The Ex Who Glowed In The Dark Part 10

"Detective Daggett's coming back? He can't help now. We're on deadline. We failed to find Grant. Now we just need to find the code so I can give it to them."

Amanda popped open a c.o.ke, stored the rest in the refrigerator, set the box of tea on the counter and went to sit at the table where Dawson still had three laptops going. "Show me the e-mail."

He turned one of the screens toward her.

From: john[email protected] To: Copy the code to a thumb drive and deliver that thumb drive to locker 232 at the Fitness 4 You Club on Preston Road before 6:00 p.m. today. After we have verified the code, your brother will be returned to you unharmed. If you fail to do so or if you give us the incorrect code, we will excise one of your brother's fingers for every hour you delay. At midnight we will slit his throat and throw his body into a dumpster.

Do not attempt to attach a tracking device. Do not attempt to change the code like your father did. Anything of this nature will result in the removal of more fingers, all of which we will deliver to you.

Amanda frowned at the stilted language. "Excise his fingers? Who says excise? It sounds more like we're dealing with a college professor than a dangerous kidnapper."

"They're dangerous. They killed my parents."

A horrible thought occurred to Amanda. "Why did they kill your parents and ruin a chance to get this program? Wouldn't they want to keep them alive until they got what they wanted?"

"That's a good point," Charley agreed. "Sounds like they thought he gave them the program they wanted, but he changed the code. So maybe they got mad and killed him for jacking them around." He shook his head. "No, that would be really dumb if they did that. If Dawson and Grant had been with them, everybody would be dead and they'd never get the right code."

The kidnappers were not dumb.

Dawson looked at her for a long moment, and she wished she hadn't asked the question. If Dawson's father gave them a program with something changed but they didn't realize it at first and thought they had the right program that meant they'd killed his parents as soon as they got what they wanted. And that probably meant they'd kill Dawson and Grant as soon as they got what they wanted from them.

"I don't know." Dawson straightened his gla.s.ses and took another drink of Red Bull.

Amanda sipped her c.o.ke and said nothing. Dawson was smart. If he didn't see all the ramifications of her question, it was because he didn't want to and she was not going to point it out to him. He didn't need to add the possibility of murder-no-matter-what to his concerns, but she would add it to her list of things to tell Daggett.

Maybe if that list was long enough, he and Ross would focus on the important stuff and forget about what she'd said to Nick yesterday.

Daggett arrived half an hour later with six breakfast sandwiches. He looked the same as the day before. Faded jeans, cowboy boots and T-shirt stuffed with bulging biceps, pecs and deltoids.

"No donuts?" Amanda asked, pulling the warm sandwiches from the bag. "I thought cops loved donuts."

"I like those donuts with the little sprinkles," Charley said. "Not that your detective friend cares what I like."

"I'm not a cop, remember?" Jake said. "I'm your gay cousin."

Amanda flinched. He wasn't going to forget about yesterday.

She handed a paper-wrapped sandwich to Dawson. "You need to eat this."

He shook his head. "No, thanks. I'm not hungry." He lifted his Red Bull can to his mouth.

"I don't recall asking if you were hungry. I said, you need to eat this." Amanda tried to a.s.sume a bossy, dictatorial voice and speak as if she expected to be obeyed.

To her surprise, it worked. Dawson pulled back the wrapper and began to eat with one hand while working the keyboard with the other.

Apparently she was onto something with the bossy att.i.tude. She and Daggett exchanged a glance and a slight shrug.

Jake took a bite of his own sandwich. "Show me the new e-mail."

Dawson indicated the laptop sitting beside the one he was using. "It's on there. Untraceable, just like the first one."

Jake pulled the computer toward him, scanned the message and frowned.

Amanda gulped down her greasy egg and sausage sandwich, surprised at how good it tasted. She had grabbed a couple of Irene's chocolate chip cookies on her way out the door that morning, but nothing substantial. "Dawson, while you eat and look for that code, Detective Jake and I are going outside to see if we can find, uh, shoe prints."

Jake swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. "Shoe prints?"

Dawson, absorbed in his work, didn't notice the ridiculous statement she'd just made. "Okay."

"Yes. Let's go look outside." She twitched her head toward the door and winked.

That effort earned her another are you nuts? look.

She walked to the door, unlocked it and went into the hallway then turned back to see Jake still sitting at the table watching her curiously. She scowled and motioned for him to get out there with her. Jerk. He was being obtuse just to get even with her.

Finally he stood and followed her into the hall.

She closed the door firmly behind them.

"Shoe prints?" he asked as they walked downstairs. "We checked for footprints yesterday and found nothing in all this concrete. What was really in that c.o.ke can?"

"It was just an excuse to get you out of Dawson's hearing." They reached the bottom floor and she pushed open the door to the outside world, to the cool, fresh air of the predawn summer day. She left the sidewalk and crossed the patchy gra.s.s, brown from summer heat and no rain, to the shadows of a big catalpa tree then turned to face him and b.u.mped into his wide, solid chest. "Oh!" She lifted her hands automatically to brace herself. Okay, maybe it wasn't a completely automatic reaction. Maybe she'd kind of been wanting an excuse to touch that chest for some time now.

He grabbed her arms to steady her. "You okay?"

"Amanda! Stop pawing him!" Charley shouted in her ear.

She jerked away. "You were following too close."

Jake spread his hands and stepped back.

d.a.m.n. Between Charley and her ability to say stupid things, she probably wasn't going to have a lot of chances to touch Jake's chest or any other part of his anatomy. "I have some things I need to tell you that I don't want Dawson to hear."

Jake folded his arms. "I have some things to tell both you and Dawson. I stayed up late last night doing some checking, then somebody woke me up after only a couple of hours of sleep. But you go right ahead and tell me your news first."

Jake had news? That sounded promising. "My news is just a possibility. I don't know anything for certain. Tell me what you learned first."

"I'll tell you and Dawson at the same time so I don't have to repeat myself."

Annoying man. "Fine, then I'll be quick. The guy in 3C, the one who sees aliens, I think he saw the aliens who took Grant. I mean, obviously they weren't really aliens. But I think he saw them even though he said he didn't."

That got Jake's attention. He took her arms and leaned toward her. If Charley wasn't there- But he was.

"Why do you think that?" Jake asked.

She told him about her encounter with tinfoil boy. "I didn't want Dawson to hear because I was afraid he'd freak out like he did when he thought Hannah was involved. You know, run over there and bang on the guy's door, try to beat him up. If Megan hadn't answered her door really fast last night, I think he would have broken it down. And he actually attacked Nick yesterday when he thought he heard a scream coming from the apartment."

Jake frowned and stepped back, turning loose of her arms. Darn. "Thought he heard a scream coming from the apartment? And you're just now telling me?"

"His cat was freaked out because-never mind. Not important. What's important is talking to Brendan about his aliens."

Jake nodded. "Okay. I'll go talk to him."

"He doesn't trust cops any more than he trusts aliens, so you'll have to go in as my gay cousin." She couldn't stop the smile that spread across her lips at her dig. No, it probably wasn't the way to get close enough to touch again, but he deserved it. He'd given her plenty of grief about her poor choice of words.

Jake refused to rise to the bait. "I'll do whatever needs to be done. If all else fails, maybe I could shove a few splinters under his fingernails to make him talk."

"I don't think that will be necessary." He was kidding. She was sure he was kidding. Pretty sure.

"You said you had two things. What's the other one?"

She repeated her theory that Dawson and Grant could be in danger even if he located and turned over to them the program they wanted.

"I know."

That sent a cold chill down her spine. "You know?"

"In my other life, I'm a cop. I know a few things about criminals. They tried to clean up all loose ends before. They'll do it again. After somebody kills once, every time gets easier."

"Do you think Sunny and I are in danger? They were following us." If she'd put Sunny in danger, she'd never forgive herself.

"I think you'll be fine if you can back off and let Ross and me handle this. We're actually trained to do this sort of thing." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "But of course you can't back off. So, yeah, I think you're in danger."

Amanda could think of no response to that except something snarky like You can really be a jerk when you try, so she ignored his comment. "Let's go talk to tinfoil boy."

He followed her inside and up the steps to the third floor.

"Go back in and hold Dawson's hand while I talk to 3C," he said.

Amanda gaped at him and reconsidered her decision to refrain from telling him he was a jerk. "No. Did you not listen to me? You need me to go with you as your cousin. I've met him and talked to him. We've bonded."

"Bonded? Really? He threatened you with a gun and closed the door in your face. That doesn't sound like any kind of bonding I've ever heard of."

Amanda marched past him and knocked on Brendan's door.

"I'll go in and check on him." Charley zipped past then returned in a few seconds. "He's suiting up."

The door opened and half of Brendan's face appeared, enough she could see that he was wearing his silver helmet and jacket. "Hi, Amanda."

Amanda gave Jake a smug look then returned her attention to Brendan. "This is my cousin Jake. He'd like to ask you a few questions about the aliens, if that's okay."

Brendan opened the door wider and eyed Jake askance. "I don't like him."

"That's okay. I don't like him either. But you can trust him. He's trying to help Dawson get his brother back from the aliens."

Jake moved closer to the door. "I've dealt with aliens before. I might be able to get the boy back if I knew which group took him. Can you describe them?"

Amanda made a note that Jake hadn't asked Brendan directly if he'd seen the people who took Grant. Instead he'd begun with the a.s.sumption that he knew Brendan had seen them and was simply asking for a description. She'd have to remember that technique. It could come in handy for all sorts of situations.

Brendan hesitated, pushed his gla.s.ses up on his nose and squinted at Jake. For a moment she thought he was once again going to deny having seen the kidnappers, but he didn't. "Three of them. Tall and short. One man was tall and one was short, and the woman was short. They were wearing disguises, but I think they were from the Alpha Centauri system. They've been taking boys to work in the crystal mines."

Jake nodded. "Tough on the boys, digging out those crystals. Would you recognize any of these creatures if you saw them again?"

"Of course I would, but they're long gone, halfway back to Alpha Centauri by now." He looked around nervously as if uncertain whether the creatures were truly gone or just lurking around the corner.

"Maybe they are and maybe they're not." Jake lifted a hand. "Could you stay here for just a minute and let me check on something?"

Brendan looked at Amanda as if asking what he should do. Maybe they had bonded in an offbeat sort of way. She nodded.

"Okay," he said.

Jake strode to the apartment next door and knocked. After a couple of minutes Nick Farner in his underwear opened the door. His hair was rumpled and he sported an overnight growth of dark beard above a very nice bod.

Brendan disappeared inside his apartment and closed the door quietly. Maybe he didn't think Nick Farner had a nice bod.

"Hi, Nick. Remember me? Jake, Amanda's cousin?"

Nick rubbed his eyes and yawned. "Yeah, sure. What's up, Jake, Amanda's cousin?"

"We're out of coffee. Just wondered if we could borrow some."

"Okay." Nick disappeared back into the apartment and returned shortly with a plastic bowl containing something dark. "Here you go."

Jake accepted the container. "Thanks."

"Sure. Anytime." Nick closed the door.

Jake came back over to Amanda. "Where's our witness?"

Charley darted through the door of 3C and back again. "He's standing on the other side."

"He closed the door," Amanda said. "What did you expect? Don't you think it was a little rude to leave him like that and go borrow coffee from a neighbor right in the middle of a conversation?"

"That neighbor just got out of prison, and he is definitely not Mrs. Lowell's grandson. I wanted Matthews to see him, maybe identify him as one of the kidnappers." Jake knocked on Brendan's door.

Before Amanda could digest that last bit of information, the door opened a crack. "That's him," Brendan whispered. "That's the tall Alpha Centaurian who took the boy."

Chapter Eleven.

Amanda gulped. She'd just been staring at a kidnapper-murderer, thinking he had a hot bod. So much for her survival instinct. But Brendan had said there were three aliens, two men and one woman. "The short man, was he bald?" Her voice came out barely above a whisper.

"Of course. Alpha Centaurians don't have any hair. That one you just saw in that apartment over there was wearing a wig."