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I looked through the piles, separated them into groups, and when that didn’t reveal any universal truths, put them into chronological order.
By the time Jeff knocked on the door, I had several tidy piles of paper and absolutely no clues whatsoever. Maybe he’d had more luck.
“Hey,” I said. “What did you find?”
“Nada.” He pulled out a chair and took a seat. “She plays a lot of solitaire, which just seems extra-sad.”
“Travel plans?”
“The ticket looked completely legitimate. But there was nothing in her Web history that indicated she booked it on that computer.” He shrugged. “Could be someone else booked it; could be she used a faster computer.”
“So that doesn’t really help us narrow anything down.”
“It does not,” Jeff agreed.
I frowned down at the box. “Honestly, I don’t know anything at all so far. I’ve looked through everything in this box, stacked and reordered it, looking for a pattern.” I gestured at the receipts I’d organized. “These piles are geographical. I was hoping something would hit. But I’m not seeing anything.” I glanced at him. “Do you want to take a look? Maybe there’s shifter significance I don’t see.”
“I doubt that,” he said, but settled in to peruse.
Chapter Ten
PAPER MOON
We worked quietly, deliberately, searching through the only potential bit of evidence we had. And it wasn’t much.
“I think keeping all this stuff would weigh me down,” I said, pulling out a grocery receipt for utterly innocuous items: milk, eggs, cookies, paper towels.
“Yeah,” he said, flipping through a stack of greeting cards. “But you have Ethan, a family, friends. You have connections.” He flipped open a card, grimaced at whatever he found there, and closed it again. He put the card in the pile and looked at me. “I don’t think she does. I mean”—he spread his hands over the stack—“all this stuff would be relatively meaningless to us. Cards from people who don’t sound like they know her at all, bills, receipts. Photographs of other people’s kids. It’s almost like she was trying to build a life from paper, from the stacks of stuff that she kept in the house.”
That was both poetic and sad, and it made more sense than I preferred to admit. If Jeff was right, Aline led a sad and lonely life that had been capped by a potentially sad and lonely end. We just weren’t sure yet.
“So where does that get us?”
He pushed his hair behind his ears. “I’m not sure.”
I stood up, getting a fresh perspective on the piles we’d made on the dark wood table. “Okay. So she’s missing. The question right now is whether she’s missing on purpose, or because she’s a victim of the mattacker.”
“The ‘mattacker’?” Jeff asked, blinking.
“The magical attacker. I shortened it a little.”
Jeff chuckled. “Shorten it all you want. But nobody else in the house is going to refer to the perp as a ‘mattacker.’”
“You’re probably right. But they aren’t in the room right now. So—we know a flight was purchased for Aline—whether or not by her.” I looked back at Jeff. “I don’t suppose you know anyone with an airline connection?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “Why?” But before I could answer, his brows lifted in understanding. “Because if she got on the plane, she probably wasn’t kidnapped. I don’t know anybody offhand, and I’d prefer not to hack into transpo databases. That kind of stuff gets you flagged.”
“I think that’s a legit reason,” I assured him. “So she gets a storage locker, buys a flight, comes to Lupercalia. Leaves right before or right after the attack.”
“There’s just nothing here that touches on any of that,” Jeff said. “At least, not that I can see. But that’s part of the problem—it could all be relevant, and we wouldn’t even know it because we don’t really know what’s going on here.” He picked up a faded and water-stained receipt. “She got gas.” He picked up a strip of three yellow tickets. “She went to the carnival.” He picked up a small wax paper bag with a logo on one side. “She bought cookies at Fran’s Delights of Loring Park. That has got to be the most pretentious name for a cookie joint I’ve ever heard, but I’m getting off track.”
I was proud he realized that. He didn’t always.
“None of this stuff means anything without context, and shifter context isn’t helping much. None of it, as far as I can see, is shifter related. She lived like a human. Bought things like a human.”
“Could that be the reason she’s gone? She pretended to be a little too human?”
Jeff shrugged. “I don’t think we can rule it out. It might be time to call your team.”
I smiled at him. “I think we can arrange that.” I pulled out my phone and started up the program Luc had created for the House’s guards. It had timers, alarms, alerts, and, according to him, a “slick” little videoconferencing setup.
I set up the phone on the table and turned on the app, selecting the option to connect with the Ops Room.
An animated clip of Luc filled the screen. His animated cowboy hat bobbed back and forth as he screeched “Show me the Ops Room!” over and over again.
“Is that supposed to be a play on ‘Show me the money’?” Jeff wondered.
“God only knows,” I said, smiling with relief when the real Luc replaced the faux one.
He smiled brightly at Jeff and me. “Sentinel, I’m glad to see you’re taking advantage of the technological resources we’ve provided for you. And that you’re alive. Ethan said things got hairy. And for you, too, Jeff.”
“Being a hostage is always a bummer,” Jeff said. “But we came out all right.”
“Have you heard anything about Scott?”
“Scott?” Jeff asked with alarm.
“Kowalcyzk’s interviewing him today,” Luc explained. “Jonah said the lawyers are negotiating with the mayor’s office, the police commissioner, the feds. No other news yet.”
“At least he’s got advocates,” Jeff said.
“And loud ones. The lawyers are all over TV, the Web, talking about how poorly their client is being treated, how it’s baldly unconstitutional. They’ll get him out, or set him up for a civil suit later.”
