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“Spacious. I’ll take it.”
“Whew, I was starting to worry I wasn’t going to earn my commission.”
“Yeah, and without that, how would you buy me dinner?”
I tried my best to fold my arms. “You said you’d buy.”
“That was before you made me shower in front of five people.”
“I could still post the video on YouTube,” I offered.
Davis’s surprise looked totally genuine—and so did the flash of concern.
Hello, of course someone who actually did rub shoulders with famous people worried about something sleazy about him going viral online. He was already going through that now. “Kidding,” I said, my voice extra firm. “That breaks, like, six policies, Hardcastle.”
“Ah, then, I probably need my phone to delete some stuff.”
“I know your phone must be ringing off the hook with all your concerned fans—”
“Or vindictive Tynies making sure their attack hit the intended target,” Davis muttered.
I hadn’t wanted to ask if Harper Tyne’s fans were capable of bioterrorism becausehehad been assaulted. If I’d seen that in a headline on the Internet, I would have dismissed it as a cockamamie clickbait conspiracy theory, and Davis hadn’t mentioned it to Detective Popovich.
But given the timing, the suspect list was alarmingly small.
“So,” I said, returning to my subject, “your phone has to be decontaminated as well.”
Davis shook his head, pacing in a single, tight circle before he sank into his living room couch/dining chair/theatre seating/bed, sighing. “I don’t have time for this.”
I snorted. “There’s your first mistake; I build ‘Bioattack incident’ into my afternoon at least once a week.”
“Hey, I thought you said this was your first time.” He pretended to swipe at a tear. “Now I don’t feel special.”
“This is my first time, I promise.” I held my hands over my chest. “You’ll always have a special place in my heart.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been someone’s first potential bioweapon exposure before.” Davis mimicked my “touched” gesture.
“And the good news is that you can put all this time to good use, rewriting the city’s HAI guidelines. We only have, like, a week left to finish.”
“I knew it.” He shook his head. “This is all a ploy to get out of the task force work and keep it on your résumé. You’re probably adding this incident on there too.”
“Definitely, first bullet point.”
Davis narrowed his eyes at me. “They collected that envelope for fingerprinting, right?”
“Did they? I thought we had to take it for decontamination first, but I’m not sure it made it to the lab. Might have mysteriously disappeared.”
He offered a courtesy smile, then picked up the tethered remote, tapping it against his palm. “You said I’ll be okay?”
“Yes, why, are these accommodations not nice enough?”
“They’re very nice. Rent’s a bit steep.”
“This is an exclusive neighborhood. Historic downtown Philly, you know.”
Davis nodded, still not looking at me.
He had to be at least as scared as I was. It was so much easier to treat strangers. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, envelopes of white powder turnout to be harmless.”
