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I made a noise I'm not proud of.

"Hazel…"

"Don't. Don't be kind to me right now, it's been a week for that." I scrubbed my palms over my face like a peasant. It was becoming a habit by now. "You know what the worst part is? She'd have found him. If she'd ever once looked somewhere that didn't have magic in it, she'd have found him in one afternoon. She didn't look because she couldn't imagine that a Fae would have a gas account."

"Or," said Davon, "she looked, and she found him, and she didn't tell you."

River glared at him and tugged me closer, as if he could physically shield me from the truth with his body.

The pop machine hummed in the background.

"Say that again." Something cold was spreading through me, freezing all the way to my soul, and it had nothing to do with the male holding my hands like a lifeline.

"I'm not saying it's true." Davon held both hands up and his gaze kept jumping to Blackman nervously. "I'm saying I've been a detective for nine years and I've never once had a cold case go this easy. When something goes this easy it's usually because somebody already did the work and put it back where they found it pretending they saw nothing." He tapped the photocopy. "That lease is in the county system. It's been in the county system since 1999. It is not hidden, Hazel. It's filed."

I looked at the paper on the tailgate with my mother's handwriting on it.

Lyra Byrne. Twenty-two years old that spring. Signing a lease on a two-family home in a city with a man who wouldn't write his name down, almost three hundred dollars a month, utilities not included, and twenty-two months left to live.

Lesson number twenty-eight: the thing nobody ever tells you about digging for the truth is that you'd better be sure you want it, because you don't get to put it back.

"Is there an address?" Dread spread through me but I needed to know. To go see it would make it seem more real.

"There's an address."

"Is the house still there?"

"It's still there." Davon closed the folder with a loud smack. "I drove past it on the way out here. It's a rental. There's a kid's bike on the porch and somebody's repainted it green. The woman who lives in the downstairs unit has been there sixteen years and has never heard of any of you."

"So there's nothing there, is what you're saying."

"I didn't say that." He pulled the elastic back over the folder and held it out to me. I took it, and it weighed about as much as a sandwich but had my entire life in it. "The upstairs unit has been vacant for six months. The landlord's an outfit called Erie Property Group and they've got a receptionist who'll let anybody in to see anything if they think you might sign a lease."

I stared at him.

"Davon."

"I'm not saying do it. I'm saying it's Tuesday night, your thing is on Thursday. There's a day in the middle." He got up off the tailgate and stood there in the cold with his hands in his coat pockets. "I'm also saying I'm not going in there with you. I want to be extremely clear about that. I've seen now what happens in rooms that people like you walk into."

"Fair enough."

"It's not fair, it's cowardice, but I'm forty-one and I'd like to see forty-two." He almost smiled. "You look terrible, by the way."

"I've had a wonderful week."

"Yeah." He looked at me for a long moment, and then he said the thing he'd driven twelve hours and sat outside nine motels to say. He said it in the same flat voice he'd use to read somebody their rights.

"Hazel. Your grandmother is going to sell you out on Thursday. You already know it, and that's why you're forty miles away sitting in a parking lot instead of doing something about it."

The highway made its long tearing sound out past the ramp.

"Thanks for the warning." My reaction was as bland as oatmeal out of a box.

"Okay." Davon nodded once, aware he couldn't get more reaction out of me at that moment. I was still shocked by all the information he shared. "That's all I came to say. The rest was just paperwork."

Chapter Twelve

Erie Property Group had a receptionist named Bryce who apparently considered silence a medical emergency. In the three minutes it took him to hand over the keys to the upper unit at 2214 West 44th, I learned about his fantasy football league, his ex-girlfriend, and a rash I sincerely wished he'd kept between himself and his dermatologist.