Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(21)

He studied her with pleasure as she chattered blithely on. She was giving him too much detail, but he was not inclined to be harsh. He lifted his eyes from contemplation of her décolleté—bony, but the lush swell of bosom was appealing, surgically enhanced though it probably was; he didn’t remember from her file. And her gold skin tone and lush lips were lovely. He lifted his gaze to her animated face.

“. . . thing that I was concerned about was my physiological responses, right after the job,” she confided earnestly. “I tried, but I couldn’t control my heart rate or my body temperature, and I started to sweat. It didn’t affect my performance, but still . . . I’ve been doing the Group XIII Advanced KAM Biofeedback course again, both the A and B sections, but I wondered if you had any other suggestions for—”

“I’ll tailor a new program for you personally,” he said.

She flushed with delight. “Oh,” she breathed. “I . . . I wasn’t thinking that you should . . . I just—”

“I would be pleased,” he told her. “I would consider it an investment well worth the time and thought.”

“Oh, thank you!” she gushed. “It’s the one thing I feel uneasy about, and I was hoping to find a permanent solution. In a way, the excess emotion came in handy, when it came time to discover the body. I needed to have a huge emotional reaction, so I channeled it all there.”

She was over-congratulating herself, but he would let it pass. “Of course,” he said. “Well, my dear. There you go. Balance is key, and positive attitude as well. You took what you thought was a weakness and turned it into a strength. Brava.”

His phone made a discreet burble at that moment, while Zoe carried charmingly on about how she didn’t want to waste his valuable time. The ring tone was muted, chosen not to be intrusive or irritating, but when he looked at the name on the display, he was irritated. Reggie. From his first special-series pod. He was so angry with Reggie. He gave Zoe a dismissive gesture that shut up her babble. “Yes?” he said into the phone.

“We’ve located Lily Parr.” Reggie’s voice was flat, but there was an underlying tension that hinted at relief. As if he thought by redressing his mistake, he’d be off the hook. How innocent of him.

“Really,” King said. “Where?”

“Tony Ranieri’s diner, in Portland.”

“Ah.” King made his voice crystal sharp. “So they have already made contact. You were not able to prevent that from happening.”

“No,” Reggie admitted. “They’re together now. Inside.”

King made the adjustment for the time difference. It was early morning in Oregon. “And are you therephysically?”

“No,” Reggie said, after an infinitesimal pause. “I’m driving from Seattle. But I’m close. I’ve sent people. Tom, Cal, Martin, and Nadia.”

Oh, God. King stifled a groan. Cal, Reggie, and Nadia were all special series. He would not have chosen to bunch those three on this particular assignment, but it was too late. There were no other operatives close enough to replace them. “How did you find her?”

“It was a word-recognition app we rigged at Ranieri’s diner. We got the signal about a half an hour ago. She was talking with Ranieri there, and some key words popped up. The bot caught them, and, ah . . .”

“A bot? A word-recognition app? You’ve been conducting a passive surveillance on Bruno Ranieri? With Lily Parr on the loose?”

Reggie struggled to reply. “I, ah . . . I had people following him for four weeks straight,” he explained. “Then we decided to shift the focus of our search, so I redistributed manpower, and we—”

“Do you have a visual?” His voice chopped off the puling excuses.

“I will in a few minutes. I have people arriving in less than—”

“Is his car under surveillance?”

“Of course. Car, condo, diner, his business, everywhere,” Reggie assured him. “Everything he says has been snarfed and sifted. He hasn’t tripped the word-rec bots once since we rigged them. Until now.”

“Don’t trust those apps so blindly, Reggie,” King lectured. “They’re no substitution for human intelligence. Though you yourself might give that theory a run for its money.”

He paused, waited for Reggie to come up with a reply.

Reggie coughed, hemmed and hawed miserably, until King’s patience came to an abrupt end. He did not want to kill Bruno Ranieri. Yet. Not while there was still a chance to eliminate the danger of exposure that sneaky bitch Magda had threatened him with, years ago.

He loathed loose ends. Lily and Bruno could solve the puzzle Magda had set, tie those ends off for him, close that issue definitively.

But those two could not be out there loose, in circulation. Not now that they’d made contact. “Take them, and bring them to me,” he said. “Do not injure them. And don’t make any more mistakes.”

“Sir, we’ve done all we could since she vanished, and we—”

“We? What’s this ‘we’? You were in charge, Reginald. You were team leader. Take responsibility. Say ‘I.’ It’s what you would have done if things had gone as they goddamn well should have. Am I right?”

“But we . . . ah, but I—”