former doctor glopped down onto the files.
Which were all things like promotional packets and propaganda about the wellness center, nothing I even needed Pilar’s help on. This was a place Teplova had sat with potential clients to hook them and put them at ease, not where she’d done the real work of the facility.
Whatever that was.
I left the drawers open and wound my way back to Pilar. “Dead end. Let’s go.”
The pronouncement sounded brittle to my own ears, but she only nodded tightly. Now wasn’t the time to talk, I told myself. I’d get everybody in the loop once we were out of danger. I would.
We took a lucky turn, then, down a hallway behind the doctor’s office that looked less shiny and more official. I pushed open the next door to find an open area with desks and file cabinets set up across it as a bull pen-style workspace.
For the first time, the light was on, and a dark-haired woman stood engrossed in the open drawer of a file cabinet.
seven
EMPTY OR not, my Colt was out before I could think about it. Surprisingly, Pilar and her CZ were only a second behind me.
The woman dropped the papers she was holding and whipped her hands into the air. Then her face twisted into anger. “Damn you!” she shouted at us. “Goddamn you! Eva was helping people. Go ahead, kill me too, leave more evidence—”
Pilar shifted her gun so it was pointed down and raised her other hand. “Calm down! We’re not here to kill anyone, promise. What’s your name?”
The woman’s eyes flicked to me and then to Pilar and back again. Sharp and unafraid.
I studied her in return. She was distractingly beautiful. I found it impossible to guess her ethnicity: she might have been Italian, Asian, Spanish, or Indian, or from an island in the Pacific, or a mix of ancestry aesthetics that had made her the winner of the genetic lottery. The bones of her face cut at breathtaking angles, her eyes large and luminous. Her waist was improbably small and her legs improbably long, and the way her body curved in between struck me as exactly within the error margins of the clearly digitally reshaped models who graced every magazine and advert. Except she was real.
I’d never seen anyone like her, and I lived in LA, cesspool of models and movie stars.
She also wore an expensive-looking scarlet dress, one with a modest cut that was belied by its exactly fitted tailoring. I didn’t know anything about fashion, but it was obvious that dress was designed only as a picture frame for the body inside it. It also didn’t seem like the type of thing someone would wear to commit murder …
I blinked. It wasn’t like me to make assumptions that gave people the benefit of the doubt. I refocused on keeping my gun up and aimed—she didn’t know it was empty, or that I could kill her just as easily without it.
“You heard the question,” I said. “Who are you?” Her face hadn’t sparked any dark flashbacks for me, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Though she didn’t seem to recognize me either. I tried not to feel unduly relieved by that.
“My name is Willow Grace,” the woman said. Her inflection didn’t give a clue as to whether it was a double first name or if Grace was her surname. “You can verify that.”
“Wait, are you the same—you are! Aren’t you?” Pilar said. “I mean, you’re the news anchor. Cas, I’ve seen her before, on TV.”
Wait, what?
“What are you doing here, then?” I demanded. “Some kind of journalistic exposé?”
She brought her hands down a smidge. “I’ve told you who I am. Do me the same courtesy.”
“I’m Pilar, and this is Cas. We work for a private investigator,” Pilar said, straining the truth into zigzags.
“Show me your licenses,” said Willow Grace.
“I said I work for a PI, not that I am one,” Pilar said. “We’re—”
“I’ve got a license,” I cut in. “One second.” I took my left hand off my gun and pulled a handful of cards out of my pocket.
I managed to riffle through them one-handed by flipping them between my fingers. The first PI license I found didn’t have a name similar to Cas on it—goddamn Pilar—but it turned out I had another one. I shoved the rest of the cards back in my pocket and held it up.
“Cassie Wells, PI,” I said. I expected Pilar to glare at me, but she gave no outward sign—which was