“He’s also a rat. They’re very territorial, and Rinaldo—with your help—is trying to take over their territory.” Jackson patted the vamp’s arm, as if to comfort him. “If I were you, I’d take some of your own advice and get the hell out of this city until the dust clears.”

“Except he can’t,” Sam said behind us, “because his ass will be locked up tight until he’s tried for attempted murder.”

I swung around, not bothering to hide my surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing here?” He waved a hand. “You were under attack because Lidia accessed our computers—”

“Lidia,” I cut in. “Who’s she?”

“The inspector’s second. We won’t know for sure, but given her state of confusion when we found her, it’s pretty obvious she was under Rinaldo’s control at the time. For how long that has been the case—and what operations have been compromised—are now the questions we need to answer.”

“You’d better warn whoever is minding her that Rinaldo has a thing for killing his pawns rather than letting them speak.”

“We are well aware of that.” He paused. “Adam and several other PIT officers are on the way to take care of these four.”

“Huh,” Jackson said. “It appears PIT values us far more than we figured. Of course, if you lot had actually taken our suspicions seriously a whole lot earlier, then we might not have gotten to this point.”

“We’re not fools,” Sam bit back. “And we are rigorous with our personnel checks—”

“But not rigorous enough, obviously.” I paused. “How, exactly, was she able to hack in and run the trace?”

“She didn’t. As I said, she’s the inspector’s second, with full access to the system. She just wasn’t told we’d installed the new security program.” He glanced around as Adam and another man entered. “You want to get this scum back to headquarters?”

Adam nodded, and he and the other man immediately hauled the mute vampire to his feet and marched him out.

Sam returned his gaze to us. “What were you doing at Rosen Pharmaceuticals this afternoon?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were no longer following us.”

“We’re not, but we are keeping a watch on both Rosen Pharmaceuticals and Chase Medical Research Institute. Your arrival there was noted.”

I guess we should have expected that. I told him why we’d gone there, and then added, “As it turns out, the number she had was for one James Hamberly, who worked at Holdright.”

“Hamberly? The Aswang victim?”

“And the man who was apparently blackmailing Rosen for several thousand a month in exchange for not releasing some seriously compromising photos of Junior with several other men.”