When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel (22 page)

Her face pinched, as if he’d just said something nasty. “You heard correctly.”

“She around?”

“And how does she relate to Mr. Reinholt’s death?”

“We think she—”

“We don’t know that she does,” Gabriel said loudly over his overeager partner. “But I’ve heard a few rumors that suggest Reinholt got along better with vamps than with the average weren. Thought if anyone at the mansion had chatted him up it would be her.”

Beside him, Everil shifted in his chair.

“I see.” Delia conjured a smile, but shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid she no longer resides here. She left when Gunnolf did.”

“So she’s not in tight with Lihter?”

He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the face pinched even tighter. “No. She most definitely is not.”

He nodded. “Right. Well, thank you for your time.”

“Of course.” She walked them to the door and handed them off to the uniformed valet, who watched with an eagle eye as they piled back into the tiny car and headed off down the drive.

Gabriel waited until they were back on the main road, then glanced at Everil. “So what did we learn?”

“Not a thing,” he said, sounding particularly snippy. “Maybe if we’d told her the theory that Caris was working for Lihter …”

“Yes, I’m sure that would have opened her right up. Look, Ev, the trick in investigating is to pull the information out one strand at a time. You try to snatch the whole blanket, and everything will just get ripped to shreds.”

Everil scowled. “But we don’t have anything to work with.”

“The hell we don’t. We know that there’s no way that Lihter would have sent Caris to take care of Reinholt.”

Everil nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, yeah. So, if she was working for someone, it must’ve been Gunnolf.”

“He certainly tops the list,” Gabriel said.

“But why would Gunnolf want Reinholt dead?”

“No idea. But we’re going to have to tug that line.”

“So we’re going to Scotland?”

Gabriel nodded slowly. “I think we may have to. How are we doing on the rest of it?” He’d put Everil in charge of tracking down Caris’s contacts. Vamps or werens she tended to hang with. Confidants she’d made over the years. He wanted to talk to them all. You never knew where a key bit of information would come from.

“Got some more on that just a few hours ago. I was going to type it up at the hotel and forward it to you.”

Gabriel turned to his partner. “I think the conversational approach will do us just as well.”

“Right. Sure.” Everil cleared his throat. “Well, you already know she cozied up to Tiberius for a butt load of centuries. Then she up and betrays him and heads over to Gunnolf’s camp.”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why’d she betray him?”

“Uh.” Everil’s mouth hung open. “I—”

“Calm down, it’s not a pop quiz. But it might be relevant. Make some inquiries. Let’s see if we can’t figure it out. It may have been twenty years ago, but considering the life spans we’re dealing with, that’s hardly ancient history.”

“Right. Got it. Uh, there is one other guy. Human.”

“She hangs out with a human?”

“Apparently he’s in her family tree. Name’s Orion.”

Gabriel frowned, trying to remember why that name sounded familiar. “Richard Erasmus Orion? The medical examiner for Division 6?”

“That’s the guy. You know him?”

“Our paths have crossed.” He liked Orion. The human was thorough and smart. “Good work. We may have to pay Mr. Orion a visit. Could be he knows something about our suspect’s defection to the weren camp.”

“You think he’d tell us?”

“Won’t know until we ask.”

After that, they rode in silence a few miles, until the chirp of Gabriel’s cellphone filled the car. Gabriel didn’t recognize the number, but he picked it up, hopeful that one of the weren at the château had heard about their visit and was calling with under-the-table information.

That wasn’t the case. Instead, the caller was Peter Dietz, a former PEC agent turned private investigator whom Gabriel knew from his Texas days.

“Gabe, buddy! I heard you’re in town.”

“Shit, man. You heard wrong. I’m in Paris.”

Peter chuckled. “That’s what I mean. Paris is my playground these days. I’m supposed to be in Zurich tomorrow.
I just called your office to track you down. See if you wanted to come to the big city. They told me you’re down here in my neck of the woods. You staying the night?”

“Looks that way.”

“Tell me where you’re staying. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Buy me two,” Gabriel said with a grin, “and you’ve got a deal.”

Even at night, the area bustled with shoppers and tourists hurrying along, paying no attention to the two vampires who moved through the crowd, looking at everything and hoping that some idea would leap out at them.

“This is ridiculous,” Caris finally said. Windowshopping for fabulous leather jackets was all good and well, but it was hardly helping them locate the girl. “What do you expect to find?
Help me
written in blood and signed with an
N
?”

“I was hoping to retrace the girl’s steps. It might give us insight into who took her. And where.” He looked her up and down. “You’re a woman.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

“Where would
you
go?”

“Here?” She looked around the street, a bit baffled. Caris had never considered herself a girlie-girl. Even when she’d been human, she’d been more interested in having her brothers teach her how to fight and ride than in doing needlework and brushing her hair.

Despite that, she had to acknowledge that there was something decidedly decadent about the Zeil, and it made her want to whip out cash and buy all the fabulous clothes that filled the glass storefronts. She’d once heard the area referred to as the Fifth Avenue of Germany, and there was no denying the accuracy of that assessment.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It’s all so overwhelming.”

“Naomi had a train to catch, and she was a vampire. That meant she was here at night, with a limited amount of time to shop before she had to get to the station.”

“He said she loved to shop, too, right? So she was probably one of those power shoppers. The women you see on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive.”

“A fair assumption.”

“So she’d want one-stop shopping.” She turned and pointed to the ten-story glass structure that loomed a block away. “The Zeilgalerie.”

It wasn’t a sure bet, but it was a good one, and they hurried that way, then entered the unique shopping mall. Like the Guggenheim museum, there were no stairs, just a sloping ramp so you could walk and shop and walk and shop. It was chrome and glass and shiny, and Caris could see how someone with a shopping fetish could get lost in there for hours. Even so …

She turned to Tiberius. “We’re still floundering. She would have been into fashion. We’ve got a picture. Should we divide up and start talking to salesclerks?”

He nodded, but it was a distracted gesture. He was looking up the slope. “I can see three ATM machines just from here.”

“Except she didn’t use them,” Caris said. They’d already run her credit and debit cards. None had been used in Frankfurt. None had been used for weeks, actually.

“No, but look at the placement of the machines.”

She did and immediately saw what he was talking about. “The angle of the ATMs. Their cameras must cover at least three or four storefronts.”

“And look,” he added, pointing to the ceiling where the mall’s own security cameras swept the halls.

“Tedious, but we might get lucky. Why don’t I contact the banks and you contact mall security? With any luck, one of us will see her.”

“I think we can do it more efficiently. Considering the placement of the machines and cameras, I’d be surprised if the mall didn’t require the various banks to feed their surveillance footage through mall security.”

“So we should be able to check both in the security office.”

“All we need to do is convince one of the security guards to give us access,” she said, then smiled. “Fortunately, you can be very persuasive.”

They found the security office in the basement. A bald officer sat behind a barren desk, and he scowled up at them as they approached.

“We’d like to see your security footage,” Tiberius said in flawless German.

The officer snorted. “I’m sure you would.”

Caris waited for Tiberius to compel the officer, but he didn’t. Instead he very calmly and politely asked to see the security chief.

“We’re searching for a missing girl,” he said, when the chief arrived. A rotund man with beady eyes and sweat stains marring his underarms.

“Are you with the police?”

“No,” Tiberius answered. “But it’s important.”

The chief glanced sideways at the officer. “Come back with a cop. Until then—”

“We’re not going to do that,” Tiberius said, catching the chief’s eye. “You see, we’re in a bit of a rush.”

“A rush. I see.” The chief nodded. “If you’re in a hurry, then of course. We’ll help any way we can.”

Tiberius’s smile was thin, and just slightly triumphant. “You’re very kind.”

“Huh?” At the table, the officer was looking between the two of them as if he was witnessing a tennis match. “Sir, the rules. We can’t just let—”

Tiberius shifted his piercing gaze to the officer. “You can, and you have. And I assure you, we appreciate the assistance.”

“Right. Well, sure. Anything we can do.”

Tiberius pointed toward the door. “Shall we?”

He and Caris followed the security chief inside, then settled into chairs by the monitoring system as he scrambled to cue up the machine to the proper days. As a rule, she tried not to influence humans. Especially now that she’d become close to Orion it just seemed rude somehow. But she had to admit that when you really needed it, the trick came in pretty damn handy.

Unfortunately, after skimming through hours of footage, she was beginning to think that as handy as influencing humans might be in general, today it wasn’t paying off.

And then she saw the girl. “Stop!” She leaned forward, her finger touching the monitor. The camera had caught Naomi emerging from a lingerie store, and although someone was crossing in front of her, the glimpse of her face was enough to let Caris know they’d found the right girl.

“Take it forward one frame at a time,” Tiberius ordered the human. He complied, and they watched as Naomi exited the store and turned to the right, heading down the sloping mall walkway.

She exited the frame.

“Shit,” Caris said.

“What’s the next camera that would pick her up?” Tiberius asked.

The security chief fiddled with some knobs, and the monitor snapped to a different view. The time code was the same, and after four seconds clicked by, Naomi strolled into the frame.

This time, they saw two men behind her. They followed her out of frame, and they were still following her when the next camera picked her up.

“Weren?”

Caris shook her head. “I don’t know them, and I can’t tell from here.”

On screen, Naomi stopped at the elevator to the parking levels. The two men stood behind her, their faces entirely expressionless. Caris felt herself tense. They were going to take the girl, she was certain of it, and there wasn’t a damn thing Caris could do about it. It had already happened. All they could do was find her … and hopefully help her.

Beside her, Tiberius turned to the security chief. “You’ve been extremely helpful. Now, if you could just pull up the footage from the parking garage …”