She glanced from my wrists to my torso, then sank into the seat across from me, kicking a folder in the process.

I tried again. “You dropped—”

“I don’t want to be here,” she snapped. “I want you to be very aware of that. Do you understand me, Mr. Morris?”

“I think so,” I replied, even though I didn’t. I mean, I know I’m not The Rock, but my pecs couldn’t be that offensive. “Where would you rather be?”

“Interviewing your cohorts has proven exceedingly frustrating. So, despite wanting to be anywhere else, I am here so you can answer my questions.”

“Ah. You went through Rigel’s address book.”

She shoved her hand into the stack of files on the table, pulled out the book, and tossed it at me. Thanks to my cuffed wrists, I missed the catch and it smacked against my bare chest.

Lienna made a muffled, rather strange sound in the back of her throat. I glanced at her—standing beside the closed door with her mouth pressed into an intense scowl, as though scowling would cancel out her blush—then fished the book off my lap.

“Look at the entry for Hilda Mills,” Blythe ordered.

I flipped through the alphabetically organized names until I got to the ‘M’ section: Hilda Mills, mentalist. There was a phone number and email address, and in the margin beside her name, Rigel had scrawled the letters “BS.”

I smirked. Mills was a new, freshly minted lawyer known for her skillful bullshitting.

“BS,” Blythe said. “Blue Smoke.”

Oh. Right. I nodded as though that was absolutely what I’d been thinking. “I see that.”

“We found nine names with the same annotation. One is Quentin, and we have five others in custody—the two telekinetics who attacked you and Agent Shen yesterday, and three who were arrested with the fall of the guild.”

“Which three?” I asked. Who had Rigel brought into his top-secret clubhouse meetings? Geoff and Jeff didn’t set the bar high for inclusion and I wanted to know who else had gotten an invitation instead of me.

“It doesn’t matter. They aren’t talking.”

“I thought you had ways to make captives talk.”

The captain’s eyes flared, but before she could threaten me with a classic abuse of power, Lienna cleared her throat.

“We need to locate the remaining three.” She dared to step closer to my unclothed man muscles. “If Quentin’s trying to do something related to Blue Smoke, we have to assume he’ll contact them.”

“And you want me to give them to you.”

Blythe pulled three folders out of the stack and laid them in front of me one by one. “Collin Sharpe. Nazario Valdez. Maggie Cook.”

I knew all three but didn’t let on. The ball was in my court and I needed to decide what shot to play.

Quentin had told me Rigel kept members of Blue Smoke in the dark about who their coconspirators were, but if my empathic friend had made it to the underground lair before us and gone through Rigel’s stuff, he probably knew about Collin, Nazario, and Maggie.

So, which one would he track down first? Impossible to guess without knowing what he was trying to accomplish. He might even have doubts about his plans, based on his desire to visit the Kitsilano Klairvoyant. Or he’d had doubts. Jenkins had suggested Quentin’s reading was a positive one.

What was the line Jenkins had revealed? Something disparaging about women and … cigar smoke, wasn’t it?

I looked up at Lienna. “Do you have your phone on you?”

Her stare jerked up to my face, and my eyebrows rose by the same margin. Just where had she been looking?

“Why?” she asked with another throat clearing.

“Look up that poem from Quentin’s diviner reading. It was by the guy who wrote The Jungle Book.”

As she pulled out her cell phone, Blythe scowled. “What’s the point of this? I’m not centering my investigation around a diviner’s reading.”

“Even if you don’t believe in his reading, Quentin does.”

“Listen to this,” Lienna said, eyes glued to her phone. “‘A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; and a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.’”

Holy shit, that was even better than I’d thought. I tapped the folder with Maggie Cook’s name on it. “I think we know who Quentin is looking for.”

Blythe swept the other two folders back into the pile and opened the remaining one. “Maggie Cook. Arcana. Thirty-five years old. Smoke and Mirrors guild.”

Lienna frowned. “She’s not a KCQ member?”

“No, which is why she escaped our original roundup.”

Escaped? Was she a criminal by default, just because her name was in a dead man’s address book?

“She isn’t a rogue,” I muttered. “She’s a good person.”

“And you’re a preeminent judge of what makes a person good?” Blythe scoffed. “The sixty-one charges against you suggest otherwise.”

Lienna shifted her feet. “Captain Blythe, I told you he saved my life yesterday.”

She’d actually told the steely precinct captain how her prisoner-assistant had saved her? I’d figured that’d be an embarrassing mishap she’d rather leave out of her report. And also, I hadn’t saved her. She’d already nullified the potion’s deadly properties by the time I made my shameful act of heroism.

Blythe’s lips thinned. “I’ll be reviewing that incident in further detail. And you’d do well to remember that manipulation is second nature to his kind.”

Stiffening, Lienna crossed her arms. “I don’t think Kit is cut from the same cloth as the other KCQ rogues. In light of their corrupting influence over his entry into the mythic community, his charges should be reviewed and—”

“Enough.” Blythe slapped Maggie Cook’s folder down on the table. “I’ll decide if Mr. Morris earns leniency. Your job is to apprehend Quentin Bianchi.”

Lienna’s jaw tightened. Her shoulders shifted as she inhaled deeply, then she turned to me. “What can you tell us about Maggie? We sent agents to her home, workplace, and guild, but no one can find her.”

I swallowed back a flippant retort and answered seriously—or as serious as I ever got, “She probably caught a whiff of those agents and decided to lie low.”

“Clearly the behavior of an innocent woman,” Blythe observed. “If she didn’t do anything wrong, she has no reason to hide.”

“Oh yeah, no reason at all, even though you’d arrest her based on basically nothing.” I stuffed down my rising temper. “But Maggie’s also on the paranoid side, so she wouldn’t sit around after what happened to Rigel.”

“What’s her relationship with Rigel?” Blythe asked.

“Freelancer. Rigel hired a lot of freelancers.”

“Can you put us in touch with her?”

“It won’t be that easy.”

“Why not?”

“Like I said, she’s paranoid. She won’t willingly talk to scary MPD agents.”

“I suppose you have a better idea.” Lienna hadn’t rolled her eyes during this interrogation yet, but I could tell she was prepared to. The eye roll was loaded, like a bullet in the chamber of a gun, ready to be fired.