Twelve houses didn’t seem like a lot to investigate at first. After twenty minutes sitting in the van listening to Autumn and Sandburg pretending to be a lost couple looking for grandma’s house, I was ready to climb out of my skin. Even Baylor, normally the picture of burly calm, seemed agitated by the slow going and lack of results. We’d picked up Sandburg, Autumn, and Carly after they followed the Lupa scent trail from the vacant lot to eight blocks away where it ended in a public parking lot with no video surveillance. A dead end, and Phin still hadn’t seen movement on the construction site. So we had Autumn and Sandburg and their heightened senses of smell walking around the historic residential district of Uptown, which they both declared carried the faint odors of Lupa and money. The money I could agree with. The stained glass windows in some of those homes probably cost more than I’d have made in six months with the Triads (which wasn’t a lot to begin with, but still …).
