Free Blood Trust by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.
    Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.
    She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.
    “Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.
    She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.
    *   *   *
    I NTERVIEWING A RJETA Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.
    “It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.
    “Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”
    “Family?” Jack asked.
    “Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.
    “Friends?”
    “Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”
    “So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.
    Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”
    “Either way,” Naomi said, “she’s gonna be a bitch to find.”
    “Which is going to take time,” McKinsey said.
    They were talking like partners now, or an old married couple.
    “Time is the one thing we don’t have,” Jack told them, and because he didn’t want to tell them about his leaving with Paull, he gave them a song and dance about Alli’s legal status, as if Jenkins had given him an update. “So we need to find the girl now.”
    McKinsey was clearly unhappy with being given what was, in his estimation, an impossible task. “How do you propose we do that?”
    *   *   *
    T WILIGHT , THE bar both Billy Warren and the elusive Arjeta Kraja had supposedly frequented, was on a seedy section of M Street, about as far from the tony shops and town houses as you could get and still be in Georgetown. A sign on the door said that it was closed, but when Jack hit the brass plate the door opened. When they walked into the dimly lit interior, they were greeted by air that smelled burned.
    Detective Willowicz, smoking idly, sat on a tipped-back chair, his ankles crossed on a table. Detective O’Banion was behind the bar, drinking what appeared to be whiskey from a shot glass. No one else appeared to be around.
    Williowicz exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Well, what do we have here?”
    “Place is closed,” O’Banion said. “Wassamatter, can’t read?”
    “I could ask the same of you,” Jack said, then to Willowicz: “I thought I told you the case had been turned over to my department.”
    Willowicz contemplated the glowing end of his cigarette. “I think I might have heard something of that nature. What’s your memory of it, O’Banion?”
    O’Banion pulled at his earlobe and shrugged. “In this town, anything’s possible.” He poured himself another shot. His fingernails were filthy.
    “So what are you doing here?” Naomi said.
    “Satisfying an itch.” Willowicz watched them with a