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“Okay,” I say as Agent Jones kills the engine. “After all, I am entirely in your hands.”
Yulikova smiles. “And we’re in yours.”
I grab my duffel, they take navy overnight bags and briefcases out of the trunk, and we head for the main entrance. I feel like I am going to a very dull sleepover.
“Wait here,” Yulikova says, and leaves me standing in the lobby with the nameless female agent while Yalikova and Jones check us in.
I sit on the arm of a beige chair and stick out my free hand. “Cassel Sharpe.”
She regards me with all the suspicion that Jones usually does. Her short ginger hair is pulled back into a low ponytail, and her navy suit matches her overnight bag. Sensible beige pumps. Panty hose, for God’s sake. Tiny gold hoops in her ears complete the effect of a person with no tells and no inner life. I can’t even tell her age; it could be anywhere between late twenties and late thirties.
“Cassandra Brennan.”
I blink several times, but when she reaches out her hand, I take it and we shake.
“I see why they gave you this job,” I say finally. “Brennan family, huh? Yulikova said she hadn’t worked with many people who come from worker families. She didn’t say she’d worked with none.”
“It’s a common enough name,” she says.
Then Yulikova comes back and we head to the elevators.
My room is part of a suite, attached to the rooms where Yulikova, Jones, and Brennan will be sleeping. Of course, I’m not given my own key. My door, predictably, does not exit into the hallway but opens onto the main room, where there’s a crappy couch, a television, and a mini fridge.
I dump my duffel in my bedroom and head back out into the central room. Agent Jones is watching me, as if I’m about to pull some kind of ninja move and escape through the air vent.
“You want something from the vending machine, you ask one of us to accompany you. Otherwise you won’t be able to reenter the room—the doors lock automatically,” he says, like I’ve never been in a hotel before. Jones is about as subtle as a two-by-four to the face.
“Hey,” I say. “Where’s that partner of yours? Hunt, wasn’t it?”
“Promoted up the chain,” he says tersely.
I grin. “Give him my felicitations.”
Jones looks like he wants to slug me, which is only subtly different from his usual way of looking at me like I’m a slug.
“Are you hungry?” Yulikova asks me, interrupting our little conversation. “Did you have dinner?”
I think of the remains of the sandwich moldering in my car. The thought of eating still fills me with a vague queasiness, but I don’t want them to notice.
“I didn’t,” I say. “But I am eager to hear some specifics about what happens next.”
“Perfect,” Yulikova says. “Why don’t you wash up, and Agent Brennan can go out and get us some food. There has to be a Chinese place around here. Then we’ll talk. Cassel, is there anything you don’t like?”
“I like everything,” I say, and walk into my room.
Jones follows. “Can I have a look at that bag?”
“Go right ahead.” I sit down on the bed.
He smiles thinly. “It’s just procedure.”
My duffel seems to bore him after he feels around the lining and looks at my pictures and blank index cards. “Have to pat you down too,” he says.
I stand up and think of my cell phone in the pocket of their car door. It’s hard not to smile, but I remind myself that congratulating myself on my own cleverness is a good way to get caught.
He leaves, and I waste some time reading my paperback. It contains the unlikely reveal that the detective and the murderer he’s been tracking are actually the same person. I am incredulous at how long it took him to figure that out. I got it a lot faster when it was me.
A little while later I hear the far door to the suite open and some conversation. Then someone knocks on my door.
