The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(85)

“Of course I believe you. And so does Lehrer, or he wouldn’t have let you go.”

Ames didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue. “Whatever. Fuck ’em—I don’t care.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled something out—a flask. She unscrewed the top and took a long swallow, then offered it to Noam. “Want some?”

Noam shook his head, and Ames drank again, more this time. Noam was surprised the flask wasn’t empty when Ames finally lowered it.

“I think your dad’s looking for you.”

Noam must have seemed confused—he was confused—but Ames pointed, and he saw Lehrer standing on the other side of the room, watching them. Lehrer didn’t beckon, just inclined his head slightly before turning back to his conversation with Major General García.

Right. Noam should be talking to other people, not just Ames, especially since Lehrer already believed she was innocent. He had to at least act like he was looking for a killer.

“See you, then.”

The funeral itself was at four thirty, which meant a long time lingering around these ornamental rooms. Noam occupied himself with the refreshment table, eating bite-size tartlets and fresh fruit. Maybe, he thought as he munched on a miniature quiche, I ought to slip off to the private parts of the house and make sure Dara hasn’t left any evidence. The Ministry of Defense would have been through here already, of course, but they wouldn’t all be witchings. There might be something they missed. Something they might come back and find.

He waited until Ames came into the room, attention shifting to focus on the bereaved, then stepped over the velvet rope blocking off the hall.

The house was empty and dark, now that Noam had put some distance between him and the wake. The light streaming in through the windows insufficiently illuminated the portraits of austere white men in military uniforms and priceless landscape paintings. On the second floor Noam opened the doors one by one to look inside, using his power so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints on the knobs. He didn’t waste much time on the guest bedrooms or Ames’s room, just kept going until he found the master suite.

The bed, king size and white, was neatly made, the dresser tops all swept clean of dust and personal effects alike. At first Noam just stared at it, because . . . well, if reports were to be believed, this was where Ames Sr. was killed.

Sixteen times.

There was no blood. Someone did a very thorough job cleaning up. Still, it felt like the scene of an assassination ought to be more dramatic.

A small bookcase sat near the vanity: mostly pulp novels, which was surprising, but Noam supposed that explained why they were kept here and not on display downstairs in the library. In the bedside table he found a carton of cigarettes, a strip of condoms, and lube.

There was no computer in the bedroom, but Noam sensed one down the hall, its circuit boards quiet now, powered down. He found it in the general’s study, a smaller room with drawn curtains and an oak desk, an iron poker leaning against the cold hearth.

He seriously doubted Dara had taken a second after killing General Ames to check his email, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the general’s computer right there. The cell drive was probably full of shit Noam could leak on the site.

If Noam was extra lucky, maybe he could even find a way to pin the general’s murder on Sacha’s supporters.

Noam told the computer to turn itself on and took a seat in the comfortable leather chair behind the desk, feeling the processor work as it loaded the desktop and programs.

An empty flopcell was stuffed away in one of the drawers. Noam plugged it into the drive and told the computer to start copying the documents folder to the chip, then open the folder on-screen for Noam to view. He had to do all the work via technopathy, since he hadn’t brought gloves and couldn’t risk touching the keyboard.

He went through General Ames’s financial records first. Pretty normal: food expenses, salaries for the household staff. But then there was the money he spent at the liquor store, nice restaurants, expensive hotels. Local hotels—maybe Lehrer had been right about the general having a lover, if nothing else.

But this was looking more and more like a personal computer; Noam found very few documents relevant to the general’s job as home secretary. A few memos here and there, things he obviously intended to take care of back at the office. Reports from Swensson about his daughter’s bad behavior.

The clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen said it was just past three thirty. Noam had spent too much time here. He needed to move on. But if there was going to be something here . . . something actually useful . . . it might not be on the desktop. You didn’t get to be home secretary by being an idiot, after all. Anything good would be hidden.

Noam let the flopcell continue downloading desktop files, but he turned his attention deeper. There were some pretty thorough ways of deleting files, but when Noam had worked in the computer repair shop, half the customers came in for disk recovery. Some stuff was more difficult to recover, and the shop commensurately charged a lot more for it, but at the end of the day, the only way to really get rid of a file was to destroy the cell drive completely.

The general hadn’t done that.

And . . . yes.

General Ames had covered his tracks—that was for sure. He’d not only deleted files; he’d also reformatted a whole partition of the drive and then overwritten it. That partition was full of bogus temp files and multiple large .mp3s with nothing on them. Amateur. The .mp3s stood out like bloody handprints.