Amelia shrugged. “Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray brought me in to act as their little lapdog and fetch the nanobots as soon as Ross sold them. They didn’t exactly endear themselves to me, and I figured that if something this big was going down, your people would clue in eventually. I just stalled things for a couple of days. I convinced Peyton to let me bid against Kann for the nanobots instead of stealing them from him after the deal went through. When Ross realized he was dealing with more than one potential buyer, he decided to hold an auction, just like I knew he would.”

Amelia was still speaking a language I couldn’t quite understand. She’d stalled Peyton and convinced them to wait before moving in? She’d somehow prevented Ross from closing the deal with Kann earlier in the week?

“Why?” I glanced down to make sure my clothes were still in place, because this kept getting stranger and stranger.

Amelia shrugged. “Why not?”

Well, that was less than helpful.

“You want another answer? How about this one: because I could. Because it was fun. Because my brothers set this job up for me, and they leave the toilet seat up too damn much.” I couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not on that last one, so I just listened, open-mouthed, as she continued. “An operation as big as Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray—I knew the government had to be all over that, just waiting for these guys to mess up. I figured that if I stretched things out long enough, somebody would catch on, and as far as I’m concerned, the more players, the better the game.”

Some game. A bunch of people were fighting over deadly technology, and she was acting like this whole mission ranked right up there with Yahtzee.

“So I’m supposed to think you’re a good guy?” I asked, my voice tight. “Because you’ve been stalling your employers?”

“You’re not supposed to think I’m a good guy,” Amelia said. “You’re just supposed to think I’m good.”

“Good?”

“I’ve been playing you, and I’ve been playing them. I knew the second one of your girls put a tracker on my car, just like I knew when Peyton brought me here that all they wanted was someone to follow orders and look good doing it.” She played with the gun in the tip of her hands, stroking her thumb up and down the side. “They thought they were doing my family a favor by offering me this job.” Her lips pulled back into something that looked like a smile, but probably wasn’t. “I disagreed.”

I forced myself to think through everything Amelia had said. Peyton had brought her in to do a simple job, and somehow Amelia had manipulated them into changing the job description. She’d then orchestrated Ross’s decision to host an auction, which had resulted in two more TCIs coming to Bayport. That influx had tipped the Big Guys off to the fact that something was up, and as a result, we’d been brought in on the case. According to Amelia, that had been her intention all along.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So you wanted the government brought in on this case, but once you knew we were on it…”

“That’s when things got interesting.” Amelia’s smile looked genuine this time. “I decided to see if I could get you to take out the competition for me.”

“The competition you brought here to begin with.”

“Except for Jacob, yes.”

“And you expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with his car blowing up?”

“Haven’t we already been over this? I have no idea who killed Jacob Kann, but whoever they are, they’re good. My plan was just to plant a bunch of drugs on him and then lead your people in for the arrest.”

She talked about framing someone so glibly. “You framed him,” I said. Something about her tone and the words she’d spoken earlier led me to my next conclusion. “Just like you did with Hector Hassan.”

Amelia grinned. “I knew somebody would be on this case eventually, and I knew Hassan had some pretty unsavory backing.”

If by “unsavory,” she meant “terrorists,” then yeah.

“I needed to keep track of the others, but figured you guys would be doing the same, so I bugged Connors-Wright and Kann and gave Hassan enough rope to hang himself.”

“You bugged yourself to throw us off track.” In a word: genius.

“That pointed you guys toward Hassan, since he was the only one not already bugged, which led to you guys tracking him and bringing him into custody before he could do any real harm.” Amelia smiled then, the barest hint of satisfaction playing across her even features. “You’re welcome.”

“Okay, so you set up Hassan,” I said. “That doesn’t prove that you weren’t the one who took out Kann.” I knew I was beating a dead dog here, but I just couldn’t help it. Amelia Juarez was apparently some kind of evil mastermind, and she was standing in my bedroom. I wanted her to be the bad guy, because the idea that there was someone out there who’d beaten both of us to the weapon was scarier than the gun still trained on my forehead.

“You don’t want to take my word on the fact that I had nothing to do with Jacob’s murder? Fine. I’m assuming you guys have some sort of database. You might want to check it, because according to Peyton’s reports on the explosion, the bomb was remotely detonated, which means that someone was watching that car and waiting to press the little red button.” She smiled, and I could practically hear her thinking “check and mate.”

“Coincidentally enough, that was the day your group attempted to plant a tracker on my car. They were tailing me when the bomb went off. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the word I’m looking for here is alibi.”

I would check our files to confirm what she was saying, but I knew without doing so that she was right. We’d had teams tracking and planting surveillance on each of the TCIs, and if the bomb really had been detonated manually, none of them could have done it without one of our teams noticing. I wondered briefly how we could have missed this, how the Big Guys could have missed this, or if they’d actually missed it at all.

If none of the TCIs had planted the bomb, that meant that someone else had, and that meant that there was another player on this case. A player who’d killed Jacob Kann and later stolen the weapon from Ross’s lab. A player who, according to Amelia, had already given the nanobots to somebody else.

“Who?” I didn’t bother to elaborate. Amelia knew what I was asking.

“No more questions about my motive? No wondering why I’m being such a good little mob princess and sharing what I know?”

“Just. Tell. Me. Who.”

“I came here with an offer. If you want to know the information, that means you play by my rules.”

“What do you want?” My voice was dull, and the desire to flying tackle her and take my chances with the gun was incredible.

“All I want is a promise that once I tell you who has the bots, you and your little team will be the ones to retrieve them.”

“Done.” I didn’t give even so much as a second’s thought to the fact that we’d been taken off the case. Clearly, this diving in headfirst thing was working for me.

“There is one other little thing…” Amelia looked me straight in the eye. “I want your word that nobody hears about this conversation until tomorrow, and that whoever your team works for stays in the dark until everything’s gone down.”

I couldn’t tell her no. I could, however, lie through my teeth.

“If you break these rules,” she continued, “I reserve the right to blow your cover wide open. I’m sure Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray would love to know that the government has an entire team here, right under their noses.”

For the first time, I realized the full implications of the fact that Amelia was here, in my bedroom. Somehow, she’d figured out who I was. From the sound of it, that wasn’t all she knew.

“I saw you yesterday outside of the firm,” she explained with no small measure of glee. “You had that same unnaturally natural look about you as the girls who’d been following me, so I took a picture and tracked you down via the Web.” She paused. “I never would have guessed cheerleader.”