Day Shift

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “I wondered if they’d staked out the Goldthorpe house, but after I thought about it, I decided the man, Falco, asked Lewis, or the maid, some questions about anyone who’d come by the house lately. Lewis would definitely have blabbed about the stranger who’d been there that day, the blonde who’d been asking about Rachel’s application for home health care. So I think this guy was posted there just in case, and he got lucky.” She smiled. “Or so he thought.”

“I kind of followed that,” Manfred said, after working it through. “So you have a long-standing enemy who has a lot, a lot, of money and persistence.”

“Yeah. My dad. And most specifically, my dad’s shadow, Ellery McGuire.”

“Didn’t see that coming,” Manfred said after a moment’s silence. He knew that Olivia would be angry when she realized how much she had told him; he could only blame her talkative bout on the lack of sleep and the shock.

He had no idea who his own father had been, but that had left him at liberty to imagine his father loved him and had had to be absent for some fabulous reason. At least his father had never sent a henchman to capture him. “And you told me this because?”

“Because you were able to tell I was in trouble last night. You somehow knew. How’d you do that?”

“The piece of paper with the phone number on it. You told me not to enter it in my phone. And you’d written on the paper yourself, which made it a personal object. When I held it, I knew you were in trouble.”

She nodded, just a quick jerk of her head. “Okay. I won’t doubt you again.”

“I only get a true reading now and then,” he admitted. “But I got one for you. So treasure it.”

Manfred had a hundred questions he would have liked to ask Olivia, but now was not the time. There might never be a time. Somehow, he felt weirdly fonder of Olivia now, though he knew she was a killer. It was an unsettling feeling, somewhat like wanting to scratch a Bengal tiger behind the ears.

“Here’s what happened at the house,” Olivia said abruptly. “And by the way, good job on the floor plan.”

Manfred felt absurdly pleased at the compliment. He nodded. “I have a pretty good memory,” he said. “So you made it up to the second floor?”

Olivia told him about her first venture into the Goldthorpe mansion and her return trip that night.

“The guy was there to bring you to your dad? Or this McGuire?”

“He called Ellery McGuire, not my dad. It’s possible my dad said something like, ‘Find my daughter and bring her to me.’ My dad is the man who causes things to be done. He’s not picky about the method. Everyone takes cues from that. So I guess those were Ellery’s orders. Otherwise, the guy could have killed me right off, and no one would have known. Being dead would be better than going back to my father.”

“To you, being captured is the equivalent of being killed?”

She looked at him, surprised. Then she gave a short jerk of the head. “You’re right,” she said. “Or close enough.”

“And Lemuel found you?”

“He’d already been to the house and back by the time I got to the motel,” she said. “He rearranged the body, rather than trying to get rid of it. There was no way I could have taken the time to do that. For one thing, I wasn’t sure Falco was alone.”

“You thought there might be more than one guy there?”

“He was alone, but he could have had a team circling the block or parked nearby.”

“So we’re back where we started, at least as far as finding the jewelry I supposedly stole.”

“Yeah.” Olivia slumped in her chair, which made her look younger and less in control. Manfred much preferred Olivia the other way. He knew that competent, cold Olivia better.

After a moment or two, she said, “I think this means that sooner or later they’re going to come check you out. They don’t know why I was at the Goldthorpes’, they just know I was at the hotel, but sooner or later my father’ll think of looking at you.”

“Should I be worried about that?” Manfred asked, trying to sound like he wasn’t anxious already.

“Yes,” she said. “We all should. If the Rev is flipping out about there being reporters here to cover the story you’re a part of… he’ll go ballistic if my father’s people come around.”

“Because they’re much more scary?”

“So much more,” she said, simply stating a fact. “We’ve got to figure out another way to get at this problem. I don’t know that it’ll draw them off, but we have to make progress. It’s too bad we can’t just…”

Manfred, who’d been refilling Olivia’s coffee cup, looked up to find out why she’d stopped. She was staring at Manfred as though he’d sprouted a horn.

“What?” he said.

“Get her husband to tell you,” Olivia said.

“What?”

“Where the damn jewelry is, of course! You’re a medium. Call Rachel up, however you do it. Or her husband, what’s his name?”

“Morton. I can try,” Manfred said. He felt like smacking himself on the forehead. “It would help if we could get someone near to her to cooperate, but I’m sure her daughters wouldn’t want anything to do with a séance. And Lewis is out of the question.”