We got in. Alessandro started the engine and it roared to life.
“Linus?” he asked.
“Yes.” Please be okay. Please, please be okay.
He put the car in gear. The Alfa streaked out of the parking lot and hurtled down the street at a breakneck speed.
Linus Duncan lived in River Oaks, the most exclusive neighborhood in Houston, full of mansions, tree-lined streets, and infuriating speed bumps. Alessandro was a speed demon, and he’d bought us an extra ten minutes on the highway. But River Oaks made it impossible to maintain any kind of speed.
Bump.
Bump.
“Merda!”
Shit was a good way to describe it. I tried the phone again. No answer.
“You think something happened to him. Something serious,” Alessandro said.
“He activated the siege protocol.”
“It doesn’t mean he’s dead. It could be a test.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “Linus could be sitting inside that house with a timer, waiting to see how long it will take us to catch on.”
“I hope you’re right.”
It would be just like Linus to pull something like that. But a feeling deep down in my stomach told me that something was horribly wrong. When Nevada first trained me in investigative work, she taught me to trust my instincts. If it didn’t look right, it probably wasn’t. If the hair on the back of your neck stood up, you needed to get the hell out of there. She taught Arabella the same thing. My younger sister called it listening to the lizard brain. I trusted my lizard brain. It kept me breathing.
My phone chimed. A text message from Ragnar.
We can’t find Jadwiga. Matilda says they’re nocturnal, so we’ll come back tonight. We’ve locked the conference room and put the key on your desk.
“What is it?” Alessandro asked.
“Jadwiga.”
He glanced at me.
“There is an expensive and possibly endangered spider loose in the conference room. It was smuggled into the country, stolen, recovered, and during the handoff to the current owner it escaped.”
“In our conference room?”
“Yes.”
“How big is this spider?”
“About a four-inch leg span.”
Alessandro glanced up at the heavens. The heavens were hidden by the car roof, but I was sure the higher power had seen the silent plea for mercy in his eyes.
“I forgot to ask, how did it go with Gunderson?”
Alessandro shrugged. “We talked. I dropped him off at the Justice Center trussed up like a hog. Lenora can take it from there.”
Lenora Jordan, the Harris County DA, would definitely take it from there. As Connor once put it, law and order were her gods, and she served as their devoted paladin.
We turned around the bend. Linus’ gates came into view, Leon’s blue Shelby GT350 parked by the keypad. Alessandro pulled in behind him.
I got out of the car and walked up to the keypad. Leon had the family version of the code, but mine was the Deputy Warden sequence. I entered it.
Leon rolled down his window. “I waited as instructed.”
The gates slid open with a clang. The lights on the keypad blinked but remained a steady lemon-yellow.
I was right. Linus’ house thought it was under attack. The moment an intruder crossed the property line, Linus’ defense turrets would sprout out of the innocuous-looking lawn like some lethal mushrooms and pulverize the offender into a pile of smoking meat. Linus was a hephaestus mage. He built devastating weapons out of random trash and duct tape. His defense systems were second to none.
Alessandro got out of the car.
The wrought iron gates stood wide open, like the mandibles of some beast ready to grind us between its teeth. Theoretically, the system would recognize me and Alessandro. Theoretically, it wouldn’t kill us. Unfortunately, we’d never tested that theory under battle conditions.
“Do we go in?” Leon asked.
“I go in,” Alessandro said. “The two of you stay here.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
“There is no reason for both of us to go.”
“You’re right. I should go by myself. It’s my responsibility as the Deputy.”
“It’s my responsibility to protect the Deputy.” Alessandro’s tone said the discussion was over.
“That’s why we’ll go together.”
Leon sighed. “I guess I’ll just stay here. Watching you get inside or get turned into human hamburger meat.”
I could have done without that visual.
The longer we waited, the worse things would be.