"Trace evidence?" Charley repeated. "He"s been watching too many crime shows. Do not go with him to his apartment. He"ll get you in there and lop off your head."
"I"m sure you know more about trace evidence than I do," Amanda said, speaking to Dawson while glaring at Charley, "but let"s go look again anyway. We"ll start at the last place you saw your brother. Where and when was that?" If he said he"d last seen his brother during a computer game, she wouldn"t count on finding any unknown DNA in his apartment.
"Last night. He finished his homework, went into his bedroom and closed the door, and that"s the last time I saw him. I didn"t even check on him. I just left him in there, and they took him." Dawson headed for the door, his movements mechanical like those of a robot.
This man should not be allowed to ride the motorcycle that was his only mode of transportation. That settled it. She absolutely had to go with him, help him somehow.
"We should take the truck," she said, referring to the battered pick-up they used to transport bikes and parts. "I"ll drive."
Dawson looked back, his expression vague. "Okay."
He hated to ride in that truck with its disorderly ripped seats, missing radio k.n.o.bs and other imperfections. It completely offended his OCD sense of order. The fact that he didn"t argue about riding in the truck or leaving his bike at the shop said a lot about how upset he was.
"I"m going too. You shouldn"t be alone with him." Charley made it sound as if he had a choice of whether or not to go along when the reality was that he couldn"t get more than a few hundred feet away from her. They were bound by some invisible tether which neither seemed able to break. When she"d filed for divorce while he was still alive, he"d told her he was never going to let her go. It appeared for once he hadn"t lied. "I"ll ride in the back of the truck," he said. "You might want to think about riding back there too just in case Dawson loses it and attacks you with a thumb drive or a CD or something."
Amanda shot him an irritated glance. Whether or not Dawson really had a brother, he was suffering. Charley had not been a compa.s.sionate person when he was alive, and dying had improved him only marginally. Amanda could understand why that white light had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him, and he didn"t seem to making much progress toward reaching it.
As Dawson directed Amanda to his apartment building, she realized she had only a vague idea of where he lived. In their two year a.s.sociation, he had kept secrets, and she"d been so involved in her own problems, she"d never even noticed.
A few miles from her office, they pulled up to a run-down red brick apartment building. Their dilapidated truck fit right in with the other vehicles in the small, badly maintained parking lot behind the building.
Amanda, Dawson and Charley walked around the side of the building and along the cracked walk to the front door. Actually, Charley floated, but he liked to go through the motions of walking. He said it made him feel more normal. Not that he"d ever been normal even when he had a body to walk with.
"This place sucks," Charley said. "You need to pay crazy boy more money."
Sometimes Amanda wished Charley wasn"t already dead so she could kill him or at least torture him for a few hours. So far she hadn"t been able to figure out a way to torture a ghost but she hadn"t given up on the idea.
They walked inside the building and were greeted with the smells of moldy carpet and stale cigarette smoke. Maybe she should be paying Dawson more.
Wordlessly he moved to the staircase and started to climb.
Amanda followed.
"I"ll take the elevator." Charley shot upward, laughing.
Since he was only energy in his current state, maybe she could zap him with a battery charger and cause an overload. Or suck him into a rechargeable battery then put that battery in a flashlight and leave it on until the charge was exhausted.
Upon reaching the third floor, Dawson led her to a door marked 3D in black metal digits, unlocked two deadbolts, and opened the door.
The apartment was old but immaculate. No surprise there. Dawson regularly created order from Amanda"s chaos at the shop. The furniture was minimal with little of a personal nature. No paintings decorated the walls, no vases or candles sat on the dust-free coffee table, no sign that people lived there.
Dawson set the laptop on a small kitchen table off to one side of the living room. Two more laptops were already on the table. Dawson had mentioned three laptops, his, Grant"s and their father"s. One checkmark in the sanity column.
"Where"s Grant"s bedroom?" she asked.
"Over here." Dawson crossed the faded but clean tan carpet to a short hallway and opened the first door.
The change was radical. Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers posters covered the walls. An MP3 player with headphones sat on the small desk. Rumpled sheets and a colorful spread draped half on and half off the twin size bed. An eleven year old boy could live in this room, an eleven year old boy who"d been taken from that very bed during the night. Dawson"s story was becoming more credible.
He walked over to the bed and picked up a stuffed dog that was missing one ear, most of his hair and some of his stuffing. "Mom and Dad gave him this for his fourth birthday. He"d already stopped sleeping with it before they died. He said he was too big to play with stuffed animals, but he brought it when we had to leave and now he sleeps with it every night." He turned pain-filled eyes toward Amanda. "We have to get him back. He can"t sleep tonight without his dog."
"Do you have a picture of your brother?"
He nodded and left the room. Amanda stood in the doorway of the child"s room, afraid to enter for fear she might destroy some of that trace evidence Dawson hadn"t been able to find.
Charley had no such inhibitions. He darted in and reached down as if to touch the bed, but his hand slid into it.
"Don"t do that," Amanda protested. "You might contaminate-oh, never mind. I guess a ghost can"t contaminate evidence."
Charley flinched. "I hate it when you do that, call me a ghost and act like I don"t matter."
Dawson returned with a framed picture and handed it to her. Amanda studied the family looking back at her, four happy people smiling at an unseen camera. An older version of Dawson stood with his arm draped around an attractive woman with kind eyes. Dawson, a couple of years younger and wearing a carefree smile she"d never seen, sat next to a boy with a mischievous grin. Grant?
"It"s a few years old," Dawson said softly, reaching one finger to touch the boy"s image. "We didn"t take pictures after Mom and Dad died. I guess I should have, but I never thought about it."
Dawson had a brother. Pictures didn"t lie.
Amanda"s gaze moved from his haggard face to the empty bed. More evidence that his story was true, that his brother had been kidnapped. But if she believed him, she had to believe the whole incredible story about the false ident.i.ties, hiding from mysterious murderers and trying to find hidden source code. "We"ve got to call the police," she said decisively. "Detective Jake Daggett, the guy who helped take down Roland Kimball, he can help us."
"No! Not the police! They said not to call the police! They killed my parents. They"ll kill my brother."
"We can ask Daggett to keep it quiet. We can trust him."
"No!" Charley protested even more vehemently than Dawson. "You cannot trust that d.a.m.ned Daggett."
Amanda arched a questioning eyebrow at him.
"He"s-he"s a cowboy. He could get you killed. Remember how he acted in Silver Creek."
Amanda remembered that Daggett had charged in at the eleventh hour to capture Roland Kimball, and she and Daggett had subsequently spent some time together as she went through the process of giving her statements so they could convict the evil man. Charley had no reason to call him a cowboy except that he was really good looking and rugged in a Texas cowboy sort of way.
And that probably explained why Charley didn"t want Detective Daggett around. Jealousy of something he"d never been. That and the fact that Charley fancied there was some attraction between Daggett and her. That was ridiculous, of course.
Well, maybe not completely ridiculous, but it had nothing to do with the fact that they needed his help right now.
Dawson turned away and ran a hand through his hair, making it even messier. "We don"t dare call in the police. I"ve got to find that source code and give it to those people." He threw his hands out in a gesture of helplessness. "But I don"t know where else to look. I have no idea what Project Verdant is. Verdant means green. A green project? Recycling? Solar energy? There"s nothing like that in any of Dad"s programs."
"Okay, okay!" Amanda moved to him and took his hands in hers. She could barely manage her own life, but somehow she was going to have to take control of the situation, calm Dawson, figure out what to do next. She knew how to repair motorcycles, open a can of c.o.ke and call for pizza delivery, but she had no idea how to soothe her frantic friend or how to locate a missing boy.
"Dawson, you"re the smartest person I know. You just need to relax and think. We can do this." She tried to sound as if she really meant that last sentence.
He grabbed onto her hands as if grabbing a lifeline, his desperate expression suddenly hopeful. He seemed a lot more confident of her abilities than she was.
d.a.m.n. He was counting on her and she had no idea what to do.
When all else fails and your mind goes completely blank, fall back on manners.
It was Texas, and a stressful situation called for a hot beverage even though it was at least ninety degrees outside.
"Do you have tea or hot chocolate?"
Dawson nodded.
"Let"s make something to drink and talk this through. Where"s your tea and where are your cups?"
He led her back to the living room and indicated the small kitchen separated by an open bar. "In the cabinet."
Amanda didn"t ask which cabinet. There were only a couple to choose from. She"d find what she needed.
She located two thick white mugs, filled them with water and turned around once then twice. No microwave. She was definitely going to have to redo her budget and figure out a way to pay him more. How on earth did he cook frozen dinners without a microwave?
She found a pan, poured in the water and heated it on the small stove, then cringed when she found the tea-store brand tea bags. Well, it would have to do.
She poured the hot water into the cups, added tea bags, and took them to the table in the dining area.
"I might like to have a cup of tea, too," Charley complained. "But no, just ignore the ghost."
"Do you have a notepad and pen?" Amanda asked Dawson, trying her best to ignore the ghost.
He brought the requested items to the table.
Charley sat on the chair in front of Amanda"s cup of tea and grinned at her when she approached. "Come sit on my lap."
Amanda took another chair and moved her cup over. "You write," she said when Dawson shoved the paper toward her. "Can"t read my own writing once it gets cold." She took a drink of the store brand tea and tried not to grimace. "First we need to search through everything you brought with you when you left your old house."
"We didn"t bring a lot, just what we could throw in the car, and I"ve already been through all of it three times searching for something-an external hard drive, a flash drive, a CD, even a printout, anything that might contain source code. I haven"t found anything."
Dawson could spot a 6-32 set screw in a bin full of fasteners from across a tool crib, so if he hadn"t found anything, there probably was nothing to find. But she couldn"t say that, couldn"t let him accept defeat. "I haven"t been through it. Fresh eyes. Write that down. Number one, search possessions for something that could contain source code."
Dawson dutifully wrote on the notepad in his meticulous penmanship. He"d probably never had a teacher tell him he was going to get a C in penmanship when he actually deserved an F for such terrible handwriting, but all his other grades were As. Not that Amanda"s bad handwriting bothered her. That was why G.o.d invented word processing programs.
Dawson finished writing and looked at her, waiting.
Amanda took another sip of tea, trying to think of what to say next. "What about the rest of it, the stuff you didn"t bring, the stuff you left in Kansas City?"
"The mortgage company foreclosed on the house and set the furniture and everything out on the sidewalk for strangers to take."
Amanda flinched at the image. "Are you sure? How do you know when you"re down here and the house is up there?"
"Internet."
"Oh." She drew in a deep breath. "If that program was still somewhere in the house-" She bit off the sentence as she realized what she was about to say. The unspoken conclusion hung in the air between them.
Charley frowned. "If it was in the house, it"s gone and he can"t give it to the kidnappers which means they"ll kill his brother. Oh. I see. You knew that, didn"t you?"
Dawson"s features crumpled and for a moment Amanda thought he was going to cry. He took off his gla.s.ses and wiped his eyes then put them back on.
"So we will find your brother," she blurted, then wondered if it was possible the absurd statement had come from her own lips. How did she expect to find a kidnapped child?
"Really, Sherlock Holmes?" Charley jeered. "And just how do you think you"re going to do that?"
"How?" Dawson echoed Charley"s question. However, unlike Charley, he still had the hopeful expression that made her cringe inside and swear a personal vow that she would somehow find Grant.
"Keep writing. Two." Amanda gestured at the notepad.
Dawson ducked his head and dutifully wrote "2" on the pad.
Amanda took another sip of the bitter tea, buying time while she decided what on earth she was going to say next.
"Two. Search Grant"s room for, uh, trace evidence."
"I"ve already done that."
"But I haven"t. Fresh eyes." She was just trying to find suggestions to make Dawson feel better. She had no intention of searching Grant"s room in case there was something the police could use when Dawson finally agreed they had to call them in. "Write it down."
"This is crazy, Amanda!" Charley leaned through the table toward her. "You have no idea what trace evidence looks like, and you wouldn"t know what to do with it if you found it. You need to call the cops, just not that Daggett guy. They can either find the missing kid if there is one or get Dawson committed if there isn"t. Maybe he murdered his little brother and hid the body and this is his cover story."
Ignoring Charley, Amanda watched Dawson write her words then look at her expectantly.
"Three." She tried to remember what they did on TV shows when they were looking for a missing person. "We talk to your neighbors." Actually, that didn"t sound like a bad idea. It was the only good one she"d come up with yet. "And we"ll do three before one and two since you already did one and two."
Dawson frowned then started to tear off the top sheet.
"Stop. You don"t need to start all over and change the numbers." The boy was definitely OCD.
He dropped the sheet of paper and looked at her, fear joining with the anguish in his eyes. "I don"t know my neighbors. I"ve avoided them ever since we"ve been here."
"I know, fly under the radar. No problem. I"ll talk to them." She pushed back her chair and stood.
Dawson followed her example, squaring his shoulders. "I"ll go with you. I guess it"s too late to try to hide."
Amanda, Dawson and Charley went back out into the hallway with its stained green carpet and rancid smells. Three more apartments on the floor. That meant twelve apartments in all. Surely a boy couldn"t disappear from the building without somebody seeing something.
She turned to Dawson. "You don"t know who lives next door to you?" She indicated the apartment beside his, 3C.
He shook his head. "I know there are two women on the other side of me, but I don"t know anything about this apartment or the one next to it. Sometimes I hear strange noises coming from this one."
"Strange noises? Like what?"
"Electronic noises. Beeps, buzzing."
"Chainsaws," Charley said. "Chopping people up. I don"t think you should go in there."
That image did not make her feel even a little bit better about this visit. "Okay, let"s go talk to whoever lives in 3C."
Amanda knocked on the scarred wooden door.