Before Dylan could argue with that point, the door to the hall opened and the nervous accountant Somerset had left with the incriminating laptop stumbled into the room. She froze when she saw Nik and Dylan, her hands tightening on the folder she clutched. Her chest rose and fell quickly as she stared at them.
“I was looking for you,” she said and thrust the folder toward them. “You have to see this.”
Dylan wasn’t sure of the first part of that statement—he had the strong impression that if they’d not been there Enid would have made a break for the door—but the second part seemed compelling. He dropped the half-eaten slice of pizza into the box and grabbed a napkin to wipe the grease off his hands as he slid out of the booth.
“Stay there,” Nik told him sternly as he stepped in front of Dylan. He took the folder from Enid, flicked through the pages, and then escorted her over to the table. “Sit.”
She did. Her hands were folded in her lap, fingers tucked into her palms and out of view.
“What is it?” Dylan asked as he took the folder. There were soot stains on the manilla cardboard that smudged over his fingers as he touched them. When he opened the cover, he found copies of a dozen–more, he realized as he flipped through, contracts. “The babies?”
Enid took a deep breath and nodded. “I noticed something, when I was going through them,” she said. “They all have the same dates. Look.”
She reached out and pressed a finger to the top of the page, underlining a passage with a smear of grease. Then she flicked a few pages down and repeated the process, her fingers stained and shaky.
“OK,” Dylan said. “What does it mean?”
Enid glanced at the pizza, then almost visibly shook off the distraction. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s not consistent with a changeling brokerage. They’d want a steady stream, not a glut.”
So, nothing good.
Dylan pushed the pizza absently toward Enid as he flicked through the papers. All the dates were noted down within a few days of each other. The only difference was the year.
“That’s a lot of Christmas babies,” he noted absently.
“What?” Nik said.
Dylan looked up and waved the papers. “Based on the dates, they’d all be due around Christmas,” he said. “Irene’s baby was.”
Nik’s face creased into a scowl as he snatched a handful of pages from the folder. He checked the dates and started to count it out on his fingers. Dylan would have judged him, but he’d only made the connection because of his conversation with Irene.
“Christmas babies,” Nik said.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “It sounds more fun than it is. What is it?”
Nik grimaced and tossed the pages down. The corner of one went into the pot of garlic mayo open on the table.
“We need to talk to Hill,” he said and then leveled a finger at Dylan. “That meansyouneed to wake him up.”
It turned out that it wasn’t hard to get Hill to turn on his partner.
There was no honor among thieves or, as it turned out, those who bartered babies.
Getting him totalk, however, was another matter.
Behind Hill’s lush, placid lips were teeth burned to cinders and a tongue charred to jerky. The inside of his cheeks and the back of his throat cracked and flaked as he breathed, the flesh underneath cherry red and poisoned.
He gave them a good view of the ruin and then closed his mouth, his lips set in that serene smile.
“Did my blood do that to you?” Dylan asked, taken aback.
Hill blinked in clear contempt and shook his head. He picked up the pen they had set on the table in front of him and scrawled in a spiky, hard to read hand.
To Assure.
It took two passes at that thought before Dylan was convinced he had it right. “You agreed to let them do that?” he asked. “As insurance?”
The pen scratched over the paper again.A little price.
