Quentin kept his voice low as well when he said, "I believe her, Nate. I believe we need to search that tack room."
"Yeah, I know you believe her. The question is, what do I tell Steph — Ms. Boyd — to convince her?"
"You said she was agreeable when you talked to her last night."
"Yeah, but she wasn't happy about the situation. Now I'm supposed to get her up at dawn to okay this? Look, what do you really expect to find in there?"
"I don't know. Something. Something to help us figure out who murdered Missy and Jeremy Grant — and who knows how many of the others."
"You're expecting a lot of a lousy tack room, Quentin. People in and out all day, every day. What could be hidden in there?"
"I don't know," Quentin repeated. "But I think we need to find out."
Nate pursed his lips and blew out a slightly impatient breath. He looked tired, which wasn't surprising; he might have gotten five or six hours' sleep before Quentin's call pulled him out of his own bed, but it was more likely he'd been working in his office until well after midnight.
"You're asking me to go out on a pretty goddamned long limb here," he said finally. "We both know a thorough search of that room is going to mean checking under floorboards and behind walls. If we don't find anything after all that, the owners of this place are going to raise hell."
"I know. I wouldn't ask it, Nate, if I wasn't convinced we'll find something worthwhile in there."
The cop studied him for a long, silent moment, then sighed again. "Ah, shit. Okay, I'll go roust Ms. Boyd, see if I can think of a reasonable explanation to give her. You got any suggestions?"
Quentin was more or less accustomed to coming up with reasonable explanations for psychic "hunches" or leads, since the SCU members often found themselves in that position, but this time he was stumped. Absolutely nothing he knew of in the information he had on the missing and dead kids connected them in any unusual way with these stables. Nothing.
No connection, no warrant.
"I wish I did, but... sorry."
"And I don't suppose Ms. Brisco is ready to go public with this psychic stuff?"
"I doubt it. She's only beginning to believe it herself."
"She believes enough to insist there's something hidden in that tack room. Because another ghost told her so?"
Diana had already returned to her cottage to get dressed — at Quentin's insistence — by the time Nate had arrived, so the cop hadn't yet spoken to her. About any of her... encounters, including the one the previous afternoon. Which was probably why he sounded frustrated.
Probably.
"The ghost of another one of the missing kids told her so, Nate. Rebecca Morse. That's one missing kid you should definitely remember; you worked on her case."
Nate was frowning now. "Yeah. Yeah, I worked on it. She went out to play in the gardens one morning, and nobody admitted to seeing her once she stepped off the back veranda. We never found a trace of her. My boss at the time decided her father had snatched her; there'd been an ugly divorce. But we couldn't trace him."
"Trust me, the father didn't snatch her. Or, at any rate, she never left The Lodge." Quentin glanced toward Ruppe, and added, "I'll wait here while you talk to Ms. Boyd, if you don't mind."
"You suspect Ruppe?"
"He was here twenty-five years ago. He's here now. That's all I know." Quentin was also wary of the fact that Ruppe had turned up here when, if Quentin hadn't followed her, Diana would have been alone and vulnerable. Maybe the stable manager would have posed no threat to her even so, but Quentin wasn't prepared to accept that as a given.
There had to be a reason, after all, why his own abilities had sent him down here after her. Maybe he had just needed to wake her, to pull her from the gray time before she remained there too long. Or maybe the threat to Diana had been of the flesh-and-blood sort.
Quentin didn't know. Yet.
"Considering the precious little we've got," Nate said with another sigh, "I can't say as I blame you for what's probably grasping at straws."
"I know he was questioned after Missy was murdered. I read the file." He had memorized it.
"Then you know the cops at the time couldn't find a whiff of anything suspicious about Ruppe."
"I know. But like I said, he was here then. He's here now. If nothing else, maybe he knows something he doesn't know he knows."
Nate considered that and nodded. "Yeah, maybe. People do, often enough. But don't question him, Quentin, not yet. He woke at what he states is his usual time and came down from his apartment to find two guests poking around in his tack room, so he's got a right to be rattled and pissed. Let's not make things worse until we've got reason to, okay?"
Quentin nodded. "Understood."
"Are you okay? You look a little..."
Thinking he probably looked a lot, Quentin grimaced and said, "Headache. A real bitch of a headache." Plus his ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton, like his sinuses, and his eyes burned and ached. He was definitely paying the price for his all-night vigil.
"You should take something for that," Nate said.
"Yeah. Yeah, I will." Quentin didn't bother to explain that painkillers couldn't touch this sort of thing. Nothing ever had, except time and rest.
Nate headed off toward The Lodge's main building, leaving Quentin and Ruppe eyeing one another across nearly half the distance of the barn's long hall. Quentin knew Ruppe undoubtedly had work to do; managing a stable comprising three separate barns and more than thirty horses was a full-time job even if others did most of the grunt work. The horses were already restless in anticipation of their morning feed, stamping their hooves and snorting softly; the maintenance crew would be showing up any moment to feed them and begin mucking out the stalls.
The clipboard hanging by the tack room listed three trail rides scheduled for today, as well as half a dozen classes for those beginning riders who wanted to do more than just hang on for dear life during future trail rides.
Ruppe clearly didn't have time to stand around all morning, much less engage in a pissing contest with the cops or Quentin. But it was just as obvious that he was jealous of his authority, and not about to give ground unless forced by Management to do so.
Quentin knew the type. He'd come up against them often enough in his years as a federal cop. He also knew that Nate was right in saying this wasn't the time to question the stable manager, badly as Quentin wanted to do that.
Nate would probably point out, however gently, that there was really no hurry, after all; Missy had been gone twenty-five years, and a few more hours or days or even weeks wasn't going to change that.
Probably.
But the restlessness Quentin had been conscious of last night had shifted abruptly into a deep, cold sense of foreboding this morning when Diana had opened her eyes so suddenly to make an eerily familiar statement.
"It's coming."
And it had required all his willpower to allow her to leave his sight. To walk away from him, back up the well-lit paths to her cottage in order to change. Because that was exactly what Missy had said to him twenty-five years before.
The last time he had seen her alive.
Ellie Weeks ate a piece of plain toast and sipped hot tea, longing for the black coffee that was her usual morning pick-me-up. But pregnancy and black coffee didn't appear to go together, at least where she was concerned; drinking the tea was infinitely preferable to puking her guts out. Besides which, The Lodge's head housekeeper, Mrs. Kincaid, had been watching her very closely the last few days, and Ellie couldn't afford to do anything even remotely suspicious.
Not again, at any rate.
Hitching her chair closer to Ellie's in the staff dining room, Alison Macon whispered, "Did you hear? About last night?"