by J. R. Rain
“Gambling, drugs, bad habits? Anything like that?” I ask.
They exchange a glance.
“I really don’t think so.” Lorraine shakes her head. “David was always a fine young man. He never got into any of that… stuff.”
Every mother’s son is an angel, says Licinia. Though these two believe it.
I nod to acknowledge my spirit sister and type ‘no bad habits’ in the file. “Work?”
A brief glimpse of pride shines on both their faces.
“David’s the owner of a software company. They, uhh, write software.” Gerald smiles.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes or quip. The man’s obviously not clear of mind due to worry. That little girl’s stare weighs down my heart. “What kind of software? Name? Address?”
Lorraine hands me a business card for NexArc Solutions. It lists David Strickland as CEO and co-founder. I add the business address to the file, as well as a scan of the card.
“He’s doing rather well.” Gerald keeps fidgeting with his hat. “He offered to pay off our car. We said no, but the rascal did it anyway.”
At his use of ‘rascal,’ Licinia lets out an Aww. Old people are cute.
They kinda are. I tend to make friends with them. Helps when those who I spend a lot of time around go senile before they realize I don’t age. Speaking of which, my current friend (I tend to have one at a time) Trish is expecting me to meet her for dinner tonight… an appointment I may miss.
“That was really sweet of him.” I add a comment to the file about his money situation being good. “No marital problems?”
“Oh no!” Lorraine shakes her head. “They’ve been married nine years, and they still act like newlyweds.”
I lose a moment thinking of Albert. We’d married when I’d been a foolish young thing who thought she’d fallen in love. Maybe I had. After I parted ways with Manfred the vampire, I’d hooked up with another bloodsucker, but that hadn’t been about love as much as security and curiosity. Ivan and I met by way of a misunderstanding. He misunderstood me to be a meal for the taking, and found out the hard way I wasn’t easy prey. Once we realized we both hosted Dark Masters, he being a vampire who’d never even heard of mer-kind, we became friends, then lovers, then more. It had made for a good four years. In the end, I suspect he got bored and wanted to move on, perhaps back to Russia. Maybe he sensed the way I cooled to him after he’d mentioned he’d been a soldier during World War I. That made me think of Albert.
I catch myself comparing Albert to Patrick, my werewolf ex-husband. My love for Albert had been pure and innocent, the infatuation of a young woman. Patrick, on the other hand, showed me things sexually that changed me from a girl to a woman. Not that Albert had been a slouch. He’d been loving, caring, but basic and overly careful not to hurt me. Then again, we’d only had a week or so together after the wedding before he shipped off.
“Please, do you think you can find them?” Gerald twists his hat up like a dishtowel. I doubt the poor thing’s going to survive this meeting. “Will you help us?”
The little girl in the photo makes me want to accept the job, but some questions I still have to ask. “You don’t expect the police to help?”
“Well, it’s just that…” Lorraine looks down. “It’s only been a few days, and not too long since his trip. They seemed to think we’re being overprotective.”
Gerald stares at me with a look in his eyes like he’s hanging off a cliff by his fingertips. “It’s just a feeling. We saw your ad and…” He looks down.
Do it.
I lean back in my chair, staring at the photo on the screen. It’s the girl, isn’t it? That innocent smile.
Licinia’s influence tingles down my limbs. Yes. There is not much time. We must act soon.
I summon my most confident look for the elderly couple. “I’ll do everything I can to find them.”
For an ancient dark sorceress, you’ve got a real soft spot for missing children.
An odd (and somewhat startling) surge of warmth floods outward from my core. I had nine, four sons and five daughters. The things I did to protect them would turn you white.
I am white. Something else about the state of my body: I don’t tan.
Licinia’s sigh floods my thoughts. You know what I mean. I once made a man’s skin strangle him for pawing Mettia, my second eldest daughter. She was thirteen at the time.
My mind fills with the image of a man in Roman armor, gold and red. His skin splits open, sliding off his screaming body like a suit, and re-forms into a hollow man, which sets upon its former owner in a choking grasp, throttling him to death.
Gah! I jump in my chair, nearly falling. That’s horrifying.
The Stricklands lean forward, concerned.
“I’m fine. Weak spring in the chair, thought I was about to go over backward.” I force the image out of my head. Staring at Hannah Strickland’s huge smile helps brush that ghastly memory away. Licinia’s essence roils around at the back of my consciousness. I can’t stop staring at the little girl. One minute stretches to three, a strange, continuous throb of energy coursing across my brain.
“Miss Silver?” asks Lorraine. “Are you all right?”
For no reason I can explain, an odd worry takes root in my soul. I feel like a mother who knows their child is in danger and can’t sit still.
I blink and look up at her. “Yes. I’m fine. Just planning our next steps. I’ll start right away. Let me have your contact information so I can let you know the moment I find anything.”
Gerald pulls out a tiny notepad and pen.
Lorraine gives me a serious, hesitant stare. “I understand there is a fee. What do we owe you?”
“We can worry about that later. I don’t want to alarm you, but I have a feeling we’re in a hurry.”
Gerald’s shaking hand rips a paper from his pad and offers it to me. As soon as I touch the paper, he makes a beeping noise. Lorraine bows her head and cries into a tissue that seems to spring out of thin air. Grandmother magic.
I start to raise an eyebrow until a flash of memory leaps off them both. Their granddaughter called his paper notes ‘texting,’ and he always beeped when handing her one. Aww dammit. Something in my eye.
There’s no way I’m sleeping until I find David and his family.
fter seeing the Stricklands out, I hurry back to my desk and go through the usual internet checks on David and his wife, as well as NexArc Solutions.
No red flags pop up. Business is clean, no nasty news stories, no rumors, nothing that appears shady. From the looks of things, Christina is his first wife. According to their Facebook pages, they met in high school. More photos of the happy family get Licinia’s hackles up. I’m not sure where these feelings of hers come from, but I’ve learned to trust them. Maybe Dark Masters are tuned into some kind of cosmic Twitter feed or something.
According to their company site, NexArc Solutions ‘provides the next-generation architecture solutions for tomorrow’s business.’ I skim enough to get that they design and implement corporate network topologies as well as write custom software to optimize performance based on the type of business. Okay great. That looks boring. Some Googling finds nothing of any real interest aside from the company website. I stumble across a tech journal-slash-opinion piece about them, but it’s dreadfully dry. The author sounds revved up about some ‘revolution’ in office networks due to the way their software runs, reducing downtime and eliminating the need for in-house IT staff. I can’t find anything more on the place. Evidently, NexArc isn’t big enough to warrant a media interview with David.
I tap the main number and zero-smash my way past their phone menu until I get a live body.
“NexArc Solutions, this is Stephanie speaking,” says a young-sounding woman.
“Hi, Stephanie. My name is Alexis Silver. I’m looking for David Strickland.”
The woman’s voice loses some cheer. “Oh. He’s not available right now. Can I take a message and have him get bac
k to you?”
“I know he’s missing. His parents left my office about ten minutes ago. I’m a private investigator trying to find their son. Can you tell me anything that might be helpful?”
“Umm. I don’t know if I’m―”
I smile, despite her not being able to see me. “I’m not asking for sensitive company information. My goal is to find David and his family, preferably alive. Feel free to call his parents to confirm that they’ve contacted me if you like. I can hold.”
Stephanie covers the phone and mumbles to someone for a moment before coming back online. “All right. I really don’t have much to tell you. David left early on Friday, and he’s still not back. He hasn’t been answering his cell phone, email, or Facebook chat. I told the police the same thing. He said something about a weekend trip.”
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone? Anyone you know of who may want to hurt him? Any enemies?”
“Umm. No. David’s such a sweetheart.”
I roll the material of my sweater back and forth between my fingers, a nervous habit. “His parents mentioned he’d been receiving harassing phone calls. Has that occurred at the office?”
“Umm, no.” She answers fast enough to sound believable. “I handle most of the calls that ring through, except when I’m on lunch. Then I’m not here.”
Ouch. Right, this isn’t going to get much further. I’ve got a Dumb Dora on the phone. “All right. Can you think of anyone who might know if he went somewhere?”
“Only Mr. Robertson.”
“Mr. Robertson…?” I add the name to my file. “Can you transfer me to him, please?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. Robertson is on vacation. He took last Friday and today off. Long weekend.”
“Right. So, there’s no one at NexArc who might have a clue where David is?”
“I don’t think so.” A woman in the background mutters to her. “Oh, Linda just said that David mentioned he might take Monday off too. She doesn’t know where he went, only put a couple late-day emails on hold for him to look at this morning, but he never came in. So, I guess he did decide to take today off.”
“All right. Thank you.” I give her my number. “Please call me if you hear anything that might help locate them.”
After hanging up, I stare for a few seconds at the big fat pile of uselessness in my notes. Well, that’s six minutes I’ll never get back. Facebook can be handy in my line of work, but unfortunately for me, David’s got a few thousand friends. His wife doesn’t seem to use it for much other than posting photos of her amateur sculptures, sharing ‘life hacks’,’ and, of course, photographs of Hannah. The daughter looks like an extrovert, did a project collecting recyclables to generate money for the homeless, and appears to enjoy singing at talent shows.
Neither one of them have significant debts other than their house and car payments.
The more I dig into the Stricklands’ internet life, the stronger Licinia’s sense of urgency gets.
I shift gears and burrow into Christina’s background. She’s careful not to mention anything about her employer on her Facebook feed, but some creative Google searches take me to a LinkedIn page. She works in HR for Boeing. Wow. That might bring espionage or military issues into play. A grudgingly tedious bit of internet research pushes that theory off to the side. She doesn’t seem high enough up the food chain to be a target for corporate espionage focused on the latest fighter jet plans or whatever. Or, I’ve seen too many bad movies.
Christina’s parents are dead. Mother went two years ago; cancer got her father when she was eighteen. She’s got no siblings, and I can’t find any distant relatives. Thoughts of my mother drift in and out of my head. I can sympathize… for quite a while, Mom was all I had too.
But that’s another life… and another century.
It’s only been one for you. How do you think I feel?
I sigh. “Like me, only twenty times stronger?”
Something like that.
Next up is Detective Paolo Serrano of the Seattle PD. I met him four years ago when he was a patrolman. You could say he fell into my life quite unexpectedly. I’d been out hunting in Lake Washington due to a sudden craving for shellfish that came out of nowhere like a pregnancy urge―fat chance of that though. Any ability I had to spawn went away when I drowned. Or almost drowned. Or, whatever. Anyway, after a splash, I see headlights coming at me underwater. Officer Serrano’d been involved in a high-speed chase over the Evergreen Point Bridge, and a large truck objected to his cruiser’s presence.
Nose down, his car sank so fast, he still had air in the cabin and couldn’t get the doors open. And, just my luck, he landed right in front of me. We made eye contact. I’ll give him that, he’s damn fortunate I’m not Barnaby. I had three choices: one, get my ass out of there and hope―if he survives―people think he’s insane. However, as with that woman on the cruise, something inside me couldn’t leave him alone. My other option would’ve been to kill him, but I try not to eat cops… too many calories from all the donuts. So that left me with option three… help.
Needless to say, tearing the door off a police car and carrying him at high speed to the nearest bridge pylon proved he hadn’t hallucinated me. There’d been too many people up top for me to stick around and charm him into forgetting me, so I hung my hopes one them thinking him crazy and disappeared into the depths. A few weeks later, the guy finds my office. I’d been about to ‘encourage’ him to think he’d imagined the whole thing, but you know, having an ‘in’ with the cops isn’t a bad idea. So, he’s the second normal human who’s ever known my secret, aside from my mother.
He made his bones last November. Eight months a detective, and sometimes I help him out. Mostly, he helps me. Still, I tease him a bit.
“Officer Serrano?” I purr, and picture him shaking his head at my ‘forgetting’ his rank. Again.
“Now I know you’re doing that on purpose. What’s up, Alex?”
I give him the quick version. “I was wondering if you had anything on him that might help? I know you can’t give me specific details, but a heads up on if either David or his wife have any serious legal worries would be great.”
“Yeah, I see the report from the parents. Missing for between forty-eight and seventy-two hours. Whole family. We’ve confirmed they went on a weekend trip, but no one seems to know where. Investigators are letting the trip play out first before they take the report as something more serious than a long vacation. At the moment, it seems more a case of over-protective parents than anything we need to get involved with. Record’s clean. Not even a parking ticket. Guy’s got a white Chevy Tahoe.” Serrano gives me the plate. “Looks like he filed a report three months ago about receiving threatening phone calls, but no follow up. Calls were from a prepaid mobile. Wife’s clear, but she’s got an unpaid parking ticket from over a year ago.”
I hate burner phones so much. “All right, thanks, Paolo.”
“No problem. You think something’s happened? Got one of those feelings again?”
“Somewhat. More of an urgent thing… like something’s going to happen if I drag my ass too much. On that note… Gotta go. Ping me if you hear anything?”
“You got it. Stay safe.”
“Thanks.” I grin. Of course, I feel safer in the bad parts of town than I do in some jewelry stores. Too much damn silver in the air.
Computer locked, cell phone on the belt, I head out to my Rubi and program my GPS with the address for David Strickland’s house in the Greenwood area of Seattle. A twenty-four-minute drive later, I pull up to a rather modest home across the street from a park/playground. Sandel Park, according to my Garmin. Hmm. Guess the whole ‘money thing’ is pretty new for him.
The house is small, white, with a square fence around a yard. It’s got an attached garage, at least. Looking at the place, I’d never think a CEO lived here. Either this guy has yet to upgrade his digs to go along with his paycheck, or he’s the type who prefers not to advertise. Maybe
Gerald overstated things and they haven’t quite gotten rich yet. I’ve only got his father’s opinion of ‘doing well.’
I park by the fence, noting the driveway empty. If the man can get a Tahoe in that garage, he’s not only a programming expert, he’s mastered interdimensional travel. Heck, my Rubi wouldn’t even fit in there. I’m astounded they can live here with a child. Kids take up tons of room.
No one answers the doorbell, not that I’m surprised. A couple days’ worth of mail has built up in the box, and a scattering of outdoor toys litters the front yard. I wander around to the right, nosing past a tiny side porch, and make my way to the backyard. Nice deck, no pool, more toys: a swing set and one of those huge playhouses. Judging by the thick weeds around its base, Hannah’s already grown out of it.
Circling the house twice, checking windows and doors for signs of damage, offers little information. The property is pristine. A tiny hum goes off at the back of my mind, a bit of a danger sense I’ve had ever since I became more-than-human. It’s faint, which means I’m about to be surprised by something, but the danger is minimal.
I whirl to look behind me the same instant a pudgy thirty-something guy in a blue polo shirt and track pants walks around the corner of David’s house.
“Hi there―” I begin, before he screams and jumps back, brandishing a cheap Home Shopping Network type katana with a plastic handle and a 440-stainless blade.
The most innocent smile I’m capable of gets him to lower the sword. If I adjust my posture enough, I can shave a couple years off my apparent age and fake being seventeen, but I don’t get the feeling I need to appeal to this guy’s instinct to protect a ‘lost ingénue.’
He nods toward the house. “You a realtor or something? Snooping around Dave’s place?”
“Actually, I’m a private investigator. David’s parents hired me to find him.” I tug a business card out of my jeans and offer it. “You must be his neighbor.”
He glances briefly at the card before staring at me in awe. “Wow. You’re good.”
“You’re barefoot, wearing track pants, and carrying a cheap samurai sword. You didn’t walk very far like that, and you would’ve needed to be close to have seen me looking around.”
