Chapter 7 #3
Those must have been a no-go as well, since Pru came back to the spot where she’d left her satchel sitting on the ground and placed the fingerprint powder and brush back inside.
“All the prints on the car are Delia’s,” she said, although Caleb had already gathered as much. “I suppose the person who took her could have been wearing gloves, but none of the prints I found are smeared, so I’m not sure about that.”
Ty looked away from her to the signage at the far end of the lot, which appeared to show a diagram of the park’s trails and amenities. “I’m going to explore,” he said. “Maybe Delia didn’t stay in the parking lot. It’s possible she might have been confronted somewhere else on the park grounds.”
The same idea had already occurred to Caleb. “No, I’ll do it. You two stay here.”
As Ty opened his mouth — probably to protest — Prudence produced a key fob from inside her satchel. “We still need to look inside Delia’s car.”
And she clicked the fob, and immediately the little SUV’s lights flashed.
“You have a key?” Caleb demanded.
“Sure,” Pru said easily. “I gave her my backup, and she gave me hers. That way, we each had a little extra insurance in case either of us got stranded somewhere.”
“You could have said something about having a key.”
She shrugged. “I needed to dust for fingerprints before I looked inside the car.”
Caleb glanced over at Ty, who appeared nonplussed.
“Okay, then you two check out the interior of the car. I’m going to wander. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll bump into someone who saw Delia.”
Neither Pru nor Ty seemed too optimistic about the scenario, judging by their dubious expressions, and Caleb had to admit it was something of a long shot.
Although there were a few other cars in the parking lot, they hadn’t seen a single soul.
Anyone who was out and about in the park would be widely spaced enough that there was a good chance they wouldn’t have gotten close enough to notice any details about any other people they’d seen.
Although Caleb hoped Delia’s coppery hair was distinctive enough that someone might have caught a glimpse of her and would remember the sighting.
Besides, venturing out into the park seemed like a better way to use up some of his nervous energy than pawing around inside her car.
As he went, though, he found his spirits drooping lower and lower.
He didn’t see anyone around, and the grounds appeared to be meticulously kept, with not a single dropped candy wrapper or soda can to stand out in the landscape.
Possibly, that would have allowed him to instantly note anything Delia might have left behind, but he couldn’t help thinking that if the park rangers were this neat, they very well could have come along and erased any evidence of her presence here.
If she’d even left the parking lot.
He realized he hadn’t seen her at all today, so he had no idea what she’d been wearing when she drove down to Laughlin.
She would have gone into the office first, since he knew she had an appointment in the morning, so maybe she was still wearing her usual professional attire of a blouse and skirt and heels.
No, that didn’t sound right. Although there had been times when she’d been forced to battle a demon while dressed up, usually she tried to wear something comfortable and practical if she wasn’t going to be at the office.
She’d probably changed into jeans and flat shoes, most likely sandals, considering how hot it was out here.
So, even if he actually managed to bump into someone along the path, the only description he’d be able to give would be of a slender red-haired woman in her late twenties and not much else.
Great.
He made a loop and then headed back to the parking lot, knowing he wasn’t going to find a damn thing out here even if he stayed in the park all afternoon and all evening. The best he could do now was circle back and hope against hope that maybe Pru and Ty had found something inside Delia’s vehicle.
That sort of search wouldn’t have taken them very long, though. He wondered what they would have found to talk about while he was gone.
The two of them were sitting on the open hatchback of the Hyundai when he approached. Caleb wasn’t sure that was entirely respectful, but then again, it wasn’t as if park benches had been provided out here in the parking lot.
Also, the Range Rover would have automatically locked itself, so it wasn’t like they could have sat down in there, even if they’d wanted to deal with the heat.
“Find anything?” Pru asked, and he shook his head.
“Nothing. No sign at all that she even went into the park. I didn’t see anyone I could ask, either.”
The low grumble of a motorcycle approached from the feeder road that led into the parking lot. All three of them looked in that direction.
“Great,” Caleb muttered.
The motorcyclist was a cop. Not that any of them were doing anything illegal, but still, he tried to avoid law enforcement whenever possible.
So far, the identification he’d procured at some cost seemed to be holding up — once he’d used the fake birth certificate to obtain a Nevada driver’s license, everything had been golden —and yet he’d rather not stress-test it right now.
Both Pru and Ty got up from their perch on the rear hatch of Delia’s SUV.
Neither of them looked worried, but then, Ty rarely did.
Caleb was a little less certain about how Prudence would act under pressure, although he had a feeling that anyone whose daily routine involved following cheating husbands and collecting evidence on insurance fraudsters probably wouldn’t lose her cool very easily.
“This your vehicle?” the cop asked after he’d paused right behind the Kona. He was so typical that he might have come right out of central casting — burly, maybe in his late thirties or early forties, hair cut short, mustache on his upper lip and mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes.
For just a second, Pru hesitated. Then Ty tilted his head toward her so slightly that Caleb might have imagined the gesture, and she said, “Yes, it’s mine. Is there a problem?”
“License and registration, please.”
Well, at least he’d said “please.” Caleb had no idea what all this was about, although he guessed the park was just remote enough that it might be a tempting spot for people to park and indulge in some illegal substances.
None of them had been smoking or even drinking out of the water bottles they’d brought along, but clearly, that didn’t matter to the cop.
Pru went around to the passenger side, opened the door, and then fussed in the glove compartment for a moment. When she came back, she was holding the Kona’s registration, along with her license and what looked like an insurance card.
Looking as though she didn’t have a care in the world, she handed all the paperwork over to the cop.
“Prudence Nelson.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Your business in Laughlin, Ms. Nelson?”
“I came down with my friends to spend the day here. We thought we’d check out the park before we hit the casinos.”
The cop studied the documentation she’d given him for a moment longer before he handed it back almost reluctantly. Caleb strained to see what it said, because shouldn’t the officer have called out the obvious fact that it wasn’t Pru’s name on the registration or on the insurance card?
It was hard to see print that tiny from this distance, but he could have sworn everything was in her name, not Delia’s.
His eyes began to widen in surprise, and then he told himself not to react. He knew he hadn’t done that, which meant Ty must have cast the minor glamour.
A man of many talents, apparently.
“Have a good one,” the cop said. For just a second, Caleb could have sworn the eyes behind those mirrored sunglasses were blank and white, not human at all.
Before he could react — or maybe tell himself he must be seeing things — the man had climbed onto his motorcycle so he could turn it around and head back to the highway.
“That was close,” Caleb remarked once the officer was safely away. Probably better not to mention the eyes, especially since he didn’t know exactly what he’d seen.
“More than you know,” Ty replied. “He was possessed.”
“What?” Pru exclaimed.
A corner of Ty’s mouth lifted slightly. “Not by a demon,” he said. “By an angel.”
Maybe it was the heat, but Caleb couldn’t help feeling a little off balance right then. “Angels can possess people?” he demanded.
“Sometimes,” Ty said. “This felt like a lower-level angel. We call them the Watchers.”
“Guess what they do,” Pru put in, her eyes glinting with amusement.
Caleb had the sense she must be quoting from something, but he had absolutely no idea what. “All right, so what’s a Watcher angel doing possessing a Laughlin motorcycle cop?”
Ty’s shoulders lifted, and he glanced away from them toward the lazy curve of the Colorado a dozen or so yards away. “I already told you that the power of the river is very strong. If someone felt it was in danger somehow, then they’d send out scouts.”
“Who would be endangering the river?” Pru asked. Her hands were on her hips, fingernails glinting almost the same deep forest green as her hair, and it seemed clear she didn’t want to proceed any further until she had a better idea of what they were dealing with.
For a second or two, Ty’s glance slid toward Caleb. “The enemy, of course. The same enemy we’ve been fighting for millennia.”
“The Devil?” she demanded, and now Ty chuckled.
“Oh, he’s pretty hands-off these days. No, I meant the other demons who’re trapped in Hell. They’re always looking for a way to get out of there permanently…right, Caleb?”
Although he hated being put on the spot like that, he knew he had to answer. “Yeah, sure. It’s harder than you think, though. They can get out for a few hours or a couple of days…or even months, if they find the right person to possess…but eventually, they always get sent back.”
“You haven’t,” Ty pointed out, and now Prudence stared at Caleb as if he’d sprouted the proverbial pair of horns.
“You were in Hell?” she demanded.
“For a couple of years,” he said. “Through no fault of my own, I’d like to point out. I just got caught in the blowback when my father and his half-demon buddies decided to summon Belial to this plane. It didn’t go so well for them.”
“No,” Ty said, “it didn’t. And the only reason Caleb made it back was because he was able to piggyback on a recently dead soul who’d been sacrificed to Belial. Those were very special circumstances, though, so I don’t think any of them are going to be repeated any time soon.”
Pru didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Instead, she stood there with her hands still planted on her hips, red-lacquered lips pressed together as she tried to digest everything she’d just heard.
“All right,” she said at length. “So now we’re dealing with both angels and demons. What’s next?”
The park had turned out to be a dead end, and that meant they only had one lead they could follow while they were here in Laughlin.
“We talk to Aaron Sanchez,” Caleb replied.