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She came back.
“What the fuck are you dusting in there?”
“In the office,” she replied. “Totally trashed.”
I failed to suppress the irritation that washed across my face and through my chest. “Was someone going to fuckingtellme that?” I demanded.
Quincy blinked. “Um. The office was totally trashed and you should come look at it?”
“Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Ward, can you ask—”
“Oh, she’s got things to say aboutthat,” the medium answered, although he sounded slightly amused, which had me wondering what the fuck was going on in the metaphysical aether that was so damn entertaining.
“Is she going to be inclined to show me?” I asked.
I watched Ward’s eyes narrow and sharpen, then relax again. “She’s not happy about that idea, but she’s really not happy about the idea that somebody trashed her office after they shot her,” he reported.
“Great, let’s go. Doc, you coming?”
“I wouldn’t dream of missing it.”
* * *
Quincy hadn’t been kiddingabout the office being trashed. Ward had stopped with Taavi in the doorway, then backed a few feet back into the hallway. “Oh, I’m not going in there.”
I scooted around both Ward and Doc, then discovered why Ward had noped out of the office. There was shiteverywhere. Papers, broken porcelain and glass, pictures knocked off walls, trinkets scattered, pens dumped out of drawers, books pulled seemingly at random off shelves. He’d have run over half the contents of the room by trying to go inside.
“Fucking hell,” I breathed.
Quincy nodded. “Like I said.”
“This might actually go beyond ‘trashed,’” I told her.
She nodded, then carefully scooted around debris to go back to dusting the wood-and-leather office chair, which had been tipped on its side.
“Someone photograph this?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.” At least if I accidentally stepped on something, there would be a record of where it had been, even if they hadn’t actually labeled everything yet.
“Why did we stop marking?” I asked. There were a good two dozen little folded yellow numbers in one quadrant of the room, and that was it.
“Ran out of numbers,” Quincy answered. “Doug’s getting more.”
I nodded. “Fuck.”
“Uh-huh,” Quincy agreed.
I began making a slow—very careful—circuit of the office, looking for… I don’t know what the fuck I was looking for, to be honest. But sometimes circling would help me know it when I saw it.
Or, in this case, felt it.
“Doc, I need you.”
“How am I supposed to get anywhere in there, Hart?” he asked from the doorway.
“Not my problem, Doc, but this thing—” I pointed at a locked cabinet “—needs your attention.”
“Magic?”
