Free Hunting the Dark by Karen Mahoney Page B

‘colleague’. Could I metaphorically throw Quinn under the bus and frame him? He was dead now, anyway, so what did it really matter? Let his death have some meaning, right? I might even be able to plant some evidence that I could then take to Theo in order to get Jace off the hook, and I couldn’t pass up that chance – no matter how slim.
    I know, I know  . . . I’m an idiot. I can’t help it. But I knew Jace wasn’t responsible for any of this mess. I believed him – and not just because I liked him, but because I truly didn’t think he was capable of ending Nicole. He certainly didn’t have a motive.
    Then again, the whole thing had happened so quickly. The sneakiest of sneak attacks. It’s not like anybody had to actually
fight
, which gave me a horrible sense of how vulnerable even the most powerful of us could be. Perhaps Theo was right; the older vamps really had gotten complacent.
    Forcing myself not to inhale the lingering smell of death, I began searching the house. Swiftly cooling blood had seeped into my jeans, but I resolutely turned my attention away from that and tried to keep busy, methodically going from room to room, looking for something that might help me to make sense of this. Quinn had kept records, becoming an intel expert since his forced retirement from physical hunts. There had to be a lead of some kind, and if there was I would find it.
    I
am
the vampire Veronica Mars, right?
    The house seemed depressingly stripped down, showing all the signs of someone who lived a simple life. The life of a military man, with only the very barest of essentials. Nothing flashy. Nothing to tell me anything real about who Quinn had been.
    Except  . . . for the fancy computer in the office I’d seen earlier. Now
that
must have cost a few dollars. Seemed like a strange thing for such a minimalist sort of guy to own. If it had been a laptop I could have just taken it with me, but I didn’t want to carry the tower outside and risk damaging it in some way. Also, the screensaver had still been active, meaning that Quinn could have been using it recently. No harm in taking a quick peek.
    I’m good with computers – it’s a neat skill to have when Theo wants me to falsify birth and death information for members of the Boston Family. That kind of deception becomes necessary when you live for a long time. A
very
long time. I realize that it’s not ethical, but you could argue that the very existence of vampires isn’t exactly ethical. We survive on human blood. That’s sort of a problem. When you get right down to it, a few hacked genealogy databases isn’t really the end of the world.
    I headed back to the office and seated myself in front of the shiny terminal. I felt so much better – way more in control. I cracked my knuckles. Humming to myself, I jiggled the mouse and got to work on Quinn’s files.
    Mostly there was just regular stuff like house-related documents, bills, bank records, and other mind-numbingly boring information. But outside of the personal folders, there were one or two other items of interest.
    First up, a folder titled simply – and worryingly –
Targets
. All the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I was pretty sure that Quinn wasn’t talking financial targets, and clicking on the icon proved me right. It was kind of like opening Pandora’s box.
    I swallowed as I scrolled through dozens of individually named files. It would take a while to go through the contents properly, but I scanned the list for anything that might somehow link to Nicole. Could it really be that easy? Was this some kind of kill list?
    Of course not. There was no obvious sign of her, but everything was filed by surname and I didn’t know her full details or any of her aliases. I figured that she was Italian, but she hadn’t lived in Italy for a long, long time. I had no idea what her birth name was, anyway. She was super-old, I knew that, but even Holly didn’t know
how
old. That could mean