animal, a part of me felt sure.
I blinked the disturbing image away. After all, it’s not like I had never done anything questionable with my skill set.
“They tracked her down. After all this time,” Willow Grace said softly. “When I found her, I knew.”
She spoke with a startling lack of emotion. But then, as someone who was friends with Rio, I didn’t need people to show their tears on their sleeve.
“Get on the computers,” I said to Pilar, finally lowering my gun. “Grab everything you can. Hey. Willow Grace. Do you know the passwords and everything?”
She hesitated. “No.”
On the fly, I struggled to make all the pieces jam together. The man on the lawn—an unseen enemy, someone from our joint history? Teplova’s murderer, and possibly someone who’d be happy to kill me too?
But the way she’d been killed … it had lacked all finesse. Messy. Uncoordinated. Same with Arthur’s office.
Not to mention, Arthur wouldn’t have kept any investigation into my past a secret from Checker …
“What about other enemies?” I asked Willow Grace. “Did anyone else have disagreements with Teplova?”
“Of course,” she answered. “Everyone who knew of her work felt obligated to have an opinion. Which wasn’t a lot of people, but when you have a business, you have to spread the word to some degree. After we became close, and she worked on me, I reciprocated by bringing her other high-end interest. But not everyone reacted well.”
Pilar made a small noise. I glanced over, but she was busy with the computer.
“Anyone who would hire a batshit mercenary explosives expert?” I pressed.
Willow Grace’s eyebrows lifted slightly.
“I saw how she died,” I said.
“She did have wealthy enemies from this phase of her life,” Willow Grace admitted. “Their resources would have been extensive. But I don’t think—”
“There’s more than one piece to this,” I cut her off. I just couldn’t see how yet. The man on the lawn, and the creature and the bombs … “Pilar, look in particular for any mention of D.J. or Pithica.”
“You still think D.J.’s involved?” Pilar said, but I was more interested in Willow Grace’s reaction. Her perfect complexion had paled about three shades.
But it wasn’t from the word I’d expected.
“D.J.?” she repeated, her aggressiveness gone almost faint.
Oh, shit. Sometimes I hated being right.
“Yeah,” I said. “What do you know about—”
A sharp crack sounded from outside.
“That wasn’t gunfire,” I said, and ran for the door.
“This way!” called Willow Grace, and took a turn down another corridor that opened out onto a patio. More booms and cracks—
We burst outside. The sky was filled with fireworks, spouts of white light pinwheeling into cascades.
I double-checked in my head. It was August. Way too late for Independence Day shenanigans.
The sky cleared momentarily, and then a single firework soared to the center of the starless blackness. It popped into a squiggle, the line of brilliant white dots painting a sideways S across the smoggy clouds.
A second lone firework came a moment later, exploding into a sharply angled curve.
Next came a ring in a perfect circle. Then two loops with long tails.
The final one burst into a long, two-pronged fork, the pinpoints of light dripping from the shape and dissolving into the dark.
The message hadn’t been all that obvious, but patterns always make themselves clear to me, even ones scrawled on the sky in messy English.
“Sloppy,” I said aloud.
“What?” Willow Grace had gone even paler.
I pointed upward. “Letters. They spelled sloppy.” The display hadn’t been a very high one. On a clear night, it would have been visible in Ventura, but today, I estimated the population who were even in a position to see it to be no more than a few thousand—to see it unobstructed, even less. And it had been centered almost right on top of us.
“This was a message for somebody here.” I turned to Willow Grace. “Who would they be talking to? Your friend? Her murderer?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.” I tried to read her expression, but couldn’t—shock, fear, confusion? Anger?
A hum rose on the edge of our senses.
“What’s that?” said Pilar. She’d come out behind us, poised like she thought she’d need to run or fight.
She wasn’t wrong.
“Drones.” I turned and shoved Pilar ahead of me back under the eave of the patio and then inside the building, Willow Grace following. My ears teased out the frequencies, calculating differentials in the Doppler effect: small drones, on the order of remote-controlled helicopters you could get at any electronics store. But a lot of them—
They came out