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“There is,” Petra said, then looked at us. “Have you figured it out yet?”
We looked at her, then the map, trying to figure out where she was leading us.
“No?” Theo said.
With a heavy sigh, Petra pulled up another photo. This one was an overhead shot of the fairies at Grant Park, the careful lines in a V configuration, with Theo and me tiny dots in front of them.
The fairies’ formation matched the ley lines perfectly.
“That’s why they were in that V configuration,” she said. “They were standing over one of the angles created by the conjunction.”
“Damn good work,” Yuen said, and his smile was as wide as Petra’s had been. He seemed genuinely proud of her work, which I suspected wouldn’t have been Dearborn’s reaction.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So the fairies wanted to use the ley lines for something,” I asked. “And they figured the conjunction—two ley lines crossing—would give them the biggest bang for the buck.”
“Maybe,” Petra said. “We don’t know much about the mechanism of ley lines because of—”
“Big Petroleum,”we finished for her.
“Hilarious,” she said without a hint of humor. “And correct. But presumably they want the power.”
“Ruadan wants the power,” I murmured, stepping closer to the map and wondering what he had planned.
“If they wanted the conjunction,” Theo said, “they might try Grant Park again. Or the next best thing, which I guess would be anywhere else along the ley lines?”
I nodded. “So if we search the ley lines, we might find thefairies.” And then the obvious thing hit me. “Can you put the Potter Park tower and the castle on that map?”
Petra looked at me, grinned. “Of course,” she said with a nod. “Of course they did that.”
She knew what I was looking for. And when she plotted the two structures on the map, she showed my instinct had been right.
“They’re positioned over ley lines,” Theo said.
“Claudia probably selected the Potter Park tower because of the location over the north-south line,” I said, “and bought the castle property for the same reason.”
“We’ll get CPD officers to travel the lines, look for any sign of them. Can you get me a scalable version of the map and the course of the ley lines to pass along? Perhaps one that, just in case of Big Petroleum, doesn’t actually say ‘ley lines’?”
“Sure,” she said. “No one has to know what the lines represent. We can call them... fairy migratory routes or something.”
“That’s good,” I said.
She smiled, which crinkled her nose. “Yeah, I like it, too.”
Yuen’s screen buzzed, and he pulled it out. “I think our luck is changing,” he said, and swept a finger across the screen to send an image to the larger monitor.
The image was dark, but it showed side-by-side images of a fairy. In the first, the neck of his tunic was pinned with a gold pin. In the second, the pin was gone.
“Cadogan House surveillance video,” Yuen said. “These images are from the evening of the party. And, interestingly, they are the only images of him at the event. There are none of him entering through the front gate or speaking to the other guests.”
“Like he was there for a very short time,” Theo said, “and a very specific purpose.”
“Precisely,” Yuen said.
I closed my eyes and walked through the scene, trying to putmyself in the fairy’s place. “He wants to stay undetected, so he avoids the front gate. Instead, he comes in over the wall. He kills Tomas, magicks Riley and gives him the knife, then sneaks out over the wall again, leaving his pin behind, then disposes of his bloody clothes.”
“And the only evidence we have of any of that is circumstantial,” Yuen said.
