“Is there anyone you’d want to talk to?” he asked. “With the Invocation?”
Fraser gave a startled, not very amused chuckle at the question.
“If you’d asked me last week…” he muttered, then shook himself. “No. Nobody. The dead should stay dead. It’s kinder. On them and on us.”
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and hunched his shoulders up towards his ears. The expression on his face was troubled as he turned and stomped back over to Trudy.
“You were right,” Hill said. “It looks like Mark, whoever he is, struck a nerve.”
Davy hung his fancy dress costume in its garment bag on a hanger and hooked it over the top of the wardrobe door. He had just turned away to go into the bathroom when his phone rang.
There were only a few people it could be. Davy picked the phone up and waited in silence to find out which of them it was.
“If Davy’s really back?” Gallagher said after a moment. “Tell him to fuck off. I’ve sent you what I could find on Tannenbaum, and that’s it. We’re square now. No more debt.”
“And the new ID?”
“With the courier,” Gallagher said. “They’re on schedule to deliver tonight, at the party, like you asked. I had to use some age progression software on the photo I had of him. Hope he doesn’t mind, but I made him bald.”
She hung up.
Davy reached up with a tentacle to touch his hair. Although he supposed it wasHill’shair, so he couldn’t claim any of it officially. Not that he’d needed to. He’d died with a full head of hair, so that wasn’t going to change now.
Besides, he shared at least 50 percent of his genetics with Fraser, and Fraser had a good head of hair.
While Davy struggled with his unexpected insecurity about his hair, he opened his email program and waited. It had already been sent, according to Gallagher, but it was only when he opened the app that the email appeared at the top of the list. No tone. No notifications. It just arrived.
He opened it and flicked down and across, sliding the unresponsive PDF back and forth on the small screen to get all the details. It was a thorough report—Gallagher had her pride—but Davy just skimmed it.
All he really needed was the Cliff Notes version, and Gallagher delivered. The highlights of Tannenbaum’s last thirty years popped off the page for him.
Debt.
Bankruptcy.
Insurance fraud.
Divorce. Two of those.
His house was foreclosed on. His parents' house burned down.
He was on the no-fly list.
Hell, apparently he’d been the victim of a home invasion in the early hours of this morning. He was going to spend Christmas in a hospital.
It was a lot of misfortune for one man, but the sticking point was that Tannenbaum didn’t seem worth all that effort. He was politically moderate, socially neutral, and he drove at the speed limit. There was nothing about him that seemed like the trigger for a decades-long harassment campaign.
Fraser had been called a sociopath before—as had Davy, although that hadn’t been in a therapeutic environment—but he wouldn’t spend resources on something like this without a reason.
He didn’t have a green front door. Davy checked. It had been red.
His tentacles had been draped around the room while he read: draped over the back of a loveseat, slung bonelessly over the handle of the bathroom door, curled up on the bed like a cat. They suddenly stirred and picked themselves up.
Davy turned as Hill walked into the room. He looked…tired? He did, but that wasn’t it exactly. It took a second, but Davy remembered the word his mom had always used for people she didn’t care for.
Drawn.
He looked drawn, like someone had just sketched him in. Last night had drained his eyes to a dull greenish gray and left shadows at his temples and collarbones. Or maybe that was just the Invocation, a supernatural reaction to being somehowwrong.
