“Tell me about the conspiracy,” he said.

“I used to work for Lucan Protection Services. Do you know it?”

He paused his coffee mug in midair, all of his senses crackling. “Sure. Max Lucan is a member of the Arcane Society. He runs a high-end art-and-antiquities security agency.”

“I went to work for his company about seven months ago. At the time I felt very fortunate to get the job.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that the combination of my talent plus my family history gives me employment problems. The result is that I change employers the way some folks change their socks.” She paused. “I get fired a lot.”

“I understand the personal history issues. It could not have been easy growing up in a family that doesn’t officially exist. But what’s the problem with your talent? I would think being a finder would make you a natural fit for any kind of investigation or security firm.”

She took another sip of tea and lowered the mug. “The problem is that I’m picky about what I find.”

“Explain.”

“A lot of security and investigation work involves locating people who don’t want to be found. Often those who are lost have a very good reason for disappearing. Then there are the dead bodies. Sure, once in a while those kinds of jobs are okay. I understand that sort of work needs doing.”

“Like yesterday at the Zander mansion?”

“Right,” she said, very earnest now. “I mean, I’m all for getting justice for murder victims and closure for families. It’s important work. Honorable work. Necessary work. But it is incredibly depressing to spend your entire working life, day in and day out, searching for people who are either dead or don’t want to be found.”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” he admitted. “Is that what you did?”

“Mostly. As soon as my employers realized I could find bodies and lost people, they kept giving me those kinds of cases. But Lucan Protection Services was different. I was one of the technicians there. I enjoyed the work. No one expected me to find dead people, just lost art and antiquities.”

“What went wrong?”

“I was doing a really good job. I got promoted to Department A.”

“What’s Department A?”

“It’s an elite investigation division within Lucan,” she said. “Very hush-hush.”

Fallon suppressed a groan. “Right. Hush-hush.”

“I was doing okay, making good money. I was even thinking about getting vested in the company retirement plan. I had a nice apartment. It almost felt as if I was starting to get a life. Finally.”

“You didn’t have one before going to work for Lucan?”

“Not the normal kind,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like living under fake names and IDs your whole life?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I can see where it would start to wear on a person.”

“After a while, you start to wonder if you really exist. But I was beginning to feel comfortable at Lucan, probably because people like me are considered normal there, at least inside Department A.”

“You mean people with some talent?”

She nodded. “Lucan hires a lot of sensitives, especially in Department A. It caters to clients who are sensitives and deal in antiquities that have a paranormal provenance. All in all, I fit right in. Then I found out what was really going on.”

The rabbit hole suddenly got a whole lot darker. I’m doomed, Fallon thought. I’ve fallen for a woman who has gone over the horizon.

“What did you stumble into?” he asked, resigned to his fate.

“One of the lead investigators in Department A, Julian Garrett, my old boss there, is running his own private business. He’s an arms dealer. But not just any arms dealer. He specializes in paranormal weapons.”

Isabella waited, watching expectantly for his reaction to her bombshell.

“Huh,” he said.

“That’s all you have to say? I thought Arcane frowned very heavily on that kind of thing.”

“It does.” Fallon put his fingertips together and gave the subject some serious thought. “Hard to imagine that something like that could be going on inside Lucan Protection Services, though. I don’t doubt that Max Lucan has brokered a few shady antiquities sales in his time. And I’m aware that he specializes in art and artifacts with a paranormal provenance. But Lucan is no fool. He knows that if Arcane finds out that he’s dealing para-weapons to bad guys with some talent, J&J will come down on him like a very big mountain.”

“I don’t think Max Lucan knew what was going on. But I think he must have been getting suspicious about Department A. Julian Garrett knew that. To save his own hide, he set me up to take the fall. Now Lucan thinks I’m the one who was dealing the para-weapons. I’m sure he told Julian to find me and bring me in, but Julian wants me dead so I can’t talk.”

“Let’s go back a step. How did you discover that you were being set up by Julian Garrett?”

“I walked into my cubicle one morning and saw a whole bunch of really ugly energy around my desk and computer. It was not there the day before when I left work. The trail led straight back to Julian Garrett’s office.”

“What did you do?”

“I realized Julian had been in my cubicle, but I couldn’t imagine why. I started going through my drawers. I didn’t find anything, so I went to work running all sorts of virus checks and searches on my computer.”

“You found something?”

“A hidden file,” Isabella said. “It contained a record of the sale of a number of antiquities. At first glance there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, but I couldn’t understand why Julian put the file on my computer. So I started researching the individual artifacts.”

“What did you find?”

“I soon discovered that all the objects had a few things in common. In addition to having the usual paranormal provenance, every single one of them should have been classified as weapons-grade artifacts according to the company guidelines.”

“Anything else?”

“All of the transactions had been handled off the books. None of the sales were recorded in the company archives. What’s more, they had all been obtained from a single source, a broker named Orville Sloan. He’s a major player in the black market.”

“Did you confront Julian Garrett?”

“For Pete’s sake, of course not,” Isabella said. She looked horrified. “It was obvious he was setting me up. It would have been my word against Julian’s. Julian has worked for Lucan for several years. Lucan trusts him. What’s more, Lucan would have been ruthless. He would have made certain that I wound up in prison or worse.”

“So you ran.”

“Yes. But I also called my grandmother and told her what was going on. She’s the one who said that if Julian Garrett found me, he would very likely kill me.”

Isabella was not inventing any of this, Fallon thought. Her interpretation of events might be skewed, but she was giving him the facts as she knew them. What the hell was going on here?

Fallon sat forward, reached for the computer keyboard and typed in a quick series of searches. He got a ping immediately.

“What did you find?” Isabella asked.

“A report of the death of an arms dealer named Orville Sloan.” Fallon studied the data on the screen. “He was shot a month ago. No suspects.”

Isabella’s mouth tightened. “I’ll bet Julian killed him to cover up more tracks.”

“Arms dealers have a lot of enemies,” Fallon said mildly.

He reminded himself that Isabella was the granddaughter of the Sentinel. Conspiracy theories were second nature to her. But he couldn’t restrain his instinctive response. He slid deeper into the hot zone of his talent. The vast web was starting to brighten with a cold light. A pattern was forming. There was something here, something important.

“I don’t suppose you have anything resembling proof of what you think is going on inside Department A, do you?” he asked.

Isabella hesitated. “It’s sort of hard to prove that kind of stuff.”