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Someone was shutting down any and every case that stank of the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum—someone with enough clout to get Villanova to agree to it. And that was the part that bothered me the most. I’d always thought Villanova was pretty clean. God knows he’d stood up for my pointy-eared ass often enough, which meant that he at least wasn’t a raging bigot.
So I wanted him to be clean.
But if hewasclean, that meant that whoever was being pressured was above him—and that was a good deal scarier than thinking Villanova was dirty.
I was afraid that the evidence pointed to the worse of the two options.
If Villanova was clean, that meant that the corruption in the RPD went higher. Or it meant that the corruption was higher even than the RPD, and I really didn’t like the idea that the mayor’s or DA’s office was the source of the shut-down.
I’d opened my mouth to say as much, but Dan spoke first.
“I don’t want to know, Hart,” he said softly. “I just don’t.”
I shut my mouth. I wanted to ask him how he could keep working there, how he could just accept these bullshit limitations being placed on him, how he could just roll over and play fucking dead when there were people legitimatelydying, their killers going unpunished. The problem was that it would make me feel better about my own choice to quit, but would probably make Dan feel like crap for staying.
Which wasn’t a very nice thing to do.
And I was trying to be a better person.
So I didn’t say any of that. I just shut the fuck up and ate some pizza, trying to figure out how to get access to that journal and how to get more information on this new Ordo murder. Ian Whitehead.
Instead, I asked a question. “What can I do, Dan?”
He stared at me. “What?”
“You’re not any happier about having your case frozen than I was,” I explained. “But you want to keep your job. So what can I do?”
I watched him go from dejected to thoughtful, although I could also tell that he wasn’t sure how to answer my question. But the simple fact that I’d asked it gave him a little ray of hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing in our line of work. Dangerous, because it meant that you were likely to be disappointed a lot more often than not. But necessary, because without it, it would be impossible to keep going when you had nothing to go on.
Elliot had told me to bring in my own cases. Well, Faith Oldham was my case. And yeah, I wasn’t going to get paid by a wealthy client to do it, but it wouldn’t be the first time Beyond the Veil took on something pro bono because it was important.
And I was pretty sure that as much as Ward hated dealing with the Ordo, he would be absolutely on board with finding more of them and throwing them behind bars. So he’d let me take on this one.
I should have done it six months ago.
Better fucking late as hell than never.
10
Dan had sentme at least two dozen texts over the last four days, letting me know he was trying to track down information on the old Ordo cases—Greer, Nesbit, Mitchell, and even Oldham, despite the shit it would land him in if Villanova found out. I’d gotten phone photos of some of the old files he’d managed to get access to while ostensibly investigating some of his other cases, but he hadn’t been able to get me the notebook Doc and I had pulled out of the Miller-Duskevicz attic.
Because the notebook was apparently now fucking missing.
God fucking damn it.
I took a couple deep breaths and reminded myself that it wasn’t Dan’s fault that someone had disappeared the fucking thing. Fortunately for Dan, he wasn’t in the room with me, and hadn’t had to listen to the stream of curses that had accompanied the arrival of his latest text—the one that saidyoure not going to like this but its gone and theres no record of anybody taking it.
Dan did not believe in using punctuation in his texts.
“Are we okay, handsome?”
I looked up from my phone. I was at work, and Rebeckah Kwan was standing in the doorway to my office, her head tilted slightly to the side in a question.
Beck is hands-down the most fashionable member of Beyond the Veil, and today she was wearing a floor-length crimson, pink, and gold brocade-print sundress, a tasseled belt, and heavy gold jewelry. It should have made her look like a set of Victorian curtains, but it didn’t. Instead, it looked tastefully classy with a flare of artsy.
I sighed.
