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“He and the others attacked you,” Gwen said. “They want you in, what did they call it, seclusion.”
“And I declined. Blake, as far as I can tell, was just the messenger. Clive is the one in charge.”
Gwen ignored that. “Where were you last night?”
“The Grove, as you know. After that, NAC headquarters. We helped prepare a catering order, and there were at least two dozen shifters, including the Apex, who’d be happy to verify that. After that, we went home. It was nearly dawn when I went to bed.”
“Alone?”
I looked up at Robinson, my eyes flat. “Yes. My bed empty, my apartment empty. Lulu was... gone.” Presumably at Mateo’s, but I hadn’t even had time to ask her before they’d escorted me out.
“So you don’t have an alibi for the time of the murder?”
Sneaky question. “I don’t know when the murder occurred, so I don’t know where I was.”
“Six ten in the morning,” Theo said.
I thought back. “I’d have been in bed and unconscious. The sun is so bad for the skin,” I added dryly, then frowned as I began to think logically again. “That’s, like, ten minutes before sunrise, and it’s at least a twenty-minute drive from Brass & Copper to the loft, depending on traffic.”
I paused, let them do the math. “You found me in the loft just after dawn. I had to be in the loft before the sun came up, or I’d have been burned.” I pulled up my sleeves, showed the unmarred skin. “I wasn’t.”
“Armored car?” Gwen asked.
“I don’t have a car, much less a sun-shielded one. Regardless, I was at the loft. The building has a security camera on the door. Lulu wanted to be sure she was in a secure building.”
Gwen looked up at the window, nodded at someone on the other side, who, I guessed, was now in charge of obtaining a copy of the video.
She looked at me again. “So you ordered someone to do it.”
I met her gaze, steadily. “Your first theory was that I killed a man I barely know in a building I’ve never been in for no apparent reason. That didn’t pan out, so you think I have assassins on call, and I’d have them do my dirty work for me. I’m not sure which is more insulting,” I said and heard the temper in my voice. Didn’t mind it.
“If a vampire killed him,” I continued, “he’d either have stayed in the building or had a sun-shielded car of his own. If it was a human, he could have walked away. Is the building secured?”
“Not the area where Blake was found,” Gwen said. “There are public restaurants and shops in the lobby. He was found on that floor, albeit in a low-traffic area. You’d need a badge for the elevators to go up to the business floors.”
“Residences?”
“No.”
They might have pulled me in for questioning, but if they’d really believed I’d done it, they wouldn’t be giving me so many details. So while I let myself relax, I didn’t let my guard fully down.
“Why was Blake in the Brass & Copper building right before dawn?” I asked. “If there aren’t any residences, there’s nowhere to bed down if he misses the timing and the sun comes up. That’s dangerous.”
“Coffee,” Theo said. “There’s a coffee shop in the lobby, and it opens early. We have a surveillance shot of him buying a drink shortly before he was killed.”
“Alone?”
“Alone,” Theo said. “Doesn’t mean he was alone when he went into the building or afterward.”
“Perhaps you glamoured him,” Gwen said. “Convinced him to do something risky. Maybe you hoped the sun would do the work for you.”
Instinctively, I touched the spot on my thigh that still bore a pale scar, earned in Minnesota when a magic-crazed shifter had tried to rip the protective shielding off a window in the middle of the day. He’d managed only to damage it, but the thin bead of sunlight hurt worse than a blade. Had hurt badly enough to wake me from daytime unconsciousness.
“Glamour doesn’t change minds,” I said. “It lowers inhibitions. It’s persuasive, but sunlight kills. You’d need something more than glamour to convince a vampire to risk it.”
Coffee addiction or not—and I knew from coffee addiction—was a vampire going to risk death by scorching just to get a fix? “You’ll need to check how he arrived—and how he intended to get out again. It’s very risky behavior, especially for someone who isn’t from Chicago and doesn’t know their way around.”
Gwen didn’t look thrilled that I was giving her investigatory advice. Which I suppose seemed pretty cocky. “What do you have against the AAM?” she asked.
