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“Doing it,” said Leo.
“I meant about Diana,” Remi said impatiently.
“Yep,” said Leo. He stood up abruptly and walked away.
Remi and Monroe looked at each other, and Remi felt that momentary flutter of delight inside. “Where the hell did he go?” said Monroe.
“Beats me,” said Remi.
Twenty minutes later Leo returned carrying an evidence bag with a notebook inside it. “You won’t believe this,” he said, carefully extracting the notebook with his gloved hands and placing it on his desk.
Remi’s eyes widened, and she rolled her chair backwards until it bumped against Leo’s desk. “What have you got?” she asked eagerly. Monroe joined them, crowding in on Leo’s other side.
As Remi read what was on the little book, her heartbeat quickened. “No way,” she said. She carefully picked up the notebook using the plastic evidence bag, and charged back into Storm’s office without bothering to knock. Leo and Monroe followed her in a little more hesitantly.
Storm had been on the phone, but he hung up, and immediately said, “Whatever you’re going to say, I’ve already thought about it. Diana chose to leave, and now she’s on her own.”
There was a tone of finality in what he had said, but Remi was in no mood to listen. Storm was sulking, which was not like him at all. He was sore that Diana had left like she had, and now he was getting defensive about it. Men!
“It wasn’t fair,” she said. “We all ganged up on her.”
“No we didn’t,” Monroe protested. And then he seemed to play over what had happened in his head and suddenly looked a little shamefaced. “Oh. Maybe we did,” he mumbled.
“What’s done is done,” said Storm in that very rational boss voice of his. “We can’t help Diana if she is set on this world goose chase.”
“Oh just admit that you’re angry with her,” said Remi. “Because she blatantly lied to you about not interfering with the Ronin case and now you think she’s got no faith or trust in your judgment.”
“Are you saying it was any different?” said Storm in his totally reasonable voice, which was beginning to get on Remi’s nerves.
“We were harsh,” she said. “But you were worse. You’ve been super irritable recently, and I hate to tell you this boss, but you did take it out on Diana. She’s only been working with us part-time these past three weeks and she’s already closed three cases that were supposedly unsolvable. She is a member of this team, and she works damn hard. And now it’s our turn to help her.”
“I haven’t been irritable,” protested Storm.
“Yes you have,” said Remi and Leo and Monroe in unison.
Storm glowered at the three of them. “My mood has nothing to do with what happened with Diana.”
“Good,” said Remi, “Then you will agree now that we’ve all calmed down that we made a mistake and we should help her.”
“You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped,” said Storm.
“Of course she wants our help! She’s just too proud to admit it. And can you blame her? This case is personal. He killed her mother! Devil Claw is the whole reason why she came into work for the Agency in the first place, and now she’s got this one chance, and how can we blame her for throwing everything away to try to catch him? She had to have been absolutely desperate if she went to visit a vampire nest by herself. Boss, are you really going to let her put herself in danger that way?”
“I’ve done my best to reason with her,” said Storm. “She’s got it into her head that Steffane Ronin is innocent, that he really does know who Devil Claw is, but Ronin is not innocent. I was part of the team that arrested him, and he almost had me persuaded for a very short time that he really was innocent because he almost seemed to believe it himself. He was adamant. His mesmerism was so powerful that we were afraid that he would influence the jury. In the end it turned out it couldn’t have been anyone but him. He insisted that he was in love with Leonie Ashbeck, but her aunt said the girl had been terrified of him. Steffane Ronin lied about his innocence, and now he’s lying about knowing Devil Claw. If Diana won’
t listen to reason, she’s going to have to come to the right conclusion on her own the hard way.”
“What if there was a link between Stefanne Ronin and Devil Claw?” Remi said. She carefully placed the notebook onto his desk in front of him. “Leo found something.”
Storm scanned the page she had opened it to and his eyebrows drew together as he deciphered the cramped handwriting.
Leo spoke. “Seven years ago, a year before Steffane Ronin returned to the Ronin family fold, a young woman named Tamara Westmoor was murdered by Devil Claw. It was before any of us joined the Agency.”
Storm was still reading through the notebook, his brow furrowed. “I remember reading those case notes. Westmoor worked for the Agency. She was one of our own. She was one of the Devil Claw’s first known killings.”
“This is her notebook,” said Leo. “I just got it from the evidence archives.” He pointed to a specific passage of writing. “This whole notebook is full of Officer Westmoor’s personal notes on Steffane Ronin. She was trying to convict him for his misdeeds and his dangerous lifestyle, and going by the dates in this notebook, it was right to before she became a victim of the Devil Claw Killer.”
Feeling excited, Remi interjected. “Shortly after her killing Steffane Ronin returned to his family fold to take up the heritage that he had so thoroughly rejected before. What if Steffane Ronin knew Devil Claw? Maybe Officer Westmoor was too close to arresting Ronin and he felt that he was in danger. What if his buddy Devil Claw did him a favor and got rid of her? What if Steffane Ronin returned to his family because he needed their money to pay back the Devil Claw Killer?”
