“You think Aggie took the tie clip,” Vicki said.

“Someone here pulled the tie out from under the body and took the clip,” Grimshaw replied. “If it wasn’t Aggie, then I’d bet a month’s wages that it was one of her kin.”

“You really need it for the investigation? Why?”

“Because Detective Swinn was very upset about its disappearance, and I want to know what’s so special about that particular tie clip.”

They fell into an awkward silence. She seemed reluctant to be around him, and not because he was a cop. She was acting like someone had painted an insulting remark about her on a public wall, making her the focus of unhappy attention—and he was one of the people who had read it.

Before he could decide if he should say anything about the fireplug remark Swinn had made, Aggie returned. She landed on the wide arm of the chair near the front door and dropped the tie clip she carried in her beak. She nudged it this way and that until the tie clip was resting on the front edge of the arm, right in a narrow beam of sunlight that showed the clip to best advantage.

Grimshaw set the charm bracelet on the arm and scooped up the tie clip. Aggie grabbed the bracelet and flew off. Bargain set and sealed.

He looked at the tie clip and frowned, unable to see why Swinn had gone into conniptions about its loss. Okay, everything from a crime scene should be bagged, but he didn’t think that was the reason Swinn had reacted the way he did.

Then he caught the look on Vicki DeVine’s face. “What is it?”

“Yorick has a tie clip like that.”

He held it up to give her a better look. “Your ex-husband has a tie clip like this or just similar to this?”

She looked at him, her eyes full of confusion. “Exactly like that.”

CHAPTER 22

Vicki

Thaisday, Juin 15

Sitting in The Jumble’s library with Ilya Sanguinati and Officer Grimshaw, I looked at the books I had shelved yesterday and had an epiphany. While I enjoyed reading thrillers, I didn’t want to be the girl tangled in the plot of one because I would have been the heroine’s best friend or the girl who had fallen for the hero—the girl he felt some affection for because she gave him sex while he was getting over the loss of his one true love. Those were the girls who ended up getting tossed in the wood chipper or left at the bottom of a deep, dry well full of spiders and millipedes—said well suddenly refilling, quite inconveniently, so that the girl would be found but not in time, especially if she was the passing love interest of the hero of the story. Those were also the girls who would be tied up in a cave and left to become the frame for a bat guano sculpture.

But even the epiphany didn’t stop me from snorting out a laugh when Officer Grimshaw floated his theory about the tie clips.

“You think Yorick belongs to a secret society? An organization with secret handshakes and code words? A society that, wanting to remain secret, identifies its members by a tie clip? Are you serious?”

Apparently he was. I looked at Ilya Sanguinati to see what he thought about Grimshaw’s theory. I don’t know if it was because he was a vampire or an attorney, but he had mastered the poker face.

“You think it’s possible,” I said to Ilya.

“It should be considered,” he replied. “It indicates a connection between Detective Swinn and your ex-husband.”

Grimshaw leaned toward me, his forearms resting on his thighs, his face full of concerned sincerity. “Think about it. You were married to the man for how many years? Did he belong to any clubs, go out to monthly meetings that were members only?” He picked up an evidence bag containing the tie clip and held it up. “Your ex-husband and at least one of the detectives in a CIU team had this exact tie clip. A Bristol CIU team should have taken the assignment when I reported the suspicious death of Franklin Cartwright on your property. But a team from Putney, led by Marmaduke Swinn, showed up instead.”

“The police in Putney have not concerned themselves with the citizens of Sproing until now,” Ilya Sanguinati said.

“Bristol has two CIU teams that are supposed to handle any suspicious deaths or other incidents in Bristol and the area within Bristol’s jurisdiction, which includes Lake Silence. Highway patrol out of Bristol is supposed to handle anything on the roads between Crystal Lake and Lake Silence, and that includes answering calls from Sproing.” Grimshaw’s expression hardened. “It was possible that both Bristol teams already had cases and couldn’t send anyone that day, but I checked with Captain Hargreaves and he told me a team had been available. Somehow Swinn heard about Cartwright and claimed jurisdiction, saying it was related to a crime he was already investigating. Since no one in Bristol wanted to fight with Swinn over going to Sproing, they let him have the case.”

“Geez,” I said, “what do you guys do? Play rock, paper, scissors to decide who has to take a call here?” I knew the police didn’t like coming to Sproing—and to be fair, they had good reason to feel that way—but being told you sometimes got protection from someone like Swinn because no one else wanted to come didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy—or safe.

I don’t think I have a good poker face, because Grimshaw looked uncomfortable. Ilya Sanguinati’s poker face didn’t change, but I had the feeling he might have a few things to say to someone about how humans protected other humans.

“Right now, it doesn’t matter how Swinn got the case,” Grimshaw said. “What matters is why he wanted it.”

“That man, Franklin Cartwright,” Ilya said. “Did he have one of those tie clips?”

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw replied. “He was dressed casually when he was found. Swinn’s team collected his things from the boardinghouse.”

So now we had a conspiracy? This was getting better and better. Or worse and worse.

I raked my fingers through my hair, dislodging some of the clips that kept it under control. Ilya Sanguinati looked at my sproinging hair. His poker face cracked. His lips twitched. I promised myself that I would cover all the mirrors until I ran a brush through my hair so that I wouldn’t scare myself.

We won’t talk about the time I got a brush so tangled in my hair I had to make an emergency appointment with my stylist and have her perform a brushectomy to avoid having brush-head for the rest of my life.

“How many secret societies can there be?” I lobbed the question, not expecting an answer.

“Since they’re secret, it’s anyone’s guess,” Grimshaw replied.

His eyes went blank. I watched him swallow. We had momentarily forgotten that one of us was not like the others.

Now neither of us looked at the vampire in the room. The Humans First and Last movement hadn’t been a secret. It had been a political pro-human, anti-Others group that started with speeches and ended with the acts of violence that started the war that killed a lot of people in Thaisia and destroyed the Cel-Romano Alliance of Nations on the other side of the Atlantik Ocean. But secret societies with secret agendas that might pose a threat to the terra indigene?

I had a bad feeling Grimshaw and I had just painted targets on the backs of several people—including my ex-husband. Yorick used to say a successful businessman was bound to make a few enemies. I don’t think he’d considered that the Sanguinati might be one of them when he said that.

“It may not be a secret society,” I said. “It could be a private or exclusive group that doesn’t want their name splashed in the newspapers for doing charitable work. Or it could be a club. Yorick was a member of a couple of clubs where he hobnobbed with people who had money or social clout. Those clubs were exclusive but they weren’t secret.”

Grimshaw nodded. “That would make more sense, although I doubt that Marmaduke Swinn or Franklin Cartwright had money or the social clout to belong to such a club.”

“It doesn’t matter if Detective Swinn and Franklin Cartwright are part of that group,” Ilya said. “It doesn’t change the fact that humans with an agenda are causing trouble at The Jumble. Until we know who belongs to this tie clip club, we cannot determine if they are merely a nuisance or a real threat.”