Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(55)
“Yes,” Quinn said absently. “But I don’t think he bled at all.” Before I could ask what that meant, he abruptly reached forward and flipped the skeleton over.
I jumped, half expecting it to roll the extra two feet and bump into my ankles. But it just lay there on its back, allowing me to see the empty plastic bag that had been beneath it.
“A blood bag,” Quinn said. He got up and went over to the fridge, beckoning me to follow. I stepped carefully over the body and joined him.
He opened the fridge door, exposing neat rows of deep red IV bags. “Most of us drink live, but Maven has a private donation center set up for anyone who wants it, or for those of us who aren’t great at pressing foundings,” Quinn told me. “The bag was still was in his hand when he answered the door, which confirms it was a vampire.” Before I could ask, he added, “If it’d been a human, Nolan wouldn’t have still had the blood bag in his hand.”
Okay. “What do we do now?” I asked.
Quinn looked straight at me, his gaze so intense that I flinched. “Nolan being dead . . . it complicates things,” he said frankly. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “I gotta make a call, and then we’ll take a quick look around.”
Quinn, as it turned out, wasn’t responsible for doing the vampire dirty work in Denver— they had their own person for that. After placing the call, he grabbed a wooden chair from the small table in the living room and used it to prop the door shut. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, “so search fast.” He looked around. “Why don’t you start in the living room? I’ll head for the back bedroom, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
So for the second time in two days, I found myself searching a vampire’s quarters for clues. Nolan’s place was the opposite of Darcy and Victor’s filthy college apartment: the condo was tidy and sparsely decorated, with simple, comfortable furniture and lots of neutral colors. There weren’t even a lot of places to search. I had only gotten as far as flipping through the stack of reading material on Nolan’s side table—fishing magazines, an invitation to a condo association meeting, some junk mail—before Quinn called for me.
I followed his voice to the little bedroom at the end of the hall. I rounded the door frame, and right in the center of the otherwise empty room I saw a big pile of brand-new baby gear, still packed in bags and boxes. There was a high chair, a Pack ’n Play, an economy-sized box of diapers, a changing pad, and two bags bearing the logo of a popular kids’ clothing store. I reached into the clothing bag and pulled out a package of onesies, size eighteen months. An involuntary shiver shook me where I stood.
“This is where they were bringing Charlie,” I whispered.
Chapter 24
Quinn just nodded, his face expressionless. I tried to focus on the logic, the chain of events, before I lost myself in what could have happened. “Victor and Darcy picked up Charlie,” I said slowly. “They realized they’d forgotten to bring any diapers from John’s house . . . and maybe they didn’t know Nolan already had some here. So they stopped at the Flatiron Depot to grab a package before leaving Boulder.” I looked around the room. “This wasn’t her final destination, though. Darcy said their senior was going to take Charlie to the ‘merchant,’ which I figured meant middleman.”
“That makes sense,” Quinn agreed. “They’d want to get her out of Itachi’s enclave as quick as possible. Besides, if the plan was for Charlie to stay here, Nolan would have set all this stuff up. My guess is that he was storing it here, maybe overnight, and was planning to hand it off with the baby.”
“But who killed Nolan? It wasn’t Victor or Darcy. That puddle of blood is bright red. He was killed tonight, probably while we were talking to Kirby.” So not Kirby, either.
“Well, we know there’s a fourth player in the kidnapping,” Quinn said. “The person who wanted Charlie. Whoever it is doesn’t want to make another grab for her right now, not while Itachi and Maven are watching her. But Nolan was a loose thread.”
“Meanwhile, we’re looking for the kidnapper,” I finished. “It was only a matter of time before we found Nolan, and whoever did this knew it.” I gritted my teeth, fighting down the urge to punch something. “We must have missed this guy by minutes.”
Quinn checked his watch. “Speaking of which, we need to get going.”
“What? Are you serious?” My voice came out harsher than I’d intended, and frustration was turning my stomach. Quinn and I were at a dead end, and we both knew it. I just wasn’t ready to admit it yet. “We’ve barely looked around.”
“The Denver crew’s gonna be here any second,” the vampire explained.
“But we don’t know anything,” I protested. “We haven’t searched enough—”
“There’s not going to be anything else here, Lex,” Quinn insisted. “Nolan was a pro. He was too careful to leave evidence of who he was working for, and even if he had made a mistake, the killer would have found it first.”
I pointed at the stack of baby supplies. “Then why didn’t the killer take this stuff?”
“Because,” Quinn said patiently, like I was a particularly dimwitted child, “he—or she—wanted us to find it.”