Кей Хупер - Hiding in the Shadows

That didn't work either.

She walked slowly, wandering without rhyme or reason. She passed the huge earth-moving machines parked on the site, the stacks of construction materials, and the trailer that housed the construction office.

Nothing she saw awoke a spark of memory.

It was, she saw now, absurd to imagine that Dinah might have been held here. The building was only a skeleton, even the underground floors barely enclosed. In fact, here at the back, the building was still open all the way down to the bottom most concrete floor.

Kane was moving around in the shadows of that lowest area, but she wasn't about to join him — mostly because she didn't care for shadowy underground places.

Mostly.

She turned and continued along a few feet inside the fence, picking her way over uneven ground and around the occasional pile of debris. Two giant Dumpsters barred her way at one point, and she chose to go between them and the fence rather than around them.

If she hadn't, she never would have seen the break in the fence.

The wooden slats had been removed or never installed in this section, so it was possible to see through the chain-link to what lay outside. There was an empty half acre or so, and then the back of a large building. A warehouse, she thought, maybe for industrial use rather than just storage. She saw at least one loading dock, but the place seemed deserted on this Tuesday afternoon.

Then she caught a whiff of something she thought she should recognize, something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. That was the only warning she had before the eighty pound Rottweiler threw himself at the fence.

"No judge in his right mind is going to give the police a warrant to search that place just because they have a guard dog," Daniels said matter-of-fact. "Not on the basis of a dream."

"I think it was more than a dream," Kane said.

"I know what you think." Daniels believed in nothing except what he could see, hear, or touch with his hands — but Kane wasn't paying him to scoff, and he saw Daniels send a faintly apologetic glance to Faith as she stood in the kitchen doorway with a cup of coffee.

Faith lifted her cup to Daniels in a grave salute of understanding, and Kane decided she was holding up pretty well after having a monster dog try to eat his way through a fence to get at her.

Kane, on the other hand, was moving restlessly around the living room of the apartment. Daniels watched him. "So let's talk about that warehouse."

And when Kane shot him a quick glance, he added dryly, "Don't think I don't know you're planning to check it out yourself as soon as it gets dark enough."

"Somebody has to."

"That's a hell of a big dog, Kane."

"Even a big dog can be handled — if you have enough sedatives and a hunk of raw meat."

"Unless he's trained not to take food from strangers. "

"Well, there's only one way to find out."

Daniels smiled slightly. "True. But before you start doctoring sirloin, let me make a few calls and find out what I can about that warehouse."

Kane went to sit on the piano bench and absently ran his fingers up and down the scales to work out of the tension his hands.

"Cochrane was the name on the building."

"I saw it. And I got the street address, so I should be able to find out what the place is and who owns it."

"I know who owns it." Kane began to play the piano softly, choosing without thought a piece he was very familiar with — and which had always been Dinah's favorite despite her avowed tin ear: Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."

"Jordan Cochrane and family. Mostly Jordan Cochrane."

"You know him?"

"We've met here and there. Not really surprising, since his family businesses include various aspects of construction. And since he's beginning a run for the governor's mansion."

Faith spoke for the first time since they'd returned. "Construction again."

Kane looked across the room at her. "You noticed that, huh?"

"And politics. Didn't Dinah say..."

"That this story she was into involved business and criminal elements — and possibly politics. Yes." Kane paused. "You told us you were sure Dinah wasn't in that warehouse now."

Carefully, Faith replied, "I'm sure I would have felt something, being that close. But I'm also sure she was there, the night she disappeared."

"Then we have to check it out."

Daniels drew a breath. "Breaking and entering, Kane."

"I'm willing to risk it."

"Yeah. I thought you might be."

"You don't have to..."

Daniels didn't let him finish. "Are you kidding? In all these weeks, this feels like the closest we've come to an honest-to-God trail without ice all over it. I'm definitely coming along."

"So am I." Faith kept her gaze on Kane.

He continued to play the piano for several minutes, looking at her rather than the keys, then broke off abruptly and rose to his feet.

"Faith ..."

"If that's where Dinah was held, where the where they hurt her, I'll be able to recognize the place, I know I will."

He nodded finally. "All right. You'll need a jacket, something dark. I think there's one of Dinah's in my closet, if you want to grab that."

The dog had either never been trained not to take food from strangers, or defied his training in order to sink his teeth into the raw steak.

They had to wait a few minutes for the sedatives to take effect, but he was sleeping peacefully by the time Kane picked the padlock on the gate and they crept in.

"I don't think I want to ask who taught you to do that," Daniels said dryly.

A smothered laugh escaped Kane. "It was Dinah. One of her shadier contacts taught her years ago, and she taught me last spring after I got locked out of the apartment once. She made sure we both kept in practice, said you never knew when it might come in handy."

He kept his voice low.

Faith, walking silently between the two men, wondered if that was why Dinah's tormentors had bound her wrists with thin, brutal wire. Had they tried something simpler in the early days of her captivity, like handcuffs, only to find that their victim was adept at picking locks?

"Yeah," Daniels said, "but that's a first-class set of burglar's tools you've got there, pal. Should I ask where you got them?"

Kane patted the zippered leather case he had in his jacket pocket.

"It's amazing what you can get these days if you ask the right person. Dinah knew who to ask."

"Uh-huh. Well, the warehouse is bound to have a security system," Daniels pointed out. "How are you with those?"

"We'll see, won't we?"

Faith heard Daniels swear under his breath, thought he didn't sound all that upset. In fact, it had already occurred to her that both men relished this outing; after all the weeks of sifting through facts and talking to people, taking even a risky action appealed to them. As for Faith, she felt ... peculiar. Lost in Dinah's jacket, which was several sizes too large, and dwarfed by the two large men, she had an odd sense of not really being there. Or maybe that was because the sound of the water was back, so distant she caught herself straining to hear it, and that gave her a sense of some other place. She tried to concentrate on the here and now, gazing warily around through darkness at the hulking shapes of the warehouse and outbuildings, but the feeling of unreality persisted. Her hands felt cold; she jammed them into the pockets of the jacket. In the right pocket, she felt something, and her fingers explored with idle curiosity. A thin, flexible piece of metal. She had no idea what it was, but could not find the concentration to pull it out and look at it.

The warehouse loomed above them, and she tried to focus on it in another attempt to fix her consciousness on the present. But the faint sounds of water rushing grew more distinct inside her head.