Rico slapped her notebook against the arm of the chair. “God damn it, this is not a punishment.” She sprang up out of the chair and paced to the other end of the room, stood there for a few seconds, and walked back to my bedside. “Not negotiable. You’re out. Sorry if it cuts into your income.”

I had my mouth open to tell her off, when I realized it was another of those characteristic sentences: Sorry if it cuts into your income. It built a cofferdam around the thing she didn’t want to talk about, and let the discussion run safely around and on. And she expected me to respond in kind. This time I had no idea what she didn’t want to talk about.

I took a deep breath and nodded, and said, “I won’t starve.”

I saw a small relaxation in her face. She poised her pen over the notebook again and asked, “Toby brought you the food?”

“Anybody could have been in the back and added something to it. Except—while Saquash was getting the food. Hawthorn was out front talking to me. And once it was in front of me, nobody had a chance to do anything to it.”

“What about the beer and the aspirin? Hawthorn brought those.”

“The aspirin was in an aspirin bottle, the pills were stamped ‘aspirin,’ and I shook them out myself. That would have taken a hell of a lot of planning to set up.”

“The beer?”

I reconstructed my memories. “No. The beer had a crimp-on cap. I watched him pop it off with the opener. I think you have to leave Hawthorn out.”

“Maybe. Christ, this is going to be fun. I have to question everybody without making it look as if anyone’s under suspicion. You say Hawthorn got on the radio?”

“He said he radioed for authorization to do stuff outside his turf.”

“I’ll check that. If he mentioned the motorcycle to the dispatcher, the field of suspects opens up like a sonofabitch.”

I knew what she meant: The cops on Dragonstooth Hill would have the news. So would anyone in B-town who’d monitored that frequency in the frail hope that radio transmission would, even temporarily, be working in the Borderlands the way it worked everywhere else. If I were the illusionist, I would try to keep an ear on the police band, if I knew there was one. It was still possible that Rico wasn’t looking for another cop.

Except for the suspicious circumstances of my falling asleep in the police station. “I might not have been doped,” I said.

“Of course not. And the Elflands may have disappeared again while we’ve been standing here, but it’s not what you’d call likely.” This time her expression reminded me a lot of one Tick-Tick might have used.

“Could it have been a spell?”