It was my turn to grunt. “Fine by me.” He couldn’t fool me. Now that he knew the two were connected, you couldn’t keep him away with a legion of superheroes. He’d tell Tony, and they’d both be there tomorrow.
“Does the dead body with the bullet in his forehead belong to the stalker?” he asked.
“Tomorrow, Adam and I will be happy to talk,” I said, firmly keeping myself from explaining. “You mind if I call our lawyer?”
He glanced at the Cantrip agents and smiled grimly. “You aren’t under arrest. Without the assurance that there was magic afoot here, Cantrip doesn’t have the authority. And I am not inclined to arrest anyone without more information. Without an arrest, I don’t see that I have any say over what you do.”
My phone was intact, which was something of a miracle in and of itself. Willis put himself between me and the Cantrip agents while I called the pack’s lawyers. Their phone system forwarded me to the lawyer on call, and the woman who answered sounded harried. I could hear kids screaming in the background, but since the screams were interspaced with wild laughter, I wasn’t too concerned.
“Trevellyan,” she said in a breathless voice. She cleared her throat and continued in a much more lawyerly fashion, though her voice was still very Marilyn Monroe. “Good evening, Ms. Hauptman. How can I help?”
I gave her a brief explanation—stalker, break-in, dead body. Not telling her anything Willis, who was watching me with grim amusement, didn’t already know. I told her Adam wanted to get out of here tonight and give a statement tomorrow.
“Don’t say anything,” she said. “Don’t let Adam say anything. I’ll be right there.”
________
SHE STRODE ONTO THE SCENE, A FIVE-FOOT-NOTHINGwarrior with iron gray hair and eyes clear and sharp blue. She took one good long look around and marched up to Clay Willis, having evidently determined he was in charge.
“Are my clients under arrest?” she asked Willis.
Adam, trailing his pair of Feds, approached in time for Willis to answer, “No, ma’am.”
“We still have some questions,” said Agent Orton.
“Which my clients will answer tomorrow in my office.” She gave them her card. “Call that number tomorrow at eight thirty sharp, and someone will tell you when to come.”
She ushered Adam and me to Adam’s car.
“Now run while you can,” she murmured. “I will do the same. The grandmother magic will wear off in a minute, and someone will decide that the dead body means they should arrest someone. Don’t answer your phone unless you know the number and come into my office tomorrow at seven thirty.”
________
“SHE’S GOOD,” I SAID. “TOUGH, SMART, AND FUNNY ASa bonus. I wonder if there really is grandmother magic.”
“For what we pay her, she’d better be good,” agreed Adam. “She doesn’t need grandmother magic to make people scramble at her command.” He pressed a button on his steering wheel, and said, “Call Warren.”
A woman’s voice from his dash said, “Calling.”
“Boss?” Warren answered. “Everyone okay?”
“Mercy’s singed, but still swinging.”
“Good to hear. I got quite an earful from your security chief, who deleted a lot of interesting material.”
“Then you know most of it. I need you to get everyone out of our house right now. Apparently, Christy’s stalker is some kind of supernatural who can set things on fire.”
“You want me to take them home?” Warren asked.
Adam took in a deep breath. “What do you think?”
“I think that our place got a lot of attention in the press when those rogue agents kidnapped Kyle.”
“Suggestions?”
“How about Honey’s place? It’s big enough to house everyone if we don’t all need bedrooms, and it hasn’t been plastered all over the newspaper.”
Honey’s house was in Finley, too. Another large house like ours, though it wasn’t built to be a pack den, so while there was plenty of room, it was short on beds.
