The Reckless Oath We Made(30)

“Miss Trego. I need you to calm down and—”

“Do not tell me to calm down. Whatever happens to her, it’s on you.”

“All I’m asking you to do is come inside for a few minutes and have a calm discussion with me,” Mansur said.

“To hell with you.” She turned to me, and the heat of her gaze fell full upon me. “Gentry, will you give me a ride over to Wesley?”

“My lady, I stand ready.” I beckoned her accompany me, for the ambulance prepared to depart.

“Please, Miss Trego,” Mansur said. “If we go in and talk right now, I’ll give you a police escort to the hospital as soon as we’re done.”

“You could give me a police escort right now, but instead you’re playing this game.”

“Miss Trego. I do not want to take you down to the police station to have this conversation. I would really rather—”

“Are you threatening to arrest me, you asshole?”

My lady raised her hand and I feared she meant to strike him. Hot dread filled my breast, and I knew not what to do. I laid my hands upon my neck, but found no relief.

“Thou art all that stands between them,” the Witch said.

“Better a shield than a sword,” said the black knight.

I stepped between Lady Zhorzha and Mansur.

“My lady,” I said. “Mayhap ’tis better to cede to him.”

“You should listen to your friend,” Mansur said.

“Fine. Fucking fine. Let’s go in and talk.”

My lady spake in a great dragon voice, all damped smoke and fury, and I feared for her. She wore her anger like a cloak of fire that burned none but herself.





CHAPTER 15





Zee



The cops had emptied out almost the whole front room. Only a few pieces of furniture were left: a big bookcase; one of those particleboard pantries, which had disintegrated when they tried to move it; and, in Mom’s “craft corner,” there was a dining room table I didn’t remember ever eating at. It had a sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse, from all those years of being piled high with stuff.

“Please, sit down, Miss Trego,” Mansur said. “I don’t want to keep you any longer than necessary. I know you’re worried about your mother.”

There was a rug under the dining room table, but I couldn’t tell what color it was, because it had twenty years of dirt worked into it. I was embarrassed. Not for me, but for Mom, having people come in and see her house like that. When I was a kid, she’d always insisted that the house was cluttered, but clean. Even when I was a kid, I knew that was wishful thinking. You can’t keep a house clean when you can’t actually get to the floor. Or the walls. Or the furniture.

The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t imagined Mom’s house emptied out like that, but that I’d always imagined LaReigne would be there with me, cleaning it out, after Mom died. Now everything was turned upside down, and maybe LaReigne was dead.

Mansur pulled out a chair for me and, after I sat down, he and Smith sat down across from me. Smith had a file folder that he laid on the table between us. Close enough that I could have reached for it, if I wanted to. I didn’t.

“All we want to do is eliminate any possibility that you or your mother have any involvement,” Mansur said. “That will help our investigation go forward in the right direction.”

“If I’d been involved, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to be here talking to you,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad you’re talking with us. So let’s figure out what the situation is with your sister.”

“The situation? She’s been kidnapped by a pair of Nazis. Or maybe she’s dead. And what are you doing about it? Because this—” I held my arms out to try to include the whole idea of searching my mother’s house. “This is not helping.”

“I appreciate that to you this seems like a step backward, but it lets us check off this box. And let me be blunt, there are a couple of things that don’t add up for us.” Mansur took the leaky pen out of his pocket and flipped open his notebook. “When the police arrived at your apartment at six A.M. on Tuesday, May second, you and your nephew weren’t there. Where were you?”

“At a friend’s house.”

“Wasn’t Marcus supposed to be in school later that morning?”

“Would you take your nephew to school if his mother had been kidnapped?” I said.

“Except that information hadn’t been released yet. Did you know LaReigne wasn’t coming home?”

“She already wasn’t home at two A.M.,” I said. “Which was when I needed to go to my friend’s. LaReigne wasn’t answering her phone, and I couldn’t leave Marcus alone, could I? So I took him with me.”

I’d always thought of myself as a pretty good liar, but I’d never had to lie about actual criminal shit to a pair of federal marshals while I was freaking out about my mother maybe having a heart attack and my sister maybe being dead.

Mansur put down his pen and rested his elbows on the table.

“We know they had help after they abandoned your sister’s car. So you can understand why it’s important that we know where you were. Because if I were trying to help my boyfriend break out of prison, it would be convenient if my sister could meet us and drive us somewhere else. Lose the trail.”