Page 19 of Taken for Granite
And now she was tampering with a crime scene with her gargoyle. She needed a bath and a drink. A glass of whiskey would be nice, too.
“Mickey called me. My number’s on his phone. That’s as good as a fingerprint.” It tied them together, within an hour of the murder.
She needed a bottle of whiskey, actually.
“Describe the scene for me,” Tas said.
The request caught Juniper by surprise. “What? Why? Use your own damn eyes.”
“I can not. Now, describe the scene for me,” Tas ordered.
“You’re blind?” Juniper stepped back and looked at Tas, really looked at him and not the wings or the horns or the hard-on.
He was not well. Exhausted. His tail lazily swept behind him, as if making sure no one snuck up on him from behind, and he stood on the balls of his feet, as if ready to dash away.
He turned his face toward her, but his dull purplish gray eyes didn’t look at her. He just stared at her without really seeing her. Because he couldn’t see her. How had she failed to notice that?
Juniper took a deep breath and forced herself to look past the four dead bodies and actually look at the room. “Um, well, the door was forced. Kicked in. But I know Mickey is paranoid as fuck and his door is reinforced. That didn’t open on the first kick—it took work. So why is Mickey sitting here in his lounger?”
Mickey wasn’t her friend, no matter what he thought. She had no feelings for him beyond what a rabbit might feel like when it’s waiting for the fox to finally stop playing with it and go for the kill, but she didn’t like seeing him sprawled in the black leather recliner with his mouth hanging open. No matter how horrible a person he had been, he deserved a bit of dignity in death. Oddly, his flat, dull eyes were exactly the same in death as in life.
“They’re all sitting. Single shot, right in the middle of the forehead. Someone got the drop on them, which means the door is for show. Oh, and the bullet spray in the wall. Forgot to mention that.” The walls were a pristine white, excluding the blood spray directly behind the couch from the two victims resting there, marred only by a line of bullet holes. “But the bullets are way above the actual, um, bodies.”
She knew them. She knew their names but she couldn’t bring herself to say it because that would add a whole new layer of realness to a horribly real situation.
“So the bullets in the wall are for show, too.” Juniper rubbed her index finger in the spot just below her bottom lip. Chloe called it herthinking stance. “Whoever did this wants it to look like an everyday hit on Mickey.”
“This phone you speak of, does your sister carry a similar device?”
“Of course.” A teenager without a cellphone? Not that Chloe ever went out, but she should have it for emergencies. “Oh.”
Juniper fumbled in her pocket for her cellphone, finding it slippery with her barf-covered fingers. Gross—but she couldn’t worry about that now. She had to wipe her fingers on her jeans several times before the phone would accept her thumbprint and unlock.
She waited as the phone called Chloe’s, listening for the familiar ringtone just in case the phone had been left in the building. Not expecting an answer, she nearly dropped the phone. “Um, hello?”
“Miss Bouvet, I presume,” a feminine voice said in a cool British accent.
Tas stood straighter, as if he could hear the other end of the conversation.
Screw it. Juniper reached her maximum level of weirdness for the day and her filter broke. Any instinct to be humble and beg for her sister burned away. All that remained was a slap-happy state of derangement. “So this is the Illuminati?”
“Be quiet, Miss Bouvet, or I will put a bullet in dear Chloe’s head,” the woman snapped.
Juniper might as well have plunged into a pool of ice water. “Okay.”
“I am Agent Rhododendron. You have something that belongs to my organization. Your employer had foolish notions about conspiracies and property law. I’ve educated him on this matter. Do you require the same education?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“I have no interest in babysitting your sibling. I also do not wish to hurt her. Do you want me to hurt her?”
“No. Please don’t.”
“Excellent. I will text you a location. Bring the creature. Retrieve your sister.”
“I don’t have him.”
“Miss Bouvet, I do not appreciate being lied to. We know you have the creature with you now. It followed you willingly, didn’t it?”
