At a stoplight, he turned his head slightly and caught me looking.
“What?” he asked quietly.
“You make this look easy.”
A small pause. “It’s mostly repetition.”
“That’s less romantic than I had hoped.”
“I’m working, not operating in a romantic capacity.”
From the second row, without turning around, Dominic said, “A pity. You’d both be better behaved if you were.”
Eamon made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes for two seconds.
“He’s unbearable,” I said.
“Yes,” Thiago replied.
When I opened my eyes again, I found I was calmer than I had been an hour earlier. Not because anything had improved. Henri was still out there. Bridget had handed over too much information, and the concert was coming whether any of us liked it or not.
Thiago was beside me. Dominic was in front of us. Eamon had both hands on the wheel. The three men made all the difference in my world.
Chapter eighteen
Thiago
My phone rang while I was still standing at the kitchen counter with the Orpheum floor plan spread beneath my hands.
Luca had left the kitchen a few minutes earlier. Dominic was in the salon with the doors closed, a thin stripe of light showing beneath them that hadn’t changed for the past hour. Eamon had stepped outside to take a call from the police liaison, and I’d heard the courtyard gate open and close behind him.
The number on my phone screen was Michael’s.
He texted when he had questions. He called when something had hardened from possibility into fact.
“Reyes.”
“Confirmation on Devereaux,” he said, skipping the greeting. His voice was clipped and calm. “Hotel reservation in New Orleans through the twenty-ninth. He checked in two days ago.”
I looked down at the floor plan, tracing the narrow service lane behind the Orpheum with one finger. “We expected that.”
“There’s more.” I heard papers shift on his end. “A traffic camera picked him up on August twentieth, entering the servicelane. The time stamp puts him inside the building for about eleven minutes.”
I stopped moving my hand.
“Before the stage mark moved,” I said.
“Exactly. Enough time to walk the wing and confirm the line of sight. He wasn’t there to work. He was there to measure.”
“Roles are separating cleanly,” Michael said.
I picked up my pencil lying beside the floor plan. “Go on.”
“Micah is the weapon arm. Devereaux is the distraction arm. Bridget supplied the intelligence.” A pause. “Henri coordinates. He designed the entire thing and remains outside of it.”
I wrote the names in a column. Seeing them in my handwriting clarified the structure.
