“No…that can’t be right. I just saw Regg. We had a drink uptown. He gave me this,” she pulled a yellow slip of paper from inside that disturbingly sensual cloak.

Bruutus reached and snagged the crumpled up mess from her hand, not wanting to play cat and mouse with 20 questions. “I’ll just look at that.” The paper was new, some kind of legal script, the kind he’d seen when he was at the city offices all day – the kind they write your disciplinary notices on.

He unfolded it quickly and scanned the contents. It was directions – to his office. They were written in neat little letters, arranged in perfect words that never touched one another. No way Reggie would have written something like this. “Whoever gave you this, it wasn’t Reggie. I’m of half a mind to put you in the street right now.”

“You’d send me back out in the dark alone? Mr. Weaver, please. It was hard enough just walking down here. This cloak doesn’t hide me from the rats.”

“What did he look like?”

“What?”

“The man who gave you this; what did he look like?”

“Reggie…”

“No, it was not Reggie Hunter. What did this man,” Brutus waved the building block lettering in her face, “look like?”

For her part, the shapely blond woman in the dripping black cloths didn’t flinch or cry, she just looked surprised. That look Brutus knew too well of a woman who was used to getting what she wanted being rebuked. He took special pleasure in creating that expression when he was still serving notices and protecting heiresses.

“He was short, shorter than me by about an inch. He had a thick, curly head of black hair and a little bit of hair over his upper lip. He was a strong man – handled his frame well,” Brutus tried not to laugh when he heard her essentially admit she had slept with the little liar. “And he absolutely assured me he knew you.”

“Well, whoever it was, he was not Reggie Hunter. That poor son of a bitch died two years ago next week…” Brutus stopped as he realized that it really was almost two years since Reggie had been stabbed in that warehouse. Immediately he turned to the woman in front of him suspiciously, “now, we just need to figure out who exactly is trying to fuck with me.”