“So are you thinking perp or victim?”
“I don’t know what to think, but if he doesn’t have anything to do with it, why did he lie?”
Clayton shrugged. “Maybe he was afraid he’d get in trouble for filming the school.”
“A court already cleared him on that last year. No, he’s hiding something else. Let’s get an APB out on him. State it’s for suspicion in the Thief investigation. That should get plenty of eyes looking for him.”
A tech appeared in the doorway behind Clayton. “Walker Norris,” the tech said, “We didn’t know you were on scene.”
“I won’t be for long.” She turned and pointed at the equipment. “Do you see what I’m looking at here?”
The tech’s eyes widened. “That’s the playground across the street. The one where the little girl was taken.”
“Very good. Now get me anything you can from that camera. I don’t care if it’s an image of Bigfoot flipping me the bird, I want to see it.”
Chapter Eleven
The smell of bacon and fresh coffee roused Juliana from her slumber. She sat on the edge of the bed and combed her hair with her fingers. Sleep had done little to rid her of the bone-numbing exhaustion that was becoming her constant companion. Of course, she might have felt more rested if she hadn’t spent the entire night dreaming of ghouls and mutilated children. She pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the bathroom. She took some time to freshen up, then unlocked the bedroom door and stepped out into the living room. Thomas sat at the dining table reading a paper.
She stopped, surprised to see him even though he told her he’d be back before she woke. And it wasn’t as if anyone else would be making bacon and coffee in the kitchen. He didn’t even flip the paper down to glance at her. Odd. “Good morning,” she finally said. When he didn’t respond, she shrugged and padded past him into the kitchen.
She poured a cup of coffee and grabbed a plate of bacon and scrambled eggs. The eggs were still warm, which told her Thomas hadn’t started making them until he heard her get up. She sat at the opposite end of the table from him. He folded his paper, setting it in front of him, and leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and watched as she ate. When he continued to sit that way without saying anything, she put down her fork and picked up her mug. “Problem?” she asked over the rim.
A muscle twitched in his jaw as it so often did when he was around her. “You locked the door.”
Her eyebrows raised in surprise. Of course she locked the door to the bedroom. She was in a strange place by herself. And her bad dreams gave her a jumpy trigger finger. Before she could attempt to explain, he continued.
“I will refrain for the moment from commenting on you sleeping in one of the guest rooms, but you will not lock me out again. Is that understood?”
She took a long swallow of the coffee, giving herself a chance to calm before she answered. Placing the mug on the table, she laid her hands next to it, fingers splayed. “To make things perfectly clear here, Mr. Kendrick, I will sleep where I damn well please and will lock any damn door I see fit.” Okay, so that probably wasn’t the best way to end the argument but she was so cursed tired of the man’s domineering attitude. She was a grown woman, not a child to be dictated to.
He got up from his chair and strode down the length of the table. With one swift movement, he yanked her chair away from the table and leaned on the arms, boxing her in. “To make things perfectly clear, Ms. Norris, when you are in our home, you will sleep in our bed and nowhere else. If someone needs to sleep in the guest room, it will be me. And lock any door you please, just not against me. You don’t need protection from me.”
With that, he leaned forward and kissed her soundly on the lips. He strode back to his seat, snapped the paper open and went back to reading it while she sat there and blinked dumbly at him. She took a moment to process everything he’d just thrown at her. He was the only one she’d ever known who could aggravate her and make her feel cherished, important, in the same conversation.
She cleared her throat. “I didn’t lock the door against you. I was protecting you from me.”
He peered at her over the paper. “Come again?”
“I sleep with a gun, Thomas. I’m working on a case that has me keyed up and on edge. I’m sleeping in a strange place I’ve never been in before without any of my usual wards or protections. It’s safe to say if you startled me, I might have put a bullet in you.”
He put the paper down again. His lips twitched in a half smile. “I’m pleased to know you care, but I can assure you that there is a plethora of wards and protections on our home. You needn’t have worried.”
“There are?”
“Of course.” He sounded offended that she’d thought otherwise.
“But you didn’t have to set them for me the first time I came.”
He huffed. “You’re my mate,
Joya
. They’ve always been set for you.”
Her checks heated. “Oh. Well. As for the other, I’m not about to kick you out of your bed.”
“So don’t. I’ll be more than happy to share our bed with you, but you are not sleeping in the guest room.” A snap of the paper as he picked it back up signaled the end of the conversation. She frowned in annoyance. Nothing said she had to stay here. She could just as easily go home and take a portal back in the mornings. That would really piss him off.
She scanned the back of the paper while she drank her coffee. An ad halfway down the page caught her eye and she nearly choked. She all but leaped across the table and snatched the paper from Thomas’s hands. He looked at her bemused as she flipped it over and spread it out on the table. “Son of a bitch,” she said.
“What?” He stood beside her.
She pointed at the ad that had caught her eye. The New Hope Halloween Carnival Running as Planned it proclaimed in bold print. Come Celebrate with Us was in smaller print beneath along with all the details for times and ticket pricing. “Why not just hand the bastard a gilded invitation? Please come take our kids.” The mayor had cancelled trick-or-treating due to the disappearances and the safety concern, but the fairgrounds were technically outside of the city limits.
“So, what’s the plan?” Thomas asked as if she could just formulate one in two minutes.
Her phone rang in the other room. “Hold that thought.”
She hurried into the bedroom and snatched her cell phone off the nightstand. “Norris.”
“I’m at the hotel. I’ve got some files for you to look at,” Jeremiah said. “We had some interesting hits come up on the database search.”
She glanced down at her pajama pants, T-shirt and bare feet. “Do you remember where the service elevator was?”
“I believe so.”
“Go wait by it. I’m sending someone to get you.” She hung up before he had a chance to ask any questions. It would be much easier to show him than to try to explain it.
She stuck her head out the door. “Go fetch Jeremiah, would you? He’s waiting by the service elevator on the third floor. I’m going to hop in the shower.”
Thomas blinked at her, then shook his head as he headed toward the service entrance.
By the time she got out of the shower, the two men had cleared everything from the dining table but the files and the coffee mugs. Good to see they had their priorities in order. As soon as she emerged, Thomas went to get her a fresh cup of coffee.
“Anything new on Oliver?” she asked.
Jeremiah shook his head. “Computer guys are still going over the equipment, but it looks like the data is a total loss. And there have been no hits on the APB. He’s probably long gone.”
“Oliver?” Thomas asked as he handed her the mug.
She curled up on one of the chairs. “He is a person of interest in the Richards kidnapping. He tried to call me yesterday, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of him. We also discovered he had cameras on the crime scene.”
“This is the ghoul from last night?” The question told her that he’d talked to Clayton.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I kind of liked him. I don’t know why, I only talked to him few a few minutes, but I did. I hate that he’s mixed up in this, but I should have known better. I could tell he was hiding something.” She lied about not knowing why she liked the ghoul. His loneliness reminded her of her own. That feeling of being in the middle of everything but not really a part of it. She’d spent a good portion of her life feeling that way and was instantly drawn to anyone else who felt the same. Unfortunately for her, most of those people ended up being mentally unstable at best, and criminals at worst.
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs of thought away and looked at Jeremiah. “So what’ve you got for me?”
He slid three folders in front of her. “We got several hits off the search. Some of them we could eliminate fairly easily as they’re locked up or deceased or what have you. There are some others we’re still looking at, but I don’t think they’ll amount to anything. These were the best ones.”
She flipped open the folders and laid them out so she could view them all at once. Three unflattering mug shots glared back at her. All men, all magic users.
“The first,” he said tapping the left most folder, “is Daniel Larsen—ogre, small-time thug with a lot of petty theft, some drugs and assault. Most recently, he served one year of a five-year sentence for child endangerment. Family owns a warehouse not far from the pier.”
Juliana flipped through the file. Lots of possession charges and shoplifting. Once he’d stolen a fundraising jar off the counter of a convenience store. There were several arrests for assault. Usually fights he’d gotten into at a bar. Obviously, Larsen had a short temper. She kept flipping until she got to the endangerment charge. He’d left a three-year-old and a one-year-old unattended at home while he went to the bar to get wasted. She closed the file and slid it back to Jeremiah. “The endangerment charge was against his own kids and it sounds more like he’s just an idiot than anything deliberate.”
Jeremiah opened the file back up and pushed it back across the table. “That’s true enough, but look here.”
He’d found a page from an interrogation transcript. It went over Larsen’s background. The ogre had apparently cast a spell at the cops chasing him. The detective doing the interrogation asked Larsen why he did all the crap he did when he could use magic like that. Larsen responded that he had the power, but he didn’t know what to do with it. So he stuck with what he did know. A powerful untrained magic user. Just what they’d been looking for.
“It looks like the warehouse has been abandoned for a while, too. Plus its location would make it a convenient point from which to dump the twins and Pruett.”
Now she understood why this had made Jeremiah’s most-likely-suspects pile, but she still didn’t think this was their man. Nothing in his history indicated that he was smart enough to pull this off. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea to have him brought in for questioning. Just to make sure he’s got an alibi. See if you can get anyone to give you a search warrant for that warehouse as well.”
He nodded and slid that file out of the way before pointing to the one on the right. “Kevin Peele was a suspect in an attempted kidnapping but never charged. A gypsy, he’s got some land not far from here, but as far as we know, there are no buildings on it.”
This file was much thinner than the previous one, the suspect having little criminal history to speak of. A teenage girl had claimed that Peele had stopped to talk to her as she walked home from school. He’d offered her a ride and when she’d refused, she said he tried to force her into his car. Peele stated that he had offered the girl a ride, but he’d never tried to grab her. It was a classic case of she said, he said.
When it came time for the trial, the girl recanted. Though it still wasn’t clear if she’d done so because Peele was telling the truth or if she was simply scared of testifying against him. He had a reputation in certain circles of New Hope for being the person you went to for curses and the like. Nothing had ever been proven in regard to that either, obviously, or he’d be in jail. “Well, if nothing else, he does have a knack for keeping himself out of trouble. Pick him up. Find out what he’s been up to for the past couple months.” She tossed the file out of the way.
Knowing Jeremiah would save the most likely suspect for last, she leaned forward when he pointed at the picture. “Gregory George.”
“Why do I know that name?” Thomas asked.
“Child trafficking,” she said. The memory clicked into place as she flipped through the file. He’d been taking children for years and selling them. For what she could only imagine and didn’t want to know for sure. She had enough nightmare material. The light fae had focused on runaways and homeless children. Children less likely to be missed. “If I remember right, he was partial to Altered children. He got nailed about five years ago. It made national news. I thought he was supposed to be doing life somewhere.”
“He was. His attorney got him off on a technicality during appeal,” Jeremiah clarified. “He got out about eight months ago.”
“And as close as we can figure the Thief started operating six months ago. Tell me he’s got someplace he could be stashing those kids,” she said.
“Family farm. Lives there with his mom and dad.” Jeremiah practically beamed.
“Get me a warrant,” she said and went to find her shoes.
“Already working on it.”
“We’ve also got another problem,” she said when she came back to the table, boots and gun on. She grabbed the paper and showed the carnival ad to Jeremiah.
He blew out a long breath. “Great. That’s fantastic. What are we going to do about it?”
She tilted her head to the side, stretching the muscles in her neck. “I don’t know. Last I knew, Mephisto still owned the carnival and the fairgrounds. He’s a greedy bastard. He won’t shut down without a court order and there’s no way we’d get one. Not without proof the Thief will hit there. And maybe not even then depending on the judge. But he’s not completely unreasonable. I doubt he’d object to a heavy law-enforcement presence.”
Thomas nodded. “He might even welcome it. It would keep trouble away without him having to pay for security. And you know how he hates trouble. Or paying for anything.”
She’d forgotten that Thomas was the one who introduced her to the dark fae a decade ago. Mephisto often hired the local coven or local Were packs to run security when he had an event going on. And since he owned at least a partial interest in about half the town, that was often. Maybe with Thomas backing her up, they could convince Mephisto it was in his best interest to let them invade the fairgrounds.
Jeremiah glanced at his phone when it buzzed. “We’ll have to discuss it later. That’s your warrant.”