A game they played; sometimes listing the facts made a pattern come plain, like the transposed digits in the broadsheet puzzlers. He rang for a servant, and began. "I am the fabulously wealthy Emmett Goodwood. Who wants me dead?"
"My heirs and assigns," Garrett said promptly. "My mistress. Do I have a mistress?"
Sebastien licked his pencil and made a note in the margin of the newspaper while Garrett restrained the urge to warn him against antimony poisoning. You couldn't get French graphite in the colonies any more. But wampyr, as far as she knew, were no more subject to long-term harm from toxins than from bullets.
And—witness Sebastien's cavalier handling of the rosary bead—tales of allergies to holy relics were myth as well.
"If I don't have a mistress, why not?"
"I love my wife?" Garrett suggested, and Sebastien noted wife below mistress on the yellow newsprint. He also wrote down brother, sister, son.
"Goodwood seems like it should be an English name, doesn't it?"
"Nothing Englisher," Sebastien answered. The orange tom appeared beside his chair and made an imperative noise, and Sebastien reached down to scratch it behind the ears. "So why did he die with a Fenian death-wish clutched in his hand?"
"Does he have any family in the old country?"
"Mary is no doubt in receipt of a small mountain of documents wired from London by now," Garrett said. "Do you think Finn's Boys might have done away with him as a message to a relative in the heart of the Empire?"
"English colonial politics are not my forte. But it supports investigation, I should think." He held the pencil in his left hand now, and the right still dangled toward the floor, scratching the cat under its chin. Garrett could hear it purring again, and the sound brought with it smell of the dead man's room. She waited to see if Sebastien would give her anything more—a hint of Mr. Priest's investigations, of his illicit contacts. But he petted the cat one last time and sat upright, saying, "If he thought the Fenians sought his death, he'd have no little reason for the locked door and the derringer."
The cat blatted at him, and Garrett laughed as he blocked his lap and newspaper with the hand holding the pencil. "I had no idea you were so fond of cats."
"They aren't often so fond of me as el Capitán here, are they, gato?" Sebastien said the last as if in direct address to the cat, which smoothed its whiskers at him. Even Garrett's fearless terrier had not been so fearless, at first, of the well-dressed predator.
Cat eyed wampyr, and after a brief battle of wills the wampyr stood, surrendering the chair. "Mary sent over fresh clothing. You'll want to get back on the case, of course."
There were a thousand things she could have said. She laid a hand on his forearm, stroking the fabric of his coat. "I've never been in your house before," she reminded. "May I have the tour?"
"Of course. That is the parlor. You'll pardon me if I introduce the front rooms from the doorway."
He made her laugh. It was the deadpan as much as the conspiratorial tone. She moved forward, into the well-lit parlor, letting her toes seek out the direct rays of the sun where they warmed the carpet. She turned to see him, framed through the door. "Why are all your windows open? That seems
incautious—"
"It presents a grim façade from the street if everything is sealed, don't you think?" He wasn't quite looking at her, but rather into the shadows by the cold fireplace. "The light doesn't dazzle me if I don't stare at it directly, and I'm no more likely to stray into a sunbeam than you are to lay your arm across a hot stove-lid. Also, the servants prefer a little light." Then, delicately, like a testing cat himself. "And Jack."
"Ah yes. Jack." He let her have the silence while she selected her words. "Sebastien, who is Mr. Priest?"
"An emancipated and quite capable young man," he said. "Anything else, he should tell you himself."
"Your pet?"
He still wasn't looking at her; now he stared down at the cat, quite cozy in his abandoned armchair. "One would think they were seeking the warmth, no?"
"One would think," she said. "Do you love him?"
His dark eyes shone when he glanced up at her, though she did not think wampyr could weep. "Don't be foolish." He made a gesture as if blowing the fluff from a dandelion clock. "One cannot love