“It would have been two or three weeks ago,” Ledger said as he checked the date on the letter. He read down through the boastful paragraphs and decided Violet wouldn’t have kept her mouth shut in real life. “She was either murdered, or she disappeared, after talking about some big break she was about to have.”
Hark snorted. “I meant I wanted you to narrow it down,” he said. “I do this, and you keep my name out of your mouth around that… that thing.”
His voice cracked.
“Sure,” Ledger said. He didn’t have any intention of sticking to that. If Hark could be useful, Ledger would use him. That didn’t sound like it would encourage the man to get to work, though. “Call me when you find anything.”
“Yeah,” Hark said. His voice dropped, gone rough and creaky in his throat. “Have you dreamed about him? It. Earl. I do, and I think he can see me. See me through them. Do you think he could do that?”
Probably. That wouldn’t help put Hark’s mind at rest, though.
“Probably,” Ledger said. “A good thing you have something to do to keep you awake.”
He’d never liked Hark.
Ledger hung up and lay back on the bed, his legs hanging over the side to accommodate the paperwork. He could feel the pressure of the deadline as it crawled closer; every minute ticked away a weight in the back of his skull. It felt like he needed to do something, to bedoingsomething, but there was nothing he could do until someone got back to him.
Except it felt like there was. Ledger could feel it, just out of reach in his mind.
He’d missedsomething, but he couldn’t put his finger on what.
Not yet.
Ledger folded his arm over his face. Maybe it would come to him if he closed his eyes. Just for a few minutes.
CHAPTER13
THIS MORNING THE“free breakfast” included a bowl of hard-boiled eggs under a sweaty plastic dome. Appetizing. Ledger helped himself to more of the bad coffee instead. He sat in a cheap plastic chair and set his phone on the table in front of him so he’d not miss it when it rang.
It didn’t.
Ledger drank the coffee—it wasn’t even hot, the one thing it had going for it, this morning—and got up to get another cup. There was a different clerk behind reception this morning, an older man with fastidiously dyed black hair and a bone-white mustache. He came out from behind the desk and shoved a business card with a short strip of tickets stapled to it at Ledger.
“Free rides.”
“Um,” Ledger said wittily.
He cut himself some slack on that. Between raising Bell from the dead, or part of the dead man at least, and dealing with Syder, he’d not gotten much sleep. He was only one coffee in as well. That he had an “um” in him was performing above expectations.
For lack of any other ideas, he reached for the leaflet. Before he could take it, Wren sniped it out of the receptionist’s hand.
“That’s me,” he said as he tucked the card and tickets into his jeans. He grinned cockily at the receptionist and winked. “I’m the free ride.”
The clerk’s deadpan expression didn’t change. “I got that.”
He left.
Ledger lifted the coffee pot off the hot plate. “I think, technically, I was the free ride,” he said as he topped up his cup.
As he set the glass pot back down, Wren took his coffee off the stained table. “Do you usually charge?” he asked.
“Do you?”
Wren shrugged. He grabbed a handful of sugar packets in one hand and ripped them open with his teeth.
“There’s usually some tit for tat,” he said as he tipped an obscene amount of sugar into the black liquid. “That’s what the boss keeps me around for.”
Ledger tried to control his face. He probably didn’t manage it from the hard look Wren gave him.
