Finally, we agreed on something.
The clock was ticking, and not just for Alexis. My window of usefulness was closing. Sugar and caffeine had pushed back the nausea and the crimson haze of my headache, but I figured I had thirty, maybe forty minutes of coherence before the migraine stomped me flat.
4
WE EXITED THE dormitory and a camera flash drove a spike into my eye.
My knees buckled as the headache blossomed to full force. Taylor caught me under one arm and Gerard under the other, hustling me through a small crowd of reporters bristling with cameras, microrecorders, and questions.
“Are you the agents in charge?”
“Any leads on who killed Dev Maguire’s henchman?”
“Or the whereabouts of Miss Maguire or her body?”
“Does Mr. Maguire know you’ve hired a psychic to find his daughter?”
Taylor took up the rear guard, offering them nothing but “No comment at this time” while his partner shoved me into the backseat of the black SUV waiting by the curb.
“Effing reporters,” growled Gerard as he slammed my door. He might as well have been slamming it on my head.
“How the hell did they find out about her?” the agent demanded, once he and Taylor had climbed into the front and closed out the reporters.
“Pretty coed goes missing?” said Taylor, buckling his seat belt. “It was going to splash, even without a whale like Maguire involved.”
“No. I mean her.” Gerard stabbed his thumb toward me, sitting innocently in the backseat, trying not to be sick.
“Chill.” Taylor sounded like he’d reached the end of his patience about five snarky comments ago, and I was glad those hadn’t come from me. “It’s not her fault college students like to Tweet. Hell, she’s probably got a fan page on Facebook by now.”
Gerard chilled. He went positively frosty and flexed his hands on the steering wheel like he was picturing them around someone’s neck. “I swear, rookie, if little Miss Ghostbuster blows this investigation for me, I’m going to make sure she—and you—are sidelined until monkeys fly out of my ass.”
Taylor spoke low and grim, reminding me why I wanted to stay on his good side. “You know, Gerard, the Minneapolis field office didn’t ask for us. They asked for Daisy. You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for her. Maybe you’d better think about what’s best for the case instead of what’s best for your career.”
Just a guess, but this wasn’t going to make Gerard like me any better. He slammed the SUV into gear and pulled out from in front of the dorm so fast my head bounced on the back of the seat. Fireworks exploded and my stomach flipped over.
I must have made a sound, because Taylor turned to look at me. “Hang tight, Daisy. We’re headed to one of the precincts in Minneapolis. We’ll base out of there, and you can get some rest in the ready room.”
A swig from my latest bottle of Coke helped me sound half normal as I said, “You should take me with you if you’re going to see Maguire.”
“How do you propose we explain you?” sneered Gerard, eyes on the road. He wasn’t even pretending to be nice now that we were in private. “Junior Miss Marple, goth edition?”
That might have been funny if he weren’t such an ass. “He’s going to know about me from the six o’clock news anyway. And crime boss or not, he’s a dad. Parents will try anything to find their kids.”
Taylor and I had searched for enough children to know. It only took one.
With his arm hooked over the seat back, Taylor studied me. From his skeptical frown, I figured I must look as bad as I felt. “No offense, Daisy, but are you going to be good for anything? You look like you’re about to hurl.”
“Do not throw up in this car,” snapped Gerard. “We’ll be responsible for having it cleaned.”
Just when I thought I couldn’t hate him any more than I already did.
• • •
We arrived at a police station in Minneapolis, where we—meaning the agents—were liaising with the local PD and meeting someone from the FBI field office. I was hazy on the details, and Taylor didn’t introduce me to anyone before he strong-armed me into an office, sat me on a sagging sofa, and made sure there was an empty trash can within easy reach. I would have protested, but the fluorescent lights sent signals to the hammers inside my skull. A dark office was only sensible.
“An hour,” I told Taylor as I flopped over on the couch. It smelled like shoe polish, stale coffee, and cop eighteen hours into a twenty-four-hour shift. “That’s all I need. It will take that long, at least, to get the search warrant for Maguire’s house, right?”
“Longer,” he assured me, with a glance at his watch, “since they’ll have to drag a judge away from his dinner.”
The thought of dinner made me glad for the trash can. “I’m sorry,” I moaned, my cheek sticking to the pleather sofa.
“Why?” Taylor crouched to eye level, which would have helped if I could see straight. Just then he had four dark-blue eyes and two square jaws. Not quite as handsome as the usual number. The expression on his face made up for it. “The fact that you can’t locate Alexis is a good thing, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. It meant she was alive. “But all that stuff about the black dog. And Bruiser. It was so weird. And worse, it was useless.” I closed my eyes because they were starting to sting and I didn’t want to cry in front of him. “I wish my head would stop hurting so I could think.”
After a quiet moment, Taylor picked up my legs, which were hanging off the couch, and put them properly up beside the rest of me. Then he covered me with a scratchy blanket that smelled like gunpowder. His hand clasped my shoulder before slipping away. “Get some rest, kiddo. There’s nothing to do right now anyway.”
Ugh. Kiddo. That was nearly as nauseating as the migraine and the sofa smell.
Someone shook me awake about five seconds later. It was a young woman with short blond hair and too much makeup for a uniformed cop. But then, I couldn’t quite focus on her face, so maybe I was wrong.
She shoved a bottle of Coke under my nose. “Here. He said you’d need this.”
I took it automatically and sat up to crack the seal on the plastic cap. “Agent Taylor sent you?” The soda was cold, and so was the air when my blanket slid off.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m assigned to take you to a hotel to get some sleep.”
I choked midswallow and wiped at my chin. “That is not the plan. The plan is I sleep here until the warrants come through.”
“What good are you when you can’t even drink properly, kid?” She stood, then hooked a hand under my arm and pulled me to my feet. “Come on. The motel is close and a lot more comfortable than this. I’ll come get you when those warrants are done.”
I wanted to be stubborn and tough things out. I also knew I’d recover faster in comfort and proper darkness. So I knocked back another slug of soda and followed the uniformed woman out of the office and down a hall. Either we were traveling very fast or my brain was moving very slowly, because it seemed like we were far away from the noise of the squad room by the time I wondered if I should text Taylor and remind him to take me with him to call on Maguire.
“What are you looking for?” asked the uniform, when she saw me digging in my backpack.
Earphones, lab notebook, e-reader, but no sweater. I had to start packing better. “My phone.” I couldn’t seem to put my fingers on that, either. And it wasn’t a big bag.
“I’m sure it’s in there somewhere,” she said as we neared a bar-locked door at the end of the hall.
I didn’t like that answer. I didn’t like that she wore so much makeup. I mean, I can rock the black eyeliner, too. But I wasn’t wearing the badge of the Minnesota PD.
“So, what do you hear?” I asked, in a conversational tone. If Taylor really had sent her, she’d give me the no-worries response.
“That they’re hoping to have those warrants in a few hours.” The officer didn’t miss a beat as she straight-a
rmed the door and held it open to the frigid night. “Now come on. I’m letting all the cold air in.”
This? Was not good.
She saw in my face the instant I decided I wasn’t going anywhere. And holy cats, that chick moved fast. In a flash she snagged my arm, yanking me off-balance so I stumbled out into the cold.
The icy air sliced through the fog in my head, but too late. The door slammed and latched closed, and I was standing on a sidewalk, not in a squad car bay, and in front of me was not a black-and-white cruiser but a big black sedan.
This was also not good.
The young man who leaned on the fender straightened when he saw us. He looked about eight feet tall, and as he stepped forward he practically vibrated with purpose, all of it narrowed in on me.
I did the only thing possible: I ignored the red haze of the migraine and ran.
Tall Guy grabbed me by the shoulders, but I realized it wasn’t to catch me because I was running, but to catch me because I was falling. The haze was taking over, blossoming in crimson over my vision, closing in black from the edges until the last thing, the very last thing I saw was a pair of hazel-green eyes, swimming with ghosts.
5
I WOKE FACEDOWN in a drool-soaked pillow.
There were worse puddles to wake up in, I suppose, but I didn’t want to think about that. I just wanted to lie there, absolutely still, until I was certain that nothing was going to kill me. Not my migraine, not Agent Gerard, not whoever had snatched me off the curb.
Imminent death seemed unlikely. I was tucked under a fluffy quilt, sprawled on a bed that was more comfortable than the one in my dorm room. When I cracked an eyelid to take a peek, I glimpsed a nicely decorated room, with a reassuring absence of white slavers and crack whores.
A quick inventory under the covers revealed no amateur sutures, so I didn’t seem to be missing a kidney. Just my clothes.
Not all of them. I still had my underwear on, thank God. Good thing I listened to Aunt Pet and put on clean ones every morning.
I was due an almighty freak-out. I mean, my family is unconventional to say the least, what with teen psychics and mad scientists and kitchen witches. But kidnapping was out of the ordinary, even for a Goodnight.
First things first, though. I’d spotted an adjoining bathroom, and I had to pee like a racehorse.
Once I had taken care of business, I put off panic and took stock of the bathroom in case I needed to make a last stand. An inventory of the medicine cabinet turned up a disposable razor, a bottle of mouthwash, a toothbrush in a cellophane wrapper, and assorted travel-sized toiletries. Ones with French names, so I knew they were très expensive. And on the back of the bathroom door was a bathrobe. It was like I’d been kidnapped and dumped at the Four Seasons.
I put on the bathrobe rather than wander around in my skivvies, then used the mouthwash to rinse the taste of stale cola and migraine off my tongue. Only after I swished and spat did it occur to me that the mouthwash might be drugged. Wouldn’t that just pull the handle on this crapper of a day.
I sat down heavily on the closed toilet lid and tried to figure out what had happened. A dark car pulling up in front of me, hands hustling me toward it. An embarrassingly short scuffle, then … unconsciousness.
Had I been taken by the same people who had snatched Alexis Maguire? What were the odds it was some random grab? Maybe not zilch, but close.
How long before Agent Taylor missed me? If he thought I was still sleeping off the post-mojo migraine, he wouldn’t bother me until the warrants were approved. As for my thirty-six cousins and aunts, we have a kind of radar for when one of us is in trouble, but I tripped it so regularly, no one would really worry until I didn’t check in.
Phone. I remembered looking for my phone in my small backpack. I charged out of the bathroom, intent on finding my stuff. Instead I found a man coming in the other door.
I screamed, and he did, too. I scrambled for a weapon, but only turned up an ornamental wooden duck from the top of the dresser. I cocked it back, ready to let fly if the guy took one step toward me.
He didn’t. He just stood in the doorway recovering his dignity, and said in a pained voice, “Please don’t do that. That decoy is an antique.”
That pretty much defused my fight-or-flight response. And I couldn’t exactly picture this tidy, gray-haired man jumping me in any case. He was way too … dapper.
He was also carrying my clothes, neatly folded, and he put them on the table near the door, without making any sudden moves. “Your clothes have been cleaned and pressed. I was just going to slip them in here. We were expecting you to be unconscious for a bit longer.”
“Who is ‘we’?” I demanded. “And where am I?”
“I’ll let them know you’re awake,” he said, taking hold of the door handle. “Can I get you anything, Miss Goodnight? A sandwich? Cup of coffee?”
I lowered my arm, realizing the futility of menacing anyone with a duck. “I would really like an appetizer of ‘what’s going on’ with a heaping portion of ‘get the hell out of Dodge.’ ”
“I’m afraid that’s not on the menu, miss.”
With a sigh, I put the decoy back on the dresser. “I’ll just take a cup of coffee, then.”
Jeeves nodded and closed the door behind him. I heard the solid click of a lock but hurried to try the knob anyway.
No dice. Next I ran to the window and flung back the curtain. I was on the second floor of a huge house. Like, mansion huge. It was dark outside, but I saw no other house lights close by. An estate, then. Was Alexis somewhere here, too? Was one of Maguire’s crime-boss rivals behind this? What could they possibly want with me?
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to just sit there in that comfy bathrobe waiting for someone to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I grabbed my clothes and got dressed. The shirt and skirt were still warm, and I pulled my socks on over my goose pimples, missing the robe already. A quick search turned up my sneakers, but not my backpack. I was just lacing up the former when I heard footsteps in the hall outside.
The panic I’d been putting off had me hard in its teeth. What if it wasn’t Jeeves? What if they’d sent someone like Bruiser to get me?
I snatched up a vase, dumped out the cut-flower arrangement, and jumped behind the door. It opened without hesitation, and I didn’t hesitate to attack.
The guy who came in was considerably taller than Jeeves. The vase glanced off the back of his skull and smashed on his shoulders. He hit the deck and didn’t get up as a dark wetness soaked his blue dress shirt.
Sweet Saint Gertrude, I’d killed him.
No. It was only the water from the vase. The guy sprawled on the floor was better-looking than Jeeves and considerably younger. Like maybe twenty-one. Twenty-two at the outside limit. They’d sent an intern to collect me.
I hadn’t thought as far as what I’d do next, but running seemed smart. I burst out of the Four Seasons prison cell into a wide hallway with a high ceiling and hardwood floors, polished smooth and dust-free. The walls were painted a warm, sandy color, and there was art. Real art. I thought I recognized a Remington landscape, and at a glance, it didn’t look like a print.
Alexis might be in the building somewhere, but there was no convenient clue where I could find her. Just the endless House Beautiful hallway. The sound of big, heavy somebodies approaching from the left, however, was a pretty big hint I should run the other way, so I did.
That hall dead-ended at another one, and I picked a direction at random, feeling like a rat in a Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous maze. The corridor made another turn, and dude, this place was huge.
A billiard room. A den or library. Then an invitingly dark room, which turned out to be a freaking movie theater. I dove behind a row of cushy chairs, holding my breath until I heard two linebackers go by.
This was not a good plan. The house was too big to randomly search for Alexis. I couldn’t even find the stairs. But if I did, and I managed to
get out, I could bring back help.
I crept to the door, and after a quick check of the hall, doubled back the way I’d come, running as quietly as possible. Except when I rounded the maze corner back to that first hall, there was a wet and cranky henchman intern in my way.
He raised his hands in the international gesture for halt right there. He may have actually said “Stop!” but I had escape ringing in my ears, so I accelerated to ramming speed.
He probably had fifty pounds on me, mostly height and shoulders, but I had inertia and surprise on my side. I knocked him out of my way and kept going.
But now I’d pissed him off, and he was fast, with really long legs, even longer than mine. Before I got to the end of the hall with its glimpse (finally!) of stairs, he grabbed me from behind, arms wrapped around mine.
“Calm down,” he said in my ear. “I don’t want to hurt—”
The rest was just a grunt of pain as I slammed my elbow—and I have really pointy elbows—into his ribs. He doubled over with a wheeze but still had a grip on me, so I kicked him in the instep and he let go.
But only for a second. The bastard even limped fast.
He grabbed me again, but our feet tangled up and we tumbled forward. I braced for impact, and for all that guy to come down and snap me like a twig, but at the last instant, he twisted to take the brunt of the crash onto the hardwood floor. It knocked the wind out of him, but he was a tough bastard, so as I squirmed out of his hold I kneed him in the groin just to make sure he stayed down.
I have really pointy knees, too.
Bruised and breathless, I left him in a groaning heap on the floor and ran for the stairs. On my way down I met Jeeves on his way up, my cup of coffee on a tiny tray in his left hand.
“Sorry,” I said, breezing past. “Can’t stay for refreshments.”
The butler didn’t say anything. He just grabbed my hand as I went by, and with some twist of physics, mechanics, or magic, I was suddenly pinned to the wall, my arm twisted up behind me, utterly unable to move.
Jeeves hadn’t even spilled the coffee. “I apologize, Miss Goodnight,” he said with unflappable courtesy. “Hell out of Dodge isn’t on the self-service menu, either.”