Free Queen of Wands-eARC by John Ringo Page B

stuff into random suitcases, lots of them, and can never find what she wants, so she throws the stuff in every direction looking for her other shoe. And then complains when she can’t find what she’s thrown around. Sharing a room with her is beyond a pain.”
    “Finding anything in here is going to be beyond a pain,” Kurt said. “But I suppose we have to look. How does she keep records?”
    “You’re joking, right?”
    * * *
    “Here’s something interesting,” Barb said.
    They’d been picking through the detritus of Janea’s life on the road for three hours. A notebook with some notes on the investigation had been found under a pile of dirty laundry. Unfortunately, it only had a few brief entries dated to the first two days Janea had been in town. There were good notes for the first few minutes of her in-brief, after which they were mainly on the subject of the personality and dress failures of the briefers. One of the entries was about a cute guy she’d seen at a coffee shop. Another was on the quality of shopping at the local mall. There was nothing to indicate that she’d actually been investigating anything, but the mall was one of the noted overlap points.
    “What?” Kurt asked, tossing another pair of underwear into a growing pile. He’d decided the only way to make sense of anything was to sort the room and had been hard at it, occasionally gulping when he ran across something extremely personal, for the last hour.
    “It’s a card from a paranormal society,” Barb said. “Tennessee Area Ghost Hunters. Hugh Yeaton, Senior Investigator.”
    “Any number of reasons she’d have that,” Kurt said, wincing and placing a very odd-looking device in his “very odd-looking devices” pile. “She might have called them to find out if they had any leads.”
    “We try really hard not to get involved with any of these guys,” Barb said, placing the card on the notebook. “Most of them are kooks and wannabes. And a goodly number of the ones that can actually sense stuff get their powers from the wrong side of the street, if you take my meaning.”
    “Hey, aren’t those the guys who have got a TV show?” Kurt asked, lifting up a piece of clothing and considering it. “I have no clue which pile this should go in. It gets a pile of its own.”
    “I dunno,” Barb said. “I don’t watch much TV.”
    “It’s on A&U,” Kurt said, distantly. “I’m not sure I want to know what this is for…”
    “Well, it’s the only thing we’ve got from this mess,” Barb replied. “But we’ll check it out later. We’re missing something.”
    “You always are,” Kurt said, sighing. “It’s why the Monday morning quarterbacking you get from stuff like Congressional investigations is so stupid. Sure, all the data is there, and in hindsight it all makes sense. But when you’re looking at it, it’s just mush.”
    “What do we know?” Barb said, leaning back on the dresser and closing her eyes. “Janea was found in Coolidge Park.”
    “Over on North Shore,” Kurt said, nodding. “But that’s a dry hole. No actual connections to that immediate area. And her car was on the other side of the river. Which means she probably took the walking bridge over the river. But we interviewed everyone we could find in the area and nobody saw her crossing. Either way.”
    “But that’s where she was ,” Barb said. “On the North Shore. She was conscious, then. But already incoherent. Probably already on the Paths but sort of functional to move in the mundane world. So it couldn’t have happened far from where she was picked up. We need to pay a visit to Mr. Yeaton.”
    * * *
    “Good afternoon, ma’am,” Kurt said, holding out his ID. “We’re looking for Hugh Yeaton.”
    The address listed on the business card had led them to a suburban two-story house in a working-class neighborhood in East Ridge and, presumably, the lady of the house. The thin, dark-haired woman looked at the ID suspiciously, then