Finder's Keeper (6 page)

“That’s so…”
Hot
.
Sexy. Fuck-me-now.
Somehow he didn’t think Mia would go for that. So he blurted the first safe word that popped into his head: “Cute.”

Mia went stiff and Chase saw his life flash before his eyes as her face morphed into something from
Children of the Corn
.

“Cute?” she asked in a low voice the Grim Reaper would have run from screaming.

Shit
. So much for safe.

Cute
. He’d just called her research cute.

Her blood began to boil, a nice steady simmer.

Mia had heard a lot of reactions to her work. Some people were intimidated or awed by her intellect, others just zoned out on that boring science stuff, while still others pretended to understand and nodded along before asking a question that made it patently obvious they had no idea what she’d been talking about—but
cute
, that was new.

He got bonus points for originality, if nothing else.

“Cute was the wrong word,” Chase said, back-pedaling frantically.

“No, no, science is
adorable
. I don’t know why I’ve never described it that way before,” she snapped.

The idiot man smiled at her. Why couldn’t he just react like a normal person? He was impossible to argue with properly. None of her scathing comments seemed to land on him. They just slid right off the easy slickness of his bullshit.

“Look, you’re a scientist, I get it. You aren’t going to be taken in by smoke and mirrors. But as a scientist, aren’t you even a little curious to see if I can actually do what I say I can do? And how? Don’t you want to know the science behind it?”

She was curious. Dammit. She wanted to know how his con worked.
If
his con worked, there was a chance it could work for her.

Her best hypothesis involved hypnosis—accessing her subconscious mind’s memory of an item’s location. Hypnosis wasn’t magic. It was simply a method of bypassing the parts of the brain that function to suppress extraneous memory or maintain impulse control—so the subject clucks like a chicken in front of an audience of strangers.

But she wasn’t going to give this stranger open access to her subconscious—no matter how smooth he could talk. Or how good he looked.

She might have been more likely to trust an ugly, awkward man. This one was too slick. Not polished, but naturally slippery.

“I think you should go.” What else did people say in situations like this?
It’s not you, it’s me?
Something about doors hitting asses on the way out?

“Suit yourself,” he said, making no move down the steps. “You don’t want my help, that’s fine, but I’m afraid I’ll have to invoke the Prank Clause.”

“Excuse me?”

“With as many crank calls as an office like Karmic gets, we have to have a policy in place for people who schedule appointments just to jerk us around. Now, we wouldn’t normally charge just for a consultation—unless the appointment was a fake. Then we have the prank fee. One hundred dollars. No out-of-state checks, please. Just make it out to Karmic Consultants.”

“That’s extortion.”

“You’d pay a plumber for making a house call—oh, that’s right, your daddy’s your plumber.” He pulled a crisp white business card from one pocket of his ragged jeans. “You got a problem, take it up with Karma. She’s the boss.”

“People lie on the phone.”

“People lie in person too, but not Karma. Go see her, if that’s what it takes to convince you we’re for real.”

It was oddly tempting. Part of her was curious to see for herself what sort of woman ran a paranormal investigating agency, but… “It’s Saturday.”

“And the office is technically closed, but Karma will be there. She’s always there.”

Dammit.
Mia still felt like she was being taken for a ride, but she had called them, not the other way around. Maybe she had just identified herself as a mark by doing so, but maybe, just maybe, they could actually help. Was she desperate enough to resort to supposedly supernatural measures?

From the kitchen, her cell phone began playing her mother’s personalized ring tone. Mia flinched. She could
not
talk to her mother. And if she sent this lunatic away, she didn’t have the first idea how to find the watch. “Okay. I’ll go talk to this Karma person.” She snatched the card from his fingers.

“I’ll just pretend you were convinced by my winning charm rather than that phone call,” Chase said with a lazy grin.

Mia glared up at him. She hated assumptions and she wanted to hate his, but the damn man kept jumping to the right conclusions. It was kind of…
nice
not having to guide him through the conversation with a roadmap to get him to what she meant. He could skip ahead in the conversation and actually keep up with her.

Not just keep up, she realized. Get ahead.
She
had to struggle to keep up with
him
, conversationally. He was verbally cagey. Clearly upfront, almost obvious about it, just using a heavy dose of charm to smooth over his verbal manipulations. It was an unfamiliar challenge.

“You can go now,” she snapped, sending a pointed look at the foot he’d wedged against her door.

He pulled back his foot and began backing down the steps. “I’ll call ahead to let Karma know you’re coming, but if the front door is locked, just ring the bell. You’ll probably beat me there.”

He was coming too? “You don’t have to—”

“Oh, I have to. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” He reached the bottom of the stairs and grabbed a bicycle she hadn’t noticed leaning against the railing. Maybe the alcohol was still slowing her brain down, but it took him throwing his leg over the seat before she realized it was his.

“You came here on a
bike
?”

Chase shrugged, the muscles of his shoulders doing interesting things beneath the almost see-through thinness of his shirt. “I don’t like cars.”

“Oh God. You’re one of those techno-phobe tree huggers, aren’t you?”

It was not the most tactful thing to say. Mia could have blamed her lack of verbal filter on the alcohol still working its way out of her system, but the truth was her social filters were pretty much permanently busted. But Chase just laughed. An easy, open burst of sound that made her want to smile with him. The man was impossible to offend.

“Nope,” he said. “I’d just rather get around this way when I can.” He tipped an imaginary cap at her. “See you soon, sweetheart.”

He kicked off and pedaled smoothly out of her neighborhood, Mia watching his every move until he turned the corner and glided out of sight. He biked everywhere.
Bet you can bounce a quarter off that ass.

Mia flushed, slamming the door and putting her back to it. Riding a bike wasn’t hot. It wasn’t. He was like a middle schooler. A grown man who looked like a Calvin Klein model and rode a bike. That was
not attractive.

It was eco-friendly though. Mia wasn’t against the environment. She just disliked the rabid environmentalists who were anti-science. Anti-progress.

Chase Hunter just seemed… God, she didn’t know what he seemed. He confused her. Something she could safely say no man had ever done.

But could he help her?

From the kitchen, her mother’s ringtone sounded again. She couldn’t answer. Not yet. Not until she had the watch so her mother wouldn’t hear the lack of it in her voice and drive over here to murder her.

My fate is in the hands of a beach bum on a bicycle.
Mia groaned and sank to the floor. She’d give herself five minutes to wallow. Then five minutes to put herself in order, and twenty to research the hell out of Karmic Consultants. Thirty minutes to regain her sanity; then she had to go meet the Ghostbusters.

Right after she called the cops.

“And here’s a copy for your insurance adjuster.”

Mia’s brows pinched together as she accepted the police report being extended to her by the one-foot-in-retirement officer who had taken her complaint. “Why would my insurance adjuster need one?”

Officer Grant shrugged. “Standard policy for reimbursement.” When she blinked at him blankly, he went on. “So you can replace the watch.”

Mia frowned. “I don’t want to replace the watch. It’s irreplaceable. I want you to find it. Won’t there be an investigation?”

“No sign of forced entry. Nothing else taken. A time frame of a year when the item could have been taken.
If
it was taken.” Officer Grant shook his head. “Look, lady, we do what we can, but petty theft isn’t enough to mobilize the force, okay? My advice? Go home and take another look. Odds are you put it in some drawer and forgot about it. Happens all the time.”

“Not to me. I’m organized.”

“And that’s commendable. But everybody makes mistakes.”

Losing the watch wasn’t a mistake. It was a catastrophe. “There isn’t anything you can do?”

Officer Grant reached into his desk and pulled out a card—a very familiar-looking card. “It’s out there, but you could try this private consulting firm. They’ve worked on missing items cases with us in the past. I don’t put much stock in it, but damned if they don’t get results.”

Mia accepted the card, her scientific heart sinking at the sight of the name emblazoned boldly across the front. Karmic Consultants.

Chapter Six

Neurotic & Neurotic-er

Karma studied the fervent young woman seated in her office. Mia Corregianni leaned forward in the straight-backed chair, so tense the air molecules around her seemed to vibrate with suppressed energy.

Her skirt suit was conservative and wrinkle-free despite the humidity, as if the fabric itself knew better than to threaten the ordered perfection of her appearance. Even her glasses didn’t dare slip out of place. Her name and coloring betrayed Italian descent, but there was nothing effusive or unrestrained about her. She was bony enough to make any Italian mama tie her down and force-feed her a platter of lasagna, and she’d yanked her dark hair back in a bun so tight it had to be painful.

At first glance Miss Corregianni seemed perfectly composed, back straight, hands neatly folded. Poised. Calm. Until you heard the barely-holding-it-together edge to her voice and looked closer to see the white-knuckled clench of her fingers and the glassy panic in her eyes.

And until one recalled the slurred hysteria that had caught Karma’s attention on her call last night.

Karma found her utterly fascinating—rigid control was something of a hobby of hers and Mia was an intriguing case. Not just in the restrained fervor of her need for
it
, as she had repeatedly blathered on the phone last night though she had carefully avoided explaining what
it
was, but also in the way she seemed to deeply resent her need for
it
, and correspondingly her presence in Karma’s office.

Karma laced her fingers together on her desk and revealed none of her fascination in the coolly professional tone with which she said, “Miss Corregianni, I assure you, in spite of his somewhat less-than-professional appearance, Chase is one of our best.”

Every instinct Karma possessed demanded it had to be Chase who handled Mia’s case. If only to pit the finder’s lazy, surfer-boy attitude against Mia’s unrelenting control. Karma’d pay good money to watch
that
show.

“How does this work exactly?”

“I see no need to invoke the Prank Clause in your case. Should you elect to use our services, the consultant will work with you to locate your missing item. In cases involving our finders we do not charge any fees unless we deliver, and we use a sliding pay scale. The longer it takes us, the less it will cost you.” Karma indicated the pricing brochure in Mia’s hands.

“No, I mean I want to know how this finding, this…magic supposedly works.” She lowered her voice. “I’m a scientist,” she confessed as if she half expected to be thrown out for the admission.

Professional skepticism explained part of her reluctance to be there, but Karma had a feeling there was more to it than that. And her gut was rarely wrong.

“All this is quite a lot for a student of scientific skepticism to swallow.” Mia unclenched her fingers long enough to flick them around the office, as though there were three-card monty hucksters dripping from the walls and bearded ladies dangling from the ceiling instead of the clean, classic lines and subtle Asian influences Karma chose to surround herself with at work.

She couldn’t entirely fault skeptics like Dr. Corregianni. She’d fielded job applications from far too many fakes and con artists over the years to still have any naiveté intact on that subject.

“I don’t actually know the science of how my finders’ abilities work,” Karma admitted. “I simply know that they do. Seeing is believing.”

Mia grimaced—just a slight twitch of her oh-so-restrained facial muscles—and rocked back in her chair, though her back still stayed a strict two inches from the chair back. “I see. I’m on a tight time frame,” Dr. Corregianni said with the same crisp precision she’d stated all the other facts of her case.
It
had been stolen out of her condo safe sometime in the last eleven months. She had no idea who had taken
it
or why
. It
was a family heirloom of particular significance but no great monetary value. She needed to hand
it
off at a family event in three weeks’ time.

“I appreciate the urgency of the situation. That is why I sent Chase first thing this morning.” At which point Mia had refused to let Chase do his job. One of her best finders was cooling his heels in her reception area when he could have already completed the find and moved on. Karma tried to remind herself the customer was always right. Even when they were working against their own interests. “I’ll just call him in and we can begin, shall I? Hopefully we’ll have your item back to you within the hour.”

Mia blinked once, the only indication that Karma had startled her with that declaration. She’d evidently expected vague promises and sleight of hand, not an air of confident guarantee. “How can you be so positive you can help me?”