me that I've been out here for nearly an hour and they've been on a business call?" Her voice was dangerously low, each word very calm, very clear.
Galen got up and walked the dripping cup into the kitchen, one hand held underneath it to keep from leaving a trail of tea behind.
"Business call to the faerie courts," I said. "Trust me when I say that I'd rather you'd have walked in on a full-blown menage a trois than the call I just finished."
She seemed to see me clearly for the first time. "You look shaken."
I shrugged. "My family ... gotta love 'em."
She looked at me a long time, almost a minute, as if she was making up her mind about something. Finally, she shook her head. "Rhys is right. Only the threat of seeing you in flagrante delicto would have kept me out here this long. But family business isn't police business, so screw it."
"Are you here on police business?" Doyle asked as he moved smoothly past me into the larger room.
"Yes," she said, and stepped around the couch to face him.
He kept moving into the dining area so it wasn't so confrontational, but Lucy wanted a confrontation. She stood with her arms crossed under her breasts, looking belligerent like she wanted to pick a fight with someone.
"What's wrong, Lucy?" I asked, moving into the room to sit down on the far edge of the couch. If she wanted to keep eye contact with me, she'd have to walk around the couch and face me. She did, settling uneasily into the pink chair again.
She leaned forward, hands clasped together, fingers entwined as she fought with herself.
I asked again, "What's wrong, Lucy?"
"There was another mass killing last night." Lucy usually gave good eye contact, but not today. Today her eyes roved over the apartment, restless, not looking at anything too long.
"Was it like the one we saw?" I asked.
She nodded, resting a momentary gaze on me, then turned away to look at the television, the line of herbs that Galen had growing in the window. "Exactly the same except for location."
Doyle came to kneel behind the couch, arms touching my shoulders lightly. I think he'd knelt so he wouldn't loom over us. "Jeremy has informed us that everyone at his agency has been forbidden from this case. Your Lieutenant Peterson doesn't seem too happy with us."
"I don't know what's gotten up Peterson's craw, and I'm sitting here trying to decide if I care. If I talk to you about this case, it could mean my job." She pushed to her feet and began to pace in the small space of the living room; picture window to pink chair, caught between the couch and the white painted wood of the entertainment center.
"All I've ever wanted was to be a cop." She shook her head, running fingers through her thick brunette hair. "But I'd rather lose my job than see another one of these scenes."
She sat down in the pink chair abruptly, and now she looked at me, those wide eyes, that earnest face. She'd made her decision. It was there in her face. "Have you been following the case in the papers or the news?"
"The news called the club incident a mysterious gas leak." Doyle rested his chin on my shoulder as he spoke. His deep voice vibrated down my skin, along my spine.
I had to fight to keep how it affected me from showing on my face. I don't think it showed.
"The second was one of those traveling clubs, raves, I believe, bad drugs."
She nodded. "A bad batch of ecstasy, yeah. At least, that's the story we leaked. We made sure the press had something to chase so they wouldn't put two and two together and start a citywide panic. But the rave was exactly like the first two scenes."
"First two?" I asked.
She nodded. "The very first scene probably wouldn't even have come up on anybody's radar if it hadn't been in a ritzy area of town. Just six adults that time, a small dinner party gone very bad. It'd still be floating around on someone's weird shit pile as unsolved. But the vics were high profile, so when the club got hit, it rang bells downtown, and suddenly we had a task force. We needed one, but we never would have gotten it this quickly if one of the first vics hadn't been friends with several mayors and a chief of police or two." She sounded bitter and tired.
"The first