Kitty Raises Hell (Kitty Norville 6)

We went back to the suite. Ben leaned over to mutter at me, “Just what we need, another potential target.”

“Yeah, I know,” I admitted.

“So you invited him anyway?”

“I couldn’t say no.” It wasn’t like I was hoping Peter might replace T.J. It just kind of looked that way from the outside.

“Everyone, this is Peter,” I said, introducing him.

The sound of recorded laughter answered me, coming from Jules’s laptop. Not eerie, sinister, Vincent Price laughter. Rather, it sounded like a grown man trying not to chuckle at a silly joke. It was sniggering. Then it vanished into crackling static.

“What was that?” I said, wincing. The noise grated in my sensitive werewolf ears.

“EVP. The timing matches it to the appearance of the figure in the fire,” Jules said.

EVP. Electronic voice phenomenon. Another paranormal investigative mainstay, like EMF detectors. Great. Giving the creature a voice somehow made it even worse. “What’s it mean?”

“I’m thinking of all the ways someone could claim the figure in that clip is a guy in a fireproof suit, like you said,” he explained. “Even though we all know there was no one else in that building, and the cameras didn’t pick up anything, no movement, nobody entering and leaving, nothing. Because I’m sorry, but that sounds like a guy in a suit laughing at us. Even though I know it isn’t. But that’s what the skeptics are going to call us on when we show this.”

“But how do you prove a negative?” Peter said. “How do you prove it wasn’t a guy in a suit?” The voice of the skeptic. The voice of reason, rather. If it weren’t for everything else that had happened, I’d be there with him.

“Now you understand the problem with just about everything we do,” Gary said.

“Maybe you’ve been going about this backward,” Peter said. “This isn’t random, right? Someone put this in motion. So go to the source. Shut them down on their end.”

“Kitty can’t go to Vegas,” Ben said. “They already tried to kill her once, I don’t want to give them another chance.”

“And Odysseus Grant, my contact there, is missing. I’m afraid something’s happened to him.”

Peter shrugged. “I could go look for him. Maybe dig up anything else on whoever’s doing this.”

“Would you?” I said.

“Can you front the money for a plane ticket?”

Straightforward guy. I liked him. Give him a few more years and a few more hard knocks he could do Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. “Sure.”

“Maybe that’s what we need,” Jules said. “We work on the paranormal end of things, and you can figure out how they started this in the first place. Is that a plan?” With a look, he consulted everyone gathered in the room: me, Ben, Peter, his teammates.

Any plan that didn’t involve Roman made me happy.

“When can you leave?” I asked Peter.

“As soon as we get a flight, I can leave. I’ll need to park my bike somewhere,” he said.

“You can use the carport at our place,” Ben said. “I can drive you to the airport.”

The plan, such as it was, came together. Using Jules’s computer, we ordered tickets for an afternoon flight for Peter. Ben and Peter would drive to the condo to drop off Peter’s motorcycle, then Ben would drive him to the airport. I’d stay and help with the research, even though I wasn’t much good for anything beyond creative Internet searches. Sometimes, creative Internet searches could be incredibly useful.

The hope was we’d have more information by evening, so we wouldn’t be going into the second séance quite so blind. Roman kept stressing how little time we had to solve this thing. I didn’t know what that meant, but the sooner the eureka moment came, the better.

Peter and Ben headed out. On his way out, Ben took my wrist and pulled me to a private corner on the porch. It was about as domineering as he ever got with me, and I co

uldn’t say that I liked it.

I pulled my arm away from him and glared. “What?”

He held my face in his hands and studied me, looking into my eyes like he could see through them, see to what I was thinking.