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Just as she looked down at her notebook again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Glen abruptly rise from his chair. Fia got up, looking in the direction he was looking. The back room.
Both sisters, oblivious to the fact that their respective agents were out of their chairs, continued to chatter.
“Agent Duncan?” Fia called out from across the room. He was closer to the rear entrance than she was.
He held up his finger. He was still watching something or someone in the rear of the building.
Suddenly, he took off across the lobby. “Stop, FBI!”
Fia sprinted after him.
There was a crash in the mail room. Something fell. An unidentified object slid across the freshly mopped and sanitized marble floor. By the time Fia made it through the archway, Glen was going out the back door into the alley.
“You! Stop. FBI!” he hollered.
Fia leaped over a box of spilled envelopes. “Agent Duncan, wait!” She burst out the back door, down the steps, through the fluttering strips of freshly acquired yellow police tape the local police had used to block off the building. Glen ran ahead of her, down the alley, toward the street that ran behind the post office. He was chasing a pigtailed teenager.
Fia immediately recognized the girl from the back of her head. This is getting better by the second. This young lady was not someone in Clare Point the human needed to meet. She was an important woman in the sept, but in a vulnerable place right now, which made them all vulnerable. “Kaleigh,” she called. “It’s Fia. Stop.”
The teen flew around the corner and down the block.
Fia pushed to catch up with Glen, but he had almost half a block start on her. “Duncan,” she called. “Slow down. I know her.”
He continued at an all-out run.
They crossed the street and Kaleigh zigzagged, cutting through another alley, down the next block. Dogs barked. Pat Hill stopped his pickup in the middle of the street to watch the two FBI agents in suits chase down the teenager in shorts and a tank top. They had picked up a yellow lab, that ran behind them, barking excitedly.
“Duncan, for Pete’s sake,” Fia hollered. She was fit and a good runner, but she had not packed her running shoes and she was going to be pissed if she broke the heel on her new loafers. “I know where she lives!”
He slowed and Fia caught up. He was panting pretty hard. Fit, but not as fit as Fia. Most humans weren’t.
“She was in the post office. In the back,” Glen panted, jogging beside her. “I don’t know what she was doing, but she took off the minute she realized I saw her.”
Fia looked up ahead, shooting thoughts in the girl’s direction. What are you doing in the post office? What are you doing, running from a federal law enforcement agent?
If the teen heard Fia, she didn’t respond. Kaleigh leaped a line of waist-high azalea bushes, cutting across Victor Simpson’s scraggly lawn.
“Damn it, Kaleigh!” Fia called out, skirting two garbage cans turned over on the sidewalk. The lab had caught up and was leaping in front of her, still barking wildly. “Don’t make me run another two blocks to your house. Your da will have your hide,” she threatened.
The girl, tennis shoes flying, threw a glance over her shoulder. “Fee? That you?”
“How many FBI agents do you think we have in town? Yes, it’s me,” Fia answered, aloud.
Kaleigh halted on the far side of Simpson’s lawn, eyeing Glen suspiciously.
“Get over here!” Fia stopped just short of the hedge, waving her hand, then shooing the dog. Take a hike, buster, or I’ll be having doggy burgers for dinner tonight, she warned.
The lab tucked his tail between his legs and took off down the sidewalk in the direction he’d come.
Glen pulled up and walked around in a circle, trying to catch his breath.
“Did she take anything?” Fia asked him.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know, but she ran when she saw me.”
“You probably just scared her. Let me handle this,” she said. Then to Kaleigh, “I said, get over here.” She pointed to the grass beside her.
Kaleigh squeezed between two bushes, still considering the male FBI agent warily.
“He’s with me,” Fia assured her.
“Something of interest to you in the post office, young lady?” Glen demanded.
“Special Agent Duncan, please,” Fia said. “This is Kaleigh Kahill.”
“Another relative?”
“Distant.”
Glen studied the teenager. She glared back.
Please, be careful, Fia warned telepathically. “Kaleigh, do you mind telling us what you were doing in the rear of the post office? Didn’t you notice the door was taped off? Surely you knew you didn’t belong there.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the redhead flung back. “I was just looking around.”
“Do you know something about Mr. McCathal’s death?” Glen asked.
“No more than anyone else in town.”
Fia brushed her hand against the girl’s arm. “You didn’t touch anything?”
“No. I just wanted to see if the blood was still there. Meg said her Uncle Mahon said there were gallons of blood. I said she was lying because you don’t have gallons of blood. Everyone knows that!”
Fia glanced at Glen. He seemed to be relaxing a little. He was obviously pissed off, but she could see that he was beginning to see what this was, and that was nothing more than a nosy teenager being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Where’s your mom and dad?” Fia asked.
“I don’t know. Home, I guess.”
Fia looked to Glen. “Why don’t I walk her home, speak to her parents. You better get back to the sisters. Officer Hill was the only other person left in the building and those ladies are liable to tag-team him and take him down with their armored purses.”
She said it with a straight face and heavily laced with sarcasm. To her surprise, Glen grinned.
She liked being surprised by humans. They didn’t do it often.
“Count yourself lucky this time, Miss Kahill,” he warned Kaleigh with an accusing finger. “I catch you poking around my crime scene again, I don’t care who you’re related to, you’ll be arrested.”
Kaleigh opened her mouth to respond, then, wisely, clamped it shut.
Fia grabbed the teenager and steered her to the sidewalk and toward home. “Give me a couple of minutes, Special Agent Duncan. I’m going to escort Kaleigh home and speak with her parents. You can tell Miss Ross—my Miss Ross—she’s free to go. I don’t have any more questions for her.”
He hesitated, then lifted his hand and headed off in the opposite direction. Fia hustled Kaleigh down the street, waiting until Glen was out of earshot before she spoke.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Fia demanded from between clenched teeth. “Didn’t you hear me telepathically?”
The girl looked up with bright blue eyes. “No, I didn’t,” she said in the same indignant tone Fia heard from human teenagers. “I’m only ten months old, remember?”
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