Inside the building, the air was almost unbearably heavy and sticky on Hallie’s skin, even with the lightweight clothes she was wearing. She didn’t know how the tactical team could bear it, smothered in their heavy combat gear.
Apart from a fairly large main area, the rest of the internal space had been divided into small rooms, including a kitchen that Hallie thought should just be set on fire as a health hazard and a bathroom that smelled even worse than the kitchen. There were two rooms that had been used as bedrooms, with mattresses on the floor in each. Frollo said the rest of the team members were searching through those, but pointed to theflimsy table in the main room. “We saw the papers and tablet there and thought you’d want to take a look.”
“Good, thank you,” Girard said, moving to the table.
Hallie paused and sent a frowning look over her shoulder. “How many mattresses did you count?”
“Five,” Frollo said, a certain grimness in his voice. “And, yes, it looks like they’ve all been used.”
“So we have potentially two more?” Hallie frowned again as she thought back to the night before. “I don’t remember seeing anyone else, or sensing anyone else around. Just the three of them.” A chill ran over her skin. She’d barely managed to deal with the attackers who had come into the house. She was quite sure she wouldn’t have managed to deal with another two as well.
“It’s possible that they fled when the others didn’t come back last night,” Frollo said. He didn’t sound convinced. “We’ll let you know if we find any ID or anything like that in the bedrooms.”
“Good, thank you,” Hallie said, and went to join Girard at the table. He was wearing a pair of thin gloves and holding a computer tablet in his hand, frowning at the screen. As he was better suited to dealing with it, Hallie turned her attention to what was left on the table surface, pulling on a pair of gloves of her own. In contrast to every other raised surface in the house, there were no dirty plates or glasses or other dishes on the table, just a range of printed materials.
At first glance, the collection looked completely random. Tourist information and address cards for businesses in the city, what looked like a bank statement, and random sheets of paper. But there were no other papers in the house that Hallie had seen, so she thought they must mean something. And the fact that the people in the house hadn’t left their crockery and glasses on the table also meant they’d taken care to keep this one spot relativelyclean. Then she recognised one of the businesses and picked up the card, showing it to Girard.
“This is the restaurant we stopped at on the first day. The one that had those awful mustard-yellow curtains. Remember?”
“I remember those curtains, certainly,” Girard said, looking up from the tablet screen and frowning at the papers on the table.
They had gone to the restaurant to talk to the owner, who was supposedly well-connected in the criminal underground of Minamaan. He’d been less than helpful, which had just confirmed both Hallie and Girard’s suspicions that he knew a lot more than he was prepared to share.
“And this is that furniture shop we went to later that day,” Girard said, pointing to another card.
“I think I recognise most of these other names, too,” Hallie said, another chill running across her skin. “So, have they been following us, or were we following them?”
“It does seem that they were in the same places we were,” Girard agreed.
“Why did you go there?” Frollo asked. Hallie had forgotten he was still in the room.
“We were tracking down Manju Nayak,” Hallie said. She met Girard’s gaze. “So, we weren’t the only ones.”
“But we got to him first,” Girard pointed out.
“And they must have followed us back to the house,” Hallie finished.
“We’re sure that the target was Manju Nayak?” Frollo asked, sounding concerned.
“He was the first one hit, and the only new factor in the house,” Girard answered. “And from the way that the office and our rooms were searched, it seems like they were looking for information as much as they wanted Manju dead.”
“The people who were staying here were working for someone else, though,” Hallie said, half to herself, as she picked up someof the sheets of paper and started looking through them. There was one that looked like a transport schedule of some kind. It reminded Hallie of the bus timetables in low city, although she didn’t recognise any of the names.
“What makes you say that?” Frollo asked, curiosity clear.
“Well, these look like receipts. The sort of thing that you’d gather to prove to your boss that you had actually done the work,” Hallie said, glancing up with a half-smile. “My aunt would never pay out for anything unless I could prove I’d spent the money.”
“The Conclave Investigators have a similar policy,” Girard said. “And it makes sense. It could also be that they wanted to keep track of where they’d been.”
“And someone who knew the city most likely wouldn’t need the cards or leaflets. They’d be familiar enough to get around without them,” Hallie said. “Which gives more weight to the idea that the people who’d been staying here weren’t local. Hired in.”
“Any ideas by who?” Frollo asked, eyes sharp. Thinking about the potential threat, Hallie guessed. That was a large part of his job here, after all.
“There’s some encrypted communications on the tablet,” Girard said, holding it up so Hallie and Frollo could see the screen. It looked like a confusing wall of text to Hallie - black characters on a white background - and like no messaging programme she’d ever used. “I think it’s in some kind of code, which I can’t read. We’d need the tech team to look at it.”
“Huh,” Hallie said, as her eyes turned back to the papers she was holding. “They are abbreviations. No wonder I didn’t recognise anything. This one is circled. D Y N, then the number 32. Is that Daydawn?” she looked up at the brief silence to see a grim look exchanged between Girard and Frollo. “What?”
“DYN is the abbreviation for the Daydawn port and 32 could be a location along the dockside,” Girard said. “It’s where oneof the bombs went off before the last Conclave meeting in Daydawn.”
