The PowWow

Jacob was praying when I left.

Positioned by the window the way he always was, head bowed, hands loose. The morning light coming in at the angle it came in at this time of year, falling across the floor in a way that made the apartment look more peaceful than it currently felt.

I stood at the door for a moment.

During the Nephilim case — in the middle of everything with Nathanial — Jacob had stopped me at the door. Had given me the cautionary tale of King Asa, quiet and precise, the kind of thing he said when he saw something I hadn't seen yet about myself or the situation. He'd done it with the particular care of a man who understood that some corrections needed to happen before the door opened rather than after.

He said nothing this time.

I waited another beat. Picked up my keys. Let myself out.

The drive toward the precinct gave me enough quiet to do what I did with quiet — run everything back through. Jacob's word count had been declining since the morning after the double date. That was the metric I'd developed over a lifetime of living with him. Two words was baseline Jacob. One word was Jacob processing something significant. Zero words was Jacob carrying something he hadn't decided what to do with yet.

We were at zero.

The last time we'd been at zero for this long was after the gym fight with Nathanial. And I knew what that had been about.

I didn't know what this was about yet.

But I knew it wasn't nothing.

Rachel was waiting outside the precinct. Professional mode fully assembled and operational — jacket, badge visible, the particular posture of a detective who was on the clock and intended everyone in the vicinity to be aware of it. She came down the steps and got in with the efficient economy of someone who had somewhere to be.

I pulled away from the curb.

We made it half a block.

Then she leaned over and pressed a small kiss to my cheek. Quick. Warm. Entirely deliberate.

"Nice to see you," she said.

Then she sat back, opened the file folder on her knee, and was fully professional again before I'd completed the thought the kiss had interrupted.

I kept my eyes on the road.

"Nice to see you too," I said, with what I felt was admirable composure for a man whose cognitive function had just been temporarily redirected.

"Cross has been careful," she said, already moving. "The name on the campaign credentials doesn't match anything in the system. The real Devin Cross is a forty-seven year old accountant in Tempe, Arizona. Whoever our Cross is, he borrowed the name and built around it." She turned a page. "Campaign finance records show payments to a consulting firm — Meridian Cultural Group. Filed in Delaware, which tells us nothing except that someone wanted it to tell us nothing."

"Meridian Cultural Group," I said.

"LLC. Registered agent is a law firm that registers approximately four hundred entities a year. Shell inside a shell."

I nodded. "I know someone who can work with that."

Rachel looked at me. "Who?"

"His name is Curtis." I kept my expression neutral. "He's a specialist."

"What kind of specialist?"

"The useful kind." I paused. "He's helped us before. He's good at finding things inside things."

Rachel looked back at her file. "How does he feel about police presence?"

I considered the honest answer to that question.

"I've never asked," I said.

Rachel's eyes moved to me with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to pursue something. She decided not to. "Fine," she said. "Take me to your specialist."

Curtis answered the door in the particular state of a man who had been awake for an indeterminate number of hours doing something that required multiple monitors and didn't benefit from interruption. He looked at me. He looked past me at Rachel.

His eyes went to the badge on her hip.

The eyebrow went up. All the way. The full elevation I'd last seen through a restaurant window at the discovery of Jacob's shoes.

He blinked twice.

Then something unexpected happened.

Curtis smiled.

Not the cautious half-smile he deployed for Jacob and me under optimum conditions. A genuine, full-wattage, completely uncharacteristic smile of the kind I would not have believed his face was capable of producing if I weren't watching it happen in real time.

"Detective," he said. "Please come in."

Rachel stepped inside. Curtis stepped back to make room with a hospitality that I had never personally received at this threshold in any of my previous visits.

I followed.

Curtis was already moving toward the kitchen.

"Water?" he said, over his shoulder. To Rachel.

"Thank you," Rachel said, looking around the apartment with the measured assessment of someone cataloguing an environment.

A bottle of water appeared. Iced. With a paper towel wrapped around the base to catch the condensation. Curtis set it on the cleared corner of the desk nearest Rachel's position with the focused attention of a man who had been waiting his whole life to be useful to law enforcement and had not previously been given the opportunity.

Then a bowl of chips materialized. Low-fat. Decanted from the bag into the bowl because apparently we were doing this properly.

I looked at the bowl.

I looked at Curtis.

He looked at me with an expression of perfect serenity and turned back to his monitors.

I sat down.

Rachel settled into the chair Curtis had produced — also from somewhere, also for her — and looked at the screens with the focused attention she brought to things she wanted to understand. "Meridian Cultural Group," she said. "Delaware LLC. Payments from the Harrison campaign. Registered agent is a high-volume firm."

Curtis's fingers were already moving. "Delaware shell with a high-volume agent means the useful information isn't in the registration. It's in the transaction trail." He pulled up something. Then something else. His eyes moved across the screens with the particular efficiency of a man reading a language other people didn't know existed. "Campaign disbursements are public record. Meridian received eleven payments over four months. The receiving account is — " He stopped. Looked closer. "Interesting."

"What?" I said.

"The account routes through two intermediaries before it lands anywhere findable." He pulled up a third screen. "First intermediary is a payment processor in the Cayman Islands. Standard obfuscation." His fingers moved again. "Second intermediary is a holding entity." He read it off the screen. "S. Riel Holdings. Registered in Cyprus."

He said it the way he said everything — as data, one item among many, moving on before the previous thing had finished landing.

Rachel wrote it down. I looked at it on the screen for a second longer than the context required and then looked away because the context required moving forward.

"Transaction pattern suggests Cross has been operating out of the same geographic area for the duration of the campaign," Curtis continued. "Cross-referencing the campaign event locations with the payment timestamps and the cell tower data I absolutely did not access — " He glanced at Rachel.

Rachel was looking at her notepad.

"I have a triangulation," Curtis said. "Three-block radius. East of the commercial district, near the river."

He printed something and handed it to Rachel with both hands, which was not how Curtis normally handed things to people.

Rachel took it, reviewed it, and stood. "This is good work," she said.

Curtis appeared to experience something in the region of his sternum that he didn't have immediate language for. "Thank you, Detective," he said. "Any time."

I stood. Looked at the remaining chips in the bowl.

Rachel, already turning toward the door, reached back without looking and picked up two chips and pressed them into my hand.

I ate them while Curtis showed Rachel out with a solicitude that I found both touching and personally offensive.

The door closed.

I looked at Curtis.

He looked at me.

"Not a word," I said.

"I wasn't going to say anything," he said.

"Good."

He turned back to his monitors. "She's great," he said.

I let myself out.

Rachel was at the Highlander when I got there. She waited until I'd unlocked it and we'd both gotten in, and then she leaned over and kissed my cheek again. Same cheek. Same deliberate brevity.

"You take me to the nicest places," she said.

I looked at her.

She opened her file folder.

"East of the commercial district," she said. "Near the river. We should move quickly."

I started the engine.

"Curtis liked you," I said.

"Most people like me," she said, without looking up.

"Curtis doesn't like most people."

She almost smiled. "I know," she said. "Maybe it’s just you."

Then she did smile, and it lit up the car. She was high-wattage and I immediately felt way out of my depth, again.

I pulled out into traffic.

The river was twenty minutes away. I thought about Jacob, zero words, rolling his shoulders in a brick alley after an exorcism. I thought about S. Riel Holdings in Cyprus, which I'd already forgotten by the time we cleared the block.

I thought about two small kisses and what they added up to.

I drove.