Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [96]
Here and there I saw incriminating keywords. Jordan Roe. Holtzer Point. A fistful of serial numbers beginning with 636. Ian’s stood out most prominently, but only because I’d seen it before. The others could’ve belonged to anybody. Adrian hadn’t said which one indicated his sister. I skimmed for the kind of contextual information that could’ve pointed her out to me, but didn’t see much. The medical notes seemed either imprecise to me or entirely too precise—and outside my field of expertise.
So I was hanging out, staring at the sheets while Adrian took his shower, when another keyword leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. Literally, for a moment, I could not breathe. I said it aloud, in a feeble attempt to break the spell.
“Bruner.”
The man who’d sent a douchebag named Trevor into my storage facility. The man who wanted to hire parcours kids to perform “reconnaissance” on me, or my stuff—or other vampires, and their stuff. Major Bruner, misogynist pig on the phone and sneaky military official in the office.
The man I’d just emailed, lying through my teeth and crossing my fingers.
I am absolutely certain that my heart stopped.
Then the shower stopped, and I knew my alone-time was drawing to a close.
Reaching for a drawer, I yanked it open and rifled around through the dried-up pens and broken pencils that accumulate in every single place where I ever spend more than a week at a time. I hadn’t been to my Atlanta condo in quite a while, as I admitted earlier. But still, the trappings of my neuroses were present—as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Finally I found a pencil that had enough lead to leave a mark. I used it to circle all instances of this Major Bruner and I even underlined a serial number—or a shorthand number, maybe—that seemed to be connected with either him or with this project. By the time Adrian exited the bathroom, wearing a fluffy crimson towel and trailing a billowing cloud of steam, I’d scribbled a stack of notes and drawn an army’s worth of arrows.
“You okay?” Adrian asked, possibly noting my gritted teeth and manic attention to the musty papers.
“Oh, I’m just ducky,” I assured him, but I assume that the frenetic triumph in my eyes told him there was more to the story, so I pointed the pencil down at the sheet and said, “You see this guy? You see his name?”
“Bruner? You know him?” he asked, slinging around behind me to get a better look. He smelled like my soap, my shampoo, and whatever I’d last used to clean the tub.
“We’re not friends, but I’ve spoken to him. Once, on the phone.” Suddenly he was suspicious. I wasn’t explaining myself too well, so I added, “And several times by email. This asshole’s been following me. Or looking into me. Something like that. And I don’t like it.”
I left the papers on the counter and turned around so I could face him while I offered something like an explanation. “See, I have this … this place. Let’s call it a storage facility. And last week, some dude broke into it. I went through his clothes and his wallet and found—”
“You killed him?” I heard idle curiosity, but no judgment.
So I said, “Yeah, I killed him. He broke into my property, and his name was Trevor and … and he was menacing a couple of homeless kids who pretty much live there. I did the world a favor.”
“No need to get defensive.”
“Who’s defensive?” I asked. “Point is, I went through the guy’s stuff and I found a note with a phone number, which led me to this guy.” I punctuated the last two words by jabbing the pencil at the sheet of marked-up paper. “We’ve been emailing back and forth. I’ve been trying to figure out what he knows, and why he’s looking at me. He thinks he’s talking to a teenager named Abigail.”
He thought about this, took a closer look at the sheet, which brought his towel-only self up closer to me, but I wasn’t complaining. Goddamn, he really was good looking. No wonder he made such a hot woman. I also noticed that the tattoo—which he usually kept covered with stage makeup—was on full display. It was typical military ink. Eagles and banners. The kind of thing