Dad cried out, and on instinct I grabbed his hand. At my touch, he appeared to relax, the tension draining from his haggard face.
“I’m here,” I said.
He shifted, began to snore.
After another fifteen minutes or so, satisfied that he was doing a little better, I pulled a spare blanket and pillow from his linen closet and lay on the floor next to his bed. There wasn’t a lot of room, but I didn’t expect that I’d sleep much no matter where I bedded down.
I surprised myself. My head had barely hit the pillow before I woke up to a bright morning and the song of a cactus wren drifting in through the open window. I sat up and peered over the edge of my dad’s bed. He was still asleep, soundly, peacefully. No flinching that I could see.
Relieved, I gathered up the blanket and pillow and padded out of the room, making as little noise as possible. I hated to leave him alone after the night he’d had, but I had work to do, and my dad’s trailer didn’t even have Internet. I hoped that he would remember to eat today, and I wrote him a quick note promising to come back in the next day or two. I had no idea if he would find it or read it or be able to make sense of it. But I put it on the counter in his small kitchen, where it was most likely to catch his eye.
I went out to my car and opened the door to climb in. But then I paused, gazing back at the trailer. I’d learned a long time ago to trust my magical instincts. And they told me that there was a common thread running through all that had happened in recent days: My dad’s pain, the killing of James Howell and the disabling of Flight 595, even the odd burst of magic that had saved my life the night I confronted Mark Darby. I couldn’t make sense of it, not yet. But I was sure it was right there in front of me. All I needed to do was connect the dots.
I got in the car and started back toward the city, a cloud of dust rising behind me, blood red in the early morning sun.
CHAPTER 9
I stopped at home to put on fresh clothes before going to my office and firing up the computer and my seven-hundred-dollar Saeco espresso machine. What can I say? I really, really like coffee, especially Sumatran. I’ll eat cold pizza for breakfast and store-brand ice cream instead of the fancy kinds that come in pint containers costing seven bucks a pop. But try to sneak cheap coffee by me and I’ll know it from the smell.
Once I had a bit of caffeine in me, I searched online for everything I could find on Regina Witcombe. Most of what I read focused on her philanthropic activities; finding detailed information about her business dealings proved frustrating. Apparently, she didn’t like to shine a spotlight on that part of her life. But I kept digging and over the next hour managed to piece together a rough portrait of her rise to corporate power.
Her husband, Michael, had died while yachting-alone-off the Malibu coast about ten years before. She had been in Belize, traveling with friends. The story was he drank a bit too much wine and wasn’t prepared when his vessel encountered high winds and rough seas. The Coast Guard believed that he fell off the boat and drowned; the yacht, the Regina, of course, was discovered a day later, drifting near Santa Catalina Island. Regina and her two daughters inherited everything, and after a brief power struggle with the corporate board of Witcombe Financial, she was named its new CEO. She possessed a business degree from the Wharton School, and a degree in law from Georgetown, and she had been active in the company as a vice-president and in-house counsel. It wasn’t like she was unqualified, but she leap-frogged several senior execs to take the position, and a few of them were pretty unhappy about it. In the wake of her elevation to CEO, three of Witcombe’s top executives left the company.
The controversy didn’t last long, however, because the board of directors and the rest of her executive team closed ranks behind her, and because the company continued to do well under her leadership.
Nevertheless, reading about Michael Witcombe’s death and all that followed set off alarm bells in my head. A tragic accident, a perfect alibi, an inheritance worth more than a billion dollars. It all struck me as too convenient, too easy. Add in rumors of dark magic, and I was ready to call Kona and tell her to have the case reopened. Never mind that it was a few hundred miles outside her jurisdiction.
There was no shortage of photographs of her online. She was an attractive woman: auburn hair, blue eyes, brilliant smile, always impeccably dressed. She had been in her early forties when Michael died, and so was in her early fifties now, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at her. I found a video of her as well, speaking to stockholders at Witcombe’s annual meeting. She spoke in a warm alto, her manner easy, charming even. But I couldn’t tell for certain, from either the clip I watched or the photos I found, whether she was really a weremyste. The blurring of features that I experienced when face-to-face with another sorcerer didn’t translate to these media. I had no idea how I might get close enough to this woman to see for myself if she was a myste. And I wasn’t yet ready to take Jacinto Amaya’s word for it.
My perusal of the roster of Witcombe’s corporate officers didn’t produce much, although I jotted down the names of the highest ranking executives to run by Kona and Billie.
I kept digging, collecting tidbits about Regina Witcombe’s life like a mouse hoarding crumbs. It seemed that two years ago she had sold her estate in Scottsdale and bought a place in Paradise Valley for a cool eleven million and change. Must be nice to have options like that.
Something in my mind clicked again. I picked up the phone and called a friend of mine, an ex-girlfriend as it happened, who had helped me find the office in which I was sitting.
“This is Sally Peters.”
“Hey, Sally. It’s Jay Fearsson.”
“Hey there, stranger. How’s the PI biz?”
“It’s keeping me busy, paying some bills.”
“Getting you in the paper, too. I saw that you got shot.”
“Yeah, I’m better now.”
“Well, good. Wanna take me out for dinner? Maybe get lucky?”
“I thought you were engaged.”
“I was,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sal. But I’m going to have to pass on the getting lucky thing.”
“Jay Fearsson, do you have a girlfriend?”
A big, fat, stupid grin split my face. Billie and I had been together for a couple of months, but the novelty of being in a serious relationship hadn’t worn off yet. “Yep. Pretty crazy, right?”
“Wow, yeah. Pretty crazy. So if you’re not calling me for a night on the town, are you calling for business?”
“Sort of. I need a little information. If a house was sold a couple of years ago, can you still pull up the listing on your system, maybe tell me some of the details?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “A couple of years? I dunno. But I can try. Where was the house?”
“Scottsdale. It belonged to Regina Witcombe.”
She laughed. “The Witcombe estate? I don’t have to do a search. Every agent in the greater Phoenix area was drooling over those commissions-one agency got both the sale of the Scottsdale house and the purchase of the mansion in Paradise Valley. Both were handled by Sonoran Winds Realty.”
Bingo.
“You don’t happen to know who the listing agent was, do you?”
“For which one?”
I wasn’t sure it mattered, but I said, “The Scottsdale sale.” I held my breath, hoping against hope that she would remember that name as well.
“Oh God. I should remember. She was the toast of the town for weeks afterward.”
“It was a woman.”