The Keepers Story 01 - The Gatekeeper

away nervously, and he realized he’d hit on the key to keeping her safe.
    “You don’t know who he is,” she said, but she still wouldn’t meet his eyes.
    “I’ll find him. I know he’s in San Francisco,” Saxon told her.
    She shook her head. “Don’t you dare! He doesn’t know that Angie is missing. He doesn’t know that I’m here. He and my mother—”
    “Listen to what you’re saying! Do you want them to lose two daughters?”
    “Care to let me finish?” she asked him coolly.
    “All right.” He stood back, arms crossed over his chest.
    “Not too long ago, my father got a request from a Keeper in London, via Larry Miller, our Keeper in San Francisco. They were having some trouble in Chelmsford—a banshee rampage. Anyway, they were seeking my father’s advice.” She was quiet for a minute. “My dad has a background in law enforcement and the judicial system. He’s gone to work with the English on a central plan so they won’t find themselves in this situation again, and my mother’s over there with him. It’s very secret. I don’t even have a way to reach him. He calls every few days to check on me. He thinks Angie is so busy with a show that she’s impossible to reach, so...”
    “So you’ve been lying to him,” Saxon finished. “Your father is Theo McGowan, then? The former congressman?”
    She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.
    He shook his head. “Great. Theo McGowan’s daughter is in Vegas pretending to be a stripper, and he has no idea.”
    “You won’t find him.”
    “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking how great it is that the San Francisco Keepers actually cooperate with their international counterparts. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is—”
    “Finding Angie and stopping this killing spree,” Calleigh said. “And that’s just what I intend to do.”
    “Calleigh, listen, I’m a cop—”
    “And I’m a big girl. You can’t stop me. What you can do, if you want, is help me,” she told him. “Meanwhile, your bill is getting higher and higher,” she warned him. “You need to get out of here before you go bankrupt.”
    “Calleigh, I can’t let you do this.”
    “It’s not your call. Right now you need to go. We can talk later,” she told him. “Trust me. If you don’t give me away, I’m safe, at least for this afternoon, even if I can manage to lure Carl Bailey here. If—”
    “Carl Bailey is old, Calleigh.”
    “And I’m young.”
    “My point is, he knows every trick in the book, and he hasn’t got a moral fiber in his body. He’d just as soon kill you as look at you if you were in his way.”
    “Then I’ll have to make sure he doesn’t realize I’m in his way. How about I meet you tonight and we can make a plan to work together?” she said. “Please. Frankly, I don’t want to be responsible for a good cop going bad to pay his bill for my services.”
    He hesitated. “You’re not lying to me to get me out of here?”
    “No. I swear. I’ll do anything to find Angie, so if you’re really going to search for her and not think of her as a showgirl gone bad—”
    “Calleigh, Missing Persons has been on it—”
    “And done nothing.”
    “All right. We’ll talk tonight. But if you don’t show, I will find you here, and I will find a way to arrest you.”
    “I’ll meet you.”
    “Where?”
    She scratched out an address he knew vaguely. It was one of the local equestrian facilities where the members of the show circuit trained their hundred-thousand-dollar mounts.
    “This is where you’re living?” he asked her incredulously.
    She nodded. “The house belongs to a man—a human being—named Dirk. He’s in love with Angie, and he’s going insane with her gone.”
    “And he knows what you’re doing and hasn’t tried to stop you?”
    “Seriously? Even if he wanted to—which he doesn’t—can you imagine any human who could stop me? I need to find my sister.”
    Saxon knew that he would find Angela Sanderson, no matter what. She was Elven.
    He looked at Candy—at the hope in her eyes.
    He could only pray that, with everything else that had been going on, there was the ghost of a chance that he would find her alive.

Chapter 4
    S axon had several hours to kill until he was scheduled to meet up with Calleigh.
    He headed back to his station house, sat down at his computer and pulled up the information on the cases that he was now convinced were linked.
    Two months back: