Chapter 3
Chapter Three
ELI
Ifollowed Alice down the hall, watching her fifties-style dress—white with red cherries, swirl around her quick-moving legs.
Alice, I’d learned, was a ball of energy who ruthlessly organized everyone in sight.
She was so good at it that no one complained.
She and Miranda had hit it off immediately, bonding over a love of to-do lists.
I hadn’t pegged Alice for a true crime junkie.
Maybe I’d assumed that being in the thick of the real business—the kind that regularly put her husband and his team in danger—would have jaded her, but she seemed to fizz with excitement.
By the time we stepped into the small yet elegant lobby, she’d tamped down her exuberance, covering it with a professional sheen.
“Miss Calloway,” she said.
I came to a stop in front of the woman sitting on a small love seat, the heels of her sneakers bouncing restlessly against the floor.
Whatever I had thought a murder podcaster would look like, Sylvie Calloway was not it.
She came to her feet, a little wobbly, her pulse visibly thudding in her neck.
Shaky. Anxious. There was a smear on her cheek that looked like mud or soot.
The rest of her wasn’t any cleaner than her face.
Her jeans were filthy, and she had a bloody scrape on her hand that hadn’t been cleaned.
If I had to guess, I would have said she was straight off a fairly gnarly weeklong camping trip, not visiting an exclusive security agency to conduct an interview.
Sylvie met my eyes, then looked to Alice as Alice said, “This is Elias Bishop. Eli. I’ll show you two to one of our meeting rooms, and you can tell Eli what’s going on and see how we can help.”
“I don’t know that I need help,” Sylvie Calloway said, her eyes narrowing as she looked at me. “I have questions.”
She didn’t need help? I wasn’t sure about that.
Sylvie Calloway was a mess. But her response was interesting.
It showed me she had a backbone and wasn’t bothered by the scrapes or her appearance.
I found myself mildly curious as to what she had to say.
But that didn’t mean I was ready to babysit some podcaster.
My job had given me a healthy suspicion of the media in general.
“I’m sure Eli can answer your questions,” Alice said with a bright smile. She stabbed a look in my direction that said I’d better take care of whatever her favorite podcaster needed.
I had no interest in pissing Alice off. Aside from the fact that she made things run smoothly at Sinclair Security, I liked her. But the jury was still out on Sylvie Calloway.
I wasn’t a fan of the whole “true crime” thing.
And civilians going out there with a microphone, investigating crime?
No fucking way. It was a mess from start to finish.
This was a tough business for trained investigators.
They didn’t need some know-it-all wannabe celebrity with a mic in her hand to complicate shit.
Sylvie Calloway and I followed Alice down the hall, walking side by side.
I snuck a glance at her. Cinnamon-colored hair—not quite brown, not red—was pulled in a messy knot at the back of her head.
I guessed when it was down, it would be past her shoulders and wavy.
She had a smattering of freckles across her nose and a rosebud of a mouth that almost?—
I tore my eyes away and glued them to the back of Alice’s head.
Rosebud? What the fuck? Her lips were pink.
Plenty of women had pink lips. She wasn’t short.
She wasn’t tall. Her head reached just above my shoulder.
I couldn’t tell what her body looked like, dressed as she was in loose jeans and a fleece. And now I was thinking about her body.
“Sleep in an alley last night?” I asked, one eyebrow raised, aware I was being kind of a dick and not really caring.
Alice turned and shot me a sharp glance over her shoulder.
I ignored it. I didn’t like the effect Sylvie was having on me, and I wanted to be back in that conference room, figuring out how to find Silas, unable to shake the nagging worry that he needed his team and we weren’t there.
I did not want to be doing a client intake for some woman with a podcast who thought she knew how to investigate a crime because she had a laptop and a microphone and had spent a week camping and got scared by the woods. Or whatever she’d been doing.
My only real objection to coming to Sinclair Security, other than the lack of detail in Silas’s bullshit story about why we were here, was this: interfacing with clients.
At Creed Global, it was generally Silas and Miranda, and sometimes Ryder, who dealt with clients.
The rest of us did the actual work. At Sinclair, it wasn’t so clean-cut.
Everyone was expected to be able to deal with the client.
That required a level of polish I was capable of, but I didn’t like it.
“Can I get you anything?” Alice’s eyes lingered on me for barely a heartbeat before she turned the focus of her attention on Sylvie. “Something to eat, maybe? Did you get a chance to have breakfast?” Alice’s eyes dropped to the watch on her wrist. “It’s still early enough. I can send out?—”
Almost reluctantly, Sylvie let out a breath and said, “I haven’t, and if it’s not too much trouble?—”
“No trouble at all. How does a breakfast sandwich sound? Biscuit? Croissant?”
“A breakfast sandwich on a biscuit would be heaven,” Sylvie said. “And coffee. Please.”
“Coffee, we have. I’ll take care of it, no worries. Eli, anything for you?”
“Just the coffee, Alice, thanks,” I said, my gut sinking at the thought that this client intake was going to last long enough for Alice to order breakfast delivered. Fuck me.
“Take a seat,” I said to Sylvie, not liking the twinge of worry in my chest as she pulled out a black leather desk chair a little gingerly and sat slowly. I recognized someone in pain from an injury when I saw it. I’d been there myself often enough.
Her hazel eyes fixed on me. “I have a few questions,” she said. “Alice has it wrong. I’m not here as a client. I’m here following a lead.”
Pushing my concern aside and pleased I was right—that this was going to be bullshit—I sat back, propped my ankle on my knee, crossed my arms over my chest, and thought I might actually enjoy this.
I was curious what this woman thought she was going to get out of anyone at Sinclair.
Confidentiality was at the heart of what we did.
We absolutely didn’t spill details to journalists.
Picking up the backpack she’d set at her feet, Sylvie unzipped the top and pulled out a leather-bound notebook and a pen. Clicking out the gel tip, she looked up at me and said, “I’m investigating a case. A cold case, technically, though it’s too new to have been shelved so fast.”
That was a little interesting. I was tempted to lean forward, but I didn’t want Sylvie to know she’d piqued my curiosity.
I decided to play, just a little bit. “For a client? Do you have a personal interest in the victim?”
“Neither. Not really.” She sat back and tapped the side of her pen on her notebook. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Should I?” I asked.
She shrugged and flashed a quick grin that lit her hazel eyes, turning them gold for a second.
With that cinnamon hair and those freckles, that rosy mouth—everything about her glowed, even though as I studied her, she definitely looked like she had spent the night in an alley.
I guessed that Sylvie Calloway might not be a fashionista, but she didn’t usually walk around smeared with mud, her hair falling out of its messy bun, not a speck of makeup on her face.
“Alice said you’re a podcaster.” I spoke the word like I’d never heard of podcasting before, just to get under her skin, hiding my amusement when it worked.
Her eyes flashed again, this time with a little heat. “Yeah,” she agreed. “A podcaster. You know, I record things. People listen.”
“And you talk about crime?” I said again, letting disbelief color my words as if I couldn’t imagine such a delicate little flower involved in something as messy as crime. As I expected, this got her back up. I fought a small grin as she bristled.
“I investigate unsolved murders of women.” Her tone was cool, almost crisp, and I got the feeling I wasn’t the first person to give her attitude about her job.
“I’ve finished four seasons. Well, season four still has one episode to air, but I’ve put it to bed on my end, and I’m investigating season five. ”
“So, you’ve been doing this for five years?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Kind of. I started researching my first season about five years ago, but seasons in podcasting aren’t the same as television.
It’s basically, I find a case, I record episodes tracking my investigation, and when I think I’ve gotten as far as I can or the story’s done, I wrap it up, and I find another one. ”
“Solve anything?” I asked, remembering that Cooper said she had, but wondering how she’d spin it.
“One, I helped, yeah. There’s a guy behind bars for the murder of a teenager, in part because of me.”
“What did you do that the cops couldn’t?” I asked, curious to know if she’d really played a part in closing the case.
That rosebud mouth curved again, and I saw her pride in what she’d done. “I’m guessing, given where you work, that you know as well as I do that there are things the cops can’t do.”
“Yep,” I agreed, knowing exactly what she meant.
“Well, in that case, there were things they thought they knew that they couldn’t prove. And they couldn’t dig anymore because their suspect had been pushing back, and they didn’t have enough to justify their investigation.”
I cocked my head to the side, trying to put the picture together in my head. “The cops threw you at the killer?”