Thankfully, no. That was all part of a teenaged dragon’s growing pains and therefore well in his past. “Wrong again. I’m completely settled into this skin.”
Even if he wasn’t always entirely comfortable in it.
Once they were within sight of the Marcus house, they both turned entirely professional.
“Do you want me to talk to the family? It’d give you more time to roll around in the money.”
He suspected her real offer was to spare him the discomfort of dealing with the unavoidable collateral damage. He appreciated it but couldn’t take her up on it. It was his operation, so it was his responsibility to take on the worst parts of it.
He shook his head. “I can talk to them—unless you think it would go better if you did?”
“Please, you could out-manner Emily Post. No amount of human-to-human sympathy on my part is going to outdo that.”
She parked at the end of the long, winding drive up to the Marcus house, which was, Theo observed, immense but without the faintest hint of character or grandeur. It looked like it had been picked out of a magazine of the world’s most lavish houses and then plunked down on the ground in one piece, with no one bothering to see that it took on any harmony with the landscape or, for that matter, any individuality. It irritated him that Marcus has wasted other people’s money on something so unimpressive. More selfishly, it irritated him even more that he would have to take charge now of auctioning it off and do his best to gain a good profit from its ugliness.
“I had a Barbie Dream House that looked exactly like this,” Gretchen said. “Ready?”
Dragon weather, he reminded himself. For all that he would have the unpleasant task of disappointing two women who had already been disappointed enough, he was getting what he wanted. None of this was pretty, but it was the best chance Marcus’s victims had of being made whole. And, with him gone, their only chance of getting justice. There was some luck buried in the day, even if the circumstances made it harder to see than he would have thought.
He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Ready.”
The house had officially become property of the United States Marshals’ Office at nine a.m. sharp, which meant there was no legal obligation for Theo and Gretchen to knock. They already had keys to the new locks. They knocked anyway.
The doorbell, Theo saw, had been ripped out of its fixture and was dangling loosely from its wires. He wondered if that had been the work of a vandal or if one of the women inside had gotten sick and tired of people ringing it to tell them how awful they were. He hoped the first. He hoped it hadn’t been that bad.
When Tiffani Marcus opened the door, he knew at once that it had been even worse than that.
Theo had seen pictures of her before. Her image had made the rounds on every channel: no one could get enough of Gordon Marcus’s trophy wife. As the investigation had wound endlessly on, she had come to look more and more haggard as she was asked to repeat the same answers over and over again. No, she didn’t know where her husband was. Yes, she was proceeding with divorce filings. No, she hadn’t known about any of it. Yes, she was horrified by what he’d done.
The coverage of Jillian Marcus was comparatively gentle. She had, after all, distanced herself from her father years ago, to the point where their lives hardly seemed to intersect. That made it all the more puzzling to him that she had come back now.
Then, seeing Tiffani, he knew at once. She hadn’t come back for her father. She’d seen the same press coverage he had, and she’d come back for her stepmother.
Who was... covered in flour?
“Ms. Marcus?”
“Tiffani,” she said, holding out one flour-stained hand. Theo and Gretchen politely shook. “I could stand hearing my married name a little less right now, so please: Tiffani. You must be the US Marshals.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Deputy Theo St. Vincent and this is my partner, Deputy Gretchen Miller.”
Gretchen said, “I’m sorry we’re meeting you under these circumstances, Tiffani.”
Her voice made it clear that her regret was genuine, and Tiffani, seemingly starved of ordinary human kindness from strangers, smiled at her. “Thank you. I’m sorry my husband turned out to be a monumental prick. Would the two of you like some cookies?”
He was relieved the flour had a mundane explanation. He sized up her offer and decided that if she’d put herself through the trouble of baking on a day like today, it would be a sign of disrespect to not have a cookie. His seven year-old self, he thought dryly, would have highly approved of this logic.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “That would be lovely.”
They stepped into the house and were greeted by a battalion of nutcrackers.
Gretchen yelped.
Theo’s dragon reared up in alarm, nostrils flaring with small puffs of fire. Soldiers!
Not that this isn’t alarming, Theo said to his dragon, but you’re an idiot.
“Sorry,” Tiffani said, her nose wrinkled with distaste. “They’re Gordon’s.” Then it was like the sun came up in her eyes. “Bringing them all out here was Jilly’s idea. She said you might as well gather his things up first.”