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“I get those once in a while.”
She ignored that. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Has there been anybody else besides you and me?”
“No.”
“You’re not the oversharing type, are you?”
“No.”
A moment ago she had been nervous—make that anxious. Okay, scared. Now she was getting irritated.
“I wonder how many buyers the informant lined up?” she said.
“The thing about a list is that it’s easy to duplicate,” he said. “Why not sell it to as many people as possible? The only thing in our favor is that the market for that particular product has to be fairly limited.”
“Good point.”
“I’ve got five grand in this pack,” he said. “How much did you bring?”
Talia flexed her fingers around the strap of the pack, trying to decide what to say. She finally decided that he probably didn’t intend to rob her for the cash. Like her, he was here for the list.
“A thousand,” she admitted.
“You got a deal. I was told to be here at precisely four thirty. You?”
“Six.”
“She was gone when I arrived.”
“She?” Talia raised her brows. “What makes you so sure the seller is a woman?”
“I went into the house and took a look around while I waited. Found a short-term rental agreement dated a couple of days ago. It was signedPhoebe Hatch. Might or might not be the person trying to sell the list, but I’d say the odds are she’s our informant.”
“You just walked into the house?”
“The door was unlocked.”
He did not sound concerned with the finer points of the law, and she decided that, under the circumstances, she wasn’t, either.
“What did you find besides the rental agreement?” she asked, not even trying to conceal her suspicions.
“I didn’t find the list.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m standing here in the backyard of a stranger’s house at six o’clock in the morning arguing witha woman who is carrying a thousand dollars in a pack. You do realize that to the average cop this would look a lot like a drug deal? If someone sees us and calls nine-one-one we would probably both be arrested.”
“You stuck around because you wanted to identify the competition,” she said.
“It seemed like the logical thing to do. Look, neither of us can afford to waste time discussing motives. Do you want to trade information? If not, I’m going to bail before one of the neighbors decides to call the police.”
She glanced into the darkened kitchen. She and the rest of theLost Night Filescrew were desperate for answers. This was as close as any of them had come to locating the list.
“All right, I’ll trade,” she said. “You were here before me. You went inside. What did you find?”
