The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(58)
I love social media and the people who are careless with it. Tony had an open Facebook profile. I rummaged through his pictures and posts, looking for a clue. Then I found one, and wished I hadn’t.
“Bentley.”
“Did you find her?” he asked, peering over his bifocals.
“Amber’s his daughter, Bentley. She’s eight years old.”
Twenty-Nine
I paced a hole in the staff lounge’s cheap blue carpet, trying to focus. We needed Tony Vance’s home address, and fast. While Bentley searched the net, coming up empty, I contemplated a dozen angles and discarded them all. My watch read a quarter after seven; even if I could sweet-talk somebody at the company office into giving me what I needed, there wouldn’t be anyone there at this hour to answer the phone. Then I looked back to my screen, still showing Tony’s profile, and snapped my fingers.
The last picture in the album was a shot of little Amber, cherub-cheeked and triumphant, at an elementary school gymnastics competition. A brightly painted sign in the background told me what I needed to know.
“Bentley, look up an address for Springlake Montessori.”
“She won’t be at school. It’s far too late—”
“No,” I said, sitting down beside him. “I just need to know where it is. The founders of Carmichael-Sterling Nevada, Lauren and her inner circle, are all transplants from the company’s Seattle office. They bought Sheldon Kaufman a house—that’s how I connected the Kaufmans with Carmichael-Sterling in the first place. I’m betting everybody got one. I can get a list of all of the company’s properties from the Clark County assessor’s office, but not who lives there.”
Bentley nodded, typing away. “And Tony Vance’s home will probably be the property nearest his daughter’s school.”
“Exactly. It’s the best lead we’re going to get.”
“What are you going to do?” he said, furrowing his brow.
“Stop him. That girl isn’t dying tonight. Not on my watch.”
Ten minutes later we had an address. I jotted it down on a scrap of paper and pushed my chair back.
“I need you to round up whoever you can,” I told Bentley, “and get over to Spengler’s house. Someone’s going to come looking for him sooner or later, and the cops won’t be far behind. Do a locust job.”
A locust job was the magician’s equivalent of erasing the porn from your dead buddy’s hard drive before his mom sees it. They’d scour Spengler’s house for any enchanted relics, journals, grimoires, and occult ciphers, anything that could raise a citizen’s eyebrow. It was never hard to enlist folks for that kind of work—and not just to protect our shared secrets. In a locust job, you keep what you take.
I drove to the address I hoped was Tony Vance’s house. I didn’t pray, as a rule. If there was a God, we weren’t on speaking terms, and I didn’t think either of us cared what the other had to say. Still, pushing the pedal hard enough to make the engine whine, streetlights strobing across the dirty windshield, I was tempted. Then I remembered God’s track record when it comes to helping out little kids.
I was the only person fighting for Amber Vance’s life tonight. Succeed or fail, what happened was on my shoulders alone.
? ? ?
Judging from the size of Tony’s house, being Lauren Carmichael’s lackey paid well. A low brick wall, more ornamental than protective, encircled his estate and its emerald green lawn. I ditched my car on a side street and came in from the back, hopping the wall and staying low as I skirted a playground. A swing dangled from rusty chains, listlessly rocking in the wake of a chill night breeze.
I peered into the garage. A new Mercedes sat on the other side of a small window, but the garage was big enough for two cars. No way to tell if Tony was home or not. Worse, since he’d sat out the fight at Spengler’s place, I had no idea what he was capable of. I’d just have to improvise.
A place this nice would have an alarm system on the front door, especially if Tony was hiding some of Lauren’s dirty little secrets inside. I wasn’t prepared to deal with that kind of security. My best bet was the door connecting the attached garage to the rest of the house. Most people don’t think to alarm those, and even fewer are in the habit of locking up when they come and go because they think their rolling garage door can keep them safe. Bad assumption.
I scavenged a fist-sized rock from the yard, one that came to a blunt point, and wrapped my coat around it to help muffle the noise. A few firm taps broke out a corner of the garage window. I paused, listening for the whine of an alarm. Nothing stirred but the wind. A few minutes later, methodically busting out the glass and clearing the broken window one shard at a time, I’d made an opening big enough to climb through.
I slipped through the window and onto the garage floor, crouching in the puddle of broken glass. Ears perked, I crept to the inside door and gave the knob a slow turn. Bingo. Light streamed from a silver wall sconce in the inside hallway, casting a warm glow against the blue Victorian wallpaper.
Drifting from room to room like a ghost, I searched for signs of life. The plan was simple. If I found Amber first, I’d get her to safety any way I could and deal with the consequences later. If I found Tony first…well, I still hoped I could reason with him. He’d trudged along with the rest of the group, showing none of their enthusiasm or their bloodthirstiness, to the point that I wondered if Lauren had some kind of leverage over him. If I could turn him around, he’d be our best chance at shutting this whole thing down.