By this time, I knew better than to barge into the office assuming the coast was clear. I skulked in the shrubbery at the edge of the parking lot until I was sure no one else was hiding there. Although come to think of it, all I could really be sure of was that anyone hiding there had more patience than I did. I waited inside the front door until my eyes had adjusted to the inside light level, which turned out to be useful. If I’d gone upstairs right away, I would probably still have noticed the suspicious shadow in the hall outside the Mutant Wizards office. But if my eyes hadn’t been adjusted to the dark, I probably would have leaped out to neutralize the shadow’s owner with a few swift kicks and punches, and I would have been very embarrassed when I realized I’d attacked an old-fashioned floor mop resting harmlessly in a pail outside the janitor’s closet. I made a mental note to complain to the cleaners tomorrow.
I crept inside the office, easing the door shut so no one would hear me coming, and I skulked about from doorway to doorway, looking for signs of other skulkers.
And I spotted something. A flash of light. I paused, and peered in the direction of the light. There it was again. Someone was in one of the cubes, using a flashlight.
To be precise, someone was in Ted’s old cube.
I slid silently through Cubeville until I was right outside the cube where the light had appeared. I readied my own flashlight and was about to leap out and confront the intruder when -
My pager went off.
“Oh, hi, Meg.”
Dad stuck his head out of the cube while I was struggling to silence the pager. Hell, struggling to find the pager, which had apparently migrated to the very bottom of my purse.
“You can turn on a light if you like,” he added.
I sighed and pulled out the pager. Rob had called. What now?
“Hi, Meg,” he said, when I called him. “Do you know where Dad is?”
“You’re in luck; he’s right here,” I said. Of course, I didn’t mention where here was. “Want to talk to him?”
“No, that’s okay,” Rob said. “I was just worried. He’s usually home by now.”
“I can send him home,” I said.
“No, if you two are busy, that’s okay,” he said. “Just remind him he’s supposed to take Spike when he gets home. Unless you’d like to - “
“I’ll remind him,” I said, hanging up. “Rob was worried,” I added, to Dad.
“That’s nice,” Dad said. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor mat in Ted’s cube, groping around to see if anything was hidden on the back of the file cabinet, on the underside of the desk surface, or inside the partitions.
“Having any luck?” I said after watching him for a minute.
“No,” Dad said. “Ow.”
He’d scratched himself on a sharp edge inside the partition. He sat for a few moments, sucking the cut and favoring the partition with the sort of disappointed look that suggested he was half expecting it to apologize.
“No, I don’t think there’s anything here to find,” he said. “I can help you with whatever you’re doing.”
Normally, I’d have waffled. Dad helping with a task all too often escalated into Dad taking over and turning it into something larger, more complex, and completely different from what I intended.
Then on the other hand, considering what I wanted to accomplish…
“You’re welcome to help if you like,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s not very exciting.”
“You forget,” Dad said, sounding hurt. “I’ve participated in investigations before. I know crime solving sometimes involves a level of patient, meticulous effort that would seem tedious to the uninitiated.”
Yes, Dad probably did know that, but since patient, meticulous effort wasn’t exactly his forte, he’d probably used the knowledge to make sure he was elsewhere when any such effort was going on.
“Right,” I said. “Okay. What we need to do is test every floor tile in the place to see which ones are loose.”
“Loose floor tiles?” Dad said. “Does this have something to do with the murder?”
Did he think I dropped by the office at midnight to catch up on maintenance work?