“Not me, gorgeous, although I admit he is a fine specimen of a man. I’m talking about you.”
Heat flushed my cheeks, confirming Morrie’s claim. “Wait, how did you—”
Quoth chose that moment to swoop down and drop the phone into Morrie’s hand.
“Excellent.” Morrie sat back in the hedge and flipped through the photographs. “You found evidence Cox was the blackmailer?”
Quoth transformed. He crouched on one knee, his impressive cock swinging between his legs. “Nope. It’s not him.”
“So he’s not blackmailing?”
“Oh, no, he’s blackmailing Ribald, all right. But I doubt he killed Ashley. Look.” Quoth flicked through the photo album on the phone. I peered over his shoulder, and gasped at what I saw.
Inside the vault were hundreds of outfits packed into racks and displayed on mannequins. I recognized pieces from some of the world’s top designers. Rick Owens, Elsa Schiaparelli, Guo Pei, even my dear Vivienne Westwood. If these were real, they were worththousands. Maybe even millions. But that wasn’t what drew my attention.
At the end of the room was a wall displaying glamorous shots of Roger Cox, bedecked in sparkling makeup and dressed in an array of glittering evening dresses, his balding head covered with fabulous wigs. Quoth flipped past image after image of Cox’s round, wrinkling figure spilling out of couture dresses. Another photograph showed a corner of the vault set up as a makeshift photography studio, complete with red carpet and fashion-week backdrop.
“Wheeee, okay.” I rubbed my eyes and handed the phone back to Quoth. “It proves Cox has something to hide, but not that he was a blackmailer or that he didn’t kill Ashley.”
“I found his book of secrets.” Quoth zoomed in on a large ledger book resting on a pedestal. “It’s filled with stories of incest and ill-gotten gains. There’s a file on every major designer in the industry. It looks like he’s been getting free gowns off them for years in exchange for keeping secrets about their affairs, backroom deals, crooked contracts, and drug habits.”
“Like Charles Augustus Milverton, the blackmailer,” I said. “It was one of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous cases.”
“Based, I believe, on the real-life master blackmailer Charles Augustus Howell,” Quoth supplied. “An art dealer and infamous blackmailer who persuaded Dante Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife.”
“Ah, now Howell I remember. He was found in a Chelsea public house with his throat slit and a half-sovereign coin shoved in his mouth. Such a tragic death for one so talented.” Morrie frowned at the images. “Unfortunately, Quoth’s correct. I think we have to discount Mr. Cox from our inquiries.”
“What? Why?” I glanced over Morrie’s shoulder at the images, but nothing obvious jumped out at me.
“Cox is running a lucrative operation here. I don’t think he’d risk its future, nor his secret coming out, by murdering anyone. He wasn’t even blackmailing Ribald for his drawings.”
“What was it about, then?”
“According to Cox’s ledger, Ribald had affairs with several interns.” Quoth pushed his legs into the Holly Santiago jeans I’d brought along for him. “One of them could have been Ashley. The timing matches up.”
“Gross.” I wrinkled my face. That didn’t seem like Ashley, but then, I’d discovered all sorts of things about her I didn’t like recently. I remembered that note from Marcus in her suitcase.Yup, definitely possible.“Does that mean Ribald’s our next suspect?”
“It would seem weird for him to go after Ashley instead of Cox. But I think we can definitely discount Cox.” Quoth pointed to one of the photographs as he buttoned his shirt. “This little number is time-stamped for the night of the murder. He’s alibi’ed himself.”
“So we’re back to square one,” I groaned, my head in my hands. “We have no idea who killed Ashley, and the police are going to arrest me and throw me in jail and I’ll never eat a slice of pizza or get keratin treatment ever again.”
“Not necessarily,” Morrie helped me out of the bushes. I picked thorns out of my hair as we made our way back down the road to the bus stop. “We’re back to our original theory – the person buying Ribald’s designs is the killer. We find that person, we clear your name.”
On the bus back to ___field, I sat next to Quoth. “Thank you for breaking and entering to help me.”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to break the law when the law doesn’t know you exist.”
“Do youwantto exist?”
Quoth stared out the window. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“It does to me. You did amazingly well yesterday in London, and today. You have more control than you think. What it—”
“Please,” he glared at me with all the seeming of a demon that was dreaming. “Don’t talk about this. If I transform on this bus, I’ll be taken away to a laboratory for study.”
“I won’t. I promise.” Quoth turned away from me, burying his head into his shoulder. I touched his arm, but he shrunk back, and my chest constricted to think that I’d upset him. In the seat in front of us, Morrie stared at his phone, completely oblivious.
I slumped in my seat, emotions tearing through me. The trip had been a complete disappointment. We’d hit a dead end with the case, which meant I was still the chief suspect. The rain had soaked through my suede jacket, and my teeth chattered together as I inspected the cuts on my hand from the hedgerow. Worst of all, I’d upset Quoth and I was no closer to figuring out the tangled web of desires that assailed me whenever one of the guys were in the room.
