I found them in the smaller back room, sitting around one of the tables with the silver-haired woman, who was tapping on an open laptop and looked more like a girl now that I could see her face. The music was quieter here, more of a vibration than a cohesive sound, although I did make out the muffled lyrics to “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Jude turned to look at me as I crossed the room to join them, like he’d sensed me there. “Speak of the devil.”
“Is that why you’re hiding from me?” I hated the defensiveness in my voice but that was how I always felt around them: on guard and ready to fight.
“We’re not hiding from you.” He got up and pulled over a chair from another table. “We’re just not used to having a… partner.”
“She’s not a partner,” Rafe said.
Jude rolled his eyes. “Take a seat, boss. We’ll catch you up.”
25
JUDE
She lookedlike she was walking into the lion’s den and I couldn’t really blame her. I wanted to believe we’d done enough to earn her trust over the past few weeks, but the truth was, I wasn’t sure there were enough good deeds in the world to make up for what we’d done to her.
That was why we’d been handling the search for Mr. Suit, not because we didn’t want to include Lilah but because this was something we wanted to do for her, a chance to make up for what we’d done — not by doing some abstractly right thing, like we’d done when we’d taken the hit of our dishonorable discharge for calling out that sick fuck Sandoval, but by doing something forher.
But that was something I’d learned about Lilah (and believe me, I’d been trying to learn everything I could because she’d become something of a fucking obsession): you couldn’t tell her you were doing something for her. She’d only refuse, tell you she could take care of herself, throw up those walls she’d built after the shit show that had happened in high school.
You had to help Lilah quietly, in ways she wouldn’t notice, in ways that didn’t seem like a big deal. We’d been doing a whole lot of that since she’d moved in.
That she didn’t know it was the point.
She moved toward the empty chair like a murder suspect taking a seat at an interrogation table, then leaned over to extend her hand to Storm.
“I’m Lilah. Nice to meet you.”
I could see Lilah taking Storm in, saw Storm the way Lilah probably did: a waifish teenager with silver hair, piercings, and tattoos. A kid with something to prove.
Storm grinned, looking every bit as young as she was, which was somewhere around nineteen. “Storm. You too.”
“Storm’s been working on the security cameras around the Dive,” I explained as Lilah took a seat.
“You’re a hacker?” Lilah asked her. “Is that an okay question to ask?”
Storm laughed. “I prefer ‘cyber security expert.’ Gets me into less trouble. But, yeah. I can get around most of the vanilla security measures out there.” She looked nervously around the room. “Or I could, if, you know, that was a thing I wanted to do.”
Lilah pressed her lips together and nodded. She got Storm’s drift.
“Can you show her the car?” Nolan asked Storm.
Storm turned her computer around and magnified the grainy image she’d already shown us: a long black car — not a limousine but a Lincoln Town Car, the kind with tinted windows piloted by drivers whose employers didn’t want the attention of a limousine — with a New York plate.
“Kind of generic, I know,” Storm said. “And these cameras are never the best for resolution.”
“Where was this taken?” Lilah asked.
“The lot at Pink,” Nolan said. “Is this the car Mr. Suit drives? The one they shoved the girl into that night?”
Lilah leaned in, squinting a little at the image. “Maybe… It’s such a generic car. Can we run the plate? See who it’s registered to?”
“Already done,” Storm said. “Not much help.”
“Why not?” Lilah asked.
“It’s registered to a company,” Rafe said, the first words he’d spoken since Lilah sat down.