Once again Jackie stood in the entry of Nick Anderson’s house. He had given her the keys without even asking. She wanted to say a jail cell had made him cooperative, but he had given them to her as they’d walked into the FBI building.
“Go look,” he had said. “Save you the effort of getting a warrant.”
She had snatched the keys from his hand without reply and left him cooling his stubborn ass in a holding cell. Gamble and a handful of others were searching Shelby’s house. She didn’t expect them to find anything. If there was something to find, Jackie figured Nick’s place would be where they would find it.
Nick had said something about Shelby wanting blood to help find Drake, but the rest of the conversation was a blurred-out wash of noise. Anger and fear had been churning through Jackie so furiously that nothing Nick had to say mattered. The fact that Shelby had attacked someone for blood, and Laurel had gone off with her, was enough. Now, in the quiet of Nick’s house, reason had crept back into Jackie’s senses. Laurel had likely just turned off her phone and forgot, but it was still unlike her, and the fact that Shelby did not answer either was worrisome. What if they had gone off on her motorcycle and crashed? They could both be dead in a ravine somewhere.
Jackie tried calling Laurel again for the twentieth time and clicked off when the voice mail began. “Damnit, Laur. You’re pissing me off.”
“What was that, Jack?” Agent Pederson stood in front of her, looking into the living room.
“Nothing. Just annoyed at Laurel.”
“Probably just got her phone off. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.” Jackie didn’t sound very convincing. “Take Warren and Smith down to the bedroom wing there. Summit, we’ll start upstairs in the loft.”
“Sounds good,” he said and marched up the steps two at a time.
The curving staircase opened onto a loft space that looked down on the entry on one side and the living room on the other. The roof peaked overhead, letting in light through a series of skylights. A wide hallway extended out in one direction over the bedroom wing, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. He had a small bookstore’s worth of books. At the opposite end she could see a pair of overstuffed leather chairs, a table and lamp between them. The loft area itself had a large desk with a computer monitor perched on one corner. The rest of the room drew most of Jackie’s attention, however. There, in all its gleaming black glory, was a baby grand. A Steinway. It looked far more impressive up close than it had from the living room floor.
“Son of a bitch.” Did it have to be a nicer, better-kept version of her own?
“Find something, Jack?”
“No, keep looking. Check the desk. I’ll look in the library.”
Jackie walked the length of the hall, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but for all intents and purposes it appeared to be just what it was. There were books on all manner of subjects, even an entire section devoted to the supernatural. Somebody else was going to get to catalog everything if it came to that.
“Storage area over the garage here, Jack!” Summit called down to her. “You want me to get the picks and open it?”
Jackie wandered back toward the loft. “Just break the fucking thing open.”
“It’s dead bolted.”
“Interesting. Get the picks then.”
Five minutes later, Summit had the storage door open. The men downstairs had turned up nothing of interest to that point. Jackie flicked on the light switch next to the door, and the interior flooded with light, revealing what Jackie could think of as only a museum.
Summit whistled. “Wow. What the hell is this?”
She stepped in, careful not to disturb anything. A life-size painting of a woman was mounted to the wall at the far end, some twenty-five feet away. A display case had rows of quilts neatly stacked inside. Next to it was an old rocking chair, draped with one of the quilts and stacked up with dolls-the old, handstuffed Raggedy Ann kind. There was an old flip-top desk, and Jackie saw when she walked up that the top had been changed to glass, turned into a display case, which covered a neatly arranged assortment of coins inside plastic sleeves.
“The little fucker,” Jackie muttered under her breath and opened the case. She grabbed the penny sitting in the last spot in the last row of the collection.
“Hey,” Summit exclaimed. “Is that the penny stolen from the evidence room?”
“I think so.” It would be interesting to hear Nick explain that one away.
“What is all this shit, you think?”
Jackie put the penny in her pocket and kept looking around. Though a museum had been the first thought that had come to mind, she realized now, as she approached the painting at the far end, what it really was. “Memories,” she said.
Nick Anderson had built a shrine to his dead family.
A framed piece of newsprint on the wall caught Jackie’s eye. The title, written on a small placard beneath the old news clipping, read, GWEN AND THE KIDS, FIRST DAY ON THE JOB, APRIL 1862. It was the photo Hauser had pulled up on his screen. There were a couple more old photos of the family. On top of a small curio stand by the painting was a small wooden box with tarot cards inside. Carefully, Jackie fanned through them. They were all in the same style as the one they had found, and-sure enough-the one they had was not in there.
The nervous pang of fear returned in full force. Jackie could not shake the feeling that Laurel was in serious danger. What if the freak-out about Jackie needing to be careful had really been intended for Laurel? What if her little visitor had been trying to tell her that she specifically was in danger? She gathered up the box, knocking over one of the photos, which she noticed had the names and ages of the family on the back. The realization hit her, a sucker punch to the gut, leaving her momentarily breathless. Gwen and Laurel were both thirty-one. How had she missed that?
“Summit,” she said, motioning to everything in the room. “Pictures. I want pictures of everything in here. I’ve got to head back now.”
He gave her a perplexed look. “We just got here.”
“Just do it, Summit. I’m going.” She pushed passed him and leaped down the stairs three at a time.