Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,40

this.” I held up the mummy flash drive, currently headless, and rattled off the links in my logic chain. “So we’ve got the ancient world, this Egyptian mummy, which relates to Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, which makes me think of the Oosterhouse Jackal.”

Carson didn’t seem as amazed by my reasoning as I thought he should be. “It does seem like a coincidence of jackals,” he admitted, and took the flash drive from me again. “Do you think this has the information we need to find the Oosterhouse one?”

“Alexis hid something that those brotherhood creeps wanted.”

“But we’re not sure it’s the brotherhood that kidnapped her,” said Carson, and I couldn’t tell if he was playing devil’s advocate or what. “They may be a second party looking for the Jackal.”

“A second party looking for something that the Internet has never heard of? What are the odds?”

He gave me a look that said what are the odds that a crime boss would have a witch on staff to help him kidnap a teen FBI psychic to look for his kidnapped daughter. Or some other unlikely scenario. “Let’s keep an open mind,” he said aloud. “I agree the brotherhood is connected, just not how.”

“Okay.” Drumming my fingers, I tried to decide how much to tell him about the encounter with the bodyguard-driver, and how to phrase it so I didn’t sound crazy. “Here’s another coincidence. Alexis’s driver—well, his remnant—said something weird about a black dog. Maybe it was something he saw when he died, or something his spirit saw, I don’t know. But a jackal and a dog might look the same. Not that Anubis would terrorize a spirit. He was supposed to be the protector of the dead.…”

I trailed off at Carson’s expression of flat-out disbelief. “You’re not seriously suggesting an ancient Egyptian god has shown up in Minnesota,” he said.

“Of course not,” I scoffed, because that was ridiculous. “Who would come to Minnesota in the winter if they could help it?”

Carson gave me one of his studying looks. “You’re being flippant again.”

He’d figured me out. Flippant equaled freaked. And Bruiser’s shade had me freaked. So had the disappearance of Mrs. Hardwicke. Someone, or something, was messing with the spirit world.

I turned to the last thing I had to offer, putting the head back on the mummy and holding it so the logo showed. “Then there’s this. The Oriental Institute is a research organization and museum of Near East history. It’s one of the top places for Egyptologists to study, and it’s been around for ages. My great-great-aunt went on a few of their expeditions in the nineteen twenties. She’s kind of a family legend.”

His brows arched. “Did she raise a mummy?”

“Not exactly.” Let’s just say I wasn’t the first Goodnight to get in over her head with the dead. “But the Oriental Institute is another tie to ancient Egypt, and we know Alexis has been there.”

Carson took the flash drive from me, holding it up as if to look the mummy in the eye. “You think the Oosterhouse Jackal is there? Or maybe something that will lead to it?”

Did I? The evidence was awfully circumstantial, as Taylor would tell me. Psychic evidence wasn’t admissible; my job was to find links between random-seeming things, which would then point the way to hard evidence. I wished I could offer Carson hard evidence, but all I had was my gut feeling.

“I think our best bet is to follow Alexis’s footsteps. If she was looking for this Oosterhouse Jackal, then backtracking may lead to her kidnappers.” I spread my hands, open palmed, on the table. “It’s just a hunch. But I am psychic.”

Carson didn’t seem to need more than that. He grabbed the check and pocketed the flash drive. “Let’s go. We can be in Chicago in five and a half hours.” Then he glanced at me and changed his mind. “Six, if we stop to get you some less conspicuous clothes.”

14

WE SPRINTED ACROSS the acre of parking lot to the Walmart, not slowing down until we reached the air lock of shelter between inner and outer doors, beside the shopping carts and stacks of shoppers’ guides. I breathed on my hands and stuck them under my arms. “How does anyone live through the winter here?”

Carson laughed. The longer we were away from the Maguire complex, the easier that seemed to happen. “This isn’t winter. It’s autumn.” He took out his wallet and handed me a thick wad of bills. “Get a change of