Only half an hour into his hacking, Gilley had gained access to Sullivan’s bank account. “Why people do their personal banking on a work computer is beyond me,” he said. “Okay, here we go. Five thousand dollars was wired into his account the day after Bradley got me to agree to display the dagger.”
“Does it show the source?”
“Someone named Todd Tolliver.”
“That sounds like a made-up name,” I said. “And five grand doesn’t sound like a big enough bribe to let in someone looking to sabotage an exhibit at the risk of losing his job.”
“It was probably only the down payment,” Olivera said, making sure to frown at the fact that Gilley was rooting around in Sullivan’s bank accounts. “A show of good faith. He was likely promised that he’d get the rest after the dagger had been stolen.”
“Gil and I were talking while you were sleeping, Chris, and we think that the dagger being stolen was only part of it. We think that whoever set all this up was planning something big at the exhibit’s opening day, but then Heath and I showed up with gear that had been at our office and was still fully magnetized, and we thwarted his plans. I believe that this guy then came back to get the dagger after hours, not knowing that Sullivan was here in his office working, and when he tripped the alarm, Sullivan surprised him, and maybe he and the killer got into it, which is how Sullivan ended up dead.”
Olivera nodded. “Sounds like a reasonable scenario,” she said. “What big thing do you think the killer was planning?”
“Well,” I said, “unleashing a demon like we saw tonight into a crowd of innocent bystanders makes for a pretty big statement, don’t you think?”
Chris’s expression turned grim. “To what end, though?” she said. “I mean, this guy is obviously smart. He’s careful. And he’s plotted this whole thing out expertly. What would he have to gain by doing something like that?”
Gilley and I exchanged a look, and it was Gilley who answered. “We think, given his knowledge of how magnets affect a portal, and his knowledge of the dagger and its history, that he’s a fellow ghostbuster. Someone who’s had extensive experience working with spooks, and even demons.”
“Huh,” she said. “Okay, so who in your line of work could pull off something like that?”
Again I looked at Gilley. “Nobody named Todd Tolliver; that’s for sure,” he said. “But there is one guy who comes to mind.”
“Rick Lavinia,” I said, and Gilley nodded as if he’d been thinking the very same thing.
“Who’s Rick Lavinia?”
Gilley scoffed as if he couldn’t believe she’d never heard of him. “He’s a ghostbuster with his own cable show too. He started about two years before we did, and he was haunted TV’s most popular ghostbuster until Heath came along.” My brow furrowed indignantly and Gilley shrugged and added, “You’re super cute and all, M.J., but most people tune in to watch that hottie you’re married to. I know that’s why I watch the show.”
“Can we get back to the point here?” Chris said.
“Yes,” I said firmly, with another irritated look at Gil. “Rick has, on a few occasions, publicly dogged our show. He’s the guy who likes to stomp around haunted locations and yell at the spooks, daring them to come out and show themselves. He got hurt pretty bad a year ago when one such spook picked his ass up and tossed him down the cellar stairs.”
“It was epic!” Gilley said with a giggle.
“Which is exactly what Gilley tweeted right after the episode aired. He tagged Rick in the tweet, which wasn’t his smartest move . . .”
Gilley rolled his eyes. “That douche bag had it coming.”
“. . . and Rick went off on a tirade about our show and how fake it was and how lame we were. It was kind of embarrassing to watch.”
“So you two are competitors,” Olivera said.
“We are,” I said. “But it’s one-sided, more so from his perspective than ours.”
“Why’s that?”
Gil and I exchanged a knowing look. “We got the movie deal,” he said simply. “And all the fame and fortune that follows that. They’ll be airing reruns of our show till the cows come home and we’ll get royalties from the show and the movie for a long time to come.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “we heard through the grapevine that Rick’s show is on the bubble.”
“On the bubble?”
“Likely to get canceled,” Gilley told her.
“But what would stealing Oruç’s dagger get him?”
“Ratings,” I said. “Rick likes to call himself the demon slayer. He learned from us that magnets can bring down even the nastiest spooks, and he’s actually locked up one or two of the nastier ones. If he unleashed Oruç’s demon here and caused a panic, he could swoop in and be the big hero. Especially if he had possession of the dagger itself.”
Olivera nodded. “Okay, so we’ve got motive. What about opportunity? Where’s Rick Lavinia based?”
Gilley smiled. “Right here in Boston, baby.”
“Is he in town right now?” she pressed.
Gilley began typing on Sullivan’s computer, and we waited for him to say something, but after a few moments all he did was drop his jaw. “No. Way.”
“What?” I asked.
Gil swiveled the screen around. “There’s no mention of where Rick is right now,” he said. “But his Instagram posted this from him yesterday morning.”
I moved over to look closely at the photo. My heart began to thud in my chest when I saw that it was a photo taken from fairly far away of a building we’d been in the day before and knew intimately. The caption read, “Got notice that this abandoned apartment house is crazy haunted. Might have to check it out soon.”
“Ashworth Commons,” I said, honestly shocked that Rick would be so brazen.
Olivera had stepped forward to look at the photo too. “Now, that’s interesting,” she said. “But also odd, don’t you think? I mean, he says that he got some sort of notice about it. That place is crazy haunted. Could someone have tipped him off about it?”
I shrugged. “It’s possible, but isn’t it sort of too big of a coincidence? I mean, Rick has means, motive, and now we know he’s had opportunity. What more do we need?”
“A smoking dagger would be nice,” Olivera said. “Okay, I’ll dig into his background a little in the morning, see if I can’t find out where he is at the moment at least.”
Turning back to Gilley, I said, “Is there anything on Sullivan’s computer connecting him to Rick?”
“None that I could find,” he said. “He had his personal e-mail on here as well as his corporate one, but nothing looks suspicious, and I sifted through his deleted e-mails too.”
“Then do you think everything was arranged by phone?” I asked, hoping maybe Olivera could get Sullivan’s phone records.
“It looks like . . . ,” Gilley began, before his voice trailed off and he stared off into space for a moment. “Hold on,” he said. Typing furiously again, he said, “Well, would you look at that!”
“What?” I said, moving toward the desk to peer at the screen he’d just swiveled around to me. “It’s a draft of an e-mail.”
Gilley nodded. “Yes! But read it, M.J.!”
I did—out loud so that Olivera could hear it. “Come at midnight. You’ll have the place until five a.m. I’ve turned off the motion sensors. Use the back door. My code is seven-two-one-four.” I cocked my head after reading it. “That’s it for the message, but I’m not sure how this points us to the perp. Sullivan never sent the e-mail.”
“He didn’t have to,” Gilley said. “The draft was last saved a week ago. All the killer had to do was log into this e-mail account and look up the draft. Sullivan could’ve easily edited the draft later to something totally innocuous and no one would’ve ever been the wiser.”
I squinted at the screen again. “There’s an address in the ‘To’ field. Two-kittens-and-a-canary at gmail dot com.”
“That’s Sullivan’s mother’s e-mail address,” Gil told me. “Again, the museum director was really careful. If anybody peeked into this file on his personal e-mail account, they would’ve thought it was just some random message to his mom, or, if they were suspicious, he could’ve claimed he’d been drafting an e-mail to his mom which got interrupted and he never sent it out.”
“Wow,” I said. “Gil, do you think Sullivan would’ve thought this up on his own?”
“I doubt it,” Gilley said. “His computer skills weren’t the greatest. I think it’s more likely that someone told him how to set it up. And Rick Lavinia is fairly savvy on the computer. He’s got all the social media accounts up and humming, and he monitors and posts them himself. I also think that, at one point in his past before he started ghostbusting, he was a graphic designer, so this communicating through a draft on an e-mail wouldn’t be a big leap for him.”
“Is there any way to back-trace exactly who logged in to Sullivan’s e-mail remotely?”
“I can try to trace it through the IP address,” Gil said. “It could work.”
“Cool.” Leaning my head back against the wall and closing my eyes, I thought I’d just get a few minutes of sleep.
“M.J.?” Gilley suddenly said.
“Yeah?” I said, jolting awake again.
“Come here and look at this!”
I got up and moved to the desk, and Olivera did too. Gil had pulled up the draft of the e-mail again, and the former message was gone. The one there now was being typed out even while we watched.
I will destroy you. I will destroy everything you love. Everything you hold dear. Everything you are. Everything you wanted to become. You will all die and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
And then the cursor on the page moved to the top of the e-mail and clicked the delete button, and the draft was gone.
• • •
Hours later I crept through the door to my condo on tiptoe. Gilley was doing his koala thing again, his hand planted squarely on my back as I unlocked the door with my new key. He’d refused to go home to his condo, insisting on staying with me until we got the dagger back. Truth be told, I was a little happy he was sticking so close. It was one less person I had to worry about if they were out of my sight.
Heath stirred as we came through the door. “Em?” he said groggily as I walked over to the sofa where he lay.
“I’m here,” I said, sitting on the floor next to the sofa to drink in the sight of him. Banged up though he was, he was still the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.
“What time is it?”
“It’s early.”
Heath sat up and cupped the side of his head with his hand. “Ow,” he said, then blinked in the light that Gilley had just turned on. “Hey,” he said to Gil. Then, “Those are some mean-looking welts on your forehead, buddy. What happened to you?”
Gil shook his head. I’d told him to let me do the talking.
Heath’s brow furrowed and then he turned to look at the clock on the cable box. It read five a.m. He then focused on me. “Em?” he said, smoothing a lock of my hair. “You look like you had a rough night too. How about you don’t spare me any of the details?”
I laid my head on the sofa cushion. I’d gotten maybe half an hour of sleep. I was so tired I didn’t think I could force out a paragraph, much less a long story with all the details. “Can I tell you in a few hours?”
Heath stroked my hair. He didn’t say anything and I had a feeling he was looking at Gilley like he needed to start talking.
“She needs some rest,” Gil said. “And so do I, but I can give you the highlights after M.J. goes to bed.”
I picked my head up. Letting Gilley tell Heath about the night we had was super risky. He tended to overexaggerate the scary parts, and I didn’t want Heath to freak out that we’d come so close to getting ourselves filleted alive by a nine-foot-tall demon. “It’s better if I tell you,” I said wearily.
Heath stared at me for a good minute. “Which demon came at you tonight?”
“Oruç’s.”
“Shit, Em!” Heath said, sitting straight up and looking like he was ready to take on the demon all by his lonesome. “Where?”
“The museum,” Gil said. “Olivera took us there to check out the crime scene.”
The muscles along Heath’s jawline bunched and he visibly looked like he was trying to control his anger. “You guys went there without me?”
I sighed. “It’s not like you could’ve contributed anything, babe. I mean, you did get shot in the head and all.”
“You couldn’t have waited?” he asked me. His tone wasn’t accusing; it was more . . . disappointed.
“No,” I said. “We couldn’t. We had to check it out, and honestly, I’m glad we did, because now we know what we’re dealing with.”
“What?” Heath said.
“Someone who wants to hurt us really, really bad.”
“We didn’t know that before?”
“Oh, we did, we just didn’t know the lengths he was willing to go. Anyway, we’re okay, we learned a lot, and we’ll fill you in just as soon as I’ve had three hours to sleep.”
With that I pushed myself to my feet and shuffled to the bedroom. I wasn’t surprised that Heath followed right behind me. I shrugged out of my jeans and my sweater and crawled under the covers in the shirt I’d worn to the museum. Screw it. I was too tired to get into my pj’s.
Heath went around the bed and got in on the other side, scooting over to wrap me in his arms. I fell asleep in seconds.
The next thing I knew it was eleven a.m. I jolted awake, took one look at the clock on the nightstand, and groaned. Then I looked around the bedroom for my husband. Heath wasn’t there, but I heard hushed voices coming from the kitchen. “Dammit!” I swore. I just knew that Gilley was flapping his gums, freaking out my husband and making himself look like the hero.
Quickly I got into a pair of sweats and rushed out to the kitchen. Gilley stood at the counter, serving Heath a huge omelet complete with hash browns and toast. My stomach grumbled. “Traitor,” I said looking down at it. Where was a good bout of morning sickness when I needed it?
“Hey!” Gilley said, spying me in the doorway. “You’re finally up.”
I shuffled over to the kitchen and reached for a coffee cup. “Ah-ah,” Gil said. “No caffeine for you! I brought up some of Michel’s green tea from downstairs. You can have a cup of that.”
I glared at Gilley. Hard. “Why’re you so chipper?”
He held up his coffee mug and smiled meanly. “I’ve had my coffee.”
I was tired and cranky enough to kick him in the “coffee cups” but settled for snatching up the green tea and moving to the sink with my mug.
“Gil told me what happened,” Heath said. I felt the tension in my shoulders ratchet up another degree.
“Great,” I muttered.
“I didn’t embellish,” Gil said. “I just gave him a few highlights. Like, I told him that the demon appeared while we were in the exhibit, but that we were packing so many magnets that it shrank back from us and we chased it all the way across the museum with our spikes before we saw it vanish, and then we saw a guy we couldn’t identify leave the building out the back door. That’s when we found the door to Sullivan’s office and let ourselves in.”
My grumpy mood lessened, and I offered Gilley a grateful smile. “Thanks for filling him in,” I said.
“Yeah, like I believe Gilley’s version,” Heath scoffed.
I cleared my throat. “For once, Heath, Gil did not embellish.”
Heath considered me skeptically, and I knew he thought I was hiding something, but I wasn’t about to elaborate. “Is that as far as you got in the telling of what happened last night, Gil?”
“No, I told him all the rest too.”
“Ah,” I said a little disappointed. “So, we’re all up to speed.”
“Unless there’s anything you want to elaborate on,” Heath said.
I took my brewed cup of green tea out of the microwave. “No. I think we’re good.”
Gilley set a plate down at the counter and pointed to it. “Eat,” he ordered. “I made you a salmon, spinach, feta cheese omelet—all great pregnancy foods.”
I sat down next to Heath, ready to tuck into my omelet, but the smell of it hit me and in a moment I was running for the bathroom. As soon as I was done having my little bout of morning sickness, I wandered back to the counter, where both Gil and Heath were staring at me in alarm. “You okay, babe?” Heath asked.
“I am now,” I said, tucking into the omelet with gusto. I’d gone from totally nauseous to totally famished in about six seconds. Flat.
I ate with relish, consuming the entire two-egg omelet almost without pause. When I was done I sighed contentedly and pushed my plate away, only to find Heath and Gilley once again staring wide-eyed at me. “What?”
“Nothing,” Heath said, averting his eyes to focus on his coffee.
Gilley inched forward and slowly removed my plate. “Thanks for leaving the china,” he snickered.
“I was hungry!” I snapped. Then I realized I’d spoken rather harshly. Lord, was I really going to turn into one of those pregnancy clichés? Feeling bad, I tried to form an apology, but my gaze landed on the remains of Heath’s breakfast still on his plate. “You gonna finish that?”
He scooted the plate over to me with a chuckle. “Have at it, darlin’.”
I polished off Heath’s breakfast, then had Gilley make me a smoothie. While I sipped at it, we discussed the case. “Are we really considering Rick Lavinia for this?” Heath asked me.
He had none of the same animosity for Rick that Gilley and I held. I’d thought Rick was a pompous jerk and disliked his “techniques,” and Gilley of course had gotten into it with him in their online feud, but Heath had always had a note of sympathy for Rick. Maybe it was a “bro” thing. “I honestly wasn’t sold on him as the killer until I saw the photo on his Instagram of the Ashworth Commons,” I said. “That’s just too big a coincidence for me. And, it’d be just like Rick to taunt us with something like that.”
“Did you see him at the exhibit the night of the premiere?” Heath asked.
“No,” I said. “But we were a little distracted, remember?”
“Yeah,” Heath said. “But if he was there, don’t you think one of the fans would’ve noticed him? Rick’s pretty recognizable.”
Rick was a good-looking guy, and he had very distinctive hair, black roots with white tips, and he wore it spiky. “He could’ve been wearing a hat or some kind of a disguise,” Gilley said. “I mean, our fans went to the exhibit looking for stuff related to us, and when you two showed up, they only had eyes for you. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for him to blend in and go unnoticed if he put on glasses and a hat.”
“Plus,” I added, “Rick would know how to impersonate a Hollywood producer well enough not to raise Gilley’s suspicions.”
Gil nodded enthusiastically. Using air quotes he said, “‘Bradley’ really sold it with the name-dropping and studio-speak. He sounded legit.”
“Is Rick even in town, Gil?” Heath asked, obviously still skeptical.
“Olivera is going to check into it,” Gil said.
Which reminded me of something. “Were you able to trace the IP address for the person who logged into Sullivan’s e-mail account?” I asked Gil.
He nodded. “Yes. It routed to an address here in Boston. I sent a text to Olivera to call me as soon as she got up, but she hasn’t yet.”
That made me a little nervous. “We sent her home with plenty of magnets, right?”
“We did,” Gil assured me. “She’s probably still sleeping, M.J. Don’t worry. She’ll call.”
I’d worry until she called, but I didn’t say it. “What about Ayden?” I asked. “Have we been able to get in touch with him to see how he’s doing?”
Gilley eyed his watch. “It’s eight forty-five his time,” he said. “Think that’s too early to call his hospital room?”
“Nah,” I said. “No one can sleep well in a hospital. Let’s call.”
“Right,” Gil said, and pulled out his cell. After placing the call, he laid the smartphone on the counter and hit the speaker function.
“Hello?” a gravelly voice sounded after the third ring.
“Ayden?” I said. “It’s M.J.”
“Hey, lady,” Ayden said. “You okay?”
“I’m better than you, apparently,” I told him, wishing he were closer so that we could visit him.
“Yeah, somebody got the drop on me,” he said. “The son of a bitch.”
“How’re you feeling?” I asked.
“Great,” he deadpanned. “Never better.”
“We heard you had some cracked ribs and a punctured lung,” Gil said.
“Hey, Gilley,” Ayden said. “Yeah. The lung was just a small puncture. Doesn’t even hurt anymore, but the son of a bitch really did a number on my ankle. It got twisted up pretty good. They think I tore a ligament and they’ve been talking surgery all morning.”
I winced. As a runner, I knew that tearing a ligament was sometimes worse than breaking a bone. “Sorry to hear that, buddy,” Heath said.
“Is that Heath?”
“It is,” he said. “We’re all here.”
“Wish I was there with you,” he said. “What’s the word on the dagger?”
“It’s still out there,” I said. “And someone has unleashed the kraken.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “I was afraid of that. Anybody hurt?”
Heath, Gilley, and I exchanged a pensive look. Finally I said, “No. Still only the one dead.”
“And you’re all okay?”
“We are,” I said.
“Barely,” Gilley muttered.
“So Oruç’s demon came after you,” Ayden said. He’d heard Gilley.
I shot Gil a stern look and said, “It did, but we handled it. The bigger problem we’re dealing with right now, Ayden, is that Oruç has apparently opened up a portal big enough to let through at least some of the other spooks we’ve managed to shut down into the lower realms over the past few years. We’ve had encounters with three other nasties in just the past twenty-four hours.”
“Which ones?” Ayden asked. I’d forgotten that he’d been following our cable show for years.
“The Grim Widow, Hatchet Jack, and I’m fairly certain another spook named Sy the Slayer paid me a visit two nights ago.”
“Plus Oruç’s demon?”
“Yes,” I said.
Ayden sighed. “What a time to get mugged,” he said. “You guys need me and I’m stuck in this hospital bed.”
“I’m not sure what you could do here,” Gilley told him. “Except run for your life, and with that bum ankle . . .”
I shot Gilley another stern look.
“What?” he said.
I made a dismissive motion with my hand. “Anyway, Ayden, we think someone planned this whole thing starting about three weeks ago. It looks like the producer who called Gilley to arrange for the display of the dagger was an impostor. It also looks like there was at least some cooperation between the killer and the victim. We think we’ve found evidence of a five-thousand-dollar payoff in exchange for access to the exhibit hall to swap out all of Gilley’s magnets, and that led to the killer having access to the alarm code that would let him come back to steal the dagger.”
“Were you able to trace where the payoff came from?”
“Yeah,” Gil said. “Some guy named Todd Tolliver. We’re convinced it’s an alias.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Ayden said, “Son of a bitch.”
“What?” Heath and I said together.
“Just a little over three weeks ago I took a case investigating a hit-and-run for a couple of parents who lost their nineteen-year-old son on his way home from Stanford. His name was Todd Tolliver.”
I blinked. We all did, taking that in for a second. “Did anybody know about the case you were working?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ayden said. “Probably lots of people. I was able to track down the car and the person responsible, and the news did a story on it.”
“So if this guy knew about the case you were working on, Ayden, then maybe you weren’t mugged at random. Maybe someone wanted to cause you permanent harm.”
“That’s what I was just thinking, Heath,” Ayden said.
“He’s playing with us,” I said. “Taunting us. He’s letting us know that he’s one step ahead of us at every turn. If we start digging, all we’ll find are the many ways he’s already outmaneuvered us.” I then explained to Ayden our theory about the killer and thief being Rick Lavinia.
“You know he called me not long after your show started, right?” Ayden said.
“Wait, what?” I said. “He’s spoken to you?”
“Yeah. You two were credited with helping to solve the murders at the Drake Hotel, and I think Rick was looking for some dirt on you. He wanted to expose you as a couple of frauds, but he got nothing from me but high praise.”
“That’s how he knew about the dagger!” Gilley said. “He was researching the Drake murders and figured it out!”
Heath caught my eye. He offered me a look that suggested he apologized for being skeptical of Rick Lavinia as the primary suspect. “He probably wanted you out of the way, Ayden, because you would’ve remembered that phone call and probably pointed us right to him as a suspect.”
“Still,” Ayden said, “it doesn’t explain how Rick stole the dagger, murdered Sullivan, then made it all the way to San Francisco to get the jump on me.”
“He had help,” I said. Then I turned to Gilley. “Hey, didn’t you say that you spoke with Bradley’s assistant a couple of times? Maybe he’s part of this too.”
“The assistant was a woman, M.J.,” Gilley said.
“Ah,” I said. “Any chance the person who attacked you was a woman?”
“Maybe a woman gorilla,” Ayden said with a chuckle. “All I remember is getting hit by someone big.”
“Doesn’t mean that Lavinia doesn’t have more than one accomplice,” Heath pointed out.
“True,” Ayden said. “Still, that kind of thing takes money. Does he have the cash to support all this?”
I glanced at Heath and Gilley. They both shrugged. “We don’t know, Ayden. Maybe?”
“It’d be worth checking out his financials, but you’d need a warrant to dig into them, and for that you’d need some pretty compelling evidence that Lavinia is your guy. Right now, I don’t think you have enough,” Ayden said. It sounded like he was about to say more, but at that moment there was the sound of other voices in the background. “Crap,” he said. “Listen, the doctor’s here to talk about my ankle. I gotta go for now, but call me if anything new develops, okay?”
We promised we would and said our good-byes.
“I seriously think we should ditch this whole thing and go on an extended vacation,” Gil said into the stunned silence that followed.
Heath eyed him seriously. “If I thought that alone would keep us safe, Gil, I’d be the one buying our plane tickets.”
Gil’s phone rang and I thought it might be Ayden again, but it turned out to be Olivera. “Did you have a chance to check out Rick Lavinia?” I asked her.
“I did,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of info. He’s got one arrest on his record for a drunk and disorderly. He got that in Georgia last year, probably while filming for his show. I can’t find an address for him in Boston; his last known here was three years ago, and there’s someone else living in the apartment he once rented. If he owns property, it could be in a trust and I’d be unable to locate it unless I had the name of the trust, or, if he lives with someone, then the house could be in their name. His driver’s license still lists the old address, though. The only point of contact for him is his agent, and when I reached out to him, all he’d tell me was that Rick was in town on an investigation which is supposedly a tightly guarded secret, and he was unwilling to share the address with me unless I had a subpoena or a warrant.”
“Wow,” I said. “The agent’s a little touchy.”
“He is but it might be for good reason. His agent said that a few of Rick’s fans have tried to crash his locations before by posing as the police,” she said. “He said he wouldn’t tell me anything over the phone but he would relay a message if I wanted to leave one.”
“Did you?” Heath asked.
“Nope. I figured it’d be better not to tip our hand that we’re looking for him.”
I drummed my fingers on the counter. “Don’t you think the agent will call Rick anyway and tell him that you called?”
“He might, but maybe not. He made it sound like Rick was totally unavailable to anyone for the next forty-eight hours.”
“That’s more than long enough to unleash hell on us,” Gil moaned.
“It’s also more than enough time to track his ass down and get the dagger back,” I countered.
“Anyway,” Olivera said, to get us back on track, “Gil, I can’t find the paper that I wrote down the residence on for the IP address you gave me. Can you give it to me again?”
“Sure,” Gil said, lifting the phone to consult it. After a moment he said, “Four-ten Forrest Street.”
“Great,” she said, “I’ll check it out. You guys stay put.”
She hung up abruptly, and once again we were all left to stare at one another. “She’s crazy if she thinks we’re not going to meet her there, right?” I said.
“What?!” Gil exclaimed. “No way, M.J.! Rick might be there, lying in wait!”
I nodded. “Yes, Gil . . . with the dagger!”
“Oh, shit,” Heath said, sliding off his chair and moving around to the kitchen. “We gotta go!”
Gilley stood there with his mouth open, as if he couldn’t believe we were dashing off to meet Olivera. “Are you people crazy?”
I shoved his magnet-lined vest into his chest. “Get dressed or stay here and take your chances with whatever might show up, Gil.”
He paled. “I’m moving you to the table at the back of the reception hall with Michel’s crazy uncle Max and his flighty sister!”
I flashed him a toothy smile. “Promises, promises.”
Heath tapped my shoulder as Gilley and I glared at each other, and I got busy getting ready. Gil could come or he could stay, but Heath and I had to get to Olivera before she went all guns-a-blazing again.
As I was pushing my foot into my boot, I saw Gilley angrily duck into his vest. He was muttering pretty good under his breath too. “Maybe you should drive,” Heath said to me.
I grabbed the keys from the dish by the sink. “Good call, honey.”
We arrived at the address that Gilley had tracked to the IP address from Sullivan’s computer and I was surprised to find a nice, fairly well-kept house with yellow siding, freshly painted shutters, and a wreath on the front door. “This the place?” I asked Gil as I pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the house.
“Yep,” he replied. “At least, according to the address I got from Sullivan’s computer.”
I looked around for Olivera, but there was no sign of her. The driveway did have a car parked in it, though.
We stared at the residence for a little while, waiting and watching in silence as my windshield wipers swiped back and forth against the steady rain that’d be with us for the next couple of days. “Think someone’s home?” I said.
Gil pointed over my shoulder. “There’s a light on in the front. And a car parked in the drive. Odds are pretty good that someone’s home.”
The door to the house suddenly opened, and an elderly woman with a hunched back, blue hair, a housecoat, and brown slippers stepped out. Opening up an umbrella, she proceeded to walk down the front steps. As she shuffled along, she eyed us a little suspiciously before heading to her mailbox to retrieve the mail.
“Wow,” Heath said drily. “Rick looks taller on TV.”
“Ha!” Gil chuckled. “And younger. The miracles they work with stage makeup.”
I frowned. “Seriously, you guys, will you quit it?” We needed to keep our focus, because even though this old woman had come out of the house, it didn’t mean someone else wasn’t inside with Oruç’s dagger. “Gil,” I said, thinking of a possible connection between the old woman and our prime suspect. “Did Rick ever mention his mom?”
“Not that I know of. But I never watched past the third season, which, frankly, was beyond boring after Rick got his ass tossed down the stairs.” Gilley chuckled again at the memory. “So epic!”
“Shhh!” I told him, staring at the woman. Her body language seemed off to me, but that could’ve been because we were parked across the street from her house, engine running and watching her every move.
Before heading back inside, the old woman made a point to pause and frown at us.
“Come on,” I told the boys as I got out of the car to trot over to her. “Excuse me,” I said, holding my arm up over my head to block the rain. “Do you live here?”
“I do,” she said, clutching the handle of her umbrella.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for someone. Does anybody else live with you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know that?” she asked me. I realized that I probably should’ve introduced myself before asking about who lived in the house with her.
“Sorry. I’m Mary Jane Whitefeather, and that’s my husband,” I said, turning to point to Heath, who was coming up behind me. “And that’s my best friend, Gilley, in the car.”
She shrank a little away from me. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “And I don’t know why you’re asking about who lives here.”
I tried to think of a quick explanation as to why we needed to know but couldn’t readily think of one. “A friend of ours is in trouble, and he gave us this address to pick him up, but I don’t see him anywhere around.”
“He gave you my address?” she said, utterly confused.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he was just trying to text me an approximate location. He must’ve seen your house number and used that to let us know where he is.”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said.
“Maybe someone else in your home saw him?” I said. “I mean, if you’d like to go in and ask the other members of your household if they’ve seen a guy, about five-ten, with brown hair, walking around . . .”
The old woman backed even farther away from me. I’d spooked her.
In desperation I said, “Does Rick Lavinia live here?”
“I think you should go,” she said, pointing to my car. “This is private property and you’re trespassing.”
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “I’m really sorry to have disturbed you. Thank you, ma’am.”
With that, I turned and grabbed Heath’s hand. He hadn’t heard most of the conversation, thank God, because I’d really botched it. “Does she live alone?” he asked me as we headed back to the car.
“I can’t tell,” I said. “And now I’ve spooked her.”
“So what do we do?” he asked.
“We head back to the car and wait to hear or spot Olivera.”
As we were just about to get into my SUV, another car pulled around us and into the driveway. I glanced at it, wondering if it was Olivera, but the person who got out of the car wasn’t her; it was a man in his midforties or thereabouts, with thin brown hair and a mustache.
For two seconds I wondered if we were wrong about Rick, and this was the guy who’d been behind the theft and the murder, but then something else about him caught my attention. I knew him.
Heath motioned with his chin toward the man. “Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Murdock,” I whispered. “The security guy from the museum!”
At the same moment we recognized him, he must’ve recognized us, because he paused as he was walking toward the house, did a double take, then quickly fumbled his keys, which fell to the ground.
“Yo!” I said, as I thought about what he’d done, the danger he’d put innocent lives in, and especially the danger his actions represented to my unborn child. “Murdock! Where’s the dagger?”
Murdock hastened to bend over and retrieve his keys, but they slipped again from his grasp, and all of a sudden he just left them there and bolted. Heath took off after him like a rocket, and I gave chase too.
The three of us tore down the street, getting pelted by the rain, which made it tough to see. Murdock had a good lead on us, but Heath runs like he was born to it. I watched him pull away from me, his stride so smooth it looked effortless. His arms pumped steadily, his legs moved so fast they were a blur, and he quickly closed the distance between him and Murdock. A few more strides and he’d tackle him, I was sure, but the security guard had a trick up his sleeve neither one of us saw coming. He wheeled to the side, grabbed an empty garbage can that was left at the curbside, and hurled it at Heath.
My husband must’ve been focused only on closing the distance between him and Murdock, because he was slow to react, and the garbage can struck him in the shins. With a grunt of pain, he went down. I cried out because Heath had hit the pavement hard, but he rolled to the side, grabbed his knee for a moment, then struggled to his feet. I reached him just as he took one limping stride forward. “Ohmigod! Are you okay?” I asked, coming up next to him.
“That asshole!” Heath growled through gritted teeth.
Meanwhile, Murdock was regaining his lead, and he ran as fast as he could down the street, taking a sharp right at the corner. Heath took another sort of limp-hop and groaned.
“Honey! I think you’re hurt!”
“I’m fine!” he told me, hopping a few more steps as he tried to walk off the pain, and then he began to jog a little as I kept pace with him. We were still losing ground to Murdock, but at least we were keeping him in our sights. “There!” I said, pointing to Murdock as Heath began to pick up speed.
At the moment that Heath began to regain his stride, edging away from me, a car came around the corner and pulled up next to me. “M.J.!”
I turned to look and was shocked to see Olivera behind the wheel and Gilley sitting next to her.
I pointed ahead of me toward Murdock. “He went that way!”
“Get in!” Olivera yelled.
I slowed as she did and yanked open the back door even before she’d come to a stop, which, honestly, she never really did. By this time Heath had worked through the pain of his fall and was sprinting all out after Murdock, who had just ducked down a side street lined with commercial-looking buildings.
Olivera pressed down hard on the accelerator and took off after him. We caught up to Heath, who was baring his teeth and running with a speed I’d never seen from him. He appeared mindless of the three of us in the car and just kept chasing the security guard.
At one point, Olivera had to punch the brakes to allow Heath to cut in front of her and chase Murdock down the alley behind the commercial buildings. “Don’t lose him!” Gilley yelled at Olivera.
“Shut it, Gillespie!” Olivera said, turning the wheel forcefully to get around Heath and follow Murdock without hitting my husband.
As we made the side street, the car bounced hard—the alley was unpaved and heavily potholed. Olivera had no choice but to slow her speed or she’d wreck her frame, and Heath passed right by us as he gained even more ground on Murdock. The alley then narrowed and it became impossible to pass Heath. We had to settle for driving behind him and trying to follow Murdock’s movements.
At last Murdock reached another alleyway that cut back through to the commercial side of the street, and he turned sharply once again. Heath was maybe twenty yards behind him. We pulled up to the narrow alleyway and considered our options.
For me, it was a no-brainer. I popped the lock and pushed my way out of the car, rounding to the back of it, then chasing after my husband. Behind me I heard the roar of an engine. Olivera was going to try to go around the building and cut Murdock off on the other side. Good.
Heath blocked out all signs of Murdock racing away from us, so I just followed Heath and waited to see him launch himself at the guard to bring him down. But abruptly, Heath stopped and pulled open a door to the building on our right. I determined that Murdock must’ve gone inside to try to evade us. The door banged shut after Heath went in. I reached it five seconds later and pulled on the handle. It opened and I dashed inside.
I quickly discovered that I’d run into an auto mechanic’s garage and nearly came up short when I saw all the mechanics who’d stopped their work to watch as first Murdock ran past them, then my husband; and then they all turned to look at me.
Murdock seemed to have a good understanding of the layout of the place, because he zigzagged around cars, carts, and tires to reach the front door and pull that open too. Heath weaved, dodged, and jumped over the same obstacles as Murdock, but he was slowed by them more than Murdock had been.
I stopped gawking and gave chase again too, following right behind Heath and trying to mimic his route.
Heath reached the front door and pulled it open to head back outside after Murdock, but as I watched, I saw my husband go down again! And then I realized that that son of a bitch Murdock had put another trash can in his path, right in front of the doorway.
I silently vowed to strangle Murdock with my bare hands if Heath needed medical attention. When I reached him he was on his side, clutching his hip. “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch!” he groaned as I kicked the can out of the way and bent to help Heath.
“Babe,” I said, panting for air. “Can . . . you . . . walk?”
Heath let go of his hip and stumbled to his feet. He lifted his chin and stared at Murdock, who was running steadily and without slowing toward a building across the street. One I recognized. “Oh, shit!” I swore.
The building in question was none other than Ashworth Commons. I hadn’t realized we were so close to it, but Murdock appeared to know it well. He didn’t waver as he crossed the street, heading right for the side entrance.
At the moment he leaped from the street to the sidewalk, Olivera’s car rounded the corner with a screech. She hadn’t beaten Murdock, who’d taken the shortcut through the garage, but she did see where he was going. An oncoming car stopped her from turning left and cutting Murdock off, and he made it to the side entrance of the building before any of us could really react. Once he got inside, I just knew that all hell was certain to break loose.
Literally.