Ilona Andrews: White Hot

“How do you know about the smoking bathroom?” Here’s hoping he hadn’t shared with anyone that we were planning to visit.

“My brother is deeply offended by its existence. He’s asthmatic.”

True. So far he hadn’t lied to me.

“My turn,” Cornelius said. “What do you hope to gain by speaking with Forsberg? He won’t admit any guilt.”

“I have a lot of experience with watching people, and I can usually tell when they’re lying.”

And we ran into roadwork. Of course. Now I would have to merge onto Katy Freeway.

“Curiously, that’s almost exactly what Augustine told me about you,” Cornelius said.

Augustine had kept my secret. Primes didn’t do anything without some ulterior motive. I wasn’t looking forward to finding out what he was planning.

“Are you having second thoughts? It’s not too late. We can turn around and I’ll refund your retainer.”

“No.” Cornelius looked out the window. “When I woke up this morning, I thought of kidnapping Forsberg and torturing him until he told me everything he knew.”

Homicidal fantasies were never a good sign. “That would be a terrible idea. First, it’s illegal. Second, we don’t know if Forsberg is involved. If he isn’t, you would’ve tortured an innocent man. Third, my cousin ran the background on House Forsberg. While they are not the wealthiest House in Houston, their net worth is substantial and so is their private security force. If you were to kidnap Forsberg and not die in the attempt, you would be hunted down and eventually killed.”

Cornelius didn’t answer.

Bern and I had stayed up way too late with House Forsberg’s file. Matthias Milton Forsberg, fifty-two years old, was a fourth-generation Texan and very proud of it—so proud that he’d gone to the University of Texas instead of the usual Ivy League schools. He’d become the head of his House twelve years ago, when his father retired. He was married, with two adult children, Sam Houston Forsberg and Stephen Austin Forsberg, which made me laugh a little last night while drinking coffee. It was good that he’d stopped at two, because nobody was quite sure which man Dallas was named after. Matthias had never been arrested, never served in the military, and never declared bankruptcy. He did own a lot of houses.

Magically he was a hopper. Hoppers compressed the space around them, propelling themselves or others through it. Usually their hops were short-range, topping out at thirty yards. Still, they could cover short distances very quickly and were hard to target while hopping, which made them highly sought after by the military. I’d never encountered one before, so I had watched some YouTube videos. Most of them consisted of guys between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five launching things at walls with their magic, such as watermelons, pumpkins, cans of paint, and in one particular extra-stupid video, a gallon of gasoline with a lighted fuse made out of a long sock. That went about as well as you would expect. Most of them tried to throw each other or themselves as well, but none had enough power. The best they could do was stagger their friends a few feet. According to Bern, the mass and size of the object were a factor.

The internet claimed that Prime-rank hoppers could pass through solid walls if they timed their jumps right. If that was true, Forsberg’s reputation for flirting with corporate espionage made perfect sense.

Public records and YouTube videos weren’t much to go on, but unlike me, Cornelius had access to the House database and he’d probably met Forsberg.

“What can you tell me about Matthias Forsberg?” I asked.

“He’s a typical Houston Prime; he safeguards the family wealth, he has firm ideas of what is and isn’t proper for a person of his social standing, and he avoids public scrutiny. He considers very few people his equals and treats the rest with contempt.”

“Can he hop through walls?”

“Yes. Could you take the next exit, please?”

I pulled off the freeway.

“Make a right and park, please.”

We made a right and stopped before a construction site. The steel bones of the building were beginning to take shape, wrapped in scaffolding. Cornelius got out, took the sack out of the trunk, and walked down the road between the buildings, disappearing from view. Talon swooped down, following him.

What could be in the sack? It was plastic, reinforced with mesh. He could have body parts in there and I would never know.

I drummed my fingers on the dashboard and turned on the radio. “. . . no updates on Senator Garza’s murder investigation. The police department remains . . .”

I turned it off.

It couldn’t be body parts. They would’ve made bulges. The sack seemed uniform, so unless he’d minced the body parts into mush . . . Okay, this was just morbid. Four months ago it wouldn’t even occur to me that there might be body parts in the sack.

Cornelius reappeared, carrying an empty sack. If it had been filled with something nasty, I would smell it when he put it back in the car.

He folded the sack carefully and put it in the trunk. Nope, no weird smells. No suspicious dripping.

“Thank you,” he said. “We can be on our way now.”

The Assembly occupied the America Tower, a graceful skyscraper on the corner of Waugh Drive and Allen Parkway. The forty-two stories of pale concrete and dark windows rose in elegant curves to almost six hundred feet above Houston’s midtown. This December had brought endless rain, complete with floods, and a perpetually gloomy overcast sky. The America Tower stood out against this dark backdrop as if some wizard’s mystical spire had escaped its legend and appeared in the middle of Houston. It was filled with mages, except this kind of mage wouldn’t sing songs in a bumbling, adorable way or send you on a heroic quest. They would murder you in an instant and then their lawyers would make any hints of a criminal investigation disappear.

We cleared a security booth, where Cornelius had to show his ID, then parked and stepped out of the car. Talon dived over us and took off, flying past a large dandelion-shaped fountain wrapped in a white fuzz of mist to the trees on the side.

We walked past the perfectly manicured emerald-green lawn toward the glass entrance. I missed the weight of my gun, but the Glock had to stay in the car.

“How does your magic work?” I asked softly. “Are you telepathically controlling Talon? Could you see through his eyes?”

“No.” Cornelius shook his head. “He’s his own bird. I give him food, shelter, and affection, and in return, when I ask for a favor, he answers.”

Talon wasn’t just a bird, he was a pet. That probably meant that Bunny was also a pet. If any of his animals got hurt, Cornelius would react very strongly. I would have to keep it in mind.

We were almost to the doors.

“Forsberg probably won’t dignify any of my questions with an answer,” I said.

“I agree.”

“You may have to do the asking. I want you to be blunt. Yes-or-no questions are best.”

“So you need me to walk up to him and ask him if he’s responsible for Nari’s death?”

“No, that’s too broad a term. He may have had nothing to do with it, but he may feel guilty or upset because of what happened to her. We know that he himself didn’t do it, because at the time of the murder, he was photographed by about fifty people at the Firemen’s Annual Fundraiser Dinner. Ask him if he ordered her killed. No matter what he answers, your second question should be ‘Do you know who did?’ We need to see his reaction. Keep your questions short and to the point and don’t elaborate so he doesn’t have a way to weasel out of it. Silence puts people under a lot of pressure and they’ll try to respond. If I think he’s lying, I’ll nod.”