“Mable and I have news too,” Marvin said. “My darlin’ love was able to create a short-term glitch in the camera system that finally let us get out. We went for a little walk last night to pick up the laptop.” He sipped his coffee, making them wait for the rest.
“And?” Dani demanded. Dani had no patience with Marvin’s theatrics. He grinned.
Marvin was a controlling, manipulative, godless man, but he was also kind, from the top of his white hair to his toes, otherwise, Sandra would have hated him. But he was. Kind, that is. He did a lot of good with his fortune, posting checks with significant numbers of zeros to the homeless shelter where Sandra volunteered.
“And?” Dani insisted, louder.
Marvin’s grin widened.
Sandra stifled her desire to whack him with the magazine she always carried. That violent action was her undercover persona’s, not her own, but she had to confess, even if only to herself and God, that smacking Marvin gave her a deep andabiding pleasure, regardless of the cantankerous man’s well-spent wealth.
Finally, Marvin gave in, and said, “We were able to retrieve the laptop Zeddie smuggled in, and with it, Mable got us into the basement garage. We saw the whole place and managed to also get into the utility closet where the linens are delivered.” His eyes brows waggled suggestively. “Which is where we got in a little hanky-panky, too.”
“We nearly got caught,” Mable said, clearly pleased at having evaded detection, “but with the laptop, I was able to redirect attention away from the closet.”
“I do not want to know any details of what you were doing in the utility closet,” Sandra said firmly. She got up to make hot water for more tea.
“Aw,” Marvin said. “You woulda been so proud of Mable’s flexibility.”
Sandra blew out an exasperated breath but did not turn around.
“With the new laptop, and thanks to my sweetie pie’s gift for destroying surveillance equipment, I can do so much now.” Mable gushed. “I wish Zeddie had been more amenable to getting the laptop for me sooner.”
“We had to build up his trust,” Dani said. “Better late than never. What did you see?”
Mable
Mable watched Sandra. She was better today. She was less tense, less fidgety. Harold must really be recovering. In her off time, Mable had researched ways to turn Harold back to human, but . . . there was nothing in the databanks, even on the Dark-Witch-Web, (the dark web for black witch groups) that showed her a spell for another practitioner to return Harold to human.The practitioner who turned him in the first place was the only one who could, one-hundred-percent of the time, successfully re-transmute an animal back to human. Only three times in history had a third party forced a cursed person’s return to human shape. And Sandra, well, Sandra hated and feared her power. She might never be able to able to pull up her curse.
The guilt-ridden former preacher stared out the window at the petting zoo, which could be seen from Marvin’s window. Mable knew that if Sandra had her way, she would live in the pen with Harold, her motives all mixed together, from self-loathing, to grief and love, to some form of penance.
Mable turned on the smuggled-in laptop, listening with half an ear to Marvin, who was still explaining about their big adventure. It had been far more dangerous than they had expected. She was never one to turn away from a little fun and games but, last night, they had been close to getting caught by people who, it was likely, had no fear of committing crimes.
“While we were in the basement,” Marvin said, sounding as if it had been a wonderful adventure, “some men came in through the overhead door, driving a white truck. It looked a lot like the one in front of Building Z. The men were wearing white hazmat suits, like you described, and they moved a man from out of the elevator of this building into the truck and whisked him away.”
“Is anyone else missing?” Dani asked.
“We don’t know,” Mable said, patting her hair back from her face. It had been four weeks since her last haircut and style and she really needed her roots done. “He was male, short, and heavyset, but we never got a look at his face.” Partially because they had been bent over a commercial sized washing machine when the garage door opened, but that was another story entirely.
Most people were never hit with magic gifts, and few were cursed with a big ball of energy late in life, but some of the older students at The Sevens had been cursed hard, like Buck and the other missing geezers from Table J. When TriDevi arrived, there had been nine inmates on the Big Hitters list, including Marvin and Dani, the missing people at Table J, including Buck and a ninety-year-old woman who loved to knit, named Emogene Smathers, and a man from Table B, named Richard D. Richards (who fit the physical description of the man they saw wheeled away). Big hitters were the ones who could help save the planet. Or make big bucks for someone in the darker world of money laundering or drug-running . . . or power harvesting.
Mable entered a line of code and hit ENTER. A database opened and Mable could have squealed in delight. She had drilled a way into the log of patients at Building Z. There were new patients.
“News,” she said. “The missing geezers are not runaways or dead. We have five new admissions to Building Z in the last twenty-four hours.” She looked at her crime-solving partners. “I’m betting they were drugged, carted away, and are now in lockdown and unconscious.”
Through her pain, Dani ground out, “Our current theory was right. The power of magic practitioners is being harvested for profit, and against their will.”
“I fucking hate harvesters,” Marvin said.
“Yeah,” Mable said. “Me too. And now that I have a computer on site, I can track everyone and figure everything out.”
“Can you get into all the records?” Dani asked.
Mable’s fingers flew over the keyboard, her eyes searching the security code for the weakness that had to be there.Hadto be.Hadto be.Hadto be. “Ohhh. There you are,”she whispered. And then, the firewall snapped up again. She cussed softly.
Marvin chuckled and rubbed her shoulders.
Dani started again, “Have you—”
