A local habitation

“ Thereyou are,” I breathed.

The desk was covered in drifts of paper scribbled with complex calculations, while a pile of origami roses offered silent testimony to her preferred form of stress relief. Most of the papers tacked to the cube wall were work-related, with the exception of a poster of a kitten with the motto “hang in there” written in large, cartoony letters, and a photograph of a smiling man with white-blond hair. I removed the tack, turning the picture over to read the inscription on the back. “To my dearest Babs; a cat may look at a king. May I look at a cat? Love, John. ”

Oh, damn. I smothered a sigh as I put the picture down. There weren’t any other photographs, which struck me as a little strange; if Gordan had been her best friend for as long as Alex seemed to think, I would have expected to find some sign of their relationship—a picture, a card, something. But there was nothing to indicate they’d ever met outside a professional context. I started shuffling through the papers littering the desktop, frowning. Most of what I found seemed fairly mundane; notes on troubleshooting the company’s latest software offerings, bug reports, documentation of program glitches.

Barbara hadn’t been very highly ranked in the department; aside from her glaring lack of an office, the memos I could understand seemed to indicate that she’d been at the bottom of most of the corporate food chains. Whenever something went wrong, it seemed like Barbara took a lot of the blame. More tellingly, a lot of the blame was coming from Gordan. “Maybe they had a little falling-out,” I murmured, starting to test the drawers. Most opened easily.

The top drawer was locked. Frown deepening, I knelt and peered at it. Jan would give me the key if I asked, but I wanted to think about it first. There was probably a perfectly logical reason for Barbara’s drawer to be locked; maybe someone kept stealing her pencils.

Or maybe she was trying to hide something.

Breaking cheap locks is just one of the fun skills I’ve picked up in my day job. It’s astounding how many divorces you can finalize with things that were protected by a fifty-cent tumbler in a standard-issue desk. I sca

Desk locks generally don’t take more than a minute to pop. This one was no different. After three sharp twists of the wire the tumblers slipped, and the drawer came open with a loud “click.” The sound of Gordan’s typing stopped for a moment, then resumed, just as rapid as before. With bated breath, I eased the drawer out of the desk and sat down on the floor, starting to sift through its contents.

The top layer was fairly generic: a

Half the deposits were credited to “payday”: those were decently sized, indicating a respectable, if not show-stopping monthly income. Nothing suspicious about those. The other deposits, though . . .

The labels said “contracting bonus.” They were almost as common as the payday deposits, and each was easily three times bigger. I may not know much about the computer industry, but I understand logic. If Barbara was making that much as an independent, she wouldn’t have needed ALH; the contracting payments alone covered her withdrawals and expenses. Whatever those payments were for, it wasn’t contract work.

Tucking the checkbook into my jacket pocket, I started going through the drawer again. The remaining contents were nothing remarkable, and I quickly found myself at the bottom, with a heap of papers and office supplies on the floor beside me. I frowned, glancing from the debris to the empty drawer. When I broke into the desk, the top drawer was so full it was in danger of overflowing. Now, with the contents even less organized, I had a pile three inches shorter than the drawer was. Something was missing.

Reaching into the drawer, I slid my fingers around the edges until I hit a dip in the back left corner. Jackpot. It only took a few minutes to pry the false bottom loose, leaving me free to study the rest of the drawer’s contents. I looked inside and stopped, eyes widening. At the top of the tidy pile of paper I’d just revealed was an envelope watermarked with the stars and poppies crest of Dreamer’s Glass.

The envelope was unsealed. Careful to touch the paper as little as possible, I shook the contents into my hand: an uncashed check for an amount that matched the “contracting bonuses” listed in Barbara’s checkbook and a note that read “Enclosed please find payment for May’s activities. June’s report will be expected at the same time and place.” It was signed with the vast, looping squiggle of Duchess Riordan’s signature. If the crest hadn’t already told me what was going on, that would have cinched it.

“Guess you won’t be making June’s report,” I said, and picked up the drawer, leaving the u

That disturbing train of thought pulled into the station as I turned the corner and found myself at Gordan’s cubicle. It was more devoid of personality than the others I’d passed, but I could tell who it belonged to: the fact that she was still sitting there was a pretty big clue. She raised her head and scowled as I approached, hitting a key at the top of her keyboard. Before the screen went dark, I caught a glimpse of a diagram as complex and snarled as one of Luna’s knitting projects. “What do youwant?”

The evidence I had under my arm was enough to prove that her best friend had been working for the opposition before she died. Feeling oddly exposed, I said, “April told me you were here. You know you shouldn’t be alone.”

“You don’t know who the killer is. What makes me safer staying with them?”

Touché. “I’m trying to do my job.” I was going to be nice if it killed me. She was probably as scared as I was, if not more. After her, it was her company under siege.

“And it’s doing so much good.” She snorted. “I can see the improvements since you got here. What was I thinking?”

My good nature only goes so far. “That’s not fair. We’re doing our best.”

“It’s not? Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I guess it’s perfectly fair for you to suck face with Alex while my friends die?” I flinched. Gordan answered with a mocking smile, saying, “Honey, it’s obvious what you’ve been up to. Doesn’t it get cold out there on that hillside?”

If the sarcasm got any thicker, I was going to need a shovel. “Maybe if you’d try to help instead of attacking me all the time, we’d get better results. What’s this about a hill?”

“Maybe if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t need my help!” She glared at me. I glared back. Maybe she’d just lost her best friend, but that didn’t excuse her behavior; trauma only works as an excuse for so long. There’s a point when you have to take back the responsibility for your own actions.

“You’re riding us pretty hard for someone that doesn’t have any answers. It’s a little suspicious that the things that keep going wrong are all Coblynau technology.”