Free Trio of Sorcery by Mercedes Lackey Page B

get,” she said regretfully. “College is alot more intense than I thought it would be. And this is my dime I’m dropping here, so I’m not into pouring it down the drain….”
    â€œThe voice of conscience,” Marshal said with a laugh. “Tell you what, I’ll walk you to the stairs. I’m 4A, right by the stairwell.”
    She clasped her hands under her chin. “Oh, thank you, gallant sir!” she said in a breathless voice. “However will I repay you?”
    â€œDon’t answer that, Marshal.” Em laughed. “I’ll kick your ass.”
    Marshal put his hand over his heart. “I swear, I had no intention of—”
    â€œYeah, right.” Emory snorted. “Get outta here. See you tomorrow.”
    As soon as the apartment door closed behind them, Marshal lost every semblance of even mild intoxication, and turned to her with an intense look on his face. “All right, you wanted to know waaaaaay too much about psychic debunking. What’s going on?”
    Di hesitated for a very long time. Should she trust this guy she’d just met?
    On the other hand, nothing about any of these four had set internal alarm bells going off. And he knew more than she did by a good mile. Intuition sez—
    Before she could answer, Marshal persisted, a worried look on his face. “Someone you know getting scammed?Friend? Relative? Seriously, if I can help—you know, use the powers only for good?”
    That decided her. “Come on down to my place,” she said. “This is going to take a while.”

    The next day, she wasn’t alone when she was waiting for Joe O’Brian; Marshal was with her.
    The library seemed to be frozen somewhere in the fifties, with hard upholstered chairs and sofas with spindly little Swedish-modern wooden legs, covered in beige fabric and what might have been leather. They clashed with the Victorian architecture, but then, Dudley House was, well…not the typical Harvard House. As the painting of Karl Marx downstairs, and the fact that for years in the sixties the SDS had kept a mimeograph machine in one of the bathrooms, might have told you.
    Joe eyed Marshal, but didn’t say anything as Di introduced them. When they all sat down, however, he leaned forward over his knees. “I thought I was just meeting you, Miss Tregarde—”
    â€œMarshal’s a stage magician,” Di interrupted him. “I don’t know enough about the situation yet to know what questions to ask, but he knows about the sorts of stage magic deceptions that this Tamara might be using, so I thought I’d bring him along to help us both out.”
    She gestured to Marshal, then sat back and listened as the two men slowly pooled their knowledge. Finally Marshal shook his head. “All right. This one just might beat me. Partly. I can’t see immediately either her angle, or where she’s getting her information; she isn’t extorting money from the mom, and she’s not getting publicity out of this.”
    â€œIf she’s really smart,” Di said slowly, “she’s got a confederate. Someone posing as a cop or a reporter, who can get at least some of the detail about Melanie from school-mates or playmates or their parents. I’d bet on posing as a reporter, everyone wants to get his name in the paper, not everyone is comfortable talking to a cop.”
    Marshal nodded. “But what’s her angle? That’s the question.” He drummed his fingers on the table beside him. “Thinking aloud here…I’d think she was just throwing random stuff out as these ‘leads,’ figuring to get some publicity if one of them actually pans out, except that from what you’re telling me, the leads are anything but random. Most of them are typically vague, but they don’t seem random, and they do seem to mean something to the mom. Nothing to the cops, but either mom is