Free Vanished by Kat Richardson Page A

prosperous without being full of himself over it. He gave Lila a kiss on the cheek when he reached her side.
    “What can I do for you, Lila?”
    “Sandy, this nice woman wants to meet Paul. She works for that ghost hunter show and they want to talk to him about the office ghost.”
    Sandy looked a little less excited at the prospect than Lila had. “That’s just a story, Lila. Paul’s office isn’t haunted.” He turned his attention to me and gave me a hard, evaluating stare. “You sure it’s the place you want?”
    “Suite 204,” I replied. “I just want to take a look.”
    He shrugged his eyebrows and sighed. “Well . . . I suppose that’s OK. Really, I don’t think it’s haunted.” He looked at his watch. “You want to come over, have some coffee? We can talk it over, see if Paul’s all right with the idea.”
    “Now?” That startled me. Even Seattle’s notoriously friendly residents don’t issue invitations with such alacrity.
    “Of course now. What’s the point in waiting?” He turned toward the table he’d come from and waved. The three other men sitting there waved back. “I’m taking this pretty girl home to meet my son!” he called.
    They laughed and flapped their hands at him, waving him away. “Good luck, Sandros!” one of them called back.
    I finished off my sandwich in a couple of huge bites and left money on the table for Lila. I had a bad feeling about Paul Arkmanian as I followed his father down the street. Was he gay? A misogynist? What was the big deal with going out with a female? But I wanted into that office without having to do another Grey version of a B and E, so I was willing to try anything.
    We went down Brand and turned onto a much smaller side street. In a few blocks, all signs of business had vanished and single-family houses in neat little yards appeared. It was like something from a fifties sitcom, and I recognized the houses as the sort I’d walked past every day as a child. The nostalgia was thick enough to choke on and my eyes watered a bit.
    Arkmanian stopped and unlatched the gate of a pink house on the right. “This is it.” He glanced toward a side window that flickered with television light. He sighed. “And Paul’s home. Let’s see what he says. . . .”
    We went up the flagstone walk and into the house, which wasn’t locked. The flickering blue light from a computer monitor turned the room the harsh metallic color of dance clubs. Sandros Arkmanian turned on the overhead lamp, killing the shadows that held sway in the living room and driving the rest back into the dining room.
    The dining table was probably an antique, given the heavily carved legs that I spied under the mass of books and computer equipment. It was like a microcosm of Quinton’s lair crushed into the ten-foot-square room. A man I guessed to be Paul Arkmanian sat behind the table. He was in his late twenties, tall like his father but rangier, judging by his arms and shoulders. He wore a pair of expensive headphones and was deeply immersed in whatever was displayed on his computer screen, twitching his mouse and keyboard and staring without blinking while he grimaced at something.
    Suddenly he reared back, pounding the table and shouting, “Damn it! Damn, damn, damn! Stinking orc!”
    I glanced at Sandros. “Computer games,” he explained. “From the moment he gets home until he goes to bed. I tell you, I don’t understand it. He’d rather play with imaginary monsters than have a date.”
    Better imaginary monsters than the real thing, I thought, but still, I didn’t think I’d ever met an adult man who’d rather romp with pixels than with women. He wasn’t bad looking, and he was plainly not stupid, judging by his reading material, so . . . where was the problem?
    Sandros walked around and tapped Paul on the shoulder. The younger man jerked, blinked up at his father, and shoved the headphones down onto his neck.
    “Oh. Hi, Dad. Am I making too much noise? Did you want to