Page 38 of Death Bringer

“Thanks for the clarification. Now get out of my head.”

Rich set up Vadim’s desktop computer and phone line while Sam sat in his chair and spun himself around in circles.

Ella looked up again. “Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be, Sam?”

He stopped spinning. “Not really, I was just waiting to tell you that Mr. Feehan wants us all in the conference room at eleven.”

“Thanks. Maybe you could let Morosov try out his chair now?”

“Oh, sure, dude.” Sam leaped to his feet and then swayed. “Man,I’m like, so dizzy right now.”

Ella forced herself not to state the obvious and merely observed his unsteady progress out through the door.

“Idiot,” she remarked.

“Me?”

“No. Sam. He’s such a kid.”

“Lucky him.” Vadim had already assembled his half of the room into something that would feature on the front cover ofOffice Weekly,if such a magazine existed. For some reason, the space didn’t seem to have shrunk too much after all. “Did you make any progress tracing Adam?”

“Not much. You?”

He checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven. There’s no point in repeating myself when we’re just about to step into a meeting.”

“Even for me?”

He held the door open for her. “This time there’s only one version to tell.”

Sam and Liz were laughing and comparing notes about the last wolf-pack party they’d both attended. Rich sipped his coffee and Feehan looked up as they entered.

“Good, let’s get on, shall we?”

He added a couple of photos of Brad Dailey to the board. The pictures had obviously been taken after his death.

“Dude, that’s weird.” Sam sat up straighter. “His face is, like, beautiful. Like a mask.”

“Which is exactly what it is.” Ella agreed. “Even though he ripped it up before he died, Morosov and I reckoned, as it doesn’t really belong to him, it didn’t suffer the physical trauma of his death and reverted back to being perfect.”

“That’s creepy.” Liz shivered. “It reminds me of that story with the guy with the picture in the attic that aged while he stayed young.”

“The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

“That’s the one.”

“It makes you wonder what’s happening to Brad’s real face right now, doesn’t it?” Feehan mused. “Or if that face even exists anymore. What else do we have?”

Ella held up her hand. “I’ve been attempting to trace Adam through the various conference-registration sites and hotels, but so far no luck.”

“That’s hardly surprising. How about you, Vadim?”

“Nothing here, either. I doubt our killer attended anything in the city at all this week.”

Feehan’s face fell. “Darn it. What else do we have?’

“Well, we have the security tape of ‘Doctor Vadim’ bespelling Delia and then going into Brad’s room.” Liz said. “By the way, how are we going to stop the hospital authorities from seeing that and immediately assuming he is the killer?”

“Simple, we just don’t give them the tape back until we’ve found the real murderer.” Ella snapped.

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