“Police?” I said, looking down at him.
“Police,” the guy said, looking down even farther.
I followed his gaze and saw he had a second gun, and it was pointed at my midsection.
That’s why you don’t pull your punches, the Warrior growled in my head as it returned to the depths where it spent most of its days.
That’s why I do, I thought to myself.
“Me too,” I said out loud, stepping back, giving the guy some space.
He kept the gun on me as he retrieved his badge from the corner of the room. “Really?”
“More or less.” I picked up my own badge.
The guy looked it over. “Joseph Ledger,” he said, then handed it back, “Homeland Security, huh? I know some people there.” He rattled off a few names.
I shook my head. “And who are you?”
He held up his badge. “Doyle Carrick. Philly PD.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same thing.”
“You might, after you answer me.”
Carrick’s mouth formed a tight smile. “A friend of mine has gone missing. Bruce Scott. Goes by Moose. The girl staying in this room, Melissa Brant, was the last person who saw him.”
“Missing?” I could feel the situation getting more serious around me. I thought back to Melissa’s call, saying she was on to something big.
“How’d you get into the room?”
“The lock was busted. Fried. Moose’s room, too.” He raised an eyebrow at me, reminding me it was my turn to explain.
“Brant’s gone missing, too.”
His eyes darkened. “Since when?”
“She was supposed to give a big presentation this morning. She didn’t show. No one can find her.” I looked around the room. “Did you find anything here?”
“Her computer’s gone, but the case is here. Handbag’s next to the bed. These were inside it.” He handed over a prescription bottle, Tapazole, and an iPhone.
The phone was locked, but the display showed two medication reminders: YOU HAVE MISSED ONE DOSE OF TAPAZOLE and YOU HAVE MISSED TWO DOSES OF TAPAZOLE.
There were also five missed calls.
“Two of those calls are from Oscar Tubbs, a mutual friend of theirs. The rest are from me,” Carrick said, holding up a different phone. “Calling from Moose’s phone. I could hear her phone buzzing from out in the hall.”
“Not quite probable cause, is it?”
He shrugged. “I’m out of my jurisdiction anyway. We’re twenty hours away from the local police starting a search. I’ll worry about probable cause later. Right now, I’m worried about my friend.”
Fair enough. “How’d you get into his phone?”
“It wasn’t locked.”
I nodded. “So, they’re friends, Melissa and Moose?”
He shook his head. “They met last night, through Tubbs. How do you know Brant?”
“She’s friends with my girlfriend. They’re here at the conference together.”
“The foraging conference?”
“No, the UFO conference.”
Carrick snorted and looked away.
My face darkened as I fondly thought back to three minutes earlier when I’d been kicking his ass. Junie had long since stopped being bothered by people’s reactions to her field of expertise. I wasn’t quite there yet.
Carrick straightened out his face. “Okay, then.”
“You said Melissa was the last person to talk to Moose but they weren’t friends,” I said as I started looking through Melissa’s things. Carrick had searched the place, but I hadn’t. “What’s the deal with that?”
Carrick sat on the bed and watched me. “Moose is here for the foraging conference. I drove up yesterday from Philly to see him. I figured we’d have a few beers at the hotel bar, maybe grab breakfast the next day, but instead he wanted to take me foraging.”
“What do you mean by foraging?”
“Apparently, he hunts for wild delicacies out in the woods, mushrooms and stuff, and sells them to restaurants.”
“Really?” I said, moving from the desk to the bathroom.
Carrick shrugged. “Says he makes decent money at it. Anyway, so he wants to show me this secret, hidden spot he found a couple summers ago, where there’s something called tiger cress growing. A half-hour drive and a twenty-minute hike later, we climb up this steep little hill and down into this tiny valley, and it’s carpeted with these plants. I was actually a tiny bit impressed, but then Moose says, ‘It’s not right.’ I ask him what he means, and he says, ‘It’s the wrong color and it shouldn’t be growing so thick.’ Then he steps on it and it stinks like hell, like sulfur mixed with menthol.”
I was done searching, but I would have stopped at that point anyway. Carrick smiled. “I know, right? I’m thinking maybe it’s like cheese, like the stinkiness is why it’s so expensive. But he says it shouldn’t smell like that at all.”
“So what was it?”
Carrick shook his head. “He said it was the tiger cress, all right, but different. He bagged some up and took it to Tubbs, who’s a botanist at Gareth University, not far from here. Tubbs checked it out and contacted Brant. He thought she might be interested, for some reason.”
“Tubbs thought Melissa would be interested?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just weird. Melissa’s an astrobiologist.”
“Meaning…”
“Her specialty is extraterrestrial life.”
Carrick smiled but then saw how much I wasn’t and straightened out his face.
He clearly didn’t believe, but I’d seen stuff that I was pretty sure he hadn’t. I didn’t need him to believe, but I wanted him to take it seriously.
“Do you think you could find your way back to this place where you found the plants?” I asked.
“No. But I’d recognize it if I saw it.”
“Where was Tubbs when you called him this morning?”
“His lab at the university.”
“I’d like to talk to him in person.”
Carrick nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”
We dropped in unannounced. Carrick didn’t suspect Tubbs of anything nefarious, but he was the only connection between Moose and Melissa and we couldn’t rule anything out. If he had something to hide, a surprise could make him slip up.
During the twenty-minute drive, Carrick and I talked a little about our backgrounds. We both had our secrets. We both told some lies. We both seemed comfortable with that.
Mostly, we talked about Melissa and Moose, found photos of them online, and compared notes on what we knew about them. We needed more information to begin forming legitimate theories. The illegitimate theories — the connections between Moose’s bizarro weed patch and Melissa’s bizarro specialty of extraterrestrial life — we kept to ourselves.
We found Tubbs in his third-floor biophysics lab surrounded by clicking and whirring machines and the vague smell that could have been the sulfur and menthol Carrick had described. Tubbs’s head, shaved clean where it wasn’t already bald, was bent over a microscope.
Carrick knocked gently on the door frame, trying not to startle him. It didn’t work.
Tubbs jumped as if the microscope had bitten him. “Who are you?” he demanded.
Carrick put up his hands reassuringly. “I’m Moose’s friend Doyle. The one who called earlier.”
Tubbs’s eyes shifted to me. “Who’s he?”
I held up my badge. “Joe Ledger. Homeland Security,” I said. “I’m a friend of Melissa Brant. She’s gone missing, too.”
Tubbs’s eyes filled with dread and he looked down at the floor. “I’ve been trying to call her.”
“We’re trying to find them both,” Carrick said. “So you need to tell us what’s going on.”
He gestured at his microscope. “That stuff Moose found is very, very strange.”