had to go to work."
Son of a bitch. I knew it.
Elaine was half a beat behind me. "Who?"
"H-Helen," Abby sobbed. "It was Helen."
* * *
CHAPTER
Twenty-Seven
I stood there fuming while Elaine coaxed the rest of the story out of Abby and Priscilla.
"It was only an hour or so after you left," Abby told Elaine. "Helen got a call on her cell phone."
"Cell phone?" I perked up. "She had one that worked?"
"She doesn't have a lot of talent that way," Abby said. "None of us do, really. Even my cell phone works most of the time."
I grunted. "Means she wasn't hiding a bigger talent, then. That's worth something."
"Harry," Elaine said quietly. It was a rebuke. "Please go on, Abby."
I zipped my mouth shut.
"She got a call, and she went into the bathroom to talk. I couldn't hear what she said, but when she came out, she said she had to go to work. That she was leaving."
I lifted my eyebrows. "That's quite a job, if she's risking exposure to a killer to show up for the shift."
"That's what I said," Priscilla said, her voice even more bitter, if such a thing was possible. "It was stupid. I never even thought to be suspicious of it."
"Anna argued with her," Abby went on, "but Helen refused to stay. So Anna wanted us all to take her there together."
"Helen wouldn't have any of it, of course," Priscilla said. "At the time, I thought she might just be ashamed of us seeing her working some nothing little job at a fast-food restaurant or something."
"We never really knew what she did," Abby said, her tone numb and apologetic. "She never wanted to talk about it. We always assumed it was an issue of pride." She petted the little dog in her arms idly. "She said something about keeping us separate from the rest of her life… in any case, Anna put her into a cab and made her promise to keep in touch with us. Calling in on the phone until she was safely around other people."
"You just let her walk?" I broke in.
"She's a sister of the Ordo," Priscilla said. "Not a criminal to be distrusted and watched."
"In point of fact," I said, "she is a criminal to be distrusted and watched. Ask her freaking parole officer."
Elaine frowned at me. "Dammit, Harry. This isn't helping."
I muttered under my breath, folded my arms again, and crouched down to give Mouse's ears and neck a good scratching. Maybe it would help me keep my mouth shut. There's a first time for everything.
"Helen called me about twenty minutes later," Priscilla said. "She said that she had been followed from the hotel. That our location had become known. That we had to leave. We did, just as you told us. Helen said that she would meet us here."
"I told you to head for somewhere public—" I began, snarling.
"Harry," Elaine said, her voice sharp.
I subsided again.
There was a moment of awkward silence. "Um. So we went," Abby said. "But when we got there, Helen wasn't around."
"No," Priscilla said, hugging her arms under her breasts, looking cold and miserable, even in the turtleneck. "She called again. Begged us to come to her apartment."
"I stayed here with the dogs," Abby said. Toto looked up at her as she said it, tilting his head and wagging his little tail.
"Once Anna and I picked her up," Priscilla continued, "we headed back here—but Helen looked awful. She'd run out of insulin and hadn't been able to go get it with all the trouble. Anna dropped me off and took her to the pharmacy. That was the last we saw of her."
Abby fretted her lip and said to Priscilla, "It wasn't your fault."
Priscilla shrugged. "She'd never said anything about diabetes before. I should have known better. I should have seen…"
"Not your fault," Abby insisted, compassion in her voice. "We believed in her. We all did. But she was pulling our strings the whole time. The killer was right here among us." She shook her head. "We should have listened to you, Warden Dresden."
"We should have," Priscilla said quietly. "If we had, Anna would be alive right now."
I couldn't think of any response to that. Well. I had plenty of them, but they all were some variation on a theme of "I told you so." I felt no need to pour salt into fresh wounds, so I kept my mouth shut.
Besides, I was processing what Abby and Priscilla had told us.
Elaine traded a look with me. "Do you