And at the top of a dark flight of stairs—veering down rather than up.
Into the belly of the beast it is, then.
I hustle the rest of the way downstairs, senses on thealert. I’m out of sight of regular club-goers now, but that doesn’t mean whoever uses this space normally won’t stop by.
I need to scrounge through everything at top speed and then get the hell out of here.
My feet follow the steps until they hit a stretch of floor. No illumination follows this far from the tiny gaps around the door.
I pull out my phone and tap it to flashlight mode. A short hallway comes into view before me.
There’s another door just steps away. This one is locked too, but only mechanically. I sculpt a handful of ephemera into a key and push inside.
The phone’s thin light casts the room beyond in shades of gray. A couple of slim wooden desks stand diagonally from each other by one corner. Maps are tacked to the walls over them—one of the city, one of all of North America, and one of the whole world—but I can’t make out any markings on them to indicate specific areas of interest.
Another wall holds a set of antique-looking drawer units like I’ve seen in photos of old libraries, each drawer only big enough to hold index cards. Between the three tall units, they must have over a hundred drawers.
The only other furniture in the room is a small steel cabinet. I check that first, tugging the doors open with a faint squeak.
The shelves hold boxes of pens and stacks of blank cards as well as extra ink cartridges. Glancing around, I spot a printer tucked under one of the desks.
There are no computers in sight, but whoever uses this room could bring a laptop with them when they come and go.
As I move to the card drawers, a faint whiff of perfume—lightly aquatic with a hint of florals—reaches my nose. I pause with a hitchof my heart.
For that scent to be lingering in the air, the perfume-wearer must have been in this room not too long ago.
What if she’s only taking a brief break from her work?
With a sharper jolt of urgency, I grasp one of the drawers.
I start at the bottom, but the lowest ones are empty. When I reach for those higher up, I find them packed with cards, separated into caddies that can be lifted out individually.
Each caddy is about as long as my thumb. Most are no more than half full of cards.
Holding up my phone for light, I flick through one caddy’s contents and another’s with hasty fingers. Most of the cards only contain spidery writing in characters I don’t recognize. Some type of Asian script, maybe?
A few have been printed with photographs, with more of the unfamiliar writing on the backs. I don’t recognize the faces of the men and women in the first several of those. In some cases, the clothing choices and hair styles suggest the pictures were taken decades ago.
After trying a few drawers at random, I get a sense that the oldest images are highest up. I crouch down again, checking until I find what appear to be the most recently filled slots.
In the first of those, my searching fingers stumble on a photo of Grady Tadros. He’s standing next to a glossy marble wall looking off to the left, as if he didn’t know the picture was being taken.
My heart stops for a few beats. I lift the photograph with shaky fingers to snap a hasty picture of it with my phone and then another picture of the back in the hopes I’ll be able to translate the writing later.
His caddy only holds half a dozen cards, and that’s the only photo. Because he’s a new recruit to whatever secret villainy these cards are about?
That would fit the comments he’s made.
I take hasty pictures of the other cards and then paw through the rest of the caddies in that drawer. No one else I recognize catches my eye.
In the next drawer over, I freeze over a photo of Kenneth Hearst.
Even though I was braced to see him, a wobble runs through my gut. For an instant, I’m back in the damp night when he launched himself at me with a stabbing knife and nothing but murder in his eyes.
How did this one woman turn him from the mild-mannered second son of an upper-crust family into that monster?
His caddy holds many more cards than Grady’s did. I take some pictures, but it’s impossible to tell what’s important when I can’t read them.
