“Her name is Ava Holmes,” he said. “I guess they’ve been dating for six months or so. She works with Mike at the garden center.”
I took the paper. It had the one name and a phone number written on it, but nothing else. It would have to do. “Is that all you’ve got?” I asked.
“I … I think so. Honestly, it’s weird having someone in the house. You better go. If you leave me a card, I’ll give you a call if I can find anything out.”
I tried not to glance toward the kennel in the corner. I wanted to make my own exit before the open kennel was discovered. “I appreciate it.” I handed him one of my cards and let him herd me toward the front door, pretending not to notice the look of relief on Sam’s face as I left. I was soon back in my truck, glancing toward the woods, hoping to have another glimpse of the sphinx. “That was weird,” I told Maggie.
You’re telling me. Sphinx are really damned rare. I can’t imagine where Boris would get one.
“I was talking about Sam and the house. But yeah, that too.” I checked the scrap of paper, writing down the name and number in my phone so I didn’t lose it, then put my truck in gear. I was beginning to feel like letting that sphinx out of its kennel was going to come back and bite me. “At least we have a lead now. Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 6
I spent the rest of the day researching genealogy. Or rather, researching how to research genealogy. While I knew about DNA matches from my own work, the whole genealogy thing was way out of my wheelhouse, and I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t just a passing hobby – it was a thriving business, with millions of people into the same kind of genetic matching sites I’d tried to use. Thousands of online forums were dedicated to people trying to find their ancestors in the great, jumbled dustpan of American history that was the European western migration.
Many of those forums were dedicated to the mystery of trying to reconcile mixed-blood DNA. Apparently this was a well-known problem in the field. Nobody had an answer. But the forums did tell me something important: this was especially a problem for victims and former victims of Paronskaft.
Paronskaft was the largest of the imp companies that used to buy and sell human babies. My old nemesis, Kappie Shuteye, sat on the board of Paronskaft back in the seventies and eighties. Studying up on these forums I’d found, it turned out that mixed-blood humans were especially valuable to Paronskaft and that there were thousands of freed slaves trying to find out who their parents were.
But that was freed slaves. People whose contracts had been found when OtherOps raided Paronskaft back in the eighties. As far as I could tell, the fact that I was still enslaved made me unique.
And didn’t give me any help with getting free.
I remunerated on this all night, and then I went by Mum’s Hearth and Yard just after opening the next morning. There was only one employee working – a woman in her sixties who identified herself as “Mum” and did not like my questions about either Michael Pavlovich or his girlfriend, Ava. I was met with a curt “Ms. Holmes isn’t in for a couple of days” and a “You leave Mikey alone, he’s a good boy.” She wasn’t the slightest bit impressed by my fake OtherOps jacket, and within a few minutes I found myself back in my truck, watching the entrance to the garden center with no small amount of irritation.
It didn’t help that Maggie found the whole thing hilarious.
I tried a search for an Ava Holmes in the Hinkley area. Nothing came up. I searched for the phone number I’d been given and had the same luck. I fumed for several minutes as I tried to figure out what to do with the brand-new lead I thought I had. Maggie chuckled in the back of my head. Once I’d cooled down, I dashed off an email to a friend of mine who worked for Verizon, asking her to get me an address connected with Ava’s phone number. In return, I got an out-of-office email. I was just about to give up and head home for a couple hours when my phone rang.
“Hey, Alek, it’s Zeke.” Zeke was not a subtle guy, and I could hear in his tone after four words that he was calling to sell me something.
“What is it?” I asked grumpily.
“You having a bad day, big guy? I might have something to cheer you up.” He didn’t wait for me to ask, rushing on with, “You know how you said you’re trying to track down a thrall?”
“Do you have a lead for me?”
“A small one, I think. I’ll hook you up for two hundred dollars.”
“You tell me what it is, and I’ll decide if it’s worth that much,” I retorted. It was the same old song and dance that we both knew well. Who won often depended on if I was getting desperate or if Zeke badly needed money. He must have had a loan shark breathing down his neck, because he took only a few seconds to think about it.
“Okay, okay. Listen to this: Bay Village police department got a quiet tip last night that someone’s been stealing stock from a little local clinic.”
“What, like drugs?” I asked. “That’s not useful.”
“Nope. Blood. Seems that the manager found them two pints short last night. Could be your missing thrall.”
I considered the information. Thralls weren’t exactly like vampires – they didn’t need blood to survive. But being connected to a vampire magically gave them a thirst. Usually their master would grace them with the table scraps, but a thrall on the run wouldn’t have access to those scraps. On the other hand, now that I knew about places like Sip’n’Bite, I wasn’t so sure a thrall would need to steal to survive anyways. I said as much to Zeke.
“Oh, come on. Someone is stealing that blood. Could be your runaway.”
“Or it might be that the manager counted wrong. Have the cops even opened a case, or was this just a tip?”
“Just a tip. These small clinics always try to handle things internally.”
I snorted and was ready to hang up on Zeke when Maggie suggested, He could be avoiding Sip’n’Bites, worried that someone like you is staking them out.
Good point. I guess it’s worth our own stakeout if we’ve got no other leads today. “That,” I told Zeke, “is worth no more than a hundred bucks. If you need it now, I’ll send it over immediately.”
Zeke grumbled a little but agreed. He gave me the address of the clinic. I hung up and sent the payment over digitally, then punched the address into my GPS and started driving. It was in a little strip mall tucked between two hair salons and behind a Walmart. I watched the front for a few minutes, trying to come up with the best course of action. This was a shaky lead at best, but I did have time on my side. For once. “You okay for a stakeout?” I asked Maggie.
I’m game, just park closer.
It wasn’t a big place, so I found a shady spot as close as I could get to the clinic itself. “This work?” I asked Maggie.
Oh yeah, this is perfect. No wards, no magical anything. The place is an open book. I’ll take the first watch. If I get bored, I’ll wake you up.
“Thanks.” I turned up the radio, pulled my hat down over my head, and dozed off to the sound of Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever.”
Stakeouts are by far the most boring part of my job. They are twelve hours of nothing, with as little as a three second window of excitement when you realize it’s all been worth it – and sometimes not even that, when you’ve got the wrong building or are following the wrong guy. Maggie made things infinitely better because she enjoyed people-watching with her jinn senses. We’d play word games, chat about the inanity of life, and sometimes listen to an audiobook.