“You want to really make it up to me? Tell me what you were doing in Hedon.”
“Hedon?” She didn’t break eye contact but her still-folded hands twisted. “What’s that?”
“Cut the crap. I saw you in the Green Olive. Made you a lot more interesting than I ever would have given you credit for.”
“Excuse me?” she said, frostily.
“Oh.” I wrinkled my brow. “Have you not replaced spinning class with frequenting criminal dives? My bad.”
“At least I have two working legs. Whereas you’ve added crime to all your other pathetic affectations in hopes of being ‘interesting.’”
Ah, there was the Mayan I knew and dreamed of inflicting torturous humiliation upon. If Levi thought she’d changed, he was easily snowed. Except he wasn’t. He was as suspicious as I was. Was Mayan his weak spot, because if not, how’d she convince him she was nice now? I’d seen her in camp plays and she wasn’t that good an actress. Porn stars trod the boards as Shakespearean thespians in comparison.
Unless being around me brought out her best teen bitch. Also an option.
Mayan reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out a package of Gitanes. She flicked it open, and put one of the short, stubby cigarettes to her lips.
My brows rose for a second before I smoothed out my expression. Why would a woman whose mother died of lung cancer and who worked for a foundation dedicated to research and prevention of the disease take up smoking?
“Why were you in Hedon?” I said. “Maybe there’s a way we can mutually benefit. It’s smart having someone watch your back over there and at least with the two of us, we know who’d be wielding the knife that stabbed us.”
That got a laugh. She patted her pockets, and I moved in with a lighter. I let my fingers brush against her skin, carefully sending my magic inside her.
Nothing. She was totally Mundane with no invasive magic, though in my limited experience, if she was compelled in some way, there wouldn’t be evidence of that.
Mayan coughed a bit when she inhaled. The cigarettes had a distinctive aroma. “I didn’t have business there,” she said.
I flicked the lighter on and off. “Of all the gin joints in all the world, you didn’t just stumble into that one.”
Mayan watched the glowing tip turn to a funnel of ash, before she shook her head sharply and tapped it off. “There was a guy who I hooked up with. He brought me.”
My gut said she told the truth, but the Queen of Hearts said that Mayan hadn’t come through for her first time recently. “Damn. There goes your interesting factor.”
She shot me the finger.
“Maybe he’s the one I should be speaking to. Got a name?”
“Is there actually an alum you’re trying to find?” She fanned the smoke in front of her face, with a moue of distaste.
“What do you think?”
“In that case, my personal life is none of your business. Whatever you’re up to? I want no part of it, and I pray I never go back there.” Her voice shook with conviction. Taking one last drag, she stood up and ground the cigarette out under her boot heel. “I have work to do.”
She strode off, jerked the front doors to the building open, and was lost to view.
I flicked the lighter on, running my finger through the bottom of the flame as I eliminated the impossible. Clone? While a showdown with multiple Mayans where I had to guess who the real one was by systematically destroying them would be a hell of a Saturday night, science had not yet advanced that far.
When I was about fourteen, I’d gone to the wedding of a distant cousin with my grandparents. Bubbe hated the bride and couldn’t understand how these two were a couple. Her working theory was that the bride was a demonic double. This was a bit of Jewish lore that said everyone at birth has a demon created in their exact image. Forty days before a person’s birth, a voice from the heavens proclaims who that person is destined to marry. This voice, heard by angels and devils alike allows the devils to marry off the demonic double instead of the real thing. Doom ensues. Of course, Bubbe also said I was a demonic double, so there was that.
Who was I kidding? Mayan was already the demonic double version and she certainly hadn’t been replaced with the nice version.
Was she compelled? She didn’t behave like she was. Compulsions resulted in a one-track mind. Mayan didn’t have that.
Drugs?
I grabbed a napkin from the grilled cheese sandwich food truck parked at the curb and, picking her cigarette butt up by the tip, wrapped it up and carefully put it in my pocket. Cigarettes were a phenomenal source of latent evidence. Our skin was constantly regenerating with newer layers. Skin cells around the hands, face, and feet, especially, had high levels of cell removal. It was likely that cells were left on the cigarette, while each puff left traces of saliva. It was a goldmine of DNA, with both saliva and epithelial cells to test.
I didn’t have anyone at a forensic crime lab who owed me a favor, but I did have a direct line to the Head of House Security. Since Miles was already looped in on this case, I wasn’t breaking client confidentiality. I fired off a text asking for help.
There was one other possibility: Mayan’s mystery man. “Hooked up with” sounded very past tense and casual, but words meant nothing. Experience had taught me that people believing themselves in love did stupid things. If that was the case here, Mayan might have taken up smoking to impress the dude or bond, but she’d have to be massively head-over-heels for it to override the
