“I don’t know!” she said, the accent drawing out her o’s like stretched taffy.
He reared back a little, as if she’d just insulted his mother. “Stop it!”
Amber flinched slightly, then heaved out a breath. She needed to get a grip. Rolling her shoulders back, she very slowly said, “Sorry. Glamour spells make me panic and then I act even weirder than usual.” Her voice was back to normal.
“I honestly didn’t think weirder was possible,” he said, as he moved away from the door and toward his desk. There was the barest hint of a smile on his face.
“Rude,” Amber said, but his gentle teasing made her relax a little more. This was familiar territory.
Taking a seat behind his desk, he gestured for her to sit on the other side. “Start at the beginning, I guess. Like why you’re currently wearing yet another face.”
Instead of sitting, Amber began to pace. She told him about Sienna, Molly Hargrove’s visit to Randy Tillman’s house, and the conversation Amber overheard at Lilac Garden.
The chief didn’t say a word through all of it; the only hint of movement came from his eyes as he tracked her from one side of the room to the other.
When Amber finally paused long enough to catch her breath, the chief said, “Oh boy. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with dry-labbing. Do you know what that is?”
“You do?” Amber asked, finally taking a seat.
“Dry-labbing means a lab tech issues a report about a tested sample that never actually got tested,” he said. “There have been handfuls of cases over the years of techs making a practice of falsifying test results. It’s usually because the tech is overworked and under pressure to clear as many test kits off his or her plate, so the tech starts cutting corners.”
“Wouldn’t large-scale dry-labbing screw up all kinds of cases, though?” Amber asked. “I mean, cutting corners is one thing, but to do it at a lab where the results could mean someone is arrested or convicted?”
The chief nodded. “It’s a nightmare. Convictions have to be overturned due to inaccurate evidence. Innocent people get sentenced for things they didn’t do. Even if the tech wasn’t being outwardly malicious, dry-labbing can cause a major ripple effect. And worse still, every once and a while, you get a tech who is bribed into falsifying records—which sounds like what this Victoria woman has been doing.”
“Which likely means Simon’s blood alcohol results aren’t true. Bianca said he doesn’t drink,” Amber said. “If he really was roofied, would that show up in his blood? Is it just a matter of making sure the sample actually gets tested now?”
“Rohypnol breaks down in the bloodstream fairly quickly,” the chief said. “It’s one of the reasons it’s a favorite drug among criminals: hard to trace. If the blood sample hasn’t already been destroyed, it may be possible to get an outside lab to run a second set of tests on the blood. Normally one would go to the head of police or even the mayor to request such a thing, but we don’t have that option right now. This is both out of my immediate jurisdiction, and the two people with the most power in Marbleglen right now are both part of the cover-up. Simon’s lawyer can keep trying to make formal requests for a second test, but I have a sneaking suspicion the sample has already disappeared. That, or his lawyer is currently leaping through an endless amount of bureaucratic hoops.”
“So you’re saying we shouldn’t do anything?” Amber asked.
He cut her a sidelong look. “You know me better than that by now. I say we encourage Simon’s lawyer to keep trying to get another lab to test Simon’s blood, but we should also explore as many other options as we can.”
Satisfied with that, Amber nodded. “I should warn Molly, right? They might try to take her down too.”
“They might, yes, but as Yvette said, it’s currently in all their best interests not to act, so we have some time,” he said. “One problem with warning her about this is the matter of her reputation. She’s been called a ‘relentless snake.’ Tillman, Daniels, and Sable all have a hand in this, and they all seem perfectly content with not only the murder of an officer, but the framing of an innocent man. We don’t know what level of alliance they have for each other, or how far any of them would go in the name of self-preservation. At this point, we have to assume all three are dangerous. Throwing an equally volatile Molly Hargrove into the mix may be a bad move.”
Amber agreed. “Are we basically up a creek unless we find that storage unit, then? If Simon never gets his memories back and no additional evidence is presented, he’ll end up in County again and likely won’t see the outside world unless it’s through the spaces between the bars in his cell.”
Apparently unfazed by her grim outlook on Simon’s future, the chief said, “Can you use one of your locator spells to find the unit?”
“Not without more information. I don’t know whose name the unit is under and I have no idea where it is,” Amber said. “It might be in Marbleglen. It might be in Edgehill. Or it might not be in Oregon at all.”
The chief sighed deeply. After a moment, he grabbed his desk phone out of its cradle, put in a call, and then hit the speaker button.
“Reyes speaking.”
“Hey, Juan,” the chief said. “This is Owen.”
“Hey, man,” Reyes said. “Sorry, been meaning to call you. So … I got in contact with my FBI buddies and it turns out they’ve had their eye on Daniels for a while. He’s been in Marbleglen for going on a decade, but before that, he’d gotten caught up in a case in Florida that involved fraud, stealing from evidence lockers, and even a key witness disappearing the night before he was supposed to testify in court. Daniels was still a relatively new officer then, and it turned out that his supervisor got most of the heat for it anyway. Daniels lawyered up, the charges were eventually dropped, and he skipped town. He’s bounced from job placement to job placement since then, but Marbleglen stuck with him for some reason. Possibly because Jameson was a bit shady himself and turned a blind eye to a lot of the crap that happens in the department here.”
Chief Brown looked ten kinds of disgusted. “They going to help keep an eye on him?”
“Yeah. I told them I’ve got a reliable source telling me Daniels is up to something again, so they’ll be here in the next few days,” Reyes said. “They told me to just keep watching him and if things escalate, they can be here in an hour, max.”
“Thanks,” the chief said. “Knowing there’s one good apple in that bunch makes me feel better.”
Reyes chuckled. “Oh, hey, how’re Jessica and Sammy?”
“Good, good. I tell you we just had our second? Isabelle.”
“Congratulations! Flora is pregnant with our first,” Reyes said. “She’s due in October. That scares me more than anything on this job ever has.”
“As it should!” the chief said. “We’ll talk soon, all right? Give my best to Flora.”
“You got it. Same with Jess.”
The chief hung up, smiling softly to himself. Amber was so grateful in that moment that Edgehill had someone like Chief Brown watching out for them, and not someone like Chief Daniels.
“Would it be helpful if I did a locator spell on Daniels, Tillman, and Sable?” Amber asked now. “I could even add Molly. That way you wouldn’t have to use any of your resources to keep tabs on them.”
“That could work until we come up with a more solid plan, yeah,” he said. “Could you mark all the storage unit facilities on maps in Edgehill, Marbleglen, and Belhaven? If any of the dots travel to one of those locations, we’ll know someone is likely going after the gun.”
“No problem.”
“Good,” he said, nodding. “What do you need in order to add Victoria’s dot to the map?”
“An object that belongs to her would be ideal,” Amber said. “But a picture likely would be enough.”
“All right,” he said. “It should be relatively easy to find her if she works at a local lab. I’ll track her down. I do recommend that you warn Bianca
that Mayor Sable is going to try to cozy up to her to get information about the status of Simon’s memory.”
Amber nodded. “Okay.”
“Short of a confession,” the chief said, “locating the murder weapon might be our best chance here to at least take some of the heat off Simon. Perhaps you can have a few people who can help you keep tabs on that map? It’ll be like having a stakeout in your living room.”
“I could totally be a PI if I rarely had to leave my apartment,” Amber said. “All my snacks are there! And yeah, I have three or four people who could help.”
“Great. Get started on that, and I’ll let you know when I find Sullivan,” the chief said.
She felt the urge to yell “Break!” to end their football-like huddle but opted to just say her goodbyes and leave. She felt far steadier about this than she had when she’d left Lilac Garden, the conversation between Tillman, Daniels, and Sable still ringing in her head. Three people who had power and money and had used that power and money to cover up the fact that they’d killed one man and framed another.
Walking past Dolores’s desk, Amber raised a hand in farewell. Then that newly acquired steadiness flew out the window as she said, “Top o’ the evening to ya, lass!”
Face on fire, she fled the building.
Later that evening, Amber’s studio apartment was as packed as it had ever been. Jack, Kim, Bianca, Edgar, and Amber sat around the dining room table, which had hurriedly been cleared of Amber’s animated toys in various stages of completion. If Willow didn’t get to Edgehill soon, Amber wasn’t sure she would be able to get all the orders done in time for the festival.
But that was a worry for another day.
In the middle of the table, Amber had laid out three maps—the Belhaven one had been brought over by Kim an hour before. The maps were laid out top to bottom, starting at the head of the table, with Marbleglen at the top, Edgehill in the middle, and Belhaven at the bottom.
For an hour, Kim had helped Amber find as many storage facilities in the three towns as they could, marking each of them on the maps with a black X. Just before the rest of the group—Edgar, Jack, and Bianca—had arrived, Amber had conducted her four locator spells, resulting in four dots popping up on the map. The only one that had taken a few tries had been Molly.
At the moment, Amber only knew which dot belonged to which person because of their current locations, but since they were all the same color, it would be easy to lose track of which was which if she took her eyes off the map for too long. She wondered if she could glamour the dots to give each one a distinguishing feature.
Amber stood at the end of the table with the Belhaven map closest to her, and began her explanation of the task at hand, filling everyone in on what she’d overheard at Lilac Garden. Kim’s eyes were wide through the whole presentation, though Amber had told her most of it already.
Edgar remained his stoic, expressionless self. Jack alternated between watching Amber and the dots on the map with intense focus.
Bianca had kept her composure until Amber confirmed that Bianca’s father had been drugged and framed for murder. Then she started to pace the small apartment. No one said anything to her, somehow all sensing that the woman was clearly still listening but needed to keep moving.
“Chief Brown thinks finding the gun is our best chance right now. We’ll be doing low-budget surveillance on everyone for him until he and his colleagues come up with a plan,” Amber said. “So I’m wondering if you all will help me watch the map in shifts. During the day, if one of you can be up here watching the map during my shifts, that would help a lot. And on the weekends, when Kim, Bianca, and I are at the float barn, if one of you guys could be here, that would help too. I hardly sleep as it is, so I can take care of the evening watch.”
Jack and Kim frowned at that last part.
Bianca said, “I hardly sleep either. If you need a break one night, call me. I’ll probably be up.”
Edgar nodded. “Same.”
“Kim and I have to be at the float barn from ten until four tomorrow,” Amber said.
“Me too,” said Bianca.
“Ten? That’s so early to be out of the house,” Edgar said, groaning.
Jack laughed. “I can do ten until one or so, if you can do one till four?”
With another nod, Edgar said, “Done.”
After working out a schedule for the rest of the week, the group slowly dispersed. Bianca left first, Edgar second—after a brief conversation with Kim, who fluttered her eyelashes a lot and giggled even more—and then Kim.
When they were alone, Jack sat on the couch and motioned for Amber to join him. Once she did, he turned to face her, an elbow propped up on the back.
“Want to talk about this whole not sleeping thing?” he asked.
Amber sighed. “I just have Kieran nightmares sometimes. A … lot of times.”
“What happens in them?”
“Mostly just reliving what happened,” she said, hand absently rubbing her throat.
“That happened almost two months ago,” he said slowly. “It’s been happening for that long? Does it happen every night?”
Amber chewed her bottom lip and cast her gaze around the room. She startled when his hand pulled hers from her throat. He sandwiched her palm between his.
“Did they get worse when my memory spell broke?” he asked.
Her attention shifted to him, wondering how he’d figured that out.
“That zap was pretty strong,” he said. “It wouldn’t be surprising if it shook memories loose for you, too. I’m …” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I feel like this is my fault, too. If I hadn’t freaked out on you, the memory spell wouldn’t have happened, and the zap wouldn’t have happened, and you wouldn’t be an insomniac now.”
Amber’s chest ached at the crestfallen look on his face—the way his brows were jammed so close together, they almost fused. She reached out a finger and smoothed that giant wrinkle out of his forehead. “The nightmares happened before that. They got a little more intense after the zap—” His brows bunched up again and she reached out again to smooth them back into place. “But you didn’t cause them, okay? Don’t feel guilty.”
He nodded once, but she knew she couldn’t smooth away his guilt the same way she could the worry lines marring his forehead. His gaze was focused on her hand still sandwiched between his.
“Do you have a little time to hang out?” she asked. “Because I was thinking we could remedy that problem of you being a season behind in Vamp World.”
“Sounds perfect.”
Jack was in charge of popcorn while Amber set up her laptop on the coffee table. One day she would get an actual TV.
With the lights off, a bowl of popcorn between them, and a cat curled up on either side of them, Jack draped an arm around Amber’s shoulder as the credits for episode one started. Amber settled against him.
Sunlight cascading over her face woke her, and she stirred, disoriented. The pillow beneath her head wasn’t her usual down-stuffed one. This one was a bit unforgiving—and it breathed. It was Jack’s chest. She’d been sleeping on Jack Terrence’s chest and her legs were tangled with his and how on earth had this happened?
Amber did her best to look over her shoulder without waking him—partly because Alley’s body was curled up close enough to Jack’s face that if Amber startled the cat, Alley might either horribly maim Jack or, at the very least, smother him. Her laptop sat open on her coffee table, the screen dark. The empty popcorn bowl sat beside it. Tom was curled up by their feet.
As she returned her attention to the sleeping man she was practically on top of, said man stirred, then yawned. Alley grumbled, but merely got up, stretched, then silently hopped to the ground, presumably to finish her dozing on the window bench seat now that the sun was up and the fabric was warm.
Amber noticed the moment Jack realized he wasn’t at home asleep on his own couch, because he froze so abruptly mid-yawn, that he almost choked on it.
&n
bsp; “Oh!” he said, then relaxed beneath her and offered her a goofy, still-groggy smile. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she said, face flushed.
Jack reached up to smooth away a few wayward strands of her undoubtedly wild bedhead. The way he looked at her made her feel warm and fuzzy, but also made her want to run screaming from the room. She knew Jack would never make the same choice again—to have her erased from his memory—but the fact that he’d made that choice even once would likely always haunt her. The intense desire she had to trust him scared her more than anything. She knew the risks of dating a non-witch. She had lived through it with her ex, Max, and then again with Jack, and yet she wanted to risk the potential heartbreak all over again. Walking headlong into something with her eyes wide open to what was at stake was somehow even more terrifying than walking in blind.
“Did we even make it through episode one?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Did we eat the popcorn? Did it vanish into thin air? I swear I don’t remember anything that happened after the opening credits,” she said, hoping her morning breath wasn’t as out of control as her hair.
“Me either,” he said. “See, told you I was a party animal. Put this old man in front of a screen after eight in the evening and I’m out like a light.”
She laughed. But then the rest of the evening—what had led to Jack being in her apartment in the first place—caught up with her and she sobered quickly. “Oh no! We left the maps unattended all night.”
Jack winced. “Crap.” He didn’t make any attempts to move, though, and the sudden light pressure of his hand on her back halted her from getting up either. “It took us all of an hour to fall down on the job.”
He had one arm wrapped around her, his hand flat on her back, presumably to keep her from pitching off the side of the rather small couch and onto the floor. All she wanted to do was to lie back down, rest her head on his warm chest, and sleep for another ten or twenty hours. The look on his face now told her he wasn’t remotely concerned about what was happening on the maps.
“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.
Pawsitively Swindled Page 25
