“Okay.” She took out her phone. “You want to have not been here?”
His eyebrows snapped down. “What?”
“I’m calling Croft. Maybe I should call the locals, but Croft can get everything rolling quickly, and speed is important. She might still be alive. But that means we’ll be stuck here awhile. It might be that you and Scott dropped me and Mark off. You never came in. You’re on your way to the Twelfth Street Kitchen right now.”
“We’re not separating. If you’re here, so am I.”
She gave up and called it in.
THIRTY-THREE
RULE did not hit or harm any cops in the next few hours. Not Special Agent Ron Fielding of the FBI. Not Sergeant Willy Spaulding of the Washington Police Department, either, and that took more willpower. As Lily said at one point, Spaulding might not be an asshole, but he did a damn fine impression of one.
Lily had wanted Rule to leave, to stay free to continue their own investigation. It made sense. Rule hadn’t even considered doing so. He’d abandoned her once to get Ruben away, and she’d been arrested, locked up. It didn’t matter that his leaving hadn’t caused her arrest, and his presence couldn’t have averted it. He couldn’t abandon her again.
They did end up separated for a while. Two sets of law enforcement wanted to question them, and the federal contingent, at least, was smart enough to separate them for that. The FBI claimed a meeting room on the second floor to coordinate their investigation; Rule was questioned there while Lily was questioned elsewhere. The two of them were then stashed in the manager’s office next door to the meeting room.
The separation was probably good policy, but it came too late. They’d discussed the situation by the time Agent Fielding arrived. Lily didn’t want to call her lawyer; she wanted Anna found, and intended to cooperate as fully as possible. She warned Rule then that she’d be a suspect. Croft had told her not to reveal anything about the Bixton investigation, but Lily’s arrest was not a secret. It was quickly obvious that Fielding knew about it and what role Anna’s actions had played.
Fielding didn’t know Lily, and it was his job to speculate. Maybe Lily had suspected Anna of setting her up and had gone to confront her; the argument escalated, and Anna ended up dead. Lily then got rid of the body—probably with Rule’s help, since Anna Sjorensen outweighed Lily. Lily was alibied for almost the entire day by Mark, Scott, Cullen, and some of the others, but Fielding assumed that Rule’s people would lie if he told them to. As, of course, they would.
But Fielding was both professional and reasonable, and it was a stretch to suspect that Lily had not only killed Anna and enlisted Rule to get rid of the body, but had gone on to stage an elaborate discovery of the scene a few hours later. What was the point? Lily might be a suspect, but mostly because she couldn’t be crossed off the list altogether. After a couple hours he was ready to let them go.
Detective Spaulding was neither reasonable nor professional. Mostly he was pissed. The feds should’ve called him right away, not waited forty damn minutes. The feds were holding out on him. The feds thought they could come in and take over when this was by damn his city, his case, and he wasn’t going to put up with it. Add Lily’s recent arrest to that mountain of attitude, and he was convinced that either Lily had killed Anna or Rule had done it for her. He didn’t seem to need a reason—and, since the feds were indeed holding out on him, he didn’t have one. Lily was a fed and Rule was a werewolf. That was enough for him.
Unfortunately for the detective, he lacked a body. It was hard to build a case without one.
The afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted. Rule had his phone and could tend to some business while he waited. Plus humans constantly forgot that lupi had good ears, and the little office where Rule spent most of that time abutted on the meeting room. Rule heard a great deal about what went on with the federal part of the investigation.
Not only had they not found a body—they hadn’t found anything. The knock-on-doors didn’t turn up anyone who’d seen or heard anything suspicious. There were no fingerprints on the doorknob, and several surfaces inside the apartment had