I considered walking over to him, but he shook his head and said softly, “Go.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice.
I hoofed it to my bright red Jeep, but when I got in, I propped my head against the steering wheel and just sat there. What the hell just happened in that doctor’s office? I was normally so cool under pressure. Buffy Summersault? If I’d just risked the safety of one of my clients, I’d never forgive myself. Shawn had come to me in the strictest of confidences. It didn’t get much more delicate than investigating your own parents for child abduction. What would they do if they found out he knew?
When I looked back at Reyes, he’d shifted his attention from the angel and onto Mrs. Foster. She rushed out of a side door and hurried to a gold Prius, her movements harried, her expression lined with worry.
“And just where might you be going?” I asked no one in particular.
I turned the key, but the moment I threw Misery into drive to follow the nice kidnapper, a knock sounded on my window. My heart jumped into my throat. I turned to see the receptionist motioning me to roll the window down.
“Hey.” I couldn’t help but notice the stiff line of her mouth.
“You upset Eve,” she said.
“Yeah.” I watched as the taillights of the Prius disappeared around a corner. “Sorry about that.”
“You don’t really sell copiers, do you?”
“Sure I do. I have a card right—”
I looked around Misery, ignoring the smirk my thirteen-year-old investigator sent me from the passenger’s side. Artemis bounced up in the backseat when Angel popped in, whining in excitement, her stubby tail wagging at the speed of light.
I understood. That was often my reaction when Reyes appeared.
Angel reached back and rubbed her ears, before nodding toward the actual angel loitering in the dark garage, and asking, “What’s with all the angels?”
“Oh,” the receptionist said. “Okay. Sorry.” She started to turn. I was clearly about to lose a lead. Her demeanor was one of concern and apprehension, not triumph for having busted me for fraud.
“Okay,” I said, stopping her. “I don’t sell copiers.” I let it go there. If she had something to say, she would. If not …
She faced me again.
“She’s hot,” Angel said.
“Then what were you doing here?”
“I was just getting a feel for the place. You know, should I ever need a pediatrician.” I bowed my head and tried to ignore the fact that I would’ve been in need of one had I been able to keep my daughter. But she was safe. That was my mantra. Beep was safe. Safer than she would be around me.
“You’ll get her back,” Angel said.
I had one hand on the gearshift. He covered it with his. I turned mine up and laced our fingers together.
“You know, we could make out and she would never know.”
I rolled my eyes, then held up an index finger to the receptionist. “Excuse me.” I took my hand back and picked up my phone so I could pretend to talk on it, but first I had to set up my pretend conversation. “Hello? Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
“Are you going to do this all day?” Angel asked.
I cast him my evilest grin. And continued. “Seriously? No way. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
Angel laughed, then slowly leaned forward like he was going to kiss me. The little shit.
“You do realize my husband is not fifty feet away.”
And he was now watching us from beneath hooded lids.
Angel snorted and moved in even closer. “I’m not afraid of your husband.” When Reyes’s arm snaked around his neck and he pulled Angel back against his chest as he materialized, locking him in an inescapable chokehold, Angel added through a strained larynx, “Much. I’m not afraid of him much.”
Artemis pawed at them, wanting to play, too. Angel chuckled, ducked under Reyes’s arm, and lunged into the backseat to wrestle with her. Thank goodness the laws of physics didn’t apply. There was no way all three of them would have fit in my backseat had they been corporeal.
“Aren’t you supposed to be watching Uncle Bob?” I asked him.
“I have been. He’s perfectly safe. Swopes is on watch now.”
“Oh, okay.” I’d trust Garrett Swopes with my own life, so I felt Ubie was safe in his hands.
Angel let out a squeak that I assumed was a plea for help, but I ignored it.
“Sorry about that,” I said to the receptionist, pretending to end my pretend call.
“That’s okay.”
Reyes materialized in my passenger seat but stayed firmly planted in the supernatural realm. Otherwise she would have been in for quite the shock.
She kicked at the ground. “Well, I’ll let you go. I got off early and—”
“I guess Mrs. Foster did, too?” I asked, nodding toward the exit.
She lifted a shoulder. “I guess.”
“Do you know where she went?”
The girl narrowed her lids. “Why do you want to know?”
“No reason.” Either a paw or a foot landed on the back of my head. I coughed to cover up my sudden lurch forward, then refocused on her as Reyes shot a warning glare over his shoulder. “But if I did have a reason, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“Drop the case,” Reyes said.
But the receptionist’s reaction caught my attention. A sadness came over her. She looked down and took a long drag off an e-cigarette. “Not really. I just thought maybe you were, I don’t know, investigating or something. Like undercover maybe.”
Unless she knew what I did for a living, that was an odd thing to think. “Why would I be undercover?”
She shrugged again. “Because there was an investigation, but then nothing happened.”
“Really?” I was having a hard time hearing her over Angel’s screams. Apparently Artemis was going for the jugular.
“I’m not kidding, Dutch,” Reyes said. He leaned close until his mouth was at my ear. “Drop the fucking case.”
I tried to make my next move appear completely innocent, as though I were just looking around when I turned to face off against my husband.
His gaze sparkled with a mixture of interest and frustration. His expression hard. His full mouth set. Until I dropped my gaze to it and whispered the one question I knew he wouldn’t answer: “Why?”
He eased back, the muscles in his jaw working as he turned away from me, propped an elbow on the window frame, and rested a hand at his mouth in thought.
We had agreed a few days ago no more secrets between us. Ever. Funny how long that accord didn’t last.
“Besides, if you were undercover,” the girl continued, “you’d know more about copiers than you do. You would have brushed up on them so you didn’t look like you were undercover.”
“Ah”—I raised an index finger and turned back to her—“but maybe that was all part of my master plan. Maybe I went in without knowing that much about copiers to throw you off my scent, so to speak. If I’d known too much…” Okay, that sounded dumb, even to me. “Never mind. What’s your name, hon?”
“Tiana.”
“Tiana. That’s gorgeous.”
She shrugged and nodded a shy thank you.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?”
As she mulled over my proposition, I ignored Angel’s pleas for help and my husband’s sudden shift into a draconian style of domesticity. Thankfully, Angel’s cries were more laughter than agony. But Reyes’s mistaken impression that I’d actually comply with his ridiculous demands lay somewhere in that gray area between adorable and assault with intent to kill.
Tiana nodded and said, “Okay. As long as it’s far away from here.”
* * *
To say that the receptionist was paranoid would have been an understatement had she not had good reason. We sat in an out-of-the-way restaurant in Rio Rancho called the Turtle Mountain Brewing Company, which was about twenty minutes from where she worked.
Reyes had dematerialized the moment I started Misery, his heat scalding my skin and leaving it warm the entire trip. I’d lost both my other two passengers when Artemis plowed into Angel as I was going seventy on Paseo Del Norte. I watched as they fell onto the pavement. Cringed as car after car rolled over them. Or, well, through them. They were so into re-creating the Battle of Gettysburg that they didn’t notice, thank goodness.
The devastation of losing my passengers didn’t affect my appetite in the least. I was enjoying a killer green chile pizza called the Chimayo. I wanted to marry the pizza and have its babies, but the server said it was already spoken for. Damn it.
My jesting, however, had eased the tension roiling in Tiana’s stomach. She chowed down on a sub called the Sun Mountain. It looked amazing, and I had to resist the urge to ask for a bite. At least until we got to know each other better. I gave it ten minutes.
“You don’t understand. It’s not any one thing,” she explained. We were, of course, discussing her coworker. “I can’t really put my finger on it. I mean, Eve and her husband are, like, super religious.”
“Religious?”
“Yeah, but not your everyday kind of religious. They’re like the nut kind of religious. They believe they are here for a reason.”
“Here?”