Page 9 of Shadow Burn

“You sound worried. Since when do you back down from a risky proposition?”

He ground his teeth. Vivi waited, a faint smile on her face. One of her specialties—she did it without making him feel like a patient. She did it the way a friend waited.

A sigh escaped his lips. “Katherine trusts the page more than the people. Reminds me of my mom. She used to read the stories behind the words.” He smiled at a memory of her explaining the subtext of his favorite Jules Vern story when he was only ten. “Katherine reads the facts behind the documents. Same instinct, different tools.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He considered the question. “It’s a potential hazard. I’m still grieving my mother. Walking into a daily working relationship with a woman who reminds me of her care and insight with the written word is not a clean place to put my head.”

“Can anyone else at SPS do this work?”

“No.”

She nodded as if expecting that response. “Is the case real?”

“Yes.”

“Is Katherine in danger?”

“If she pursues this and catches the Agency’s attention, most definitely.”

“Then your only reason for declining is your discomfort with what she stirs up in you.”

“I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this. That’s the reason.”

She raised her hands in supplication. “I’m not going to talk you into taking the job. I’m only going to ask whether it’s the reason you want to give yourself when whatever happens to that woman happens, and you find out it could have been prevented if you’d been the one helping her.”

He stared at her for a long second. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man before lunch.”

“I’ve said harder things to harder men for ten years. Drink your tea.”

He drank the awful tea, stewing over her words. Over Katherine’s half-pleading eyes. Over her chewing her lip.

Vivi watched him over the rim of her cup. After a minute, she said, more gently, “What else?”

He set down the mug, deciding whether to share an underlying worry he had. “The official death, the records that don’t hold up, the institutional silence around the inconsistencies—it’s the same pattern as the secrecy around my father.”

Vivi knew about Ryan Perault. She’d known ever since Jasper had let it slip during a conversation about something else entirely, and she’d never once made it the topic when he didn’t want it to be.

“You think hers is connected?”

“No, not directly. I think it suggests how this kind of cover-up is done at the institutional level, and her case is the closest I’ve ever come to watching one get unraveled in real time. If I help her, I learn something about how to handle mine.”

Vivi seemed to think this over. “That’s another reason to take it.”

“It is.”

“How many do you need?”

He almost laughed. Instead, he pressed his palms against his thighs and looked at the photograph of Vivi and Ian on the hiking trail, both of them laughing at something off-camera.

“I’m going to do some research,” he said. “Public records, open-source. I want to confirm a couple of things about Walter Vance before I commit. If what I think is true, I’ll come back this afternoon and tell you I’m taking it.”

“Fair enough.”

He stood. At the door, he turned back. “If I take this assignment, the final-decision clause is going to be a problem.”

“The one she insisted on?”