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Desperation and determination lanced through her senses.
“Shit,” she whispered. She shook her fingers as if she had touched a hot stove. “I hate when this happens.” The small, instinctive action did nothing to cool the burn.
“Now what’s wrong?” Luke asked.
“Nothing.”
“You really are a bad liar.”
“I’ll practice.”
She studied the plant. There was nothing to see except potting soil and green leaves. But it concealed a secret.
She used a fingertip to poke around in the dirt. The small memorycard was buried a half inch below the surface. She dug it up and blew off the bits of soil.
“Okay, I am officially impressed with your talent, Talia March,” Luke said.
The pot was still hot.
“There’s something else,” she said. “Something just as important. Personal.”
She explored the soil around the plant with her fingers. A delicate gold chain necklace with a small crystal pendant was concealed beneath the surface. She pulled it out and examined it in the light of her phone.
“I get why she hid the memory card,” Luke said. “There’s probably something important on it. With luck, it will be the list we’re looking for. But why hide the necklace? It doesn’t look particularly valuable.”
Another exhilarating flash of knowing zapped Talia’s senses.
“Trust me, it’s valuable,” she said.
“Now we definitely need to talk.”
“Sure,” she said, still riding the rush. “I’ll give you the address of that coffeehouse I found earlier.”
A chill stirred the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
“Stop that,” she said.
“Do not,” Luke warned in a dangerously soft voice, “try to lose me. I will be right behind you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of dumping you,” she assured him. “At least not in the immediate future.”
“Is that so? Why not?”
“Simple. You’ve got information I need. As long as you are a potentially useful resource I will not be ghosting you.”
“I’m flattered, of course, but you do realize that logic works both ways, right?” he said. “You’ve got information I want, so I will be sticking very close.”
“In other words, we are using each other.” She gave him her shiniest smile. “I can work with that. Let’s go get some biscuits and coffee and see what’s on the memory card.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Talia took thememory card and an adapter out of her small cross-body bag and set them down on the table. “I don’t mind telling you I’m a little nervous. What if it’s just a list of names and nothing else?”
They were in a booth in a non-chain coffeehouse near Lake Union. The city was just waking up and people were trickling through the door in search of the homemade biscuits featured on the menu. She and Luke had given their orders to the server a moment ago and were drinking coffee while they waited for the food to arrive.
“If all we’ve got is a list,” Luke said, “then we will track down every name on it and gather as much information as possible. We will ask questions and we will keep asking them until we’ve got enough data to build a storyboard that will provide us with some answers.”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “Huh. That sounds like a smart way to go forward with the investigation.”
