Lupi 08 - Death Magic

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 been wiped, too.
    He reported all that to Lily as they finally headed back to the house. “Anna’s attackers were lucky,” he finished. “They seem to have carried her out of there without attracting any notice.”
    “There has to be someone around to notice. We were alone in the lobby, remember? And the elevator, and the hall. No one’s home during the day at an ESH building. It’s temporary housing, no families or retirees, and everyone’s at work. The best you could hope for is a delivery at the right time.”
    “I suppose most people in the Bureau would be aware of that.”
    She nodded. Her expression was abstracted.
    He reached for her hand. “What?” he said softly.
    “I didn’t say anything to Croft. Nothing about dopplegängers or what’s really going on. What we think is going on,” she corrected herself. “I left him in the dark about almost everything.”
    “Because there’s a chance Croft is involved.” Rule didn’t believe it . . . but that could be because he didn’t want to.
    “I hate this. I hate it. I think Drummond’s the bad guy, but maybe I think that because I want it to be him.