Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(62)

The door popped open and a mad scientist hopped out, looking very out of place in the redneck vehicle.

“It’s okay, love,” he called out. “If you answered your cell phone I’d have updated you.”

The red-haired man turned to the professor, tilted his head, and said, “I don’t talk while I’m driving. And you shouldn’t call while you are driving, Bluetooth or no. I don’t want to get that phone call.”

The mad scientist nodded, kissed the big man on the cheek, and patted his shoulder. “I’m Alex Vaughn and this bulldog is my partner, Darin Richards of the Phoenix Police Department. He worries, that’s his job. Dare, these are the FBI, they want to talk to me.”

Darin’s head jerked first to his partner and then to the two women. His eyes narrowed. “ID,” he said.

Leslie showed him her badge and he examined it. He frowned and said, “I don’t know you. I work with the local FBI office a lot.”

“They brought me out especially for this case,” Leslie said.

He looked at Anna, and she raised both hands. “Don’t look at me, I’m just a consultant.”

“And you are here to speak with Alex.”

“With Dr. Vaughn,” Leslie said. “Yes.”

“Dare,” said the mad scientist. “It’s okay.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, without agreeing at all. “Why are you here?”

“We have to do this on the lawn?” asked Leslie, not losing her smile.

“Dare,” said Alex gently. “What are they going to do? Shoot me? Let’s go in and have some coffee and talk.” He looked at Leslie. “I have a stalker, a former student. She quite often calls in complaints and we have police officers come to investigate strange noises, screaming, shots fired. You name it. The Tempe PD knows her, but occasionally she gets one through to a rookie. The fire department was here last week at two in the morning because she reported a fire. I guess she got tired of not getting a response.”

“We are definitely not here because someone called in a complaint,” Leslie said. “We’d like to interview you about an attempted kidnapping—yours—that happened in June of 1978.”

Both men’s faces went blank with surprise.

Darin recovered first. “You never told me you were kidnapped. Freaking damn it, Alex. You’d have been six in ’78. June. You’d have been five.”

“Attempted.” Dr. Vaughn sounded shell-shocked. “I don’t think the police even believed me. My dad installed a security system and my mom fed the dog steak every day for a week.”

“No one believed in fairies back then,” Anna said. “We’re all clapping our hands for Tinker Bell now, though. We have a missing child who lives four blocks from where you grew up. Would you mind talking to us about what happened?”

“Sure,” he said. “I guess. I was five, though. And it’s been a long time.”

“How about I go next door and see if your mom is home,” said Darin. “That woman has a mind like a steel trap. She’ll remember what you told her when it happened.”

“You think it was a fae?” asked Dr. Vaughn.

“He was green and hairy. His hands had six fingers with claws on them,” Anna said matter-of-factly. She’d memorized the words on the first reading—it hadn’t been hard. The boy’s terror and the police officer’s skepticism rang through in the dry words typewritten on paper older than Anna. She continued, “His voice was funny—like on TV sometimes. He had a long yellow tongue and he called you a barn. He said, ‘Come here, barn.’” She looked at the police officer. “If someone reported it now, Darin Richards, instead of years before the fae admitted their existence, what would you say it was?”

“Barn,” said Darin. “‘Bairn’ means child, right? If he was in Scotland instead of Scottsdale.”

“Yes,” said Leslie.

“You go in and have some coffee,” said Darin. In a gentler voice he said, “That sure explains some of your nightmares, Alex. You take them in and I’ll be right back.”

The mad scientist—well, mad mathematician—paced back and forth in the house even though he’d seated Leslie and Anna at the table and put coffee in front of them. He had that kind of kinky hair that never lies down right, and it was about two inches too long or ten inches too short to look good. Especially if it belonged to the kind of person who grabbed it and twisted or pulled when he was nervous.

Anna thought he was adorable. She wanted to adopt him as a big brother and give him a big hug to calm down his rising anxiety.

“My dad was a cop,” he said.

Leslie nodded. “That was in the report.”

“If he hadn’t been a cop, there wouldn’t have been a report,” Dr. Vaughn said. “He believed me. By the time I was ten, I didn’t know why. Hell, I kinda don’t believe me now. I mean, this thing looked like it was eight feet tall, and it ran away from my dog and a horseshoe I threw at it?”

“That dog impressed whoever wrote the report,” Anna said. There hadn’t been any photos of the dog in it, but she had a pretty good idea that “BFDog” in the report (complete with exclamation point and a penciled-in remark that read “I’d have run from that thing, too”) meant it wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill dog.