Magic. I’d been right. “Do you think she’s the one who’s cursing—”
“I’m not speculating. Occam and I dropped by my house to pack more clothes and I’m on my way back. I’ll make the call from HQ. ETA eight minutes.” He ended the call.
I gathered up my tablets and the note with the name and number and walked into the conference room. In the darkened space JoJo and Tandy were both poring over laptops and multiple tablets. “Rick’s on the way in to call her back. He says she’s the witch who gave him his tats.”
JoJo suggested that someone have sexual relations with her and scrubbed her hands over her turban. Tandy laughed. “We’ve already amassed a lot of research on her,” Tandy said.
Jo dropped her hands. “Yeah. With our combined talents, we pretty much know where Loriann is, where she gets her hair done, what her pets’ names are, what medicines she takes, and how she likes her steak cooked. All in fifteen minutes’ work. All we needed was a last name. Which Rick never gave us.”
I didn’t envy Loriann the loss of personal privacy. As we waited on Rick, I gave attention to my plants, sliding sturdy leaves through fingers and thumbs, thinking, trying to make the investigation fit together. Nothing fit. Parts of the puzzle were missing. Or I was blind to them. Probably that. But I didknow that Rick should have told us about Loriann, that she worked for the New Orleans Police Department, because many of the witch circles had been found in Louisiana. No matter what she was today, this witch had done evil to Rick once. She should have been on a list of suspects from day one. And Rick hadn’t told us about her.
•••
Rick blew into HQ like a storm, his eyes glowing the green of his cat, his black and silver hair flying around his head and shoulders as if caught up in a wind. He dropped his gobags and took his place at the conference table. Occam wasn’t with him, and I felt a shaft of disappointment. “I assume you’re all up to speed on Loriann,” he snapped. When Tandy and JoJo nodded, he said, “Fill me in.”
Crisply, JoJo said, “She’s twenty-seven years old, lives in New Orleans on the second floor of a two-bed, one-bath, Victorian-style two-story duplex just outside the Garden District.” She pointed to a photo of a house on the screen overhead. “She owns the house and two others, courtesy of her grandmother’s will. She’s single, has two cats, and works for NOPD Crime Lab and Evidence. She rents out the lower floor of her home to a doctor of paranormal species at Tulane Medical. She has a brother with a drug problem. She reported him missing twelve months ago. The number she gave us is the CLE direct number, but it’s possible that your call will be diverted elsewhere. This”—a second photo popped up on the big screen over the windows—“is from her most recent driver’s license, and the one beside it is from her NOPD ID.”
The woman had dark brown eyes and pale skin. She wore her brown hair parted down the middle and hanging close to her face in the driver’s license. In the NOPD photo, her hair was back in a tail, exposing her ears. Ear cartilage, shape, and placement on the head were better identification markers than facial markers, which could easily be changed by surgery. In both photos, she was unsmiling. I got the impression of heavy burdens and years of sadness from the photographs.
“She stopped dying her hair,” Rick said, his voice going soft. He cleared his throat as if something clogged it, and I remembered that odd sound when he told us about the inkspell earlier. “After I was rescued, Katie Fonteneau, once number two in the Pellissier vampire clan of New Orleans, and who is now Master of the City of Atlanta, saved Lori.”
“Why would a vampire help a witch?” Tandy asked.
His voice hoarse, Rick said, “Isleen was Katie’s scion—her blood-made vampire child. Isleen was also a psycho fanghead. Katie felt responsible for everything done to Loriann. And to me, I think.”
A vampire had to have known that her scion was insane.
Rick put his hand on his throat. Coffee gurgled into the pot behind him. Raspy, he said, “I helped Loriann get a job as a consultant at Crime Lab and Evidence. She did good work for a couple of years. Then she vanished. I haven’t had contact with her since.”
Jo said, “She was rehired by CLE this past January when the European Mithrans tried to take over. She’s full-time now, instead of the former consultancy. Her six-month evaluation was excellent.”
“Has she been researching something in private?” Rick asked softly.
“I can’t tell,” Jo said. “Her work computer files are encrypted and her personal system is set up to give an alarm if anything tries to read it. I can’t get in easily, if at all.”
“Really?” he said, as if he found that interesting. “Okay. Let’s do this. Clementine,” he said to the voice-to-text software, “record. Rick LaFleur, Jo Jones, Tandy Dyson, Nell Ingram, on conference call to Loriann Ethier”—he spelled it out—“currently of NOPD CLE.”
“CLMT2207 recording,” the system said.
He gave the date and time and punched in the phone number.
It rang once. “Crime lab. Loriann Ethier. How may I help you?”
Rick’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. I felt an odd, tugging sensation on Soulwood. “Rick LaFleur,” he said, sounding calmer than he looked. “How are you, Loriann?”
“You’ve had fifteen minutes, you and Diamond Drill. I’m sure you know everything about me.”
Jo’s head snapped to Rick at the use of her old hacker name. Loriann had been researching us, it seemed.
Loriann continued. “How areyou? Since thecallingstarted, I mean.”
Jo tapped on her laptop so fast it was a tiny little burr of sound. Tandy focused on the far wall, as if blocking out everything except the voices.
“How do you know about the calling?” Rick asked. I’d have thought him steady, uninvolved, except for the brightening green glow of his black eyes.
“Your tats are being pulled on. I can feel the magic attacking them. So I did a little research.”
Tension shot through me. Loriann knew something about the magic in Rick’s tats, and not just from the original inking. Could Loriann be the witch cursing Rick? It made sense, except for the logistics. She wasn’t in Knoxville. But... she knew too much and there was no reason why she should know. Unless she had left a backdoor into Rick’s magic tats. I sent that possibility to Jo, who shot me a startled look.
