Pack of Lies, page 5
“I wasn’t—I was just looking for Annabelle. My car is ready and I needed a ride into town,” Julien stammered, straightening hastily. “What are you doing in here?”
“Corporate espionage,” Eli said in the same lazily indifferent tone as ever, but his gaze was sharp, studying Julien, the room and, of course, the incriminatingly open drawer. “I heard they have the codes to hospitality in here. Did you happen to find it while looking for Annabelle in her desk? Or is this another electrical outlet–based escapade?”
Julien felt his face grow hot. “I saw you,” he said boldly, and Eli made a strange face, gone as quick as it had come.
“What do you think you saw?” he asked slowly.
Julien opened his mouth, but hesitated. The truth was not a whole hell of a lot. Eli had just opened a drawer. So what? So had he. But there had been something else there, too. A glimpse of the different way the man moved when unobserved. A strangeness to the way he’d stood so still. Unfortunately, Julien didn’t know how to say any of that.
“You were...looking in drawers. Locked drawers,” he remembered suddenly.
Something in Eli seemed to relax. He pushed himself to standing and took a couple of languorous steps toward Julien until he was directly in his space. “That drawer wasn’t locked.”
“Yes, it was. I just—” Julien’s mouth snapped shut and Eli smiled.
“Oh dear. Is this what they call an impasse?”
Julien shook his head, but didn’t know what he was disagreeing to exactly. He couldn’t seem to think clearly, distracted by how...near the other man was. It was strange, wasn’t it? Standing this close to someone? Eli couldn’t be taller than five foot nine or so, a good five inches shorter than Julien, and everything from his floppy hair to the fuzzy folds of his sweater said soft, delicate. But still Julien’s heart was racing as if he was standing nose to nose with a lion.
Ridiculous. A beautiful man was standing close to him and forty-four-year-old Julien Doran, who had two marriages—and two divorces—to his name, was as sweaty-palmed and wobbly-kneed as a kid at his first middle school dance.
“Um—” Julien heard himself say eloquently. He cleared his throat. “Why are you here?”
“Oh, the same reason as you, I expect. Let’s both say it on the count of three,” Eli murmured. “One, two—”
Julien felt the whittled creature being plucked out of his slackened grasp a moment too late to hold on to it. He made a belated attempt to grab it back, but Eli slipped around him like smoke.
“That belongs to Annabelle,” Julien said uselessly. “We should—I was just about to put it back.”
Eli hummed, but otherwise didn’t look up from the statue. “What does this look like to you?”
“I don’t know. Sweet Pea in a pair of cat ears?”
“Cat ears?” Eli repeated incredulously, looking almost offended. Then he laughed, a clumsy sort of huffing sound at total odds with the elegant way he moved and spoke.
“I said I don’t know. This isn’t my sort of thing,” Julien said. “What do you think it is?”
“Do you believe in monsters, Mr. Doran?” Eli ignored the other question, still spinning the creature carefully between his fingertips.
Julien snorted softly which finally made Eli look up at him with a faintly curious expression. “Not the sort with cat ears.” He hesitated. “Ah, do you?”
Eli smiled that sharp little smile. “The only visitors I like going bump in the night are the ones that make me breakfast in the mornings.” He stood abruptly, placed the statuette back in the desk and closed the drawer.
“What—” Julien began, then quickly shut up when Eli, well, prowled toward him. There was really no other word for it. Julien took a few hasty steps backward, and then a few more when Eli didn’t slow, essentially herding him back into the waiting room.
“I’d appreciate it if you stopped...manhandling me,” Julien said between gritted teeth.
“Please. When I handle men, or individuals of any gender for that matter, it involves a great deal more touching and less of whatever this is.” He plucked at Julien’s jacket. “Now tell me once more: What exactly are you doing in here?”
“I was looking for—”
The door to the waiting room opened and Annabelle walked in followed by a man Julien had only seen from a distance. They both stopped abruptly, obviously shocked that the room wasn’t empty.
“And here she is,” Eli said. “Mr. Doran was just telling me he was looking for you.”
“Oh,” Annabelle said, gaze darting between the two of them curiously. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.”
Julien shook his head. “No, I—Not long.” He glanced at Eli half expecting a contradiction, but Eli just raised an eyebrow as if to say go on. “My car is ready, and I hoped someone might give me a ride into town.”
“Of course! Cody can take you right away. You didn’t see him come in? He was supposed to meet us here with David.”
Julien’s throat itched and he traced the back of the couch with his pinkie. “Chief Bucknell? Um, why—”
This time it was a relief to hear Eli’s despondent sigh cut him off. “Not our dogged patrolman again. What errant wildlife is he after now?”
The man behind Annabelle snorted softly, which he hastily turned into a cough. “We ran into David on our way to the activity site. He told us about the incident last night.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. This is Patrick. Professor Patrick West, the cryptozoologist I was telling you about,” Annabelle announced proudly before introducing Julien and Eli.
“The business card says anthropology department, actually,” the man corrected good-naturedly, shaking Julien’s hand then reaching over to do the same with Eli. “They don’t pay me to go looking for cryptids quite yet.”
“Will the myopia of academia never end,” Eli murmured, and moved to drop his hand almost as soon as they touched, but Patrick held on.
“Have we met? You look very familiar.”
Eli smiled and blinked slowly. “If that’s the line you use on Bigfoot, no wonder you’re still looking.”
Patrick laughed. “Thanks for the tip.”
He didn’t look much like a professor. But then, Julien’s only concept of that came from the screen. Patrick was white, tall and approaching forty, at a guess. Blond, with glasses and obviously fit beneath a high-quality snow jacket, he looked like the hero of some inexplicably popular adventure series. The scientist who starts the movie awkwardly babbling data and ends it vine-swinging across an unpassable gorge with the heroine in one hand and his wire rims in the other. From the reluctant way he finally released his hand, it seemed like Patrick was interested in doing that swing with Eli.
Julien cleared his throat. “So, what does the expert think?”
“We didn’t make it to the site,” Annabelle said. “David said the snow is coming down too hard at the top of the mountain, so we’ve postponed until the morning.”
“But now I get to see the photo,” Patrick prompted, and Annabelle clapped her hands in excitement and walked across the waiting room, pulling a key ring out of her jacket pocket. Julien couldn’t resist looking at Eli, but he seemed perfectly calm.
“I’m so excited to get your opinion on this, Patrick. I think I’ve finally found proof.” Annabelle bypassed the side table nearest to the door and went to the one Eli hadn’t opened. She unlocked it, keys jingling against the metal drawer handle. Far louder than whatever Eli had used to get in.
“I try to record where we’ve already had activity. Fires. Bone piles.” While she spoke, Annabelle pulled out the camera from last night, pressed a button and frowned, words slowly petering out. “That’s...” She flipped it around, opening something on the bottom, and cried out. “It’s gone!”
“What do you mean?”
“The SD card is missing. Someone took the picture!”
Chapter Four
“Is it me, or did we just do this dance?” Eli said, leaning against the dark wood paneling.
They’d moved, or been moved, to the lodge’s breakfast room. A wall of windows, frosted with snow, overlooked the bottom of the slopes, while what smelled like ten years of breakfast sausage grease coated the tables and chairs. It was thick and distracting and Eli felt a headache sparking to life behind his nose bones. Of course, it wasn’t just the stink making him want to go home.
Bucknell had arrived shortly after Annabelle had discovered the SD was missing and had promptly corralled them away from the scene of the crime for questioning. Crime because Annabelle had not merely misplaced the card as Professor Bigfoot had gently suggested and was quickly disproven when she went to check her laptop and found it gone as well. That’s when the yelling had really begun, and, as if waiting in the wings for his cue, her assistant Cody Reeves had come charging in ready to fight, rounding their numbers up to precisely five more people than Eli ever hoped to see in the middle of a heist.
It had taken Bucknell a while to convince the hotheaded Cody no one was attacking Annabelle and he could put his fists back down. Frankly, Eli still wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to go off again and had elected to stand with his back to the wall, while Bucknell, Annabelle, Cody and the professor sat around the table. Interestingly, Doran had opted to stand as well, albeit about as far from Eli as he could get.
“It’s okay, Annabelle. All of Blue Tail’s files are backed up on my drive,” Cody was saying. “We’ll be up and running again soon.” He was young, white and tall with buzzed brown hair, big ears and a bright red snow patrol jacket pressed deep with the smell of motor oil.
“Not the picture,” Annabelle said miserably. “I was so close.”
“But Bucky here is going to find the card and it’s all going to be fine.” Cody handed her a second tissue, straight from his pocket.
“I’m about thirty years too old for nicknames, kid. I’ve told you to call me Bucknell. Or Chief, if that’s easier to remember,” he said, sounding amused, if a little tired. “Who has access to the office?”
“Apparently anyone who wants to walk in, Bucknell,” Cody said pointedly, and shot an accusing look over to where Eli and Doran were standing by the wall, an absurd amount of space between them.
Doran shifted in place. “If you mean me, then yes. I admit I went into the office. But I never touched the laptop or opened that drawer. I was only in there looking for Annabelle.”
No stammering, no blushing, no blinking. This wasn’t the same guilty man Eli had caught elbow-deep in his host’s desk. Actor, Eli reminded himself sharply.
And a quick study, too. This time he’d neatly avoided admitting knowing the drawer was locked. The office had been choking with incense, so he couldn’t track Doran’s movements through the room or, embarrassingly, notice him there at all. When Eli had realized he wasn’t alone in the office, any annoyance at his own carelessness was outmatched by surprise at exactly who was peeking out at him from behind the door.
He’d only been teasing the man last night about being a thief to watch his pretty blush. It was patently absurd to think a famous Hollywood actor would be going on a petty crime spree in a sleepy mountain town.
Or so it had seemed yesterday. Today, after seeing Doran’s big doe eyes blinking guiltily at him, that carved shifting wolf clutched in his hands, well, Eli wasn’t so sure. There was a chance he’d been played. Rare occurrence though it may be, it was still possible. But to what end? He glanced over at Doran and found him studying him intently back.
“And what about you, Mr. Smith?” Bucknell asked, and Eli looked away. “You’ll forgive me for asking, but I don’t believe I caught why you’re here?” He seemed more muted today. Older in the twenty short hours since his last interrogation. But that might have just been because he was sat across from Cody, the human iteration of a bull calf.
“A return mission.” He twisted his wrist in the air with magician-esque flourish and produced his own, far more elegant alibi—a convenient pack of playing cards. “I found these after you all left last night and assumed someone dropped them?”
“That’s mine,” Doran said, striding across the room. He reached for the box, but Eli held on.
“How peculiar. I thought you weren’t interested in this sort of thing.”
“I always try to educate myself on the local culture,” Doran said, and then with a little emphasis added, “I enjoy knowing what’s going on.”
“Then what a joyless life you must lead,” Eli murmured, but released his hold on the deck. Doran shoved it out of sight and into his pocket.
“Are you serious?” Cody asked. He stood up, rattling the wooden chair, and just barely avoiding tipping it. “You’re trying to say you came all the way over here to return some cards?”
“Cody—” Annabelle soothed.
“I’m sorry, Ms. D, but come on. That’s c-crazy!” He flinched slightly and glanced at Annabelle as he said it with an odd expression flitting over his face too quickly to parse.
“Are you implying that I have some reason to lie?” Eli asked politely.
“Not at all,” Cody said tightly, taking a step toward him. “I just think it’s interesting that you left your own tanking business in the middle of work hours to let yourself into the competition’s office while the boss was conveniently out, and just happened to be passing through at the exact moment all our files were sabotaged.”
“Tanking? Competition? Sabotage?” Eli repeated, perplexed. “I had no idea the hospitality industry of one-road-in-one-road-out Maudit Falls was so ruthless.”
“If you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind being searched.”
Eli tucked his hands behind his back hastily as his claws prickled. “So that you can confirm I didn’t sneak into an office and mysteriously pick the drawer’s lock because the success of my business depends on the blurry image of a mythical creature?” he asked with an admirable amount of incredulity considering that was exactly what had happened. “Yes, I can absolutely see why that’s far more believable than cutting out of work early to see a cute, famous actor again.”
Somewhere to his left, Doran made a small incredulous sound under his breath, but Cody just shrugged. “Who else could it have been? You have to admit it doesn’t look good. We practically caught you red-handed.”
“Not yet,” Eli murmured quietly. “But try to search me and I may soon be.”
“What did you just say?” Cody demanded. For a moment it honestly looked like Cody was about to cross the room, which would be very bad indeed. Mostly for Cody. But for Eli, too, as far as maintaining his defenseless persona went.
Then Doran stepped forward, situating himself a little between them. “I was already in the office when Mr. Smith walked in.” His dark eyes were unreadable, but there was a faint clench in his jaw.
Eli tensed, waiting to be set up. He picked the locks right in front of me. I saw him take the card. I say we all search him. I’ll get his legs.
“He didn’t go near that drawer, and we were only in there for a minute before Ms. Dunlop and Mr. West joined us. In fact, I’m the only one here who was in the room alone.” Eli raised an eyebrow in surprise, studying Doran’s profile, but the man didn’t so much as glance his way. “I think it’s fairly obvious I’m not hiding a laptop on me, but if you want to search, I understand,” Doran added, raising his arms so that his close-fitting long-sleeve shirt rose and a sliver of skin above his waistband peeked through.
“No one is searching anyone,” Annabelle interrupted. She shoved away from the table. “Mr. Smith, please accept my apology. Cody didn’t intend to accuse you of anything. Did he?” She shot her assistant a sharp look.
Cody hesitated. His face said that was exactly what he’d meant to do, but what came out of his mouth was a begrudging “No.”
“No. Of course not,” she agreed with a hint of warning in her voice and a calm sort of resolve that hadn’t been there before. “Now, I’m sure this has all been a simple misunderstanding. I’d like to move on, please.”
“Can’t do that, Annie,” Bucknell said, piping up at last. “There’s been a crime. I’ll need to file a report and—”
“No, I don’t think there has,” she said firmly. “I’m sure I’ve just misplaced them. Like Patrick said.”
Professor Bigfoot looked surprised to be called out from where he’d silently been enjoying the show, but just said, “Seems reasonable. I do it all the time myself.”
Bucknell shot him a frustrated look, before turning back to Annabelle. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Maudit is a good, safe town,” she said. “We don’t get break-ins, do we.”
They shared the long speaking look of friends who had known one another for years.
“All right,” Bucknell said finally. “But I’ll want to look through the office again with you. Make sure nothing else was...misplaced.”
“I’ll help,” Cody said immediately, glancing at Eli. “There are some very valuable items in there.”
That seemed unlikely to the point of absurdity, but it was as good a line as any to feign insult. It was always nice to enter as a burglar and leave as the wronged party. Second only to not being noticed coming and going at all. “On that note. I hate to flee the scene, but I’m getting the strangest feeling that I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“Oh, not at all,” Annabelle exclaimed, shooting Cody an annoyed look. “Please don’t rush out.”
“You have inventory to account for. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a distraction. There’s an overabundance of accusations going around as it is.”
Annie offered to walk him out and they left the others behind. On his way out, Eli cast one last curious glance at Doran only to find him studying him intently yet again. Eli wiggled his fingers goodbye and winked—Doran quickly looked away.
