“Don’t you think I want to throttle me just as much as you do right now?” Frank asked.
“You have no idea what I want to do.”
“Same here. You have no idea.” He shifted, and his chains clanked. “The worst thing is, I was afraid all my…friends…would get hurt because I know Eva isn’t alone in this. I have the feeling she’s got something else planned, but I don’t know what. I’ve wondered if she answers to a higher authority.”
There he was: Frank the PI—the man he’d become while she was away. In spite of everything, it made her kind of proud.
“Ever hear of an Underground?” Dawn sent a nasty look at the camera again. “The old woman and I touched on the topic.”
“Can she be saved from it?”
What?
“Well, can she?” he repeated.
She couldn’t fathom this. He wanted to rescue the woman who’d calculated her own murder and left a heartbroken family behind. Seriously?
“Yeah,” Dawn said. “I can decapitate her. That’d save her real good.”
Frank went pale. In his eyes, she could see him assessing the stranger she’d become.
Saying it hadn’t felt right at all; it made her guts tighten. But Eva wasn’t her mother. She wasn’t sweet, nice Jac, either. She was one of them, a Robby Pennybaker, the mini motherfucker who’d violated her and tried to kill her.
“This Underground…” he began, face flushing slightly.
“Let your beloved wife tell you about it.” Dawn hurt for Breisi, hurt for what should’ve been justice but wasn’t. “I need answers from you.”
“Like what?” He sounded so resigned, the loser of round one. Back to the Frank she knew, the pre-Breisi ne’er-do-well.
“For starters, how did you get involved with all this?”
As he hesitated, Dawn realized her right arm was throbbing. Great—the old injury letting her know it wasn’t happy. And she was really tired. It was all crashing in on her now.
“Careful what you say—she’ll hear us,” Frank whispered. “Eva’s hearing is that sharp.”
Holy…Was she ever going to get answers? What kind of situation would actually allow that to happen?
“But I’ll tell you what I can,” Frank said, and she saw that he really wanted to help her.
“Then tell me what the boss would want me to hear.”
Frank seemed to get it: they were with a PI agency that’d been hired to look into Robby Pennybaker, and that’s it. They’d talk in a private code Eva wouldn’t understand.
“How did I start?” Frank stared straight ahead. “I guess it was when a local magazine did one of those ‘Remember when…?’ stories about Eva. They had pictures of the three of us, then me and you, then updates on what we both were doing.”
For Frank, that would’ve been hanging out at the Cat’s Paw and singing about glory days with the other guys. For her own part, Dawn recalled being contacted for an interview, but she never did those. Career success had always been based on her skills; she refused to use her mother’s name to get ahead.
More important…what was Frank saying here? She recalled that The Voice had found Kiko through a newspaper article that detailed his psychic thwarting of a serial rapist. Had a magazine feature brought Frank to Limpet’s attention in the same way? Why? Because he was the father of Dawn the Prophecy Girl and Jonah would do anything—including hiring Frank—to reel her in?
“I really needed a job,” Frank added, “even though I wasn’t…trained…for this type of work. When Jonah contacted me, I accepted, few questions asked. It was a gold mine and I didn’t want to turn my back on it: a gig with great pay. It wasn’t until later that I found out there were definite…reasons…Jonah hired me.”
From Frank’s expression, Dawn knew she’d been right about Frank being the bait for her. “So why did you stay on?”
“Because I got good at the detecting stuff, and my muscles came in handy. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t being sneered at for being useless. And…Breisi…” He swallowed.
Dawn did, too, wishing Breisi would bust through that door right now. She was really the only person out there who came through every time, wasn’t she?
Chest aching, Dawn said, “Jonah took advantage of your need to have a purpose.”
At Frank’s warning look, she realized they were approaching too-much-information ground, so she shut up.
Speaking of being careful, wasn’t it odd that she hadn’t felt any hint of an Eva mind screw yet? She wouldn’t have put a trick like that past a vampire. Or maybe a creature of the night needed to be looking into her eyes to get any info.