“Maybe he simply ran out of animals.”

“And maybe these cloaks were placed here to protect whatever might be hiding in the metal room below us, and they simply began to turn on one another when hunger became too great.” I waved toward the far side of the room. “I’m betting if we walked across, we’d see a hole that lines up perfectly with the portion of the ceiling that collapsed on me.”

“That theory would make more sense if the collapse had happened in Luke’s office, not in an empty lab two floors down.”

“Maybe he simply wanted to stop anyone long before they got anywhere near his office.” I shrugged. Luke was dead, so we were never going to really know what he’d intended here. “Shall we retreat to the roof and check that?”

“What about the rest of that floor?” Sam cut in.

“If you want this stinking cesspit checked, you can fucking do it. There’s not enough money on this entire planet to entice me to take another step into this room.” Jackson paused. “And anyway, it’s not like you’re paying us, is it?”

“You’re not in jail or otherwise confined,” Sam bit back. “Right now, that’s payment enough.”

Jackson snorted. “That would be a more acceptable answer if you weren’t also using us to do your dirty work.”

“Gentlemen, enough.” The inspector’s tone was curt. “Emberly, if there’s nothing obviously related to the current search in that area, move on to the rooftop.”

I stepped back into the stairwell and headed up. The rooftop door had been propped open by a large piece of metal, and the space beyond was littered with more body parts and dark pools of liquid. At least in the open air, the stench wasn’t so bad. We did a quick check of the entire area, but there was nothing else here beyond blood-sprayed satellite dishes and silent air-conditioning units.

We reported all this and headed back down, detouring only to collect the three laptops we’d discovered. The cloaks that had littered the street in front of the building were gone; obviously, they were the ones I’d burned in the stairwell. The door leading into the old warehouse remained closed, but as we approached, its surface began to shimmer.

“And that,” I said, “is warning enough that we’d better exit via the rubble pile.”

Jackson immediately swung around and started heading toward it. “Wonder why the magic is still active? Rinaldo wants information, and he’s hardly going to get it by keeping us locked in—especially since the entire area is crawling with PIT and military personnel and not even a gnat could get in here right now.”

“Maybe he’s not responsible for it. Maybe it was part of Luke’s trap.”

“Luke was many things, but he wasn’t capable of magic,” Sam said.