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The days rolled by. He walked Everly to work, picked her up, and taught her his dirtiest and most effective street-fighting and self-defense tactics every night. That was when he got to indulge himself. Her hands on his body. Seeing that smile. The things she chattered at him, as if they were friends. As if this was their life.
During those stolen hours, he was tempted to pretend it was.
Even though he knew better.
But the rest of the time, he did his freaking job and dug into her roommate’s life. Rebecca Lambert had been born in Winnetka, one of Chicago’s most exclusive suburbs, to an unmarried single mother who had no visible means of support that Blue could uncover. And he was very, very good at following money trails.
Rebecca had gone to a private boarding school in Massachusetts, then a snooty college in Vermont, and had spent her summers in other fancy East Coast places like Cape Cod and the coast of Maine. But she’d come back to Chicago after college. And as far as Blue could tell, she hadn’t been able to hold down a job for more than a few months at a time for years. She’d taught yoga for six or so weeks at an upscale studio. She’d spent a season interning at a magazine. She’d spent a summer working in a museum, which couldn’t possibly have paid her rent.
“How did Rebecca pay her bills?”
“Hello, Blue,” Everly said dryly, and he could practically see the look that went with that tone through the phone. “How nice to hear from you in the middle of the day. Are you well? I am, too, thank you for asking.”
Making Blue realize that he’d treated her like a member of the Alaska Force team, calling her at her job and firing questions at her without bothering with the niceties.
He refused to apologize.
Everly made a humming sound that it took him a minute to realize was her. Thinking.
“Uh... She works in PR.Worked, I mean.”
“That wasn’t the only thing she did.”
“I think she used to do a bunch of different things. I got the impression she had a trust fund or something.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No.” He heard Everly shift in her seat, then the sound of her fingers tapping on a keyboard. There was no reason he should feel that as something intimate when it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. And yet... “It’s that thingthat happens. Everyone’s going along, doing the same things. Entry-level jobs, first apartments. And then suddenlysomepeople start taking extended European vacations. Or sort of flit from job to job without ever seeming stressed about it. Or they randomly buy property out of nowhere. Or even just wear really, really nice clothes you could never afford. And you realize that it’s not that they’re doing so much better than you. It’s that they have other means of support.”
Blue had never had any support but himself. It was something he’d always prided himself on.
“Your parents must be doing pretty well,” he said. “If your mom is a surgeon and your dad was a professor.”
“My parents are doing great,” Everly agreed, an edge in her voice. “And they spend their money on themselves, as they should. They’re currently on an extended French wine tour. It involves châteaus. And they’re very supportive of whatever my brother and I want to do, but they expect us to do it ourselves. I thought Rebecca probably had some extra money, but I didn’t. I don’t.”
And Blue told himself he had no reason to feel like an ass when she claimed she had work to do and hung up.
He tried to push Everly out of his head. He sat back in the chair in Rebecca’s room, her laptop open in front of him, and tried to figure her out instead. He didn’t see anything that looked like a trust fund in her financials. Still, no matter what job she took, she always had a nice, fat, comfortable balance in her bank account. It certainly wasn’t her salary that kept her account so flush.
As far as Blue could tell, it was cash infusions every week. A few thousand every time.
Anonymous, untraceable cash.
Lately, Rebecca had actually managed to keep a job for almost a full eighteen months, which was a record for her. It was the kind of PR agency that catered to celebrities who needed fires put out left and right. Blue wondered if she’d gotten herself caught up in a blaze that burned too hot, but so far, he couldn’t see how. Rebecca had worked at the firm consistently, and her coworkers seemed to like her, but she hadn’t been in charge of any clients. Which he figured made it unlikely that one of them would have taken her out.
“Rebecca didn’t handle fire drills,” the vice president of the firm told him when he wrangled a meeting with her a few days later. Angela Martin was an overdone woman who was trying her best to cling to her early fifties and a shade of blond that didn’t become her. She was also the only one who would talk to Blue, and only after he hung around during her lunch hour and tried to channel Isaac’s sort of easy charm. “She was better with the celebration afterward, when it was all champagne and quiet donations to worthy charities. That was her niche. That and attractive young men with very nice cars, that is.”
“I wasn’t aware she dated.”
“Oh, honey.” Angela let out a husky laugh. “I’m not sure I would call itdating.”
Blue kind of wanted to put himself out of his own misery after an afternoon spent listening to what qualified as a “fire drill” to people who trafficked in famous people’s worst moments and public shame, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t come up with a convincing narrative to suggest why someone might want to kill Rebecca for being caught up in anything the agencyhandled. The usual triggers—affairs, embezzlement, drugs—were the agency’s stock-in-trade.
And apparently, Rebecca’s idea of an entertaining night out. Though whatever she got up to, she tended to keep it out of the apartment she shared with Everly.
“I guess I forgot that while I was busy out there trying to defend the American dream, these people were back here crapping all over it,” Blue griped at Isaac in one of their daily status-update calls.
“That’s what civilians do,” Isaac agreed cheerfully. “Pretty much as their full-time job.”