I grabbed my heart to keep it from pounding out of my chest. “Jeez, Kate. Don’t do that.” I pulled in a deep breath and then looked quizzically up at her. “What are you doing here?”

  Peanut came trotting around the front of the Jeep, and Casey strolled along behind her. “I told you she wouldn’t take the work car.”

  “What the heck, guys?” Suddenly the lightbulb went off, and I glowered at Casey. “You didn’t need to go over the entire case again. You were waiting for Kate to drive across town. How did you…?”

  Casey shrugged, “I know that Kate knows as well as I do that when you get that look in your eyes, it spells trouble with a capital T. I sent Terri home and hung out to make sure you didn’t find any capital T’s lying around.” She shrugged and grinned, “How many times have I said friends don’t let friends self-destruct?”

  I pushed to my feet and began wiping off the back of my pants.

  Kate stepped forward and poked me hard in the chest. “And how many times have I told you to leave Pete’s suicide alone?”

  Puzzled, I glanced up at her. “Pete’s suicide?”

  “Tell me that’s not what you were going to investigate.”

  “I wasn’t.” I thought about it a moment and then shook my head. “I wouldn’t. I absolutely believed you when you said I’d better not disobey a direct order.” When her eyes narrowed, I held out my hands. “I did.”

  “So where are you going…” she looked at her watch, “…at twelve-thirty in the morning? To find Colin Resnick? By yourself?”

  “No. To find Jane March.”

  “Jane March?” Puzzled now, Kate looked at Casey and then back at me.

  “Yes. She was pissed. I mean really pissed at whoever was driving Resnick’s car when I saw them at that stoplight. I’m assuming Resnick was driving. I think Jane was absolutely livid that Resnick poisoned Tiffany along with those other kids. Why did he do it? Who knows? I don’t even know if he’s the poisoner, but my little gnome is shouting in my ear that I need to find Jane. Tonight.”

  Casey jumped in, “Maybe he drugged Tiffany to get suspicion off of Jane and, by extension, him? It does seem like Tiffany got a lighter dose since she got out of the hospital quicker than the other two victims.”

  Kate relaxed a bit. “So why tonight, and why didn’t you tell either of us?”

  “Well, because there are too many maybes. Maybe Jane is going after Resnick to kill him. Maybe Resnick is the one drugging the kids. Maybe he thought for some reason we were on to him, even though we weren’t, and he needed to draw away suspicion.”

  Exasperated, I flapped my arms trying to explain that I had absolutely no proof of anything. “It’s a hair-brained idea, and Casey was heading home with Terri, and if I’d called you at eleven thirty at night and said I have a hair-brained idea, you’d have told me we’d look into it in the morning. I think Casey hasn’t been able to find her because she’s hunting Colin Resnick, probably to kill him. That’s what I’d do, anyway, if somebody drugged my kid. If I can find her, maybe I can convince her to lead me to Colin.”

  “Okay. What evidence do you have that Colin is the person drugging the kids?” At least Kate didn’t look like she wanted to chew bullets anymore.

  “None. It’s all just circumstantial. Most of my ideas on cases are circumstantial or peripheral or whatever you want to call them until I start poking at the hornet’s nest to see what comes out.” I held my hands out to my sides. “This is me! Poking at the hornet’s nest. It’s how I work, Kate. You know that.”

  There are some things that are immutable in life; water is wet, Winnie the Pooh likes honey, and Kate walks away to think. She never does anything without a plan, unlike some of us who rarely have a plan. This is the time Casey and I keep our mouths shut. We don’t ask questions, don’t offer suggestions, and don’t engage in small talk while we wait.

  When Kate finally came back, she pointed to my work car. “Do you have your keys? We’re not taking my car because I don’t want dog hair all over the upholstery.”

  And then there are those times when, as Casey is always reminding me, I should engage my brain before engaging my mouth. “We? You don’t do police work. I mean…you do police work, but you just supervise those of us who actually do…the….” As Kate slowly raised her gaze to mine, I repeated in a resigned tone, “We. Right.” I slogged back to the house, thinking having Kate along was definitely going to cramp my style.

  I came out with my keys, and everybody, dogs, bird, partner, and…supervisor, climbed into my car.

  When I started the engine, Kate asked, “Where to?”

  I looked at her. “Hell if I know. I just drive until I figure something out.”

  She crossed her arms, put her head back on the headrest and mumbled. “Great. Wake me when you figure it out, then.”

  Casey chuckled in the backseat, and I glared at her in the rearview mirror. I drove to the Backdoor parking lot looking for Resnick’s lime green Porche. I didn’t see it, but I did see Megan making out with some guy in the bed of a pickup truck. I rolled down my window as we drove past and called out, “Classy.”

  Without skipping a beat, she flipped me the bird.

  As we pulled back onto the street, I realized I didn’t know what kind of car Jane March drove. I grabbed my cell and started flipping through my contact list.

  Without opening her eyes, Kate said, “Pull over to look up whatever it is you’re looking up.”

  Like I said, cramping my style. I sighed, and since I couldn’t find a parking place anywhere, I stopped in the middle of the street. Horns blared behind me as I scrolled through and finally found Lak’s number. I hit send and started driving again. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kate shaking her head and rubbing her eyeballs.

  Lak’s voice came on the line. “Hey, Alex. What’s up?”

  Music was blaring in the background, so I asked, “Are you at the Backdoor with Megan?”

  “Yup. Are you?”

  “Not really. Do you know what kind of car Jane March drives?”

  “No. A Ford looks like a Chevy looks like a Pinto to me. It’s white, has four doors, four tires, and looks pretty new and kind of expensive.”

  “That’s more than I had before. Thanks. Does Jane ever go to gay bars?”

  “Not that I know of. I’ve never seen her, anyway.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I hung up, then turned left, and left again, and slowly drove down the alley fronting the Backdoor. Single was perched outside on his customary bar stool, and I motioned him over to the car.

  He walked up and leaned his beefy hands on my window frame. “Hey, Alex. What’s up?” He saw Casey in the back and nodded. All of a sudden, his face lit up.

  A fraction of a second too late, I remembered Kate and the dogs were in the car at the same time.

  “Peanut! Captain! How are my favorite pups?” He pulled open the back door, and both dogs slobbered all over him. “How’re my widdle buddies, huh?”

  Trying to salvage things, I jumped out, pulled him back, and slammed the backdoor. “Single, they’re working dogs. You can’t pet them when they’re working.”

  He looked confused, “But—”

  I kicked him in the shin, and he yelped. Smiling sweetly, I put the emphasis on the first word, “Working dogs, Single.”

  He made a rounded O with his mouth and glanced through the driver’s window at Kate. Now, Single is a retired Marine, and Kate has the bearing, and glare, of any gunny sergeant, anywhere in the world. He touched the bill of his baseball cap with his fingers. “Ma’am.”

  I pointed to the back parking lot. “Would you mind checking on Megan every now and then? She’s in the bed of a pickup with some guy.”

  His eyes strayed to the corner of the building leading to the back. “Damn it all to hell. Yeah, I’ll go right now. They musta snuck out. She’s had one too many, and I told Mike to stay inside with her.” He stalked off, and I got back in my car.

  “Okay, next stop. Unfortunately, all Lak could tell me was Jane drives a white, newer model, expensive four-door sedan.”

  Kate, who often perches her glasses on her head when not using them, had them in her hand and was bouncing the earpiece against her cheek. “You come here often during working hours?”

  I knew where she was going with this and didn’t want to tag along. “No, ma’am. Unless it has something to do with a case, of course.”

  “And yet, your working dogs, that you’re supposed to keep safe at all times, are on a first name basis with the bouncer at a gay bar.”

  “Well, you see—”

  From the backseat, I heard Casey snort and mumble, “This I have got to hear.”

  I glared at her in the rearview mirror again and then snuck a glance at Kate out of the corner of my eye. “It’s like this. Megan had to train the dogs to be able to function in crowds and apparently, the Backdoor was one of the places she’d come. Single loves dogs, and I’m sure he spent time with them during their training.”

  From the backseat, I heard, “How do you pull that stuff out of your…backside…so quickly and have it sound so plausible?”

  I raised my eyebrows in the most innocent expression I had in my arsenal and looked over at Kate. “What?”

  Kate shook her head and grinned, and then finally broke into laughter. “That is a question for the ages, Casey. One that I couldn’t possibly live long enough to answer.”

  Chapter 24

  We drove to the Weasel’s Pass, hoping to find either Colin Resnick or Jane March inside. Kate sent Casey in to check things out.

  She returned, shaking her head. “The bartender knows both of them, and she said neither one had been in tonight.”

  I had absolutely no idea where to go after that. I pulled into the lot of a Circle-K and parked. “Okay. We know Resnick and Diesel were seen recently at the Pass, but they’re not there now.” I checked the time. “Fernando’s is still open. I guess we could check there.” No one said anything, so I sat a minute, thinking.

  Kate shifted in her seat so her back was up against the door. That way, she could face me and look at Casey over the seat. “Okay. Let’s back up. Alex, your hunch is that it’s Resnick drugging the kids. How did he have access to their lunches?”

  Casey must have been thinking along the same lines. “I was wondering that, too. His wife works at the school, and I checked; she was there when both Adham and Tiffany were drugged. I suppose she could have somehow slipped something into the kids’ lunches while they were in a cubby.”

  Kate cocked her head. “That presupposes she’s in on it with her husband. The same husband who’s cheating on her. But let’s go with it a minute. Did she teach any of the classes those two kids were in? And was she at Ratcliff on the day Tommy was drugged?”

  Casey shook her head. “No to both questions. Again, I checked both possibilities.”

  “Then my question remains, how did Colin Resnick get the drugs into the kids’ food?”

  I sat up so fast my seatbelt caught and held me in place. I sat back and then slowly leaned forward so the seatbelt would allow me access to my back pocket. Pulling out my notebook, I flipped through the pages and found what I was looking for.

  Kate said, “Alex?”

  “Just a second.” I grabbed the radio. “9D72.”

  “9D72.”

  “Could you find a home 10-20 for a Jason Hatcher?”

  “Stand by.”

  I looked at Kate and then at Casey. “Humor me a minute. What if Resnick breaks into the people’s homes and puts the drugs into the lunchboxes in the middle of the night? He has priors for burglary, so he knows how to get into homes. We know Adham’s mother prepares his lunch the night before because she told us she did. Resnick could have easily put something into Tiffany’s lunch if he’s sleeping with Jane, and….” I shook my head, “I don’t know. Maybe Tommy’s mother packs his lunch at night, too. It makes sense if the mornings are always so rushed.”

  “9D72.”

  I picked up the mic. “9D72.”

  “There are three Jason Hatchers in the Tucson Metropolitan Area.”

  Sitting upright now, Kate said, “Tell her to narrow the search down to the school district that Thomason Elementary is in.”

  I did, and the dispatcher came back with an address that both Casey and Kate wrote down. I pulled out into traffic and headed for the address.

  Casey spoke over the backseat. “What makes you think he’d spike Jeffrey’s lunch tonight?”

  “I have no idea. He knows Jane is pissed at him, and I guess it depends on his motivation for drugging the kids. He’s pretty twisted if he’s drugging them hoping to get on Jane’s good side, you know, by getting back at the people who made her childhood so miserable.”

  Kate shook her head. “If that’s even his motivation. We’ve also wondered if whoever is drugging them is testing the doses they can give kids that won’t kill them. It’s a perfect drug for trafficking little kids onto the sex market. Remember, you said you had it on,” she held her fingers up in quotes and rolled her eyes, “good authority it’s not the drug dealers bringing the Devil’s Breath into the region. What if it’s people involved in sex trafficking children instead? Once again, all we have is conjecture that Colin is doing it to get in good with Jane.”

  “Maybe he’s killing two birds with one stone. He needs to figure out the correct dose to use on kids and getting back at Jane’s bullies gives him the targets to test the dosages on. Like I said, he knows Jane’s pissed. What better way, in his mind, to get back in her good graces than to hurt yet another person who bullied her as a child?”

  We pulled into the neighborhood, and I parked one street south of Hatcher’s street. Kate directed Casey to take the house’s backyard and me to watch the west side. She took the east and positioned herself so she could also watch the front. It felt pretty good to have her going along with one of my hair-brained ideas instead of me having to explain to her, after the fact, why I’d done something behind her back. Once we were settled, we hunkered down to wait. It was a long shot, but we had nothing else to go on right at the moment.

  Sage kneaded my shoulder with his claws, and I already regretted bringing him along. Unfortunately, when I’d tried to leave him in my car, he’d thrown himself at the windows and made a loud, squawking racket. I had the leash around my wrist, but as I squatted next to the fence, I realized if I needed to chase or fight someone, Sage could get seriously injured. Making an executive decision and hoping he and Captain had bonded really well, I pulled off his harness and stuffed it into my pocket, praying he’d at least stick with Captain if not with me.

  When nothing happened after a half-hour, I began to think this was a stupid idea. Captain apparently had the same thoughts because fifteen minutes earlier, he’d yawned and laid down for a nap. I was waiting for Kate to call it when Captain’s head jerked up and swung toward the backyard.

  When we’d first taken up our positions, Kate told us to turn to channel six, which was basically an unused channel. That way our chatter wouldn’t interfere with the normal running of the patrol units answering calls. Casey’s voice suddenly came over the radio. I’d turned the volume down low and almost didn’t hear her say she had movement to the rear of the house.

  When I heard her shout, “Police. Don’t move,” I began jogging in her direction and Sage decided to abandon my bouncing shoulder. Several shots were exchanged, and I ran flat out toward the backyard. “Casey!”

  She shouted back, “I’ve got two running. One is armed.”

  Captain suddenly plunked down in front of me, and I almost fell over him. Foregoing his paw, he jammed his whole body into my shin, and, making an instant decision to trust his training, I crouched behind a garbage can and waited.

  A dark figure leapt onto the fence next to where I’d been standing a moment before and jumped into the alley.

  Kate chose that moment to run around the corner, and the figure took aim to fire.

  I knew I couldn’t reach him in time to stop him, but I had my Glock halfway out of the holster when Sage flew out of the darkness and attacked the guy’s head, clawing and biting and beating him with his wings.

  I didn’t have a clear shot with Sage attacking him, so I re-holstered and took advantage of the distraction by leaping on the man. I pinned his arms to his side, stripping the gun out of his hand in the process.

  He was screaming in panic, terrified that Sage was going to bite his eyes out. Couldn’t blame him there the way Sage had gone after him. The extra adrenaline gave him enough strength to pull out of my arms, and before Kate could get to us, he batted Sage off his head and took off running again.

  I started after him while pointing at the ground and yelling at Kate. “Gun!”

  She slid to a stop and grabbed it as Captain and I ran full tilt after the man. We lost him as he turned down a second alley. “Find him, Captain. Find him.”

  Sage flew over our heads and disappeared over a wooden fence. Captain ran to the fence and stood on his hind legs clawing at the wood. I tucked him under one arm and discovered I couldn’t climb and hold him at the same time.

  Kate ran up, climbed the fence, and straddled the top. She motioned with her arms, “Give him to me.”

  I tossed him up, vaulted the fence, and when I landed on the other side, I reached up and grabbed him by the collar and belly. Once his feet were back on solid ground, he took off running toward a gate leading to the home’s front yard. More shots were fired several streets away in a different direction from where we were headed. I pulled Captain to a stop and yelled at Kate, “Go help Casey or chase this guy?”

  She pointed toward the shots, “We go to Casey.”

  I nodded, and the two of us ran toward the gunfire.

  Kate pulled her radio as we ran. Her voice bounced with each step. “9D70 to 73.”

  Casey’s out-of-breath voice came on the radio. “Code four here, one down, one in custody.”

  Kate and I exchanged puzzled looks, and then she called out to me, “Back to our guy.”