“Why are we meeting out here, Alanna,” asks Glenice. She sweeps her thick brown hair into a ponytail, angular features evermore sharp. Business dress and a sidearm on her hip, she is intimidating. She crosses her arms and pops her hip. “You know I hate it here.”
Alanna nods. She looks around Lion’s Rest, where widows and widowers stand at the wall, weeping for the lost and the dead, their reflections subtly rendered in the gleaming marble facade. She pulls her long dark coat with its upturned collar shut. The winds were biting today. Or maybe it was just this space.
“Tell me about the day Petrel died,” she says.
Glenice stares at her partner. “What? Why?”
Alanna turns her head, scanning the crowd. “There is an inquiry being considered.”
“It was a bad day, Alanna,” she says through clenched teeth.
The Inspector places her hand on Glenice’s shoulder. “Yeah, it was – for me, too.”
Glenice’s lip twitches. She turns away from the monument, looking toward the lighthouse. She shudders. “As soon as I got the call from Ramirez, I geared up and set out for Dalaran.”
“There was nothing that you could have done. Why did you leave.”
Glenice pinches the bridge of her nose. She exhales. “Because if I were the victim of a hit job, I’d want someone to come look after me, too.”
“Fair.”
“I took the portal from Stormwind to Dalaran. I checked in with the Kirin Tor. One of the City guards took me into the Sewers. I called Dusky –”
“Why? Why call Dusky. You know he hates to travel.”
“...I called Dusky to supervise the autopsy.”
“And – to the best of your knowledge – what did they find.”
She dips her head, frustrated. “Why are you doing this, Alanna?”
MacLeod turns to also face the lighthouse. “Someone has complained about malfeasance on your behalf. Dusky is in it up to his neck right now, too.”
“How long –”
“From the moment you stepped through the portal. Someone’s been drafting you.”
“Fuck,” she says, before shouting: “Fuck!” loudly enough to disturb the mourners. Some of them appear understanding, like she is one of them; some of them are angry. Most are unshaken.
“Are you finished, Shadowgrove?”
“I was not careful that day, I know this. But to have been followed from the second I arrived? How would... who complained?”
Alanna shakes her head. “Don’t know. It was anonymous. But there were details about that day which suggests it’s a higher up.”
“Trask was put down two weeks before the Siege. I put the fucking bullet in the back of his head.”
She rubs her face. “...it has nothing to do with him. It cannot. He never talked. The entire time he was with us, he never talked; that was his only trump card – silence. If he wanted to do something, if he had the means to do something, he would have done it before he was executed.”
“That Au’llon woman, maybe...” Glenice’s voice trails off. No, that didn’t make any sense, either. She had no stake in that conflict. Alanna watches her friend put things together in her head. “What was it Bailey had said about Lord White? Trask? They knew each other, but they didn’t interact. She was the go-between for someone.”
“She called them ‘the tip of the spear’.”
“If that’s the tip, what’s the rest like?”
Alanna shakes her head. She stares out over the sea as a Kul’Tiran vessel docks. Transients and vagrants, emigres from Darnassus and Darkshore, rush toward it, begging for money, for bread. “Slave labor from Trask, something else entirely from Lord White. And big enough of an enterprise to funnel all of those herbs and mushrooms to Bailey – the stock came from across Azeroth.”
They fall silent as the bell tolls ten. A moment of quiet reflection for all the mourners. After a minute, Alanna jerks her thumb toward the Cathedral District. They start to walk. Glenice posits the question bothering them both:
“What tipped her off?”
Alanna frowns. “Odds are, whatever it was, it was small, like an incident report or operational notes. Maybe she was meeting a supposed contact in the Sewers?”
“That’s where anything solid about Bailey cropped up – possible, more than possible, right?”
The two women walk up the steps of the Cathedral, kneeling on the long, lush rug. Portions had been worn down over time under innumerable knees and genuflection. The appearance of opulence masks the truth of the matter – it’s all on the verge of falling apart. They start to pray.
(( Mentioned: @alanna-macleod ; Relevant: [ @blackbay-wra ] ))