Envy

This was . . . very cool, he thought as he started to enter the cannabis into the system.

As Devina rubbed herself against the officer’s body, she did this sad sack Gary Peters guy a favor by putting the security camera in the corner to sleep. It was fun to pretend to be the office ditz, and the idiot desk jockey was eating up the lie, but the ruse needed to begin and end with the pair of them tonight.

He wasn’t going to remember this tomorrow morning: In order for this to work, the status quo had to be preserved.

“Okay, let’s go in,” the guy said as he logged off the computer.

Using Britnae’s high-pitched voice and Kardashian, fake-ass, California pronunciation, she said, “Oh, my God, I’m soooo psyched. This is too real!”

Blah, blah, blah . . .but she got the tone right, because she’d been casing headquarters for quite a while now. And it wasn’t like the vocabulary was a stretch—add OMG to any one noun and one verb and that was that.

Over at the second bolted steel door, Gary Peters swiped his pass card through the reader on the wall, and then the lock disengaged with a clunk.

“You ready?” he said, all Big Man.

“I don’t know . . . I mean, yes!”

She bounced a couple of times and then resumed breasticulating on his arm as she held his hand. And while he soaked up the show, she thought, What a dumbass.

The instant they walked inside the massive storage facility, the cat-and-mouse routine took a backseat to her mission. On some level, she was pissed off at this diversion, but then again, she supposed she would have had to do something like this anyway.

Jim Heron’s disappearance was forcing her hand, though, and she hated that.

She just couldn’t fucking believe there was no sign of him. First time that had happened with an angel, and she knew only one thing for sure—he hadn’t backed out, or given up. Not in his nature. The war was still going on, and she had a soul to take over—and there were ways of guaranteeing that he showed himself.

The guard led her down the long rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving that were set at various heights and filled with boxes and bags of an incalculable variety of shapes and sizes. Everything was clearly cataloged and indexed, little hanging tags and mounted alpha-numerical signs delineating some sort of system.

What a collection. What organization . . .

Devina had to stop and take it all in. “This is amazing.”

The idiot officer got all proud and shit, even though he was just a cog that worked in the larger machine. “There are tens of thousands of pieces of evidence here at any given time. Everything is referenced by case number and logged into the computer so we can find things efficiently.” He started walking again, heading for the recesses of the place. “There are exceptions, though, like with Kroner, because there’s just so much associated with the case.”

As she followed, she stared up and around at all the objects. What. A. Turn-on.

All the way in the back, there was a bank of empty tables with chairs, like the place was a cafeteria serving up inanimate objects for consumption.

“Detectives and officers are allowed to come in and take more pictures or reexamine things or pull evidence for court. The lab also takes the objects down the hall from time to time, but they have to return the evidence. Kroner’s stuff is over here. Do not touch anything.”

Around the back of a six-foot-tall partition, there was a temporary workstation set up with tables, chairs, computer and photographic equipment, as well as bins of empty plastic bags and rolls of adhesive labels. But that wasn’t the interesting stuff. Running along low-slung shelves that were eight or nine feet long, there was a lineup of bar-coded bags that had jars and jewelry and other things in them.

Her little minion had been a busy, busy boy, hadn’t he.

“Usually, evidence is logged in down at intake, or in the lab if it’s human remains, but there was so much taken from that impounded truck, they had to set up a temporary processing unit here. All the tissue samples were done first, because they were worried about preserving them—but it turned out Kroner knew exactly what to keep the stuff in.”

Of course he had. He wanted to have parts of his victims with him always.

“There’s a lot of other objects here.” The officer lifted a white sheet that covered a huge, shallow box.

Ah, yes, exactly what she had hoped to find—a tangle of T-shirts, jewelry, purses, hair ties, and other personal effects.

Taking it all in, she felt truly, deeply sorry for Kroner. She knew exactly where his obsession was coming from, the way you didn’t want to lose what you had worked so hard for, the way you treasured your connection with the objects. And it was even more difficult for him, because unlike herself, he didn’t have a way to keep his victims forever—and now he had lost his collection.

Abruptly, Devina struggled for breath.

He had lost his precious objects, and here they were, under the aegis of humans who touched them and recataloged them and might possibly, someday in the far future, throw them away.

“Britnae? Are you okay?”

The officer appeared right by her side, hitching a hold on the image of the secretary’s arm.

“Sit down,” she heard him say from a distance.

As the room started to spin, Devina did what she was told and put her head between the knees that were not her own. Throwing out a palm, she gripped the edge of the table as if she could hold on to consciousness that way.

“Shit, shit . . . here, let me get you some cool water.”

As the officer shot off, his footfalls went at a dead run down the stacks, and she knew she didn’t have a lot of time. With a shaking, clammy hand, she took out the gold earring she had brought with her from her own collection. Tears waved across her vision as she realized anew that she was going to have to give the thing up if she wanted to progress this round with Heron—and DelVecchio.

The prospect had seemed so reasonable, so dealable, back when she’d been in her private place, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of trophies. What was one earring from a dead virgin? She was keeping the other half of the set—and she had more objects to remember that fucking Sissy Barten with.

Now, though, sitting next to the carnage of Kroner’s keepsakes, she felt like she was sending one of her very souls out into a sea of unknown and permanent loss. But what choice did she have? She had to flush out Heron, and just as important, she had to set up the endgame—

Abruptly, the image of the hot blond secretary-type began to disintegrate, Devina’s true form emerging through the slipcover of young and pink and human, her dead, ropy flesh and curled gray claws cradling the cheap- ass bird earring.

For a moment, she didn’t care. Too shaken by her own hoarding instinct, she couldn’t marshal any urgency at the fact that the officer would soon be returning and then she’d have to either infect him or kill him—neither of which she had the energy for.

Except she had to pull herself together.

Forcing herself to think, she called up a vision of her therapist, picturing that roly-poly, fully actualized, postmenopausal tree hugger who not only had an answer for everything . . . but seemed to know what the fuck she was talking about.

Devina, the anxiety is not about the things. It’s about your place in this world. . . . You must remember that you don’t need objects to justify your existence or make yourself feel safe and secure.

More to the point, unless she got her shit together, and planted the earring, she was going to compromise her larger goals even further.

You’ve already lost once, she reminded herself.

Two deep breaths . . . and another. Then she looked down at her hand and willed the image of young, dewy flesh back into place. The concentration required gave her a headache that lingered after she was back to being who she wasn’t, but there was no time to dwell on the thumping at her temples. Standing up on legs that were about as solid as soda straws, she stumbled over to the box of objects. Flipping up the corner of the drape, she planted the dove earring and then skated back to the seat the officer had put her in.

Just in time, too.