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his hat. “My money is my business, James,” I said. “Though I know you don’t agree.”
    He shoved his hands in his pockets again and let that one go. “It’s just interesting,” he said. “Gloria is dead. I follow her brother, and I find The Fantastique, of all people. The two of you have a little tête-à-tête and he gives you money. Now I’m curious.” His blue-gray gaze caught mine, held it. “You know how I get when I’m curious.”
    My face burned. “I know very well,” I said to him. “The results were in that paper you wrote for everyone to read. The one the
Daily Mail
resurrected two months ago.” I dropped my hands from my handbag. “It was a three-year-old report, James. What was it doing in the newspaper?”
    He caught my meaning. “It wasn’t my doing,” he replied. “I knew nothing about it. It was just some enterprising reporter looking to fill column inches. I’m surprised he dug up that old paper at all—I thought everyone had forgotten about it.” He shrugged. The ridicule of being a psychical researcher didn’t concern him; it never had. “But that doesn’t answer my question. What were you doing with George Sutter?”
    I took the easy answer, the bitter answer. “I’m conning him, of course. Taking his money for a lie.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “No?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, suddenly tired of parrying him. Just looking at James, trying to read the expression behind hisflawless, clean-shaven jaw and dark blond eyelashes, was sometimes exhausting. “And what do you think?”
    “Whoever George Sutter works for, he’s very powerful,” James replied. “He’s intelligent, educated. He wouldn’t be an easy mark. He disowned Gloria years ago, so he doesn’t believe in the supernatural. If George Sutter is meeting with The Fantastique, it’s probably because he’s making use of her.”
    “His sister was murdered,” I conceded. “He’s concerned.”
    “So am I,” James said. “I can read behind the headlines, Ellie, just like you can. Something is rotten about this.”
    “Of course,” I said, trying not to let the bite of jealousy enter my voice. “You and Gloria were close.”
    “I studied her for nearly ten months. I wrote a scientific paper on her. You can call that close if you want, but I certainly never wanted to see her killed.”
    He was still standing at my knees, and when I abruptly stood, my nose was nearly in the knot of his tie. I caught the brief scent of him before he took a step back. “If you want to trade places, I’ll gladly take it,” I said, trying not to let on that that brief second marked the closest I’d been to a real, physical man in years. “I didn’t go to Sutter—he came to me. I’m certainly no investigator. But I’m going to do the best I can, and you would do well to stay out of my way.”
    I thought it sounded rather tough, but all he did was give me a smile that was almost reluctant, as if he knew it would make me angry. “In my line of work, I don’t frighten very easily.”
    “Good-bye, James.”
    “I meant what I said about Sutter,” he said as I made to leave. “I have no idea what he’s up to or who he really is. Don’t trust anything he tells you to do.”
    “I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Especially not the man who ruined my mother’s career and made Gloria Sutter his prize exhibit.”
    When I saw him flinch, I turned and walked away.

CHAPTER FIVE

    G loria had lived in Soho, in a studio on the attic floor of a run-down house nearly a hundred years old. The street was lined with dim poverty-stricken artists’ studios and ramshackle galleries, pawnshops, and booths of cheaply made crafts. A Home for Fallen Women had established itself on the corner sometime in the last century, and it still kept its polished double doors open to girls unwed and pregnant or just down on their luck. I was quite certain the middle-aged spirit medium on the ground floor of Gloria’s house—who had a