Chapter 20

I got to the Lakewood Manor assisted living facility five minutes early. I aim to get everywhere five minutes early, though in this particular case, I felt nervous and rushed anyway, despite the fact that Stefan had a tendency to show up whenever he was damn well ready. At least he did when we were younger. Who’s to say if the MO was still working for him?

Sad part was, instead of putting together a game plan for what I’d tell Garcia, I was using the camera app on my new phone to make sure my hair looked okay. I had no idea what was up with that. And I didn’t want to know.

While I watched from the lobby, a black town car let out Stefan in front of the building. He adjusted his glasses, small wire-rimmed things with smoky lenses, then strode across a steaming grate in the pavement. The warm air caught the hem of his flared coat and made it billow in the fog. 

Leave it to Stefan to look dramatic just walking to the door.

As he mounted the stairs, something reared up deep inside me. A pang. Though what I might be longing for, I had no idea. Not for him. Clearly, I wouldn’t touch him if he was the last man on earth. I yearned for something way more complicated than that. An idea, maybe. The potential of something we might have been, if it weren’t for Camp Hell…or the fact that all along, he’d been blabbing all my carefully guarded secrets to anyone who cared to ask.

He got a load of me and his hazel eyes widened. “So,” he said with overdone briskness. “You’re the agent I’ve been assigned to. You must be thrilled.”

That annoying pang in my gut morphed into something a lot more familiar: anger. “I’ll need you to do some actual work. Think you can handle it?” Laying it on a little thick, I know, especially since Stefan is the last guy you want to insult, unless you’re wearing adult diapers. 

But if anything, my annoyance seemed to please him. “By all means, Agent. Just tell me what to do.”

“I’m about to inform someone that his co-worker is dead. You get a read off him, see if he’s feeling anything I need to be worried about.” Even as I said it, I realized how vague the request was. Because strong emotions are difficult to put names to. Wasn’t I just wrestling with a mysterious pang myself? If I heard a colleague died and I thought I was next in line to be rubbed out, I’d feel fear. But wouldn’t I be just as scared if I was responsible, and it seemed like the net was closing in?

Stefan, however, didn’t bat an eyelash. “Fine. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Richie’s here. Don’t be a dick.”

The front desk was expecting us. I didn’t want to blow Garcia’s cover, so I told them I’d need to have a look around the facility before I met with our retired agent. They complied. “You make that woman nervous,” Stefan murmured as we began our circuit of the building. “But only because she thinks you’re after something, and she doesn’t know what it is.”

He got all that? From nervousness? Okay. I tucked that away for future reference and forged ahead.

I don’t necessarily expect a place to be fancy just because it has the word “Manor” in its name. But given that the FPMP had placed Richard Duff in its care—and knowing how they’d always catered to him above and beyond what he actually earned—I wasn’t surprised that the place was actually pretty nice. I don’t like hospitals and homes. Too many institutional sensory details I’d rather not encounter, from ugly green walls, to the whiff of antiseptic, to the metallic clatter of a gurney and the squeak of its wonky wheel. Lakewood Manor didn’t scream out “institution” by its decor. I was no big fan of all the dark wood paneling and brocade, but if you didn’t know better, it looked like a stuffy college library, or maybe a hotel lobby. Stefan fit right in, though I’m sure if it were his place, he’d have some edgier decor. Obscure arthouse film posters. Vintage taxidermy. Homoerotic sculpture.

But who gave a damn what Stefan’s house might look like, anyway?

We found Agent Garcia in the rec room, a ponderous two-story affair with wood on wood on wood—floors, furniture, walls—practically as big as the cannery. And that’s saying a lot. I think they used to bring horse-drawn vehicles through the cannery. 

Garcia was up on a ladder, ostensibly reattaching a piece of molding that had finally given way to gravity and time. I wouldn’t have recognized him outside the FPMP if I didn’t know who I was looking for. Agent Peter Garcia fit right in at the FPMP. Black suit. Assertive body language. No-nonsense gaze. But the guy on the ladder looked like just another buff maintenance worker in a baseball cap and well-worn jeans.

“I’d do him,” Stefan said quietly.

Time stuttered.

It wasn’t exactly a flashback. I knew where I was. When I was. But the memory blossomed in all its lurid, technicolor glory, and I experienced a dizzying smack of deja vu.

The repairman. He was practically a kid—at least in my memory—but I supposed I couldn’t have been much older than he was. The HVAC was on the fritz in the sweltering height of summer and a mob of guys in tool belts had been dispatched to make sure the budding psychics didn’t melt. Stefan and I had used the distraction to slip off to the unused stairwell, and we were nearly home free when one of the repairmen rounded the corner and said, “You guys know if there’s, like, an electrical panel down there?”

My thought? He’d look hot in a leather jacket, and not just because it was pushing ninety-five degrees in there, either. But just as soon as the notion popped into my head, I did my best to erase it. In fact, I looked for something about him that was a turn-off. I couldn’t find one. He was big, but not mullet-and-power-lifting big. His skin was clearer than mine. And he had a sort of openness to his expression that had been trained out of me years before. Even his subtle Backstreet Boys vibe was kind of adorable.

Think about something else, I begged myself. Anything else. Because the last thing I wanted to do was piss off Stefan. So I was baffled when, instead of a scathing remark, his reaction was, “I’d do him. How ’bout you?”

Probably a trap. I didn’t trust myself to answer. I shrugged.

Looking back, my response hadn’t actually mattered, had it? Stefan knew full well how I really felt no matter what I did or didn’t consciously think. He pressed his black lips to my ear, and when he spoke, the caress of his words played right down my spine. “Don’t tell me you’re not curious to see if he can fit two dicks in his mouth.” My breath hitched, and he said, “I’ll bet he can.”

Anyhow. Turned out, he could.

Was I really so jaded that I’d forgotten about my first three-way up until that very moment, or was it just a memory I’d rather leave buried? And why haul it out now, other than the fact that Agent Garcia’s butt really did justice to a pair of jeans? Hearing Stefan utter that particular phrase was obviously the trigger. But something else bothered me about the whole thing. Something deeper.

Up on the ladder, Garcia turned to tuck a carpenter’s level into his belt and noticed the two of us standing there. I imagine we were kind of hard to miss, two towering guys in long black coats, given that everyone else there was under five feet tall and over ninety years of age. He climbed down and started across the broad room.

I blotted a sheen of sweat from my brow with the back of my sleeve. I’d always figured, in that first time, Stefan was the instigator. But was he? Was he really? Or had he just been doing his best to salvage a situation where he saw his boyfriend grooving on someone else?

And even more disturbing, what about that kid in the tool belt? Had he actually wanted to get us off? Was he even gay? Or had Stefan just made a phenomenally selfish judgment call and forced him to play along?

Worst of all, that guileless, wide-open expression…had we managed to wipe it off that kid’s face for good?

Just before Agent Garcia was in hearing range, Stefan shot me a ubiquitous raised eyebrow of disgust and said, “What’s your problem? So I find him attractive. Stop clutching your pearls—I might be old, but I’m not dead.”

The whole situation was so completely screwed up, it was practically a relief to switch into work mode and see if Garcia was the one who pushed Colleen Frank down the stairs.

“Can we go somewhere private?” I asked him.

“You got news about Andy? You find out who killed him?”

“Let’s just go somewhere private.”

Garcia cocked his head toward a wood-paneled alcove and the three of us set off toward it together…only to be intercepted by a nurse in very official-looking navy scrubs. “Excuse me,” she called over importantly as she power-walked for all she was worth. “Is there a problem?”

Stefan and Garcia both looked to me to explain. Fantastic. I flashed open my wallet—most likely to the card that was one punch away from a free donut—plastered on my blandest cop-face, and said, “No problem, ma’am,” with as much boredom as I could project. “Just a few routine questions.”

“Because if there’s a problem, I’ll need to know. Pete is a new hire—he’s still on probation—and if he’s making trouble already, personnel is going to hear about it.”

“No, no trouble. I have some questions for him that have nothing to do with this job. That’s all.”

“We screen our applicants as carefully as possible, and even still, people slip through. Do you understand how important it is for our residents to feel like they’re in a safe environment? The least expensive suite starts at twelve thousand dollars a month. We can’t have thugs roaming the halls.”

“Why would you think he’s—?” Ah. Agent Garcia was a little too brown for her liking, so naturally, that made him a criminal. Sure, I might be there to scope out whether or not he’d just pushed his partner down the stairs, but not because he was Mexican.

I don’t generally indulge in revenge. I’m not nearly good enough at thinking three steps ahead. But if I’d had a pad of paper on me, I could’ve given her something to be freaked out about. Such a shame…but then I realized I didn’t need one.

I pulled out my new phone and tapped an icon that looked like a memo. A blank page opened.

“Your name, Ma’am?” I said, with the faintest hint of threat. 

“Marcie. Palmer.”

I keyed in something that autocorrected to farcical pomade. Close enough. “And you’ve been working in your current position, how long?”

“Eight years?”

I answered with an overlong stare.

She sheepishly corrected it to, “Seven and a half?”

By the time I asked her a dozen entirely useless questions and keyed in a dozen inscrutable answers, she’d forgotten all about Agent Garcia and become a lot more worried about herself. “Thank you, Ma’am,” I finally said, and she was so relieved to be excused, even I could feel it. And so I couldn’t resist adding with a whiff of threat, “When I have additional questions, I’ll be in touch.” 

My badass investigator routine worked—she could hardly wait to get out of there. She power-walked away even faster than she’d originally approached.

“Thanks,” Garcia said. “Hard enough bugging the place with all these old ladies around. Now I got Nurse Ratchet breathing down my neck. So what’s going on with Andy’s investigation?”

Not that I’m any judge of character, but it seemed to me that Garcia wasn’t acting like someone who’d just thrown a colleague down the stairs. Either he was completely unaware of the stairwell incident, or he was a really good actor. Though given that he was an undercover operative…he probably could fake it. “Maybe we should sit,” I said. Once we settled out of earshot of any wandering residents, I put as much compassion into my delivery as I could muster, and said, “There’s no good way to say this. Agent Frank is dead.”

“Colleen?” he gasped. He seemed genuinely dismayed to me. Hopefully Stefan would be able to tell me why. “How?”

“She fell, but…it’s looking like a homicide.

He was up out of his seat, all furious energy, but with great effort he managed to calm himself before attracting undue attention from the blue-haired ladies playing Bridge in the corner. “Did you check out her deadbeat bum of a husband? Because her life insurance policy always seemed a little too—”

“I don’t think it was her husband,” I cut in. “It happened at headquarters.”

“How is that even possible? Is there video surveillance?”

“I don’t have that information yet. It just happened, less than an hour ago, and I’m trying to find out if you’ve got any idea who’d want to…?”

“Not Colleen. No, she was…I can’t think of anyone who’d…not anyone who had access to the secure areas of the building, anyway.”

As an FPMP agent, Colleen Frank had, of course, done surveillance in some high stakes situations. And normally, I’d be keen to check on the lottery winner with the secret precog girlfriend, or the telekinetic who turned out to be yet another hoax. But given that she worked closely with Andy Parsons, and he got clipped and chipped just three days ago, I’d bet my Donut Heaven loyalty card the leaky printer situation was at the heart of it all.

Garcia had his head in his hands, and didn’t seem like he had much to add. Stefan leaned in, touched him gently on the forearm, and said, “You’re in a hazardous line of work. Even so, when you lose one of your own, it’s no less difficult than it would be for anyone else. Always remember, at its heart, grief is an expression of love. And the fact that you feel something so acutely is an indication of the depth of your connection.”

I had to hand it to him—it was a convincing act. If I didn’t know him better, I’d swear he actually felt compassion.

Garcia composed himself quickly. Maybe working undercover helped a person compartmentalize that way. “Who’s lead investigator?”

“Agent Marks,” I said.

“I think of anything, I’ll call him. And anything he can tell me, as a professional courtesy…I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll let him know.”

He started back up the ladder to get back to his listening devices. Stefan and I turned to go.

As we walked away, while the impression was still fresh, I asked, “What did you pick up?”

“That harpy of a nurse was bent out of shape because her husband’s having an affair, so lording her authority over your sexy colleague makes her feel better.”

“Not about her.”

“I know.” He sounded very pleased with himself. “But honestly, it was more than worth the price of admission when you put her in her place. It was amusing to see you acting all official.”

“Glad I could entertain you.”

“Anyway, your guy was into the dead girl. Not sure if he was admiring her from afar or if they were banging, but he was pretty crushed over her death. More than he let on. Was he responsible in any way? He was totally shocked, so I highly doubt it. And I imagine you should talk to her husband just to make sure.” 

 Given as many empaths as I knew, you’d think I would be used to dealing with them by now. The information was useful. Worth the “price of admission”? Maybe. If it weren’t Stefan. And our past was not our past.

“What about the video surveillance he was talking about?” Stefan asked. “Even if they didn’t catch the act on camera, wouldn’t you notice someone who wasn’t supposed to be there?”

You’d think so. Unless they were a shapeshifting sex demon. Or unless they came through an astral door….

I picked up my pace. “We’re through here. I’ve really gotta get back—”

“Hey! Hardcore Vic!”

—right after I pretended to make a social call with Richie.