Ruby Fever (Hidden Legacy, #6)(10)

“Please wait there for me.”

“Inside the gates?” He opened his eyes real wide.

“Leon!”

“Don’t worry. I got it.”

A stray thought zinged across my mind. It was vague and formless, but very disturbing. “Can you show me the gates without touching them?”

The phone view swung and presented me with the wrought iron gates. The yard was pristine.

Alessandro looked at me. “What is it?”

“There are no bodies.”

For Linus to activate a lockdown meant he either expected an attack or one had already occurred. He had answered my phone call during an attack before.

“Leon, wait for us. Please.”

“I will.”

He hung up.

Mr. Gregoire reappeared, leading a team of five people onto the patio, each carrying a large duffel bag. They set the bags down, pulled out hazmat suits, and put them on. An older black woman approached me. We had worked together before. I didn’t know her name, but I knew Linus trusted her. She referred to herself as Team 1 Leader, and that’s how I addressed her as well.

“How long and where?” I asked her.

“Ninety minutes. A warehouse on Cedar Crest Street.”

She gave me the address and zipped herself into the hazmat suit. The crew converged on the body, spreading plastic sheets.

“I need a Ziploc bag and her purse,” I said.

One of the techs brought the purse and the bag to me. I unzipped it and looked inside. Pack of Kleenex, a glass case, a pink brush . . . That would do. I fished the brush out, slipped it into the Ziploc bag, and waved the tech on.

I sealed the Ziploc bag. I was probably wrong, but just in case.

I turned away from the team and looked at Mr. Gregoire. “Speaker Cabera was not here today.”

“Understood.”

“Will Simone be a problem?” Alessandro asked.

“Not at all. I chose my people very carefully.”

That left the Curtises, who would not talk for fear of being implicated, Xavier, who should be long gone by now, and whoever Cabera was meeting. That was our best lead. Over an hour had passed since this supposed lunch meeting, and her guest never showed.

Metal clanged as one of the crew members pulled a spike out of the wall with metal forceps.

I nodded to Mr. Gregoire, and Alessandro and I hurried downstairs. We exited the restaurant and marched to Alessandro’s Alfa. I would have preferred sprinting, but you never knew who was watching.

We got in. Alessandro started the engine and it roared to life.

“Linus?” he asked.

“Yes.” Please be okay. Please, please be okay.

He put the car in gear. The Alfa streaked out of the parking lot and hurtled down the street at a breakneck speed.



Linus Duncan lived in River Oaks, the most exclusive neighborhood in Houston, full of mansions, tree-lined streets, and infuriating speed bumps. Alessandro was a speed demon, and he’d bought us an extra ten minutes on the highway. But River Oaks made it impossible to maintain any kind of speed.

Bump.

Bump.

“Merda!”

Shit was a good way to describe it. I tried the phone again. No answer.

“You think something happened to him. Something serious,” Alessandro said.

“He activated the siege protocol.”

“It doesn’t mean he’s dead. It could be a test.”

I looked at him.

He shrugged. “Linus could be sitting inside that house with a timer, waiting to see how long it will take us to catch on.”

“I hope you’re right.”

It would be just like Linus to pull something like that. But a feeling deep down in my stomach told me that something was horribly wrong. When Nevada first trained me in investigative work, she taught me to trust my instincts. If it didn’t look right, it probably wasn’t. If the hair on the back of your neck stood up, you needed to get the hell out of there. She taught Arabella the same thing. My younger sister called it listening to the lizard brain. I trusted my lizard brain. It kept me breathing.

My phone chimed. A text message from Ragnar.

We can’t find Jadwiga. Matilda says they’re nocturnal, so we’ll come back tonight. We’ve locked the conference room and put the key on your desk.



“What is it?” Alessandro asked.

“Jadwiga.”

He glanced at me.

“There is an expensive and possibly endangered spider loose in the conference room. It was smuggled into the country, stolen, recovered, and during the handoff to the current owner it escaped.”

“In our conference room?”

“Yes.”

“How big is this spider?”

“About a four-inch leg span.”

Alessandro glanced up at the heavens. The heavens were hidden by the car roof, but I was sure the higher power had seen the silent plea for mercy in his eyes.

“I forgot to ask, how did it go with Gunderson?”

Alessandro shrugged. “We talked. I dropped him off at the Justice Center trussed up like a hog. Lenora can take it from there.”

Lenora Jordan, the Harris County DA, would definitely take it from there. As Connor once put it, law and order were her gods, and she served as their devoted paladin.

We turned around the bend. Linus’ gates came into view, Leon’s blue Shelby GT350 parked by the keypad. Alessandro pulled in behind him.