“No.” He looked up. “Once I do that, he doesn’t need Adam anymore, does he? He…we were supposed to make the exchange that night, but I didn’t trust him. I told him so. I said he’d need to prove they weren’t his men. He laughed at me. He didn’t have to prove anything, but if I wanted to hang on to the device for a few days, why, he had plenty for me to do. That’s when he told me to call Rule and what to say when he got here.”
“He expected Rule to bring Cullen?”
Jasper nodded. “And you. And he wanted Rule to bring the Finder, but I couldn’t talk him into that.” Bitterly he added, “I wanted him to bring the Finder, too. If he had, I would have taken a chance. I could have passed one of you a note. Friar has my house most thoroughly bugged, so I had to follow his script when you were there, but I could have passed a note. If your Finder could have found Adam…but you didn’t bring her.”
“If your house is bugged, he must know you left it tonight.”
The twist of his mouth was meant to be a smile. “Now you’re impugning my professional abilities. I left recordings, of course. Several of them, because there are bugs in almost every room. No visual, but audio is damn near as tricky if it’s done well, and his people did a good job. But I’m better.”
“How long before your recordings end?”
He glanced at his watch. “I can stay another three hours, tops. The recordings will run out in four hours and seven minutes. Right about now,” he added, “I’m in the kitchen getting some nibbles from the refrigerator.”
“If he has someone watching—”
“The lights are on timers.”
A high-end thief would need to be good at fooling surveillance, she supposed.
“I don’t think there are watchers 24/7,” Rule said. “Chris and Allan haven’t spotted any. How did you leave your house without my men seeing you?”
“There’s a way to go from my basement to my neighbor’s. I go to the third floor in his house, out a window, and into that huge oak in his backyard. From that tree I connect with another one in the yard behind him, then down, out the gate, and away.”
“Your neighbor doesn’t mind you wandering through his house to get to his tree?”
“My goal is for him to remain unaware of it. Mr. Peterson is eighty-two, deaf, and goes to bed at nine every night, so this isn’t challenging. His dog has excellent hearing, but we’re buds, so he doesn’t object to me visiting.”
Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “Surely this is not the Mr. Peterson with the Great Dane.”
Jasper smiled faintly. “In fact, it is. Mr. Peterson is a remarkably fit eighty-two, and while Ajax has a bad habit of hopping over the fence when he’s bored, he behaves well on their daily walks.”
Drummond spoke from his spot near the wall. “Machek doesn’t sound all that retired to me.”
He didn’t to Lily, either. Jasper still had all the gadgets he needed to fool surveillance. He’d worked out a route to leave his house unseen and had apparently used it before tonight. “How long did it take you to make the recordings you’re using tonight?”
Jasper’s lips thinned. “I’ve had plenty of time. Nine days. When he first took Adam I suspected he’d bugged the house. Never mind why for now—I suppose you’ll want to hear all about that, but later. I didn’t know about him being a listener, not then, so I looked for less arcane ways of eavesdropping. Once I was sure I’d found all the bugs, I started making the recordings. It seemed likely I’d want to leave without him knowing at some point.”
“Okay. How do you know the prototype is missing?”
“Because it isn’t where I left it.”
“But you weren’t going to make the exchange for the next few days. Why would you check on or move it? Isn’t there a chance you’d lead Friar to it?”
“Oh. Right. I see why you wondered.” He grimaced. “It’s hard to overcome the habit of secrecy. I’d followed my usual procedure, you see, so I needed to move it to a better hiding place.”
“Your usual procedure being—?”
“FedEx, in this case.”
“If you FedEx’ed it to yourself last night, it wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow.”
“No, I use their delivery trucks, but not that way. UPS vehicles work, too, but FedEx was closer.”
The front door opened. “—said I’d take it. Isn’t there someone else with vital and sensitive work you need to interrupt? No? Then you can guard my ass while I…oh. Hello.”
Cullen had entered pushing a room service cart, trailing his two guards. He stopped short when he saw Jasper. “Now that’s interesting. Not interesting enough to justify interrupting me, but I suppose you have questions you want to ask.”
“Something like that,” Rule said dryly. “I’m guessing the Find spell still isn’t working.”
“Not worth a damn. Weirdest thing I ever saw.” Cullen lifted the lid of one of the dishes. “That looks good. Did I eat supper?”
“Yes, but don’t let that stop you. Perhaps you’d get something for my guest as well.”
“If you mean me, I don’t want anything,” Jasper said.
“I’ll take a cup of coffee,” Lily said. “Jasper—”
“Oh, good, interrupt my spellcasting so I can play waiter.” Cullen did sarcasm so well. But he did pour a cup for her and drift in her direction while biting into the half sandwich he’d picked up.
“Are you going to keep interrupting me as some sort of payback?” she asked as she took the cup.
“Maybe. What am I interrupting?”
“Your prototype wasn’t really missing before. It is now. Jasper dropped by to tell us about it. He went to get it today, and it was gone. He was about to explain what that has to do with FedEx.”
“Um. Yes.” Jasper cast a wary glance at Cullen. “I prefer to avoid confrontation with those whose property I’ve appropriated. Some of them have nasty tempers and even nastier spells. My first goal is always to put as much distance as possible between me and the object’s previous owner. If I can hand it off to the person who ordered the job right away, fine. If not, I affix the item to a delivery truck. FedEx is my first choice. The trucks stay in motion and they—”
Cullen broke in. “Tell me you didn’t just duct tape the skull to the axle.”
“I did use duct tape. That takes a few minutes to cut through at retrieval, but it’s worth it to make the object secure. But don’t worry. The skull is in a bowling ball bag with plenty of padding. That did limit my options for where to tape it. I prefer to put objects near the engine, but a dry run showed that wouldn’t work this time.”
Cullen nodded. “Makes sense.”
Lily rolled her eyes. First Cullen bitches about having his spellcasting interrupted, then he compliments the thief who made it necessary. “Explain.”
“If you’re using a spell, it’s harder to find something that’s moving, and some Find spells—not mine, but some—are dispersed by large chunks of metal, like an engine. Doesn’t work against a good Finder, though.”
“True,” Jasper said, “but last night I needed to hide it from people other than your Finder. I was out of her range—or so I’d been told. Her limit is a hundred miles, right?”
Cullen scowled. “Told by who?”
“Robert Friar.”
“And you believe a vesceris corpi whose word is as rotten and rancid as that which he consumes?”
Jasper spoke admiringly. “That was a master-level insult. I agree about Friar, but in this case I think he spoke accurately. He wanted me to succeed.”
Lily yanked them back on track. “Tell me when you went to get the prototype, why you went at that time, and how you found the right truck.”
“To answer your last question first—GPS. I went to get it tonight at eight forty because it had been stationary for thirty minutes, suggesting the driver was done for the day.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, it was at a garage, up on a rack. The GPS tracker was still in place, but the prototype was gone.”