I frowned and started cross-referencing numbers on the lists. “And according to this, they were all checked out of a secure holding facility in Nevada and shipped as a lot. . . .” I glanced up at Susan. “When was Maggie taken, exactly?”

“A little less than twenty-four hours before I called you.”

I frowned at the timing. “They shipped it the same day Maggie was taken.”

“Yes,” she said. “About three hours after the kidnapping.”

“Shipped where?”

“That’s the question,” she said. “Assuming it’s connected with Maggie at all.”

“Odds are that it isn’t,” Martin said.

“Yeah. Your time would be better employed running down all those other leads we have, Marvin.” I spared him a glower, and went back to studying the pages. “If I can figure out what this gear is used for, maybe I can rule it out. For all I know it’s meant for a rain dance.” I tapped the pages on my knee thoughtfully. “I’ll do that first. While I do, Molly, I want you to go talk with Father Forthill, personally—we have to assume the phones aren’t safe. Forthill has some contacts down south. Tell him I’d like to know if any of them have reported anything unusual. Take Mouse to watch your back.”

“I can look after myself, Harry. It’s still daylight.”

“Your weapons, grasshopper,” I said in my Yoda voice. “You will not need them.”

She frowned at me in annoyance and said, “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.”

I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”

“That doesn’t even . . . Augh. It’s easier just to do it.” She stood up and held out her hand. I tossed her the keys to the Blue Beetle. “Come on, Mouse.”

Mouse rose from his position in the kitchen and shambled to Molly’s side.

“Hold up a second, kid. Susan,” I said. “Something about this is making the back of my neck itch. The bad guys knew where to find us last night. They must have some kind of tail on one of us, and we don’t need to walk around with a target painted on our backs. Maybe you and Martin could go see if you can catch our shadow.”

“They’ll see us and pull a fade as soon as we leave the apartment,” Martin said.

“Oh!” Molly said abruptly, her eyes brightening. “Right!”

I went out to get the mail and walk the dog around the little backyard while Molly, Susan, and Martin, under cover of one of Molly’s first-class veils, slipped out of the apartment. I gave Mouse five minutes, then called him and went back down into the apartment.

Molly had beaten me back inside, after walking Susan and Martin out of the view of any observers who had a line of sight to my apartment’s door. “How was that?” she asked. She tried for casual, but by now I knew her well enough to spot when my answer mattered.

“Smooth,” I said. “Did me proud.”

She nodded, but there was a little bit too much energy in it to be offhand agreement. Hell’s bells, I remembered what she was feeling: wanting, so badly, to prove my talent, my discipline, my skill—myself—to a teacher. It took me nearly a decade for my hindsight to come into focus, and to realize how inexperienced, how foolish, and how lucky I had been to survive my apprenticeship with both eyes and all my fingers intact.

I wasn’t too worried about sending the kid on a solo mission. It was pretty tame, and Forthill liked her. Molly wasn’t much in a fight, but she could avoid the hell out of them if she had an instant’s warning—which was where Mouse came in. Very little escaped the big dog’s solemn notice. If hostility loomed, Mouse would warn her, and hey-presto, they would both be gone.

She’d be fine.

“Don’t take too long,” I said quietly. “Eyes open. Play it safe.”

She beamed, her face alight. “You aren’t the boss of me.”

I could all but taste the pride she felt at making her talents useful to my cause. “The hell I’m not,” I told her. “Do it or I dock you a year’s pay.”

“You know you don’t pay me anything, right?”

“Curses,” I said. “Foiled again.”

She flashed me another smile and hurried out, bouncing eagerly up the steps. Mouse followed close on her heels, his ears cocked alertly up, his demeanor serious. He grabbed his leather lead from the little table by the door as he went by. Molly had forgotten it, but there were leash laws in town. I suspected that Mouse didn’t care about the law. My theory was that he insisted on his lead because people were more inclined to feel comfortable and friendly toward a huge dog when he was “safely restrained.”

Unlike me, he’s a people person. Canine. Whatever.

I waited until the Beetle had started and pulled out to close the door. Then I picked up Martin’s printed pages, tugged aside the rug that covered the trapdoor in the living room floor, and descended into my laboratory.

“My laboratory,” I said, experimentally, drawing out each syllable. “Why is it that saying it like that always makes me want to follow it with ‘mwoo-hah-hah-hah-hahhhhhh’?”

“You were overexposed to Hammer Films as a child?” chirped a cheerful voice from below.

I got to the bottom of the stepladder, murmured a word, and swept my hand in a broad gesture. A dozen candles flickered to life.

My lab wasn’t fancy. It was a concrete box, the building’s subbasement. Someone probably had neglected to backfill it with gravel and earth when the house was built. Tables and shelves lined the walls, covered in wizardly bric-a-brac. A long table ran down the middle of the room, almost entirely occupied by a scale model of downtown Chicago made of pewter, right down to the streetlights and trees.

My apprentice had a workstation at a tiny desk between two of the tables. Though she had continued to add more and more of her own notes, tools, and materials as her training continued, somehow she had kept the same amount of space open. Everything was neatly organized and sparkling clean. The division between Molly’s work area and the rest of the room was as sharp and obvious as the lines on a map.

I’d upgraded my summoning circle, which was set in the concrete floor at the far end of the little room, a five-foot hoop of braided copper, silver, and iron that had set me back three grand when I ordered it from a svartalf silversmith. The materials weren’t all that expensive, but it took serious compensation to convince a svartalf to work with iron.

Each metal strand in the circle’s braid was inscribed with sigils and runes in formulae that harnessed and controlled magical energies to a far greater degree than any simple circle. Each strand had its own string of symbols, work so tiny and precise that only svartalves and maybe Intel could have pulled it off. Flickers of light, like static discharge but more liquid, slithered around each strand of metal, red light, blue, and green dancing and intertwining in continuous spirals.

I’m still young for a wizard—but once in a while, I can make something that’s fairly cool.

One shelf was different from all the others in the room. It was a simple wooden plank. Volcanic mounds of melted candle wax capped either end. In the center of the shelf was a human skull, surrounded by paperback romance novels. As I watched, orange flickering light kindled in the skull’s empty eye sockets, then swiveled to focus on me. “Too many Hammer Films,” Bob the Skull repeated. “Or, possibly, one too many nights at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“Janet, Brad, Rocky, ugh,” I said dutifully. I went to the shelf, picked the skull up off of it (“Wheee!” said Bob), and then carried it over to a mostly clean space on one of the worktables. I set the skull down on top of a stack of notebooks, and then put Martin’s manila folder down in front of him.

“Need your take on something,” I said. I opened up the folder and started laying out the photographs Martin had given me.