Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  “Wait while I get a pen.” He did that, collecting his notebook at the same time, then listened, jotting the pertinent facts down in his personal shorthand. Jasper had long since established the habit of putting any notes about a job down in a form no one could use against him in court.

  “I’m surprised by your concern,” the warm voice said when Jasper questioned one point. “Have you changed your mind about Rule Turner now that you two have met? You told me you didn’t know much about him, but what you did know, you didn’t like.”

  “Oh,” he breathed, “but I dislike you so much more.”

  “Do you not think it impolitic to say so?”

  “Who can we be truly frank with, if not our enemies?”

  A chuckle, rich with amusement. “Oh, Jasper, don’t fool yourself. You’re bought and paid for. You’ll do as you’re told, and that’s hardly the behavior of an enemy, is it?”

  TWENTY

  RULE headed down the outdoor stairs, so baffled by emotion he barely noticed the closed-in feeling piling on top of the rest. He was only too aware of how poorly he’d handled himself in there, but at least he’d realized that and let Lily take the lead.

  She’d done that efficiently, asking plenty of questions. Not the ones he’d wanted answered, such as: How did your mother die? Or Did she look like you? Like me? Or Did you ever think about contacting me? No, she’d asked the ones that should have mattered…and would, once he pulled himself together.

  Time to make a start on that. At the base of the stairs, Rule began, “If Friar—”

  “Let’s talk about it when we get to the car,” Lily said.

  He grimaced. If Friar was involved, he’d been about to say, it changed the possibilities considerably…including the chance that someone was pointing a directional microphone their way right now. That was unlikely but possible, and he should have thought of it. “Point taken.” Then, to Scott: “Keep Chris and Alan here to keep an eye on Jasper. The others will follow us to the hotel. Send Barnaby and Joe ahead to check the car.” As he started down the sidewalk he asked Lily, “Is Drummond around?”

  “Not visibly.”

  Which was supposed to mean he couldn’t listen in, but…“Would you mind putting on your necklace?”

  For answer she reached in her purse and pulled it out, closing her hand around the stones. “It works when it’s in contact with my skin. Or it’s supposed to.”

  She didn’t tell him it was understandable that he was shaken. She didn’t ask what he thought of Jasper Machek or how he felt. She held the ghost-repelling necklace in one hand and took his hand with the other one, then walked beside him in silence. Bless her for that, as for so much else. He didn’t know what he felt or what he thought, and he couldn’t afford to be shaken. Not if Friar had his finger in this pot.

  They moved briskly down the street. Rule tried to empty his mind. It didn’t work. He was still a jumble when they crossed the first street and Lily broke the silence.

  “I liked Jasper.”

  “I did, too.” He hadn’t expected to. He hadn’t expected…any of this. He wasn’t going to be able to put it aside, was he? He wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the things that ought to matter until he’d dealt with what, inexplicably, did. He stopped and glanced back at Scott. “I need to walk a bit and clear my head. If the car’s clean, have them drive it around the block until I signal.” He made the quick gesture that told Scott to drop back several yards.

  “You want me to take a hike?” Cullen asked.

  “Or a ride. I’d rather you didn’t wander around where someone could grab you or attempt to. Either stay with Scott or get in the car with the others.”

  Rule resumed walking. Scott and Cullen fell behind. If he kept his voice low, they wouldn’t hear more than the occasional word. And now that he had this much privacy, he didn’t know what to say.

  Lily didn’t prompt him. For once, she didn’t ask questions. She just kept pace with him for another two blocks. But now, for whatever reason, he could at least turn his attention away from the noise in his head, listening to the city sounds…cars, voices from some of the houses they passed, a dog in the last block, a cat in this one. The soft sound of Lily’s footsteps beside him. Her hand was warm in his. He watched as a woman in workout clothes pushed a jogging stroller along on the other side of the street. Its occupant looked sound asleep. And he heard himself say, “It never occurred to me that she was dead.”

  Lily stopped, so he did, too. She looked at him. “Oh, Rule.”

  “It should have occurred to me. She’d be over eighty by now if she’d lived, so it was an obvious possibility. But as long as I didn’t think of her…” He shoved his free hand through his hair. “She wasn’t real. She wasn’t a person to me, yet as long as I didn’t think about her, she was still alive somewhere.” Frustrated, he added, “I don’t know why it matters.”

  “Death cuts off possibilities. Even if they were possibilities you never meant to act on, it feels different when they’re gone.”

  Possibilities he never meant to act on, never thought he wanted. And now he ached from their loss. “She wasn’t a mother to me, but she was a person. I’ll never know that person. I never thought I’d want to.”

  “She was bipolar.”

  “What?” He stared. “I mean—I know what that is, of course, but how do you know that?”

  “Isen told me last night. She was in treatment for it several times, on his dime. I thought he should have told you years ago. He and I argued about that.”

  A dozen thoughts and memories tumbled around in his head. The past was supposed to be fixed, unalterable, but it was shifting on him. Finally he said, “It takes determination to argue with Isen.”

  “The Rho thing doesn’t work on me.”

  “Even so.” He started walking again. After half a block he said, “I want to get to know Jasper.”

  “That would be good. We’ve got some heavy shit to get through first.”

  Too damn true. “Speaking of which…” Rule stopped again and looked behind them. Scott and Cullen were half a block back. He gave the signal for them to approach.

  “Jasper thought you’d be upset about Adam.”

  He quirked a surprised brow at her. “I am, of course. Assuming that our assumption about his kidnapping is true.”

  “Not that kind of upset. Upset because his lover is a man. Once he got past the shock of me figuring out what property had been taken from him, he watched you. He was waiting for you to go all ick on him.”

  “How did you see that? I didn’t.”

  “Not so much baggage. No,” she corrected herself. “Different baggage. Mine doesn’t involve Jasper.”

  He felt better. Not good, but not as jumbled. He smiled to tell Lily that. “Why do you suppose he never contacted me?”

  “He was raised by a bipolar mother who didn’t get adequate treatment for years. He grew up gay in a society that made him a target for every kind of hate and bullying. Chances are he has his own baggage, don’t you think?”

  The rented BMW reached them quickly. Rule and Lily took the backseat; Cullen sat up front with Scott. Lily, he noticed, put her necklace back in her purse. Why didn’t she just keep it on? She had some kind of crazy tolerance for Drummond’s ghost that he couldn’t fathom and didn’t like.

  “All right,” Rule said once they were moving. Short of planting a bug—which the guards had checked for—it was almost impossible to target a moving vehicle either electronically or magically. “I’d like to hear your impressions. How much of Jasper’s story was true, do you think?”

  Lily shrugged. “All, some…impossible to say.” She reached for her laptop and popped it open.

  “He smelled anxious and guilty,” Cullen put in, “but the anxiety could be about his lover. So could the guilt. Nothing gets the guilt gland pumping like thinking you’ve endangered someone you love.”

  “That part I’d put money on,” Lily said. She was typing something on her laptop as
she spoke. “The part he didn’t admit—that they’re threatening his partner to force him to do what they want. Not that I’m taking his word that it’s ‘they’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she.’ ”

  Rule hadn’t noticed Jasper’s use of the plural pronoun to refer to whoever had Adam, but now that Lily brought it up…“If Friar’s involved, ‘they’ is appropriate. Especially on this coast.” Friar’s East Coast lieutenant was in jail awaiting trial, having been refused bail as a flight risk. But his West Coast lieutenant was still free and active.

  “Friar must be part of it,” Cullen said. “How would Machek know to mention him otherwise? The official story is that Robert Friar died when the mountain came down in September.”

  Lily looked up. “But Machek didn’t mention Friar by name, did he? I did. He said something about us wanting to find the one behind the October attacks. I filled in the blank for him.”

  Cullen looked over his shoulder at her, startled. “Son of a bitch. You’re right. Did he do that on purpose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you guess that he was talking about his partner, anyway?”

  “That’s right, you didn’t see his file, did you?”

  Rule, on the other hand, had pretty much memorized it. “Arjenie dug up a fair amount about Adam King,” he said. “He showed up in one of her databases because he and Jasper purchased the house together three years ago. King is an architect who was laid off during state cutbacks a couple of years ago. He’s put out his own shingle and is enjoying some success, but he works from home. He wasn’t there today. He might have left the house for any number of reasons, but there was only one takeout lunch at the table. Only one mug on the coffee table, too.”

  Lily nodded, tapping away on her laptop. “Add to that Machek’s attitude. He wasn’t worried about getting arrested. He made the right noises, but he didn’t really care. What else would cause that kind of funneling of priorities? Odds were he was frantic about a person, not an object.”

  “Okay,” Cullen said, “I can see that. What are you working on, anyway?”

  “A request for a phone tap.”

  Rule’s head jerked. “A tap? On Jasper? But if he isn’t reporting a kidnapping—”

  She gave him a look he couldn’t read. “I’m not going to charge your brother with failure to disclose. That doesn’t mean I have to pretend Adam King’s really gone off for some downtime without his phone. First step is a tap on Jasper’s phones—at his store, his house, on his mobile. He could have a throwaway given him by his employer especially for contact, but we can’t do anything about that.”

  Cullen grinned. “You’re sneaky. Isen would approve. Where are we going, anyway?”

  Sometimes Cullen was unnervingly observant. Sometimes he failed to notice the proverbial brass band. “To the hotel,” Rule said. “Assuming Lily still wants to put off checking in with her local office?” She nodded, and Rule went on, “Tony Romano is at the hotel.”

  “What, already?”

  “Per Isen’s instructions, he didn’t go to Nokolai Clanhome. I’m to accept his submission on behalf of Nokolai.”

  “Huh. What’s on the list after that?”

  Lily raised her brows. “You have something else you need to do?”

  “I could be working a Find spell for the prototype. Cynna stayed up damn near all night working up a more detailed pattern for it, and she gave me a copy of the pattern. Integrating that pattern into a spell takes longer than using it the way she would,” he added, “and I’ll need privacy for that.”

  “Oh. Right. You should be able to work on your spell at the hotel. What comes next for me and Rule depends on what Romano tells us. Also on if we hear from Machek, or if Arjenie has learned more about that Hugo character you told me about. If she…shit, I forgot to turn my ringer back on.” She glanced at Rule as she reached in her purse. “Have you got someone who knows the city well, or should I supply someone like that? If we end up faking an exchange, that could be important.”

  “There’s Murray, but I don’t like to pull him away from Beth.” Rule considered briefly. “Tony Romano knows San Francisco. He’s lived here for…what is it?”

  She was frowning at her phone. “Beth called two more times, and there’s a text from her, too. She wants me to call. She put ‘urgent’ in all caps. It probably isn’t, but I’d better call.”

  Rule knew what she meant. Beth wasn’t the fashion-obsessed airhead she liked to impersonate, but Lily’s family had a blind spot about her job. They tended to think it was a great deal more interruptible than it was.

  Lily tapped the screen. Rule heard the phone ring, then: “Lily!”

  “Beth?” Lily said. “What did you—”

  “Thank God you called. He’s missing. The police don’t want to hear about it,” she said bitterly. “They gave me this bullshit about waiting forty-eight hours. They think he’s forgetful or drunk or just doesn’t want to see me, but Sean’s as dependable as sunrise. We had an appointment today at ten—a business appointment—but he wasn’t there, and that’s so not like him. And I can’t find anyone who’s seen him since our Bojuka class last night.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Sean. I thought I said that. Sean’s missing. Sean Friar.”

  BETH’S tiny walk-up wasn’t far from Machek’s house geographically, but it was light-years away economically. The living room—which was also the dining room and kitchen—was colorful, cluttered, and cramped. After one glance inside, Rule had told Scott to wait in the hall. Lily wasn’t sure where the other guards were.

  By the time she shoved pillows aside to sit on the shabby but comfortable couch, Lily had counted five elephants, including the framed print she’d given Beth for Christmas this year. Beth loved elephants. The large, square coffee table was Beth’s contribution, too, though it hadn’t been painted neon pink back when it sat in their mother’s living room. The apartment smelled funny. Not pot, but some kind of incense, she thought.

  Rule sat beside her on the couch. Cullen parked his rear on the lone barstool that served as additional seating. Beth paced and talked, clutching her phone in one hand like a security blanket. Hoping he’d call, Lily thought. Hoping it was all a silly mistake. Not believing that, but not willing to put down the phone, either.

  “His bike and his car were there, so I checked the windows, but they were all locked. The ones on the ground floor, anyway. I couldn’t get to the upper story.” Beth whirled to face Lily. “What if he’s lying in there, too hurt to answer?” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “The stupid police won’t check!”

  She’d cut her hair again just before Christmas, so Lily had seen the current crop already, but the blue streak was new. The spikes were more due to distraction than to make a fashion statement. Beth kept running her hands through it. “They aren’t supposed to break into people’s homes unless the need is immediate and urgent. It’s a house, not an apartment?”

  “Yes. Does that matter?”

  “Sometimes an apartment manager will open a unit for the police without a warrant. Sean works from home, you said. Does he have a housekeeper?”

  “She only comes in twice a week. Today isn’t her day.”

  “And he doesn’t have any other employees.”

  “I told you I called Carly and John!”

  “You didn’t tell me they were his employees. What did they do when they came in to work and Sean wasn’t there?”

  “Oh. They didn’t. They’re contract, like me, though they’re more full-time than I am, but they still work from home. See, Sean designs a program’s basic architecture and handles the trickier parts—he’s brilliant, really—and they work on some of the components. He calls me in for the graphics, if they’re needed. That’s what we were to talk about today. I’ve roughed in some possibilities, and we were going to talk about them.”

  “I need their phone numbers and full names. Also the names and numbers of anyone else you called or can think of, his
address, and the make and model of his car and bike.”

  “But his car and motorcycle are still there.”

  “Humor me.”

  The car was an older Lexus; Beth didn’t know the year, but thought it was at least ten years old. The motorcycle was newer, a black BMW with lots of chrome. Beth didn’t have a clue about the license numbers, but that would be easy to find. She sent Lily Carly’s and John’s contact information, as well as that of the other two people she’d called. She’d also called the hospitals, who hadn’t admitted to having a Sean Friar on their premises. Ditto for the morgue. “You said he referred to your appointment when you saw him last night.”

  “Yes, yes. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said. Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

  “I am. Do you know if he’s seeing anyone?” Beth had insisted she and Sean were not a couple.

  “He’s not.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “We’re friends. He would have told me.”

  Lily didn’t doubt Beth believed that. “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “Sure.” Beth lifted her phone, touched the screen a few times, and held it out. “This one’s pretty good.”

  It was a close-up of a forty-something man with sun-streaked hair and dark eyes. Caucasian, clean-shaven. His nose and his grin were both slightly crooked, lending an appealing asymmetry to otherwise regular features. Lily’s heart sank right down to the pit of her stomach, where it thudded around uncomfortably.

  Rule leaned in to look at the small screen. He and Lily exchanged a glance. There’d been a chance, however faint, that Beth’s Sean Friar wasn’t the one Lily had a file on. The photo took away that small hope. “Send it to me, okay?” she said, handing Beth back her phone.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m here on a case, so I can’t—no, wait, don’t explode. I’m taking you seriously, but I can’t drop everything and personally look for him. I’ll put someone on it.”

  Beth looked dubious. “You’ve got people you can put on things?”