Rick stared at her, waiting.
T. Laine said nothing, though there hadn’t been time to get permission to use the null room on Loriann.
“I’ve never been in one of those. Is it going to hurt?”
“Every second,” T. Laine said. “For all of us.”
“Shit,” she whispered.
Rick held out a hand and said, “Your electronics.”
Loriann’s mouth curled in distaste, but she dug into her bag and handed over a small stack of electronics—laptop, tablet, and cell phone—to Rick, who passed them to Occam.
Loriann squared her shoulders and walked into the null room. Rick, Tandy, and T. Laine walked in after. The door closed, cutting off the miserable energies.
The rest of us went to the conference room, where we could watch everything on the screens from the cameras in the room, filming every angle, every nuance of speech, tone, and body language for later analysis. JoJo plugged Loriann’s laptop into a special system she kept for just such purposes. The host system promptly began to mine Loriann’s.
Rick told Loriann to remove all her weapons, magical and mundane. Loriann placed her satchel on the table. “My weapon’s in there. And I have these, which will do me no good whatsoever in here.” She slid off a ring I hadn’t noticed and placed it on the table. Beside it she added a bracelet, a pair of what looked like reading glasses, and small things from her pockets. She took the seat Rick pointed to and sat. Looking around at the windowless room, she hugged herself, shivering, and not just from the air-conditioning temps.
“Tell me about Jason,” Rick said. Loriann looked down, her mouth tight with bitterness and grief. She seemed to be thinking through what she might be willing to say. “Lori?” Rick pushed.
“I’ll tell you whatIhave on Jason,” JoJo said to Occam and me, muting the volume. “The kid vanished off social media over a year ago. Wiped his accounts, not that he used them much except for searching witch sites and black-magic chat rooms. His sister reported him missing within a week of him wiping the accounts and no one has seen hide nor hair of him. Prior to that, he was in and out of the juvenile system for years, and ended up in therapy mandated by the state, which usually means some fresh-faced counselor just out of school.”
“We should have had prints from the focals,” I said.
“His records were sealed when he turned eighteen. I’m trying to get them, but that can be harder than you think.” Her fingers were flying over her keyboard as she spoke, and files began to pop up on the screens overhead. “Jason ended up with a Dr. Robert Perkins, a well-respected psychologist in New Orleans. Looks like payments went through the state and all overages were paid by a...” JoJo stopped and yanked on her earrings. It looked painful. “Isleen was Katie Fonteneau’s scion, and Fonteneau paid the overages, until Jason went missing. As an aside, seven or so months ago is when Katie left New Orleans and took over as Master of the City of Atlanta.”
I said, “I’m starting an Internet search on public events that took place twelve months ago, something, anything that might have set Jason off.”
“Is Perkins alive?” Occam asked. “Patients who go off the deep end sometimes try to kill the therapist. And what can you tell us about Perkins’ therapy files?”
“Alive and well. Old money. I’ll never get into the doctor’s accounts, not from here, and maybe not even if I was in the office. He has a nice firewall or three and the files may be encrypted. I’ll come back to it.” She put something else up on the screen. “Ah! Got something. Hang on.” A moment later she said, “Pictures of Jason, one from only two years ago. Aaaaand, Nell guessed right. According to the state’s records, Jason was sexually abused by a vampire. Because he was so young, he developed an addiction to vamp blood.”
“He was achild,” Occam growled, repressed fury in his voice. The memory of his cage glowed in his eyes.
I glanced at him and back to my laptop, thinking about the churchmen. Tender youth was a turn-on to pedophiles. Mycomputer screen showed multiple news articles. “I found something,” I said. “Twelve months ago in New Orleans, a single vampire killed more than fifty people in a dancehall bar and sexually assaulted some of them. It was all over the news, twenty-four/seven. That might have brought it all back to Jason. Might have been the tipping point.”
“I remember that,” Jo said. “Good work.”
“Listen,” Occam said, pointing to the screen with the null room video.
Jo hit a key and the speakers came on again.
“Jason stole my grandmother’s tarot deck,” Loriann said to Rick. “And yes, it was the same deck I used on you. He stole all the gauze and things I collected from the barn where I inked you.”
“You kept some of the gauze with my blood on it. You were planning on... what? Finishing the working? Binding me to yourself?”
“No, I—I don’t know why I didn’t burn everything. I wasn’tplanningon anything. I swear.”
Surprise in his tone, Occam murmured, “I sniffed the gauze and I didn’t recognize Rick’s scent, because he wasn’t infected with were-taint when it was collected. His scent’s different.”
“And that’s not the point,” Loriann said to her interrogators. “Thepointis thatJason has your bloodeven if it isn’t your werecat blood, it’s still yours. When he calls you, he can get you.” She looked around at the walls. “Unless you’re in here. God, this place makes me want to puke.”
“Yeah,” T. Laine said. “Cry me a river. Tell me about the working. What part does the tarot deck play?”
“From what I could tell, he was using a combination of the Celtic Cross spread and, beside it, what might have been an Angels and Demons spread, with other cards at each spoke of the circle. It’s a complicated working and he’s been refining it for years, no matter where we’ve lived or vacationed. He’s obsessed.” She raised her gaze to Rick, something of guilt in them. “And he wants you dead.”
“Why?” Tandy asked her.
