Deegan shook his head. “No. And it was random who put the orders in.”

“Were your drinks ever unattended?”

He shrugged. “I know what you’re asking, but I don’t remember. If I’m not focused on something particular, it doesn’t go into the hypermemory. You know that.”

She did know what he meant. She was using her hypermemory for the interview, recording every nuance of the conversation. “I’m just asking. What did you think of Sanchez?”

He hesitated. She registered doubt and curiosity and was pleased to have stumbled on something that raised her suspicions.

“I think he was working undercover for someone,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, cool, neutral, a simple request for clarification from someone like Mariel, who had a reputation for having seen it all.

Deegan twisted his lips for a moment. “Just a hunch. He asked questions that seemed innocuous, but then he had a knack for following up on them so often that I started to notice the pattern. He never took a personal call at work and said little about his private life. Sometimes he would be late or leave early or take long lunches with lame excuses. Foyle got him on that a lot, but Gabe didn’t seem to care.”

Laura noted the use of the first name. Not unusual, but rare among the cops she knew. If a cop had a long or odd last name, his brothers shortened it or came up with a nickname that played off it. Women were often called by their first names, and they sometimes called men by theirs. With the guys, it happened between close friends. Buddies. “You partnered with Sanchez a lot, right?”

Deegan nodded but looked at his feet when he did. “Yeah. He was a good cop.”

“Did you tell anyone your suspicions?”

He shook his head. “No, it was just gut stuff.”

She finally felt some grief. Not the intensity of lovers, but there had definitely been a friendship. She remembered thinking during the raid that Sanchez had no trouble working with her sendings. She sensed no guilt from Deegan. Given the obvious friendship between them, he’d project guilt or regret if he knew someone had set Sanchez up. She didn’t think Deegan was involved, not with what she was sensing from him.

“Did you ever meet Tylo Blume?”

“Twice. He offered me a job. I declined.”

“Why?”

Deegan shrugged. “Why not? I didn’t need the work.”

“Sanchez took some work.”

“Yeah. They all did. Sanchez was pushing for more.”

“Did you eat or drink with Blume?” she asked.

Deegan furrowed his brow. She worried for a moment she had been too clumsy. “Not that I recall.”

“So you had head-blindness only when you drank with Gianni, Sinclair, or Sanchez.”

Anger colored Deegan’s body signature. “Are you implying something about my fellow officers?”

She gazed steadily at him without showing any emotion. “Am I?”

“I trust them with my life,” he said.

“Janice Crawford will be pleased to hear that,” Laura said.

Deegan leaned forward, essence sparking around him in fragments. Laura didn’t move. As Deegan loomed over her, she pushed more essence into her glamour, enhancing her eyes. The gaze of an Old One was not easily held. Deegan flinched. He hesitated in the silence, then leaned back in his seat. “They’re good men,” he said.

Laura cocked her head to the side. “You don’t seem particularly concerned about Crawford. It makes me curious about your loyalties.”

He sneered at her. “Race-baiting, Tate? That’s a human game.”

She leaned back and crossed her legs. “I was talking about loyalty to truth over comrades.”

He snorted. “I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you.”

Not quite a lie, but not the truth. He had suspicions about something or someone. She had angered him too much, and his body signature was distorted by emotion.

Laura stood, adjusting some pages that threatened to slip out of her folder. “When are you reporting for duty?”

“Not soon. Something important is apparently damaged. I’m still head-blind.”

She walked to the door. “That’s all the questions I have for now, Druid Deegan. I may contact you again as the investigation proceeds.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You mean you’ll stop by to confirm answers you already have.”

Laura threw a slow smile over her shoulder. “Don’t be too sure what I know or don’t know.”

She moved smoothly out of the room with a soft, rolling gait, knowing damned well that despite his anger at her, Deegan watched her ass. She wasn’t insulted. She often turned it into an advantage.

MARIEL TATE’S OFFICE at the Guildhouse was a floor below Terryn’s, far enough away to avoid any persona conflicts for Laura yet close enough to help the transition between personas when necessary. Laura found Liam Wilson, the office assistant, working at his desk in the anteroom. “Hey, Mariel. I had a feeling you would be coming in.”

She liked him. Not many humans worked in the Guildhouse, and Liam was the only one that worked in InterSec. The fey had their fears and suspicions like everyone else, and having humans work in the heart of their U.S. diplomatic building was not desirable. Liam had shown knowledge of the fey world that impressed both Mariel and Genda Boone, the colleague with whom Mariel had been hiring an assistant. When his background check came back clean, he got the job.

He blushed when she smiled at him. “And why is that?”

He handed her a stack of pink slips of paper. “Phone messages. They always start piling up when everyone but me knows you’re about to show up.”

She took the messages and grinned. “Remind me to tell you about the restaurant in the Bahamas. You will love it. Is Genda in?”

Genda traveled as much as Mariel Tate, at least in theory, did. They both presented themselves as high-level consultants at diplomatic meetings. Laura suspected that if Genda performed undercover work for InterSec, it was minor. Industry news often reported Genda’s attending the conferences she said she did. As far as Laura was concerned, the lack of corporate espionage-to say nothing of dead bodies-in Genda’s wake validated her suspicion that the woman was nothing more than a diplomat.

Liam followed her into her office. “She’s at a meeting, but she’s in town. I have four other messages for you: a code call verifying your arrival, two from a police officer named Aaron Foyle, and one from someone claiming to be your mother, who I will not assume is the president of France, despite the accent.” The code call was a fake from Terryn. Since she didn’t recognize the phone number, wasn’t French, and didn’t know the French president, she assumed the other call was Cress joking around.

She slid into the chair behind the sleek black desk. The Mariel office was her favorite work space. In her other offices, she avoided personal trappings in order to prevent cross-contaminating personas, but Mariel’s space was her repository for souvenirs of world travel. The earth-tone colors of the room made a nice counterpoint to the riot of color in paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art. Pushpins of places she’d been or pretended to have been littered a map on a side wall. Red pins stood out even in the white of expanse of the North and South Poles, though she had been to only one of them.

“And here’s a sealed pouch.” He placed the leather envelope next to the messages and waited for her to touch it. InterSec eyes-only documents had several layers of spells on them. A courier chain spell registered the body signature of each person permitted to carry the pouch. Another spell rang softly if the pouch was moved more than a few feet away from whoever was supposed to carry it. Getting released from the spell happened when someone else with a registered body signature touched it. The idea that the pouches spent time in bathrooms and bedrooms creeped Laura out, and she thought about it every time she touched one.