wasn’t sitting well in my cramping stomach, but I needed the sustenance. Anything but another energy potion.
Before I opened the video program, I checked to make sure the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were turned off—didn’t want the laptop reporting to the OPA that I was reviewing stolen evidence. It might have been paranoid, but whatever. I felt like I had earned some paranoia.
Then I clicked the video. I fully expected it to be surveillance of my apartment, or maybe The Pit.
But the gray picture that appeared on the screen was of Suzy’s house.
I felt a wave of shock at the sight of her familiar couches and coffee table. Cat was lying on one of her chairs, kneading a blanket in his paws. The windows were open—Suzy hadn’t been burgled yet. Clicking the fast-forward button, I watched Cat sleep at four times normal speed, his furry flank rising and falling rapidly. He got up, licked his ass, went back to sleep on a couch. Night fell outside. Cat chased a fly and then disappeared.
Motion flashed outside Suzy’s window, but the video was going too quickly for me to be able to tell what it was. I resumed normal speed. Reversed. Hit play.
A human figure crossed through the shadows outside.
I watched the next five minutes with my breath stuck in my throat. The intruder didn’t come through that window. She came in somewhere off screen and walked through the living room with her back to the camera. Fished around under the coffee table, searched Suzy’s filing cabinet.
Then the intruder turned as if she could feel the camera looking at her.
I paused the video.
Her face was square and framed with heavy brown hair. Her lips were full. I would know—I’d kissed those lips.