Then her phone rang, the wordsUnknown callerflashing on the screen. She answered. “What happened to my brother?”
Grayson’s deep voice filled her car through her speakers. “I’ll find him.”
“How?You made his phone untraceable and he finds and destroys every tracker you hapless spies try to stick on his car.”
Grayson cleared his throat. “Detective—”
She cut him off. “Reece called me from behind the wheel.”
There was sudden silence on the other end of the phone.
“You told me you were the best option to protect him, but this is what you’ve done,” she said. “So when you talk, all I hear iswhy yes, ma’am, I’d like you to kick my ass.”
Grayson’s engine revved in the background, a low, powerful rumble not unlike his drawl. “What’d he say?”
“Something about insight, whatever that is. Something about a Whitman, whoever that is.”
Grayson’s exhaust opened up with a roar and the turbos kicked in with a high-pitched whistle. “Then I know where he’s going. And I’m gonna get him back.”
She passed a station wagon merging onto I-5 at school-zone speeds. “He knows about Cora.”
There was a loud honk in the background, as if Grayson had just swerved into someone’s lane. “I know.”
“He thinks this Whitman person knows something too.”
“She does.” There were more honks in the background. Grayson wasn’t making any friends. “She knows things you don’t want your brother to learn. But more than that, you don’t want him discovering what he’s willing to do to get that knowledge.Seattledoesn’t want him discovering that. So I’m gonna get him backfast.”
Jamey felt a muscle tighten in her jaw. “You better.”
She hung up on Grayson. She put on her lights and sirens, and the cars scattered before her as she sped down the highway back to police headquarters.
Reece’s bare hands prickled in the cool air of the Stone Solutions lobby. He had to fight the urge to stuff them in the blazer’s pockets, skulking past the strangers milling in the lobby as they made small talk and ate from tiny plates.
A voice was coming from a pair of open doors down the corridor, the electronic transmittal tinny and hollow.
“—newest model will be created in Hannah’s memory. She was an inspiration—”
Head down, he moved toward the elevators as quietly as he could—
“What are you doing here?”
Reece stumbled and nearly fell.
A security guard loomed over him like a gargoyle. “Are you with AMI? Press?”
From this close, Reece could read the nameWayne Smithon the card hanging from a lanyard around the guard’s neck. He seemed particularly tense.
“You obviously don’t work here,” Smith said. “You’re like twelve.”
Reece took a breath through his nose. “Press.”
“What, like with a high school newspaper or yearbook or something?”
Whatever got him in the doors. Reece smiled tightly. “Go seniors.”
“Ugh.” Smith pointed to a table next to conference room’s open doors, with a largeRegistrationsign, manned by a middle-age woman whose xenophobia was so palpable Reece could almost taste it. “Go sign in.”
Reece snapped his fingers. “Right.”
