Reyes rubbed my back. “You had a lot to learn.”

“I did, but I don’t think it’s anything that will help us with what is happening right now.”

I called a very sleepy Garrett and explained to them what I’d learned from Dr. V. He was a nice guy in the end, and I hated that he’d died of a heart attack after finding what he considered his own personal Holy Grail. He wanted to publish eventually with the texts and make the prophet Cleosaurius as famous as Nostradamus. I doubted that would ever happen, but he did find correlations to the prophecies of Cleosaurius and things that had happened throughout history. Again, the same could be said for Nostradamus and a few other prophets, but that concept was rather cool.

I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. I was still absorbing everything I’d learned and everything Reyes had told me. But I decided to focus on the bottom line. How were Reyes and I going to fight the Twelve and save our daughter? Nothing else really mattered at that point.

Well, besides the fact that I still had three, possibly four murders to solve and the fact that I still had a missing body and the fact that I was getting terribly worried about my dad. As I sat at my computer in the wee hours of morn, listening to Artemis breathe as she slept at my feet, I did search after search on every database we had access to, both legally and illegally, looking for a connection among the suicide-note victims. It was all I could do at the moment until the sun came up.

Reyes walked up and rubbed my shoulders for a few.

I lifted my coffee cup. “Your father’s blood?” I asked, offering him a sip of my decaf, but he just kissed my head and went back to bed. Osh lay on the sofa, but I got the feeling he couldn’t sleep either. Finally, after the longest sunrise in the history of the world, I picked up my phone and called Denise – my stepmother, for all intents and purposes. I knew she wouldn’t be up yet, but she’d once told me never to call her unless the sun was up. It was up!

“Hey, you!” I said as cheerfully as I could. I woke up Artemis, who groaned in protest and went to sleep with Reyes.

“Charley?” she asked, her voice sandy from sleep.

“The one and only. Have you heard from Dad?”

“No,” she said, perking up. “Have you?”

“Not a word. I need to know where he was staying when he moved out.”

“How would I know?”

“Denise, I will send an army of dead people to haunt you for all eternity.”

And that was when our usual dance, also known as the Tyrannical Two-Step, went downhill. She berated me for five solid minutes, telling me Dad’s leaving was all my fault. If only I’d done this or that or hung the moon or some shit, they would have made it. Instead I made my father’s life a living hell.

Because she had nothing to do with that.

After we hit the five-minute mile marker, I interrupted her. “Are you off your soapbox yet, because I need to do laundry.”

“Your father is missing, and all you can do is sass.”

“Well, it is my specialty.”

“Do you even have a conscience?”

Getting more annoyed by the second, I said, “I used to until it was picked clean by a vulture in polyester clothing.”

After a very long standoff, she finally flinched. “He was staying at the La Quinta. The one closest to you, by the airport.”

Having nothing more to say to her, I hung up. An hour later I found myself, along with a comely man with a newfound respect for my badassness – or possibly just my ass – at the La Quinta on Gibson.

“But I’m a private investigator,” I said to the desk clerk, who clearly hated his job.

“And I’m an ordained minister,” he said in a thick Indian accent. “Doesn’t mean I can get into any hotel room I want to just because I have a little piece of paper.”

“Little piece of paper?” I took out my license and waved it in his face. “This is laminated, I’ll have you know.”

Thankfully Cookie called, because I was about to go Val-Eeth on his ass. I filled my lungs, vowing to use my powers only for good, then said, “Charley’s House of Edible Paint.”

“His boat is still at the docks in South Texas,” she said, her voice panicked. “It took forever for the harbor patrol officer to confirm. I’m calling Robert.”

“Don’t bother. I have to call him anyway to get a warrant to Dad’s hotel room because someone —” I glared at the desk clerk. “— woke up on the wrong side of the Albuquerque, apparently.”

An hour after that little dispute, Ubie showed up with a warrant. He’d also filed a missing persons report and put out a BOLO on Dad’s vehicle. God love ’im. When he showed the warrant to the desk clerk, I smirked. The guy raised his chin and led us to Dad’s room.

“Maybe you should laminate your little piece of paper, too,” I said as he left us. I was such a child. But the moment I walked into Dad’s room, all thoughts of childhood left me. I took a few steps farther in and did a 360, my jaw open, my gaze transfixed.

The air had been sucked from the room and I started to feel light-headed. Page after page, picture after picture, article after article lined the walls in an explosive collage of… me. It was all about me. It started on the south wall in my childhood. Hundreds of pictures, most I’d never seen, were taped up. There were articles, letters, schoolwork, interviews, all about me. He even had pictures I’d never seen from my time in Uganda in the Peace Corps.