Seize the Night

convenient and to bring Mungojerrie if possible.
    I also called Manuel Ramirez. The police operator said that he was currently out of the office, and at my request, she switched me to his voice mail.
    After reciting the license number of the Suburban, which I had memorized, I said, “That's what Jimmy Wing's kidnapper was driving. If you care, give me a call after noon.”
    Sasha and I were turning back the covers on the bed in my room when the doorbell rang. Sasha pulled on a robe and went to see who had come calling.
    I slipped into a robe, too, and padded barefoot to the head of the stairs to listen.
    I took the 9-millimeter Glock with me. Moonlight Bay wasn't as full of mayhem as Jurassic Park, but I wouldn't have been entirely surprised if the doorbell had been rung by a velociraptor.
    Instead, it was Bobby, six hours early. When I heard his voice, I went downstairs.
    The foyer was dimly lighted, but above the Stickley-style table, the print of Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak glowed as though it were a window on a magical and better world.
    Bobby looked grim. “I won't take long. But you have to know about this. After I took Jenna Wing to Lilly's, I swung by Charlie Dai's house.”
    Charlie Dai—whose birth name in correct Vietnamese order was Dai Tran Gi, before he Americanized it—is the associate editor and senior reporter at the Moonlight Bay Gazette , the newspaper owned by Bobby's parents. The Halloways are estranged from Bobby, but Charlie remains his friend.
    “Charlie can't write about Lilly's boy,” Bobby continued, “at least not until he gets clearance, but I thought he ought to know. In fact … I figured he might already know.”
    Charlie is among the handful in Moonlight Bay—a few hundred out of twelve thousand—who know that a biological catastrophe occurred at Wyvern. His wife, Dr. Nora Dai—formerly Dai Minh Thu-ha—is now a retired colonel, while in the army medical corps, she commanded all medical services at Fort Wyvern for six years, a position of great responsibility on a base with more than fifty thousand population. Her medical team had treated the wounded and the dying on the night when some researchers in the genetics lab, having reached a crisis in the secret process of becoming, surprised their associates by savagely assaulting them. Nora Dai knew too much, and within hours of those strange events, she and Charlie were confronted with accusations that their immigration documents, filed twenty-six years ago, were forged. This was a lie, but unless they assisted in suppressing the truth of the Wyvern disaster and its aftermath, they would be deported without notice, and without standard legal procedures, to Vietnam, from which they would never be able to return. Threats were also made against the lives of their children and grandchildren, because those who have orchestrated this cover-up do not believe in half measures.
    Bobby and I don't know why his parents have allowed the Gazette to be corrupted, publishing a carefully managed version of the local news.
    Perhaps they believe in the rightness of the secrecy. Perhaps they don't understand the true horror of what's happened. Or maybe they're just scared.
    “Charlie's been muffled,” Bobby said, “but he's still got ink in his veins, you know, he still hears things, gathers news whether he's allowed to write all of it up or not.”
    “He's as stoked on the page as you are on the board,” I said.
    “He's a total news rat,” Bobby agreed.
    He was standing near one of the sidelights that flank the front door, rectangular geometric stained-glass windows with red, amber, green, and clear elements. No blinds cover these panes, because the deep overhang of the porch and the giant oaks prevent direct sunlight from reaching them. Bobby glanced through one of the clearer pieces of glass in the mosaic, as if he expected to see an unwelcome visitor on the front porch.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “I figured if Charlie had heard about Jimmy, he might know something we don't, might've picked up something from Manuel or someone, somewhere. But I wasn't ready for what the dude told me. Jimmy was one of three last night.”
    My stomach clenched with dread.
    “Three children kidnapped?” Sasha asked.
    Bobby nodded. “Del and Judy Stuart's twins.”
    Del Stuart has an office at Ashdon College, is for the record an employee of the Department of Education but is rumored to work for an obscure arm of the Department of Defense or the