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I tried texting the number anyway, with no luck. So, for lack of any better options, I called again and just let it ring. And ring. Andring.
The sound of a receiver being picked up stopped my breath. Then an irritated voice barked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, pranking an old woman in the middle of the night!”
Before she could slam the receiver down, or worse, hang up and leave it off the hook, I blurted, “I’m sorry, ma’am—it’s about Byron!”
Silence descended, broken only by the sound of breathing.
“Say that again?” The voice sounded a bit calmer, but something about Beatrix Delgado’s tone raised the hairs on the back of my neck.Alpha, I identified.
“Byron has gone missing,” I said—keeping the words level, even as I fought the feeling of being a wet-behind-the-ears pup confronted by a stern pack elder. “I’m Zalen Price, his housemate and employer. You’re listed as his emergency contact.”
Another pause. “Do the police know he’s missing?”
“Yes, we reported it yesterday night, as soon as we realized something was wrong,” I told her. “He disappeared with two other people from a restaurant in Soulard. Unfortunately, the police don’t seem interested in making the case a priority at this juncture.” I swallowed my surge of frustration over their unwillingness to act.
“No surprise there,” she muttered. “Mind you, this is Byron we’re talking about. You sure he didn’t just go off somewhere to have sex with these other two people?”
I nearly choked on spit, clearing my throat awkwardly before I could respond. “Quite sure, yes. A cell phone belonging to one of the other people was found damaged in the alley behind the restaurant, as though there might have been a struggle.”
She cursed under her breath. “Look, you’d better come over here so you can tell me everything face to face. I hate talking over the phone. Let me give you the address.”
Forty minutes later, I was pulling into the driveway of a tiny house in one of the older parts of Florissant. The clock on my dashboard said four-thirty a.m., and my eyes felt like someone had rubbed them with sandpaper.
There was no doorbell, so I rapped lightly on the frame of the metal storm door. Within seconds, the front door opened,revealing an elderly female alpha in a tatty bathrobe, with pink curlers in her hair. Once, she would have been as tall as I was, if not taller. But age had stooped her shoulders, making her look as though she carried a heavy, invisible weight. Her face was strong and deeply lined, jowls just starting to sag.
“Come in, but keep it quiet,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Got someone asleep in the back bedroom.”
I nodded to show I understood. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour,” I said, keeping my tone equally low. “I wasn’t sure who else to contact.”
She waved the words off and gestured me to a battered high-back chair upholstered with faded gold floral print. Once I was seated, she sat down in a similar but mismatched chair across from me.
“I’ll tell you right up front that I haven’t heard from Byron in a couple of weeks,” she said quietly. “He hasn’t got himself back in trouble with the gangs, has he?”
I hated that she needed to ask that, and hated even more the way I would have to answer. “We don’t know anything for certain, except that their disappearance is deeply out of character for all three of these people. But, yes, it’s possible a gang is involved. If so, I don’t think it had anything to do with Byron directly. It’s more likely he was caught up in it by chance.”
Beatrix frowned and tapped gnarled fingers on her thigh in a thoughtful rhythm. She drew breath as though to speak, but the interior door leading into the sitting room squeaked open, and a teenage boy with a tousled head of black hair peered in.
“Bea? What’s going on? Is everything all right?” asked Tony Scalise... the kid who’d gone missing after running away from his sexually abusive father.
He turned to me. We blinked at each other, both of us gaping in shock.
“... Zalen?” Tony asked in a small voice.
“Tony?” I said, my voice rising in disbelief. “What... what are you doing here?”
Abruptly, Tony’s expression grew cagey. Beatrix, meanwhile, had been looking between the two of us with sharp eyes that belied her age.
She sighed. “Told you to keep your head down whenever anyone came to the front door, pup.”
A hint of defiance entered Tony’s gaze. “It’s oh-dark-thirty in the morning! It coulda been anyone—a burglar, even!”
My brain was frantically shuffling and reshuffling puzzle pieces without much to show for it. I held up a hand. “No. Sorry. I need an answer, Tony.What are you doing here?”
Tony’s brown eyes darted away. “Lying low, like Byron told me to.”
“Like... Byron... told you to,” I echoed slowly.
“The pup needed a soft place to land for a bit,” Beatrix said. Her expression dared me to make an issue of it. “I do that for people sometimes.” One iron-gray eyebrow lifted, deepening the wrinkles in her forehead. “You didn’t think I was Byron’sbiologicalgrandmother, did you?”