My heart wrenched. “I know, Mom.” I rubbed my forehead. I’d never be able to convince her that Kalif was only trying to help. If I wanted to convince her to stay, I had to try something else. “But if you’re the only person in my life, and you aren’t even healthy—"
Mom looked up at the ceiling, and I thought I saw tears in the corners of her eyes. “I’m going to be fine, honey. I know I dropped the ball. I haven’t been there for you like I should have been. But I’m going to be, from now on. Things are going to be different.”
But Mom’s face stretched gaunt. Even she didn’t believe that. I was sure things were going to be different, but not in the way she wanted them to be.
Still, if she could hope for it, that would be something. “Make it different,” I said. “Stay in the hospital another few days, and really talk to the doctors about why you’re here. You can treat it like a job—make up the details, but at least hint at what’s really going on. I’ll watch your back. I promise.”
That had worked for me with Mary—maybe too well. But Mom looked down at her hands, and I swear her own body shrunk, if only by millimeters. “It’s not safe.”
I stepped closer and put a hand on her arm. “Nothing is. Every choice is a risk. But this is the best one. Trust me on this.”
Mom wavered. “I’ll think about it.”
My shoulders sagged. I didn’t love leaving it like that, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Think about it and stay,” I said.
Mom nodded, but I wasn’t sure that she actually agreed.
That wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring, but it was the best I was going to get.
Twenty-one
After leaving the psych ward, my whole body felt hollow. I grabbed smoothies for Kalif and me on the way back to the hotel, hoping to fill up the emptiness with sugar. But the cold rush only made my hands quake.
When I knocked on the hotel door, Kalif answered and took my hand, passing me his hand signal. Then he put his other hand on my shoulder. “You aren’t going to like this.”
My limbs went cold. “She’s gone already?”
“No. But I found something else. There’s a security report here saying that someone has been impersonating workers at the hospital. First a nurse in emergency, then a janitorial worker in records. Several people claim to have seen each of the workers at their jobs, when they were clocked out and off duty.”
“That’s sloppy,” I said. “Even if your mother got caught once, she shouldn’t have done it twice.”
Kalif gestured toward his phone. “I just hung up from talking to her. She says it wasn’t her, and she’s certain it wasn’t Wendy or Oliver, either.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Does she know who it was?”
Kalif shook his head.
I swore. “It’s her job to know. You shouldn’t be the one bringing these things to her. What are we working with her for if she isn’t aware of what’s going on?”
“She said she’s looking into it. But if it wasn’t you or me, or Wendy or Oliver or my mother—"
“That leaves your father,” I said.
Kalif grimaced. “Or someone else working for the Carmines.”
I nodded. We knew they liked to control shifters, which meant they might have any number of us under their employ. But Kalif’s fingers twitched, and he looked down at the carpet, like there was something he really wanted to say.
I sighed. Might as well say what he was thinking and spare him from being the one to bring it up. “Damon.”
He shrugged at me. “I’m not happy about it, but he’s an unknown element. It could have been him.”
I hated that Kalif was right. There were so few shifters—if one had been stalking the hospital, it was probably one that we knew, or at least someone cooperating with one of them. It was probably his father, but I couldn’t rule Damon out. “Are the reports time stamped?”
“Both happened this afternoon, one right before you went to the hospital, and one right after.”
“So they probably didn’t follow me there.”
Kalif nodded. “Not unless you went to the hospital half an hour before I dropped you off.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll concede it could be Damon. But it’s more likely that your mother is lying. Or that it was your father, who could have tracked us from the apartment. Laura would have told him everything she saw, if he didn’t get the whole thing on camera to begin with.”
“You’re right,” Kalif said. “I just want to think about every angle.”
I couldn’t blame him for that. I looked over the report again, and my heart squeezed. The most likely scenario was still that Mel had found her. Again.
But then again, if Mel knew where she was, she was in the best possible place. Security in the psych ward was better than in most places, and I’d already taken away the shrink persona—they’d ask questions if a second therapist showed up. Profiling the nurses would take time. Now that Aida was aware he might be skulking around, she’d be on the lookout for him as well. After all, she was the one who wanted to track him down to begin with.
“I think our best bet is to go after your father,” I said. If Mel was after my mother, then the best way to protect her from him was to find him.
Kalif shook his head. “We don’t actually have a lead about where he’ll be.”
“The hospital,” I said. “If that was him, that’s a lead.”
Kalif shook his head. “My mom’s following up on that now, but the trail looks like it goes cold pretty quick.”
I nodded. Stealing clothes in a hospital—where doctors and patients alike changed frequently—would be no problem. And with the person in question using so many different personas—there was no way for us to know who he might impersonate next.
He’d expect us to be watching my mom, so no doubt he would have been extra careful. It would be smarter for us to divide and conquer, to come at the problem from another angle entirely. And that meant I needed to trust Aida to follow that lead.
Much as I hated it.
“Let’s back up,” I said. I sat down on the edge of the bed. Starting over could take time, but I had an idea. “You’ve been monitoring the Carmines in their search for me, right?”
Kalif nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “So if I were them, I would have been monitoring the hospitals for records of Mom’s scars, and Mel’s knee wound. But also watching the financial news for mid-scale embezzlements. The kind our parents are so good at fixing.”
“I hid them from my grandparents in case any of them were you.”
But none of them had been. That was another reason I’d been scamming low lifes and thugs—jobs like that didn’t immediately flag themselves as our kind of work. “That means there were leads for you to hide. Do you have a record of them?”
Kalif smiled. “You think some of them might have been Dad. That I was inadvertently protecting him when I was trying to keep Wendy and Oliver from finding you.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “It’ll be faster to follow up on those leads than it will to troll the newspapers for new ones.”
Kalif nodded. “I can find the records. Give me a minute.” He accessed a cloud account to retrieve the information and emailed it to me, and I began to pour over it on my phone. I was immediately glad we hadn’t tried to start from scratch; it came as no surprise that there’s a lot of news in California. Even limiting the result to the Northern half of the state, we were still dealing with reports from half a dozen major newspapers and many, many minor ones.
It took us a few hours to narrow it down to the most likely leads. “This sounds like Mel,” I said. “It’s an embezzlement in Rocklin, at a software company called CareWare. Could have been Damon, but if he was telling the truth about working as hired muscle, it probably wasn’t. The next most likely candidate is your father.”
Kalif looked skeptical. “It could have been someone else entirely. Or not a shifter at all.”
&n
bsp; I held up my hands. “I’m trying to work this through. You could help.”
“I’m pulling it up,” Kalif said.
We combed over the article Kalif had flagged—from the financial section of the Sacramento Bee. A Rocklin company had lost a lot of money in an untraceable wire transfer that originated from the CEO’s computer. He’d sworn that he hadn’t done it, and there was one witness who said he’d been elsewhere at the time of the crime, but twelve people put him in his office at the time of the transfer. With those kinds of odds, it was easy to see who the police would believe.
“That could be shifter work,” I said.
“Could be,” Kalif said. “Look at this.” Kalif pulled up another article. “When things started looking really dire, the man supposedly fled the country, taking his lover with him—a woman who’d been working as the company’s head of HR.
“It’s like your dad to sleep with someone for information,” I said. “But not to run away with her.”
Kalif shrugged. “Looks like they both had a long work record, so they’re probably real people. Maybe they split because it was clear they were being set up to take the fall, and they couldn’t prove their innocence.”
I glared at the article on my phone. That was exactly the sort of thing that our parents did to unsuspecting people. It was one of the main reasons I wanted to get out of the scamming business. The police had done a lot of investigation, but if it was a shifter, they wouldn’t know what to look for. But we would. Mel had left behind tells before that we’d been able to trace.
“We could break into the company,” I said. “Look for traces that might help us follow your dad. Though they may have increased surveillance since this happened.”
Kalif clicked through the articles. “Because he’s a fugitive, it’s an open case. The police station would definitely have everything we need, including anything they seized from the company.”
He was right, but a nervous pit still knotted in my stomach. Dealing with the police was always a risk; if they discovered that shifters existed, our lives would go from hard to hellish.
“That sounds dangerous,” I said. “You’ll probably need me inside so you can get into their system, yeah?”
“That’d help,” Kalif said. “But we’ll probably need to get you in anyway, because it’s possible that not all the evidence is digitized.”
That was a good point. Besides things that couldn’t be, like clothes and shoes, police departments didn’t necessarily digitize every surveillance tape they cataloged. Without casing the company, we didn’t know what form they’d have collected it in.
But a police station was a complicated con. I didn’t want to do it alone. And it presented an opportunity to test Damon—to see what he’d do when he wasn’t chained to a bed. I couldn’t think of a safer place to do that than a police station.
“Okay,” I said. “You can back me up on the computer, and Damon can back me up in person.”
Kalif gave me a hard look.
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t let your personal feelings get in the way of finding your father, right?”
“For all you know, this was his job.”
“And if it was, better to know sooner than later. If we don’t bring him in on this, he can’t tell us what he knows.”
He turned his glare on his computer screen. “I just don’t love bringing other shifters into this mess, that’s all.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Especially ones that are male and hot, right?”
“So now you think he’s hot,” Kalif said. “Good to know.”
I rolled my eyes, but he didn’t look up from his computer to see. “I think you’re hot,” I said. “So obviously there’s no accounting for taste.”
That got a ghost of a smile, and I figured if he was smiling at my insults, even a little, he couldn’t be too angry with me.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a risk and you don’t like it. But this is a job that won’t lead him back to my mom or yours. I don’t particularly care if we lead him to your dad, you know? He has as much reason to want to find him as we do. And if we’re hunting your father, I really wouldn’t mind having some muscle on our side.”
Kalif looked down at his own forearms. “I can bulk these up, you know.”
I bumped his shoulder. “Not exactly the same as mercenary experience.”
A shadow passed over Kalif’s face. “This isn’t a physical confrontation. It’s a police station. You can handle this alone.”
I smacked him. “You’re always telling me not to work alone.”
Kalif raised his eyebrows. “And you think that sending you in with him means I’ll worry less?”
I flopped back on the bed. He had a point, but I still wanted to see what Damon could do in the field. I’d taken a big risk, exchanging hand signals with him.
But I didn’t think that reminding Kalif of that risk was a great way to convince him to play along. “You’re always fretting about how you want to go with me to watch my back, but you’re more useful somewhere you can be online. This way, we can do both.”
He shut his computer screen. “I can’t do both. That’s what I want.”
I took his hand. “I know. But if you have to choose between sending me alone, and sending me with someone who can bail me out if I need it, what do you want then?”
Kalif was quiet.
“Well?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
I tackled him, slamming him shoulder-first into the mattress. He rolled underneath me, wrapping both arms around me as the springs bounced once, and we lay tangled together. “I’m trying to respect your hang-ups,” I said into his ear. “But if you keep up the jealousy act, I’m going to have to convince you that you’re the only one I want.”
Kalif turned his head to kiss me, his lips devouring mine. That wasn’t how this was supposed to go; he was always the one who said this wasn’t about proving anything. That he wanted us to really be free of our parents and their assorted problems before we were really together. We were always teetering on this edge, him and me.
I pinned him to the bed. “You really want him to be the thing that pushes us over?”
Kalif groaned and rolled over, knocking me off him. “Did you really have to say that?”
I smiled. “That’s my job. Destroyer of romantic moments.”
“Speaker of truth,” Kalif said. “Same damn thing.”
I straightened my hair with a shift. We had to get to work, or we were going to drive each other insane. “So here’s what we need,” I said. “Covers that will get us into the police station. Keys to the evidence room. Access to the computer files. Passwords or whatever to get us into the building, computers, what have you.”
Kalif stared at the floor. “You could get Damon arrested. That would probably help.”
“Right,” I said. “Very helpful.”
Kalif held up his hands. “Hey, if he turns out to be a traitor, it’d be a great move.”
“I’m going to call Damon,” I said, "to see what he has to add.”
I turned my back on Kalif while I dialed, so I wouldn’t have to see the sour look on his face.
I was afraid that Damon had given me a fake number. No doubt he was out of his apartment by now. He could be halfway to China. But he answered on the second ring, using the same voice he’d used when he first woke up in his room—as close to his home voice as I was likely to hear.
“Hey, lovely,” Damon said.
Kalif must have heard, because he sighed heavily behind me.
I pitched my voice higher than normal—the same tone I’d used at Damon’s apartment. “Did you know it was me?” I asked, "or do you always answer your phone that way?”
“I gave you this number,” Damon said. “I saved it specially for you.”
Of course he did. I’d do the same thing with this disposable.
“Did you find him?” Damon asked.
“He’s been gone for weeks, just like you
said.”
“So I take it you’re calling to pump me for more? Sorry, sweetheart. You took me for everything the first time around.”
“No, actually,” I said. “I need to get into a police station. Got anything for that?”
Damon didn’t miss a beat. “I have some badges we might be able to use. San Francisco Police department. Sacramento Fire Department. FBI.”
“Useful,” I said. “But we’re going to the Rocklin police station. Maybe we could be visitors from the FBI.”
“And you think I want to help you? What’s in it for me?”
“The pleasure of my company,” I said.
Kalif gave another belabored sigh behind me, and this time I turned to him and mouthed: Sorry.
Damon laughed. “Fair enough. What is it that we’re looking for? That’ll be important to our angle.”
I held my breath. He’d agreed quickly—probably too quickly. Either he really wanted to see me again, or he was agreeing to get more information out of me. I could hardly fault him for the latter. That was what I’d have done, in his position. “We’re investigating an embezzlement incident at a software company in Rocklin. That wasn’t you, was it?”
“No,” Damon said. “Embezzlement really isn’t my style. We’re hoping it was the asshole?”
“Exactly,” I said. I wanted to ask him about the hospital job, but I couldn’t without letting him know that there was someone in the hospital who was important to me. I might be willing to try running jobs with him, but until I could be absolutely sure he didn’t work for the Carmines, I didn’t trust him near my mom. Not for a second. “If we suspect that the money was routed across state lines, or out of the country, that would be FBI jurisdiction.”
He had a point. “We’d need some kind of warrant, wouldn’t we?”
“Not to ask questions. And not if the police station wants to cooperate with us.”
Kalif fiddled with the hotel-provided pen, punching the clicker up and down, up and down.
My body deflated. I usually had these conversations with him. If I wanted him not to hate Damon, I wasn’t helping. But we still needed to run the job.
A Million Shadows Page 19
