Page 81 of Bitter Burn
I know what I need for my final play, and I know what I have. I need Brittany Hill, and all I have is a scribbled list of old books and an address for someone named Regina Springer.
An address and, of course, my new houseguest.
I take Petitcrieu for a quick and chilly walk in the rooftop pet area, deposit her back in bed with Isolde, where she coils neatly in the hollow shaped by Isolde’s waist, and then return to the elevator, which I take one floor down after keying in the code.
The elevator doors open to Goran at a kitchen table with a scatter of cards between him and a woman in her early thirties, who is sitting with one leg drawn up to her chest and a vape pen dangling from her hand. Nat is fast asleep on the couch, an arm flung over her eyes and her hoodie rucked up enough to show a knife sheathed at the waist of her utility pants.
“Fuck,” concedes Goran with typical military grace. “You fucking got me again.” He tosses down his hand, and Cara Sims wastes no time in scraping the bottle caps piled in the middle toward her side.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say by way of greeting.
Cara twists to look at me, the Architectural Digest–featured chandelier over the table casting every faint line around her eyes and every crease in her lips into unflattering relief. Dark roots have grown into her bottle-red hair, her fingernails are brittle and bitten, and there is a hunted look in the shadows of her cheekbones and under her eyes.
That said, her eyes are feline and quick and sharply lucid. The lackeys of Ys were fools to underestimate her. I know CIA officers who wouldn’t have lasted a day with the kind of tail she had, but she’d lasted nearly a year after her brother’s failed attempt to kill the Carpathian prime minister elect. And it wasn’t even Aaron Sims’s botched, blackmail-driven assassination that put Cara in the crosshairs of Ys—it was that he’d made the mistake of telling Cara, presumably on a line that Ys was listening to.
I’d wondered why—when Ys seemed so interested in becoming a legend in certain circles—they cared if some dead soldier had told his sister about it. His unconnected, peripatetic sister whom no one would have believed anyway. Why go to the trouble of trying to harass her into silence? Why start chasing her?
It must be that Aaron knew something else, something more. Something beyond the blackmail and illegal weapons.
Or he knew someone who did.
“You must be Mark,” Cara says. Her voice is wary, but it’s possibly an inborn wariness and not one I’ve earned outright. I’ve done my best not to give her any reason to distrust me since Nat and Goran scooped her out of a bus stop near Grand Central Terminal. I made sure they explained thoroughly that we were friends of Tristan and that we knew she wasn’t safe. Made sure that even as Goran and Nat kept her here in my apartment, below the one I actually use, she had all the amenities of a cherished guest.
But she would be foolish not to be wary. I applaud her for it.
I walk over and offer my hand. When she thinks it over for a moment and then takes my hand to shake it, I do only that. A firm, reassuring shake—no kiss on the knuckles, no winching myself closer, no knowing smile. She’s not a mark or a potential agent or anyone other than the unlucky sister to an even unluckier brother.
“Can we speak for a minute?” I ask, inclining my head toward the loft area.
She glances over at Goran, who gives her a steady look, and then nods. “All right.”
Goran makes a show of giving us privacy, clearing up the cards and turning on one of his true crime podcasts.
“Still enjoying your murder shows?” I ask him as Cara stands up and carries her glass into the kitchen.
“I’m waiting for them to cover those poisonings from last year,” he says earnestly. “The ones in Tokyo, Vancouver, and DC. We talked about them during one of our meetings, remember?”
I remember.
“Poisoning was the only thing they had in common, Goran,” I reply. “People are poisoned all the time, for all sorts of reasons. There was nothing else linking the murders together, not geography, not their jobs—not even the kind of poison.”
“There’s nothing linking them together yet,” Goran says with the conviction of a podcast subscriber.
Cara returns from the sink, and I point the way to the stairs. “Let me know if they ever find anything,” I tell the former Marine as I leave the kitchen—mostly out of polite interest but a little out of professional interest too. Sometimes an amateur investigator is able to find things authorities would never even think to look for.
Cara and I climb the stairs to the loft, and then I invite her to sit in one of the armchairs facing the night-sparkling city.
“I’m sorry for the ambush at the bus stop,” I say as I take a seat myself. “I hope it wasn’t too frightening after what you’ve been through.”
She shakes her head. “I was scared at first, but Nat and Goran told me they knew Tristan, and I guess if there’s anyone I trust to be a knight in shining armor, it’s him. And,” she says, glancing around the bookshelf-lined loft with its designer lamps and its multimillion-dollar view, “this is the first time I’ve ever lain low so high up in the air. It can’t be all bad in a place this nice.”
“Bad enough if you only have Goran to play cards with or Nat’s cooking to eat,” I say. “Now, can you tell me everything you know about Aaron’s involvement with Ys?”
Cara puts her vape pen to her lips, her eyes downcast when she inhales. When she exhales, the vapor curls around her like steam from one of Tristan’s wyverns. “Yes,” she says tiredly, and she tells me everything she can.
It is as Tristan had explained in Rome, although in greater detail, and when she’s finished, I ask her when she thinks her brother started working for Ys, how she thinks they might have communicated with him, and how much money he was able to send home and how frequently. There are few specifics in her answers but enough to confirm my suspicions that Aaron had fallen prey to Ys sometime the year before last. When I ask if she remembers anything hinting at direct Church involvement—using Church buildings as storehouses or charity missions as cover for moving supplies—she shakes her head.
It’s a long shot, but I have to try. “Do the names Regina Springer or Brittany Hill sound familiar at all? Could Aaron have mentioned them to you before your final phone call?”
