but I will. Eventually.” Eliza changed the topic. “So, you didn’t answer me. What are you still doing here?”
He noticed that she hadn’t given him an answer, either, but he let it pass. “Gathering some background information. I’m going to be out of town for a couple of days. Let the others know when they come in tomorrow, will you?”
“Sure thing.” She swung her chair around to face him. “Going somewhere good?”
He laughed. “Depends on what you think of Saratoga.”
Interest highlighted her delicate face. She assumed he was talking about the tiny town up north from Bedford, California. “Why Saratoga?”
“Our main kidnapping suspect has a relative there. Only living one I can come up with at the moment. A widowed great-aunt named—” he grinned “—Sugarland Malone. Not sure if she knows where the suspect is, but it’s worth a shot.” Even if the great-aunt did know, she might not be willing to disclose the information, Ben thought. Blood was thicker than water and he was an outsider.
Eliza smiled. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to guess what was on his mind. “If anyone can get the lady to loosen her tongue, you can.”
He wondered how much of that was flattery and how much was intuition. Eliza was a genuine psychic, one whom the police had brought in on more than a few of their unsolvable cases. He’d been as skeptical of her as anyone when he’d first met Eliza, but she’d eventually made a believer out of him. “You give me too much credit.”
Her smile deepened, the shy edge fading. “No, I don’t.”
Amused, he cocked his head. “Your psychic intuition, I take it?”
She shook her head. “More like female intuition. Some things are just self-evident.” Like a man who could charm the feathers off a bird, she thought with a smile. She doubted if he knew just how persuasive those dark blue eyes of his really were. “I’ll tell the others—and good hunting.”
“Thanks.”
That was the word for it, all right, he thought as he closed the door behind him. Hunting.
Chapter 2
The jarring noise pushed its way into his consciousness.
It was the phone, Ben realized as his brain surfaced out of a dreamless sleep. The phone was ringing. Groping for the receiver, he tried to locate and focus in on his clock.
Four-thirty.
In the morning?
He scrubbed his hand over his face, trying to pull himself together. “Hello, you’d better be an obscene phone call to make this worth my while.”
“I’ve already offered to make it worth your while, Underwood.”
The voice—cool and official—jarred loose a memory. “Mr. McNair?” Ben looked at the clock again. A hint of annoyance entered his voice. He’d come home and done further background work for his intended trip today. He’d slept for less than three hours and he liked his rest. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
The voice on the other end of the phone grew cooler. “I always know what time it is. I’m on my way to a meeting in Seattle and will be back by this evening. What I don’t know is if you’ve made any progress yet.” Ben sat up, annoyed now. Who the hell made phone calls at four-thirty in the morning? If he’d had any doubts about the man being a control freak, this cinched it.
“Some,” Ben replied in answer to McNair’s question.
“You’ve found her?” Excitement echoed in the receiver against Ben’s ear.
Ben sighed, pulling up the comforter. Outside, the January rain was beating against his window. Telling him to go back to sleep. “No, but I might have located a relative.”
“Where?”
The question echoed like a command for disclosure. Maybe it was because he was half asleep, but the tone rubbed him the wrong way. Instincts surfaced, making him just the slightest bit wary. McNair, polished CEO though he might be, was in this case a loose cannon. Loose cannons had a way of going off at precisely the worst time. Ben wasn’t about to take the chance of having things blown apart by an overzealous parent.
“Let me check it out and I’ll let you know.”
The answer irritated McNair. “I’m not paying you to play games, Underwood.”
Ben cut him yet a little more slack, though it galled him to do so. Stress did strange things to people, he reminded himself. Maybe, under ordinary circumstances, Stephen McNair was a completely likable person, although Ben sincerely doubted it.
In any event, rules had to be set and boundaries defined. “No, Mr. McNair, you’re paying me to find your son and I intend to do that. But it’ll have to be my way. Again, that’s what you’re paying me for.”
He heard the man bite off a retort he couldn’t make out, then say in a guarded voice, “You’ll call as soon as you have anything?”
“I’ll call,” Ben promised, just as he had yesterday as McNair left the office. The man had tried to bully him into making reports at regular intervals. That might have been standard procedure at McNair’s company, but that wasn’t the way he operated and Ben had made his position perfectly clear. Or so he thought.
“Speaking of calling, how did you get my home number?” It was unlisted, and although he’d given out his number on occasion to more than one distraught parent, something had prevented Ben from offering it to McNair. Self-preservation, most likely.
“I have ways.” There was a smug note in the other man’s voice. And then he reiterated his earlier point. “I would appreciate you checking in with me regularly.”
Maybe the agency should refine its screening process, Ben thought, growing closer to the end of his patience. At the moment, the agency took on all comers. Maybe it was time for Cade to rethink that when he got back from the case he was working on.
“There’s nothing regular about my line of work. I’ll call when there’s something to call about. Goodbye, Mr. McNair.”
Ben let the receiver fall back into the cradle, then slid back down on the bed. Less than five minutes of tossing and turning made him acknowledge that he was too irritated to go back to sleep.
Muttering under his breath, Ben got up to take a shower. The last time he’d been up on the wrong side of four-thirty, it’d been to get ready for his paper route before going to school. The nuns at St. Mary’s, aware of his mother’s financial situation, had said paying part of his own tuition at the parochial school would make a man out of him.
He didn’t feel very manly right now. Just tired.
With a sigh, he turned on the hot water and stepped into the shower. There was no sense wasting time.
The drive up Interstate 5 from Bedford to Saratoga would have been scenic had it not been for the early morning fog that hung about the winding road. He was a careful driver by nature.
