Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,21

seemed to love it, wandering around through the displays and asking the black-shirted staff a million questions about everything they found.

Nobody stopped me as I wandered through the sales area and toward the employees-only section of the store. There was what looked like a pretty-well-stocked employee lounge to the right and a long hallway leading toward a fireproof steel door set into the back wall. I hazarded a guess the hallway led to storage, mostly because the closed door directly to my left had a sign that said Office on it. I knocked, then opened it when I heard a gruff voice tell me to come in.

The office was fairly large, a broad rectangular space with a seating area near the door that took up two-thirds of the room. A sturdy wooden desk that would’ve been at home in any governor’s office was set back away from the entrance, positioned with its short end against the wall so whoever sat behind it was facing the door. Long stretches of narrow windows set near the ceiling provided a bit of illumination, but mostly the room was lit up by a constellation of recessed lighting set into a drop ceiling covered by punched-tin tiles. Decorated in a mishmash of Art Deco, retro toys, and video games, the wall separating the office from the main store was dominated by an enormous television, its dormant screen reflecting the man sitting on the couch across of it.

I’d pinged Rook Stevens as someone who preferred to stay behind the scenes, a puppet master of sorts who loved to put on a good show but didn’t like anyone to see his face. He was the ringmaster and the Wizard of Oz wrapped up as a strong-featured, pretty young man with mismatched eyes and a wary gaze. I gave Montoya credit for building a relationship with this man, because he struck me as someone who didn’t like entanglements… or least not romantic ones. But that also could be because I hadn’t earned the right to sit in his inner circle. Jae had been this wary, opening up only after fits and starts of trust-building events.

“I was wondering when you were going to come by,” Stevens said, not looking up from the comic book he was reading. “The coffee pot’s fresh. Grab some if you want.”

I didn’t really want any coffee, but it seemed prudent to pour myself a cup as I figured out how to deal with Stevens’s insouciance. If he’d planned to set me up to discover Adele, then I was going to have to come at him carefully. I only had Bobby’s word on Stevens’s past, but Bobby was as reliable as a sunrise. There were undercurrents in Stevens I had to negotiate, fast-moving rapid waters hiding boulders I could get hung up on, and I wondered if I’d come to a battle of wits totally unprepared and not armed to the teeth.

“Cream’s in the fridge if you want it.” He nodded with his chin toward the squat steel box the coffee maker sat on. “Then you can tell me about what happened the other night and why you look like somebody took a potato masher to your face. O’Byrne came by to shake me down, but I didn’t have anything to tell her other than what I told you—it was just a security job and I wanted basic recon. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

The coffee was strong, a bracing punch of dark roast powerful enough to make me want to check my nose to see if it was bleeding from the impact. I added a little bit of cream in the hopes of scaling back its pungent hit, but it swallowed the milky swirls as if it were a black hole eating one of those starships hanging from the store’s ceiling. I reconciled myself to not being able to sleep later on that night and sat down in one of the armchairs next to the couch.

“So you didn’t know Adele Brinkerhoff? Or why she died holding a handful of diamonds?” I watched Stevens carefully, but there was nary a flinch. There would be no poker games in our future, because his face betrayed nothing, to the point where I wasn’t even sure he knew who I was.

“No. Who was she to you?” he asked, finally putting down the comic book and sliding it onto the low table in front of him. “To be honest, I also don’t know the people who were having sex in the