“There’s nobody on the second floor, and the garage is empty save for a pretty cherry El Camino,” Zoelner announced as he descended the stairs and marched into the living room. “I called back to headquarters and had Becky run the plates. The car belongs to Sander. No real surprise there. Oh, and FYI, Becky told me to inform you guys that Ali delivered a daughter. Nine pounds, six ounces.”

“Mazel tov!” Ozzie crowed, then, “And, damn! That’s a big baby!”

Zoelner nodded. “Anyway, mom and baby are doing well. Though, supposedly, Ghost is a wreck.”

“And speaking of big,” Ozzie grinned, wiggling his eyebrows, “check out the size of this thing.” He brandished the bong in Zoelner’s face. “It’s Goliath’s bong!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Zoelner rolled his eyes, yanking the contraption from Ozzie’s hand and tossing it on the ruined sofa. “I heard you the first time. Very witty. Now shut up.”

“Any sign of a struggle upstairs or in the garage?” Mac asked. He posed the question to Zoelner, but he was staring at a kitchen chair that was tipped on its back. Eyes narrowed, he glanced over to the old-fashioned tin coffee cup turned upside down on the floor before turning to study the newspaper lying beside the table leg.

Obviously, Fido, hungry and looking for any small form of sustenance, had gone after the coffee mug Charlie had left on the table and, in the process, created this little tableau of mayhem. Which reminded Delilah…

She scooted her chair back and walked over to what she suspected was a pantry door. Turning the knob, she nearly lost her balance when Fido rushed ahead of her, barking ecstatically and turning in tight circles within the small space that was, indeed, the pantry. His thick tail whacked against her shins hard enough to leave bruises.

“Okay, okay,” she soothed. Then, spotting a thirty-pound bag of Hills Science Diet pushed into the back corner, she nudged Fido aside and used the large bowl she found inside the bag to scoop out a healthy portion of dog food.

“Yorp! Yorp!”

“Who’s a hungry boy?” she asked in that weird sing-songy voice women tended to don around infants and canines. “Who’s just about starving to death?”

“Yorpyorpyorpyorp!”

“I gotcha, big boy. Just a second.” She exited the pantry and set the bowl of kibble in front of the stove. “Here you go. Eat up.”

Fido attacked the food with gusto, his hind end swinging back and forth so forcefully he caused himself to stumble.

“Poor dog,” Zoelner observed before turning back to Mac. “And to answer your question, that’s a negative on any signs of a struggle upstairs or in the garage. All appears as it should.”

“Maybe they were abducted by aliens,” Ozzie posited unhelpfully.

“You’ve been watching too much of the Syfy channel,” Zoelner said, crossing his arms and tilting his head at Mac, who was back to staring at that silly, knocked-over chair.

“Yeah, right,” Ozzie scoffed. “There’s no such thing.”

“No such thing as aliens, or no such thing as watching too much of the Syfy channel?”

“Well, the second, naturally.” The look on Ozzie’s face was dubious. “Because of course there’s such things as aliens.”

“Of course?” Zoelner’s lips quirked.

“Yeah. I mean, the universe is a pretty big place, right? And if it’s just us, that’s an awful waste of space.”

“You stole that from Carl Sagan,” Zoelner accused.

“No, I didn’t. I stole it from the movie Contact. Maybe they stole it from Carl Sagan.”

“Whatever.” Zoelner waved him off. “The point is, Charles and Theo were not abducted by aliens, and—”

“So, I get why ol’ Sander decided to stay tucked away in the middle of nowhere, holed-up in this hellhole of a crumbling house,” Steady interrupted, emerging from the door leading to the basement stairs. “The guy’s got a state-of-the-art grow room set up down there. It’s enough to make Jay and Silent Bob weep with envy.”

Ah, the marijuana. Delilah knew she recognized that smell when she was standing out on the porch. And it hadn’t been the dried-out, skunky aroma like the kind emanating from the bong—the odor of used Mary Jane. It’d been the earthier, almost sweet smell of freshly growing weed. Not that Delilah was an expert or anything. But her roommate in college, Sarah Moore, had been a philosophy major and had kept a couple of pot plants flourishing under a UV light in her closet for…wait for it…strictly “medicinal/experimental purposes.” Feel free to insert eye-roll here.

Of course, the presence of the jolly green downstairs could also account for the discrepancies she’d seen in Charlie’s financial records. So then the question became, was it possible his disappearance, as well as her uncle’s, was some sort of drug deal gone terribly wrong? As her stomach took a nosedive into her biker boots, she posed her theory aloud.

“Are all the plants still there?” Mac asked Steady, continuing to stare at that stupid chair until Delilah was forced to glance down at the thing. What in the world is so mesmerizing about it? But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t discern anything exceptional about the standard wooden ladder-back.

“Sí, hermano,” Steady replied, his Puerto Rican accent lilting in the stale air of the house. “Everything appears to be in order. Nothing missing that I can tell. Nothing moved.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Mac shook his head, blue gaze narrowed, the too-sexy dimple twitching in his chin as his substantial jaw sawed back and forth.

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“If Sander was attacked and taken because of some sort of dust-up between pot growers,” Mac explained, “if it was a turf war gone bad or something, then whoever eighty-sixed him would’ve grabbed his plants. They’re too valuable to leave here to rot.”

Attacked and taken. Eighty-sixed… None of those words were ones Delilah wanted to hear.

“What makes you so sure he was attacked and taken?” Zoelner asked, still eyeing Mac curiously. And when Mac reached up and rubbed a wide palm over the back of his neck, Zoelner lifted a brow. “Is that Spidey sense of yours acting up again?”

Okay, and that was the second time Zoelner had used that term. “What in the world are you guys talking about?” she demanded. “What is Spidey sense?”

“Spidey sense is Spider-Man’s sixth sense about danger,” Ozzie supplied. “Except Mac’s superpower comes more in the form of an uncanny ability to piece together subtle clues.”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, not one to believe in the black arts of extrasensory perception. “You’re kidding, right?”

First aliens, now this? Maybe she’d been wrong to enlist the help of the Black Knights for this particular undertaking. Because, apparently, they were all batshit crazy. Who knew?

“It’s not a sixth sense or a superpower,” Mac assured her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s just good, ol’-fashioned FBI training.”

“Okay, good.” She nodded. “So then to reiterate and rephrase Zoelner’s question, why does your good ol’-fashioned FBI training tell you that Charlie was attacked and taken?”

“For the record,” Ozzie interjected before Mac could speak, “I’m still leaning toward alien abduction.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake…

Delilah, along with the rest of the group, watched as Mac walked over to the coffee cup. Using the steel-toe of his biker boot, he flipped the mug over. Beneath it was a small brown puddle of dried coffee.

“At first I thought Fido here,” the dog’s tail went from a side-to-side wag to a full-on circle at the mention of his name, “knocked the chair over in an attempt to get at the mug on the table,” Mac explained. And, yup. That gelled with Delilah’s take on events. “But then I saw there was a ring of coffee surrounding the lip of the cup. No way the Lab would’ve left that if he was after its contents. He’d have pushed the mug around until he lapped up every last drop. So, then if Fido wasn’t after the coffee, I asked myself, why is the cup on the floor?”

Delilah lifted a brow, glancing from the coffee mug to Mac.

“No one?” Mac’s eyes sparkled in the lamplight as his gaze swung around the group. “Okay, then. Let me demonstrate.”

He bent to pick up the tin mug and the newspaper. Then, he righted the kitchen chair before settling himself in it. Holding the paper in his left hand, the coffee cup in his right, he called to Zoelner. “Come up behind me. Grab me and drag me backward like you’re tryin’ to wrestle me out of the house.”

Dumbfounded, Delilah watched Zoelner crouch down and sneak slowly forward. Then the former CIA agent reached out and struck, quicker than—as she’d once heard Mac put it—greased lightning. One of Zoelner’s arms wrapped around Mac’s throat. His other arm clamped tight around Mac’s broad shoulders. A second later, Mac was yanked out of the chair.

The cup went flying. The newspaper fluttered to the ground. The chair tipped, and only after Zoelner dragged Mac halfway across the living room floor, Mac’s boots scrabbling for purchase, did Mac reach up and tap the guy’s forearm, saying, “Okay, that’ll do.”

He stood to his impressive height, adjusted his biker jacket, winced and touched his side like his stitches hurt—yeah, she still felt guilty about that—and gestured toward the kitchen. As a group, Delilah and the rest of the Knights turned to look. And, sure as shit, the chair was lying on its back. The paper had settled beside the table leg. And the coffee mug, though not quite where it’d been before, was still pretty darn close.