Home for a Spell (21 page)

Tom’s eyes left Marcus and settled on me. With relief? “This isn’t really a social call, Maggie.”

“I have no doubts about that, Tom,” I replied dryly. “But it doesn’t have to be difficult. Does it?”

Tom and Marcus eyed each other a little longer, and then Marcus went off without another word to the kitchen, returning a moment later to find that Tom had, indeed, done as I’d bid and was now seated on the edge of chair and was waiting for him. It wasn’t the most relaxed of perches, but it was a start. Marcus set the glass down on the table in front of Tom and then sat down in front of my reclining body on the narrow shelf of sofa leftover, his left hand looped loosely but protectively over my knee, just above my cast. I know Tom noticed.

He flipped through the file folder, selected a page, and laid it across his precisely positioned knees. Then he took his flip notebook out of his breast pocket, opened it to the next free page, and laid it down as well. He looked up at the two of us.

“Well. What a day, huh?”

If he intended to confuse us, it was working. On me, at least. “Yeah. Big day.” I glanced over at Marcus.

“I, uh, I brought forms for you. Both of you. I’d like you to fill them out with what you told me this morning. Your version of events. Your statement as to what happened.” He handed them over to us.

“Now?” I asked.

“That won’t be necessary. But if you could get them in to me as soon as possible, I would appreciate it. If you run out of room, you can attach an additional piece of paper. Just be sure to initial all pages and sign and date the form where indicated.”

“Gotcha. Can do.” I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. And Marcus wasn’t helping. Finally I asked, “Is that all?”

“Actually . . . no.” He fidgeted with the wire fastener on the spiral notebook, tracing the spaces with his fingertips. “I, uh . . . oh, hell. There is no easy way to do this, so I’m just going to come right out and say it.”

“That might help,” Marcus said, finding his voice at last. “At least it would help us get the show on the road.” I nudged him lightly with my knee and felt his hand tighten over me. Minnie, disgusted with the repeated disturbances of her glorified slumber, turned to give Marcus a reproachful sneer and then hopped down to the floor to watch the proceedings from a distance deemed safe and disturbance free.

“What do you need from us, Tom?” I asked.

He hesitated for what seemed like forever. “First, I have to ask for your sworn secrecy,” he said. “You can’t tell anyone. If you can’t promise that, then I’ll have to come up with another solution.”

“Solution to what?” I prompted gently.

“Sheriff Reed spoke to the state crime lab this afternoon. Their medical testing facility is running on schedule, but there have been staffing cutbacks due to budget cuts at the state level, and the IT group is swamped. They are pushing back time lines for the completion dates of all tests submitted to them, saying it could be months . . . which means that our investigation into Robert Locke’s murder is at a standstill. Unless . . .”

Both Marcus and I waited, but I think we both knew what he was about to say.

“Unless we find another, private-sector source to use as an outside contractor.” He lifted his gaze to meet Marcus’s neutral stare. “Which is what brings me here today.
You
have friends in high places.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Tom nodded, tapping the tip of his pen repeatedly against the notebook. “When your name came up, I have to say, I was surprised. And . . . well, never mind. But Ledbetter is insistent, and he’s convinced both Boggs and Reed that you and your computer magic are the way to go.” Ledbetter was the district attorney, so his opinion went a long way when suggestions were made toward an investigation. Tom’s expression said that he couldn’t believe it but was trying very hard to work with his superiors on this and not against them.

“That must have been hard for you.”

The words slipped out before I even knew I had opened my mouth. Marcus and Tom both looked at me curiously, and I cringed inside. Stupid empathic sensibilities. Sometimes they were more trouble than they were worth.

“Yes, well . . . it’s my job. I’ll do what I have to do,” Tom said. And then he cleared his throat. “So, what do you say? Are you interested? You would be doing a good thing for the county. The sooner we get this murder solved and put behind us, the better off we all will be.” More nonconvincing convincing.

“What ties do you have to Ledbetter?” I asked Marcus out of curiosity.

He shrugged. “I built new computers for his legal team last spring at a substantial discount over buying name brand at a retail outlet . . . which meant his budget was more than enough to allow everyone to be upgraded. It made for a very happy team. And I also solved a networking problem they’d been patchwork fixing for the last couple of years because no one understood enough about the security parameters. Good thing, too—their firewall was a joke. They’re lucky no one hacked in just because it was so laughably easy.”

Marcus let Tom wait a good long minute. So long that I was starting to feel uncomfortable with the silence myself. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

Confusion registered in Tom’s steely gray eyes. A muscle in his jaw clenched, just once, and then relaxed forcibly as if by sheer dint of will. “I don’t understand.”

But Marcus was not ready to relent. “The computer stuff is a business I run, Quinn Enterprises Ltd. It isn’t a charity. Not even for the county government.”

“We’re prepared to pay you your usual fee. All we need is a quick turnaround, guaranteed.”

“Hm,” Marcus said finally. “I start classes on Monday. That doesn’t give me a lot of leeway, but I think it can be done. What, exactly, do you have for me?”

“I need your sworn confidentiality agreements first. One for you and for Maggie.” He flicked a glance in my direction. “Normally Maggie wouldn’t be included in this special arrangement at all, but as she has medical issues at present and is staying with you at your place, the DA has agreed that this is enough of an extenuating circumstance to warrant simply obtaining her agreed-upon silence in the event that she is privy to information simply by living in the same house.” From the file he removed two prepared agreements and handed them over as well.

“Well,” I said, not certain any of that could be considered flattering, “it’s not like I’d be out spreading the word about all of your confidential information anyway, Tom.”

“Well . . . I’m sure you wouldn’t mean to. But people do tend to talk if they’re not reminded not to, Maggie. I’m just saying.”

I felt my lips compressing in annoyance and disapproval. “I honestly don’t see how that’s a fair assessment of the situation. Or of me.”

“It’s not meant to cast judgment or to be derogatory in any way—”

“And yet somehow it is,” I returned quickly, resisting the urge to cross my arms over myself. Meanwhile, Marcus was there beside me, smirking and sitting back for the ride.

“You’re being unreasonable.”

“I don’t see why it’s so unreasonable. Maybe I just don’t like being labeled a gossip.”

“I never said you would do that intentionally—”

“Oh, so it’s just that I’m not smart enough to realize when I’m going to spew information all over? Look out, room, she’s gonna blow?”

“What? No, no. That’s not what I meant. I mean, look, this is my job, Maggie.”

“To serve and protect and defend. Yeah, I know. Whatever it takes.”

Tom had had enough. “Look, are you going to agree to this or not? Because if not, it’s no skin off my nose to go back to the DA and tell him it just didn’t work out. I’m more than happy to go out and find an alternate solution. The only reason I went along with this in the first place is because Ledbetter was so dead set that this would be the perfect answer for all concerned. Quinn here makes a little money and serves a greater purpose, we get answers about what data’s on the stuff we recovered, and
bam
, murderer hopefully identified. Win-win.”

I was fully prepared to nudge the conversation back to the issue we had just been discussing. Marcus, on the other hand, decided enough was enough. “All right,” he said, cutting in and cutting off anything else I might have been ready to say.

“You’ll do it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, all right, then.” For the first time since he walked through the door Tom relaxed back in his chair. “Signatures first. Then we’ll talk about what we need you to look at.”

Marcus avoided my questioning glance, but he was already signing his, so it would have been pointless for me not to sign as well. Finishing his signature with a flourish, Marcus handed his pen over to me. I signed the agreement. It wasn’t like I would ever,
ever
go against the request for confidentiality, regardless of the issues I had with Tom. It hurt my feelings that he would think so poorly of me when I had given him no reason for so little faith. But then again, Tom was a cop, and if there was one thing I’d learned from my time with him, it was that cops of some experience lost the ability to trust your average citizen on the street, even those they had known personally for years. They viewed everyone as possible perpetrators of some crime or indiscretion, suspected everyone of secret deviance or vice, unless proven otherwise. With modern-day cops, it was no longer a case of innocent until proven guilty. It was guilty unless proven otherwise. An unfortunate occupational hazard.

Marcus had handed me his agreement to place with my own, so I tossed them down on the tabletop for Tom. “There. Two signed confidentiality agreements. Hope it helps.”

He reached for them. “It’s a start.”

I think that’s when his mind first registered the items Marcus and I had spread out on the coffee table just a short while before he’d arrived. The
click
was almost audible in the still room.

“What—” And then he recoiled instantly. “What is that?” His gaze went from one item to the next and then back again.

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. It looks like something.”

“Nothing . . . to worry about.” My voice lifted up at the end, more like a question than a statement. Darned insecurities.

“I’ll tell you what it looks like,” Tom said, his stubbornness coming out in a big way. Of course that was nothing particularly new. “It looks like something occultish.”

Tom placed anything and everything paranormal or outside of the realm of the everyday, mundane world into the occult category. But he meant it in a bad way. As though every witch and pagan out there could be compared to a more ruthless magical practitioner who was just in it for power and control over another. Because that was the fear of every mundane when it came to magick, or abilities they didn’t have. That it would be turned and used against them, and they would be defenseless to stop it. Witches, to him, were consorts of evil, trafficking with all sorts of things that he wasn’t sure existed, but didn’t want to come in on the wrong side of, just in case. He was all for stacking the deck on the side of righteousness and piety and moral standing. I, on the other hand, believed in the Light. It didn’t always mean the same thing. Take Reverend Baxter Martin, for example. The perfect example.

Marcus was in no mood. “What it is, is none of your damn business. Now, are you wanting my help or not? Because if not, you can get the hell out of my house.”

Tom shrugged. “Fair enough.” The expandable file folder came out again. He inspected our signatures and dates on the confidential agreements and then carefully filed them within. And then, he pulled out a clear plastic bag. Inside it was the crunched thumb drive that had been found among all the scattered computer effluvium in the office. He held it up. “This was found on the floor of the office this morning.”

A faint smirk touched Marcus’s lips, barely contained. “Yes, I know. I was there, remember?”

Tom ignored him. “We want you to do what you can to read the data on this, safeguard the files to prevent their loss, and try to resolve any corrupted data that you possibly can. Since the computer was specifically targeted, what we’re hoping is that we will find something on there that can be tied to a motive for the killing. Right now we’re just trying to piece together as much information as we can, just trying to talk to as many people as possible who might have seen something, anything, to try to recreate his last hours. Maybe there’s something on this that can help, too.”

“Sounds straightforward enough.”

Tom took something else out of the file folder and handed it to Marcus. “Here’s a letter for you, signed by Chief Boggs, Sheriff Reed, and District Attorney Ledbetter, giving you permission to do all of what we just talked about.” He cleared his throat. “It, um, also gives you immunity, in the event that something of a certain, um . . . nature . . . shows up. At least with regard to what you might find on the drive.”

There was something in between what he was saying that he was purposely leaving out. I could feel the presence of it, hovering there, waiting for someone to acknowledge it. “What exactly does that mean, something of a certain nature?” I asked, watching his face closely for the telltale hint of what he was hiding. Marcus was watching, too. “Immunity from what?”

I could tell he was struggling with how much he thought we should know versus how much we might need to know. Finally, he must have decided to just lay it all out on the line. “There are . . . things that could potentially be on the drive. Things that might be unpleasant. We just have no way of knowing for sure until we are able to gain access. And if it is blank or the files are corrupted or unrecoverable, well, I guess we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.”

Unpleasant. Unpleasant, how? Who were we dealing with here? Robert Locke was just your everyday, average, slightly creepy but mostly harmless apartment manager . . . wasn’t he?

Marcus just came straight out and asked him.