Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,73

man. Stubborn, angry, defensive, yes. But guilty men don’t look quite so lost. They tend to have a smug calmness somewhere inside—a certainty that they are right and will be vindicated. Kelsey didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. He looked like a hopelessly outmatched boxer who’d decided to tuck in his chin, squeeze his eyes shut, and throw as many blind punches as possible before he got KO’d.

The second factor was the photograph of Hernandez and Lucia from Ana’s bulletin board. Maia had studied it a hundred times. She kept trying to read the strange uneasiness, the tense body language between the two partners. The way they stood together, the way Etch seemed entirely conscious of Lucia . . . Timing is wrong.

Maia wondered if Ana realized how ironic her notation was.

She suspected she knew more than Ana did. She thought she now understood the motive behind Franklin White’s murder, and that was the most disturbing puzzle piece of all.

She fishtailed into the hospital lot and took a reserved space.

She rummaged through the toolbox she always kept behind her driver’s seat—a few simple items that opened most doors. One was a stethoscope.

She tucked it in the front pocket of her blazer and headed toward the lobby.

As she walked, she thought about Tres.

She’d slept in his bed last night. The pillows smelled like him. The cat curled between her feet, but the sheets weren’t warm enough.

The longer Tres and she were together, the more she missed his warmth when they slept apart. He was always hot—always just a degree shy of a fever.

She woke to winter sunlight through bare pecan branches, the creaking of pipes and the smell of melting butter and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls downstairs.

Despite her uneasy stomach and her sense of foreboding, she ate breakfast in the kitchen with Sam and Mrs. Loomis.

Even with a bandaged ear, Sam was in an excellent mood. He ate three cinnamon rolls with bacon and had two cups of coffee.

He thought Maia was one of his operatives. He kept asking her questions about clients. Maia did her best to fabricate good answers.

Mrs. Loomis talked about her children—two boys, both grown and moved out of state. Her husband the policeman had died when the boys were very young. She’d raised them on her own, hadn’t seen either of them now for several years.

“That’s a shame,” Maia said.

Mrs. Loomis spooned scrambled eggs onto their plates. “Oh, it’s not so bad. I miss them . . . but mostly I miss them being young. They drove me crazy so many years. I can’t help getting nostalgic.”

Maia must’ve looked perplexed, because Mrs. Loomis laughed. “You’ll understand when you have a child, dear.”

When. Not if.

A decade ago, Maia would’ve protested. She’d fended off many such comments, resented the assumption that because she was a woman, she would someday be a mother.

The last five or six years, those comments had become fewer and fewer.

Maia was almost grateful to hear someone make the assumption again. It sounded . . . optimistic.

Maia ate her eggs. She tried to push away the image of her father grieving, his years of anguish and worry finally breaking him, turning his bones brittle as surely as the disease that had taken his ten-year-old son, Xian, wrapped in funeral white.

Maia knew she had to get going, but she didn’t want to leave the comfort of the kitchen. She felt safe here, part of the makeshift family of Tres’ foundlings.

She thought about her own apartment in Austin, the view of Barton Creek out the kitchen window. She’d only been away from it twenty-four hours, but she had trouble picturing what it looked like. She had even more trouble thinking of it as home.

“Undercover work on the loading docks today,” Sam told her. “Be careful nobody finds you out.”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised.

She met Mrs. Loomis’ eyes. The older woman smiled as if she’d just seen a photo from her own past—something simple and poignant, with faces of children who had long since grown.

• • •

“IS DR. GAGARIN IN ICU?” MAIA asked, using a random name from the hospital directory.

The hospital receptionist looked up. What she saw: an Asian woman in an expensive black pantsuit, a stethoscope in her pocket and a confident, impatient expression—a woman who was used to having her questions answered. “I don’t know, Dr.—”

“Never mind,” Maia said. “I’ll go up myself.”

“I can page—”

“No, thank you. No time.”

Maia strode down the hallway to the elevator.

Nobody stopped her.

Maia wasn’t surprised. She’d played doctor