Page 80 of Capitol Matters

Guilt nagged at me. I’d been almost gleeful to see the snooty investigator guzzling the tainted bubbly. A stomach flu was far from the worst fate I might have wished on him but, judging by Holland’s sudden sobriety, he may have gotten far more than that.

“I know he wasn’t kind to you, but Toby is an excellent investigator,” Holland said.

Breaking out the nicknames, were we? And were those tears glistening in her eyes?

“I’ve known him since the academy,” she continued. “He was always right on my heels, so competitive…” A smile curved her lips. “It’s been an honor to have him on my team.”

Past tense. Yikes.

I gripped the back of one of her guest chairs, feeling the prickling heat of the imagined spotlight once more. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that.”

“They called in his family,” Holland said grimly.

“Shit.”

“I have an officer meeting them at the quarantine center today,” she said. “I should have gone myself, but…”

The pinch of pain on her face betrayed remorse I didn’t fully understand.

“Some investigator I am, huh?” Holland leaned back in her seat. “Youcould see something was wrong, but I was so worried about that stupid speech that I missed it entirely.”

Tobin trashed my car. Practically killed it. At the very least, he put it on life support. My appetite for revenge was far from sated, but I didn’t want the guy to die. Death surrounded me lately, and I had grown weary of it.

I may not have had the cure for what ailed Tobin Moreno, but I knew who did.

Standing on the doorstep of room 145, I scrubbed my shoes on the mat that proclaimed Whalecome! over the image of a cartoon whale spouting water. It was sole evidence Ripley did, in fact, possess a sense of humor.

The sun warmed my back as it sank toward thehorizon. I’d come here straight from work, so it was closer to night than morning, but all the guys kept odd hours, so there was no way of knowing if the grouchy healer would be awake or even home.

I’d knocked several seconds ago and was ready to try again when the chain lock clattered. The door creaked open, and in its frame stood the teen dressed in black sweatpants and a tank top. He rubbed a hand against the side of his face, his cheek creased with sheet wrinkles.

I flashed an uneven grin. “Morning, sunshine.”

Ripley’s eyes—one near black and the other solid white—narrowed. Gripping the door, he shoved it toward closing. I stomped a foot inside the frame, stopping it mid-swing.

“What do you want, Farrow?” he asked, his accent thicker in his drowsy state.

Shoving through the cracked door, I stepped into the darkened room. A quick look around found it to be vacant. “Where’s Mags?” I wondered aloud.

“About.” He stared at me sternly as I entered.

Matching double beds were done up in avocado green comforters and illuminated by the light filtering through the tattered blinds. The room stunk of mothballs and age and contained surprisingly few personal items. Even Ripley’s prison cell had been homier than this. But that had been ten-plus years in the making, and he’d had only a few weeks to settle in here.

The separate beds did not surprise me. I’d seen and heard enough to know that Ripley and Maggie’s relationship was essentially platonic. She was too childlike to be a sexual conquest, and he seemed contentto fill the role of her caregiver.

While he closed and relocked the door, I dropped onto the nearest bed—Ripley’s judging by the tangled sheets—and grabbed the television remote from the bedside table.

I consulted the boxy television housed in the entertainment center on the opposite wall.

“You didn’t answer me.” Ripley moved into my line of sight to stand with his arms crossed. “What do you want? Need another body disposed of?”

“So you can tattle to Grimm again?”

Clicking the power button caused the TV screen to flash to life. It was paused on a scene from what looked to be a video game. A horde of gray-skinned, grizzled undead swarmed the camera, climbing over the corpses of their peers in some kind of office-building bloodbath.

I waved the control toward the television. “You don’t get enough of this in real life?”

Ripley stepped forward and snatched the remote, punching the image to black before setting the control on the table.

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