The three of them looked at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted a second head.

“It doesn’t make sense to secure a laundry vent,” Rogan explained. “It’s too small and it opens into a dryer.”

“I’m curious, what are you picturing exactly?” Augustine asked. “A crisscrossing pattern of red laser beams and ferrets in harnesses slithering through it like ninjas?”

Ugh. He needed some of his own medicine. I dropped some cold into my voice. “Mr. Montgomery, contrary to what popular entertainment would like you to believe, laser beams are neither red nor visible under ordinary circumstances. I would think a man in charge of an investigative firm would know that.”

Augustine flushed. “I do know that, which is why I asked the question in the first place.”

I plowed on ahead. “Lasers wouldn’t make an optimal choice for securing a dryer vent anyway, because air carrying dryer lint would create false positives and would eventually clog the mirror system. For the same reason, heat sensors or movement sensors are out, but the exhaust could be secured by a pressure sensor. How paranoid is Baranovsky? I don’t want Cornelius’ ferrets to die. It would be painful for him.”

Cornelius reached over and squeezed my hand. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

“I’m more paranoid than Baranovsky,” Rogan said. “My laundry vents aren’t secured. But I’d imagine there is a metal grate over them.”

“Does anybody else find this whole idea of a ferret heist mildly absurd?” Augustine looked around the room.

“Grates are not an issue,” Cornelius said.

“Can your animals handle screws?” Augustine asked.

Cornelius met his gaze. “Let’s assume that I spend as much time training my animals and honing my magic as you do practicing your illusions.”

“How confident are you that this will work?” I asked Cornelius.

He smiled at me.

“Let’s do it,” Rogan said.

Rogan owned a surveillance truck. From the outside, it looked like a medium-sized RV. Inside, it was a high-tech wall of computer screens, equipment, cables, and various monitors. I sat in my black leather seat, which could rotate 270 degrees when unlocked and came equipped with a seat belt and a hiney warmer, and watched the night-vision camera feed on the main screen as two ferrets and a slightly larger creature Cornelius called a Chinese ferret-badger loped their way through the brush. The Chinese ferret-badger was adorably fluffy and I got to pet him and feed him some raisins before Bug put him into a harness that supported a camera and a communicator. Two side monitors provided similar feeds from the ferrets. Cornelius and Bug sat in front of them, both wearing headsets with mikes.

“I can’t believe you put cameras on ferrets,” Augustine said on my left.

“You put cameras on drones,” Cornelius responded.

“Yes, but drones are supposed to have cameras. This is . . . unnatural.”

Cornelius spared him a smile.

On the screen the drizzle still soaked the ground. It was the kind of night when cold seeped into your bones. I leaned closer in my seat, grateful to be dry and warm. While they had put the harnesses together, I’d made a brief run home, where I switched out of my beautiful and thoroughly rain-soaked dress into a prosaic T-shirt and jeans. My hair was still put up, but the makeup had to go. I felt more like me, but there had been something magical about that dress, about being at the gala, and walking with Rogan up to the balcony. Something that reached back through my adulthood to an almost childlike belief in magic and wonder. When I thought back to this evening, I should’ve remembered Baranovsky, the man I had spoken to only minutes before he died, murdered in his own mansion. Instead I remembered the feel of Rogan’s fingers on mine and his face when he said, “I see a Prime.” He said it as if he’d dreaded it. It bothered me. It bothered me more than Baranovsky’s murder.

Was I getting used to death? I hoped not.

According to Bug and his surveillance staff, David Howling had never made it home. He had vanished off the map somewhere between Baranovsky’s mansion and his house in River Oaks. Neither Bug nor his two surveillance helpers were able to locate him. When Bug plucked Howling’s cell phone number out of some Internet ether and called it at Rogan’s directive, the number was no longer in service.

The brush ended. The three little beasts paused. In front of them, twenty yards of open ground stretched. Past it loomed the walls of the mansion’s northern wing, where according to Rogan’s informant, the laundry room was located. Some ornamental shrubs and rose bushes wound between the walls and the brush. The laundry vent was likely concealed behind the greenery.

Cornelius flicked a switch on his headset, his voice clear and friendly, as if he were speaking to a group of small children. “Look left.”

The cameras shifted as the beasts looked left in unison.

“Look right.”

The cameras obediently swung right. All clear.

“Run to the wall.”

The three beasties dashed across the open ground, under the rose bushes, and to the wall.

Cornelius concentrated, his gaze focused, his voice intimate and almost hypnotic. “Harsh scent. Yellow poison scent. Find it.”

“Poison scent?” Rogan asked.

He’d moved to stand next to me and suddenly I was acutely aware that he was standing only inches away. I wanted him to reach out and touch me. He didn’t.

“Bleach,” Bug said softly. “He had them smell paper towels soaked in bleach. The scent lingers on clothes even in the dryer.”

The beasties dashed left, rounded the corner, and stopped before a square foot-wide vent secured by a metal grate.

“Use the small tooth,” Cornelius intoned. “Open the burrow.”

“I’m in a Disney movie,” Augustine said, his face disgusted.

One of the ferrets reached over and pulled a tiny screwdriver out of the ferret-badger’s harness. The beast raised it up and put it into the screw. The other ferret squeezed it and the electric screwdriver whirred quietly, pulling the screw out. The screwdriver slipped. The ferret patiently repositioned it again.

Augustine blinked.

It took them almost five minutes, but finally the screws came loose and the three furry burglars hooked their claws into the grate and pulled it out.

“Balu, enter the burrow. Loki, enter. Hermes, enter.”

The badger squirmed into the vent, with the ferrets following it. Lint dust floated in the air as they moved. One of the ferrets sneezed adorably. Please don’t get killed, little beasties.

Cornelius’ burglars double-timed it through the air vent. Abruptly the metal tunnel ended in a T-section, with the perpendicular tunnel running left and right. They must’ve had more than one dryer attached to it.

“Loki, wait. Hermes, wait.”

The two ferrets obediently crouched down.

“Balu, charge.”

The badger shot forward and smacked into the T-section’s wall. The entire tunnel quaked. A dent bent the soft metal.

“Again.”

The beast rammed the wall ahead. The view from its camera turned, shaking. The tunnel sagged. The weight of the badger had strained the connection between the wall and the semi-rigid metal duct running to the dryers. A narrow gap formed between the duct and the length of the dryer vent.

“Open the hole,” Cornelius intoned. The ferrets hooked their claws into the gap.

Rogan watched, an odd expression on his face.

Three minutes later Loki, the lighter ferret, squirmed out of the hole and pulled off the clamp, disconnecting the duct.

Rogan lifted his cell to his ear and said quietly, “Margaret? Look into putting pressure sensors into our dryer vents . . . Yes. Dryer vents.”

Augustine was typing something on his phone, his face unreadable. Serves you right.

The burglars dashed into the house, navigating the vast mansion and following commands as Cornelius patiently talked them through their heist. Bug had been right. The place swarmed with security personnel and detectives. Once, just before the ferrets ducked behind a curtain, Hermes’ camera caught a glimpse of Lenora Jordan, the Harris County district attorney. In her late thirties, with medium brown skin and a mane of hair twisted into a careless bun, she strode through the house with a scowl on her face. Baranosvky’s murder was big enough news to drag her out of bed and she clearly wasn’t happy about any of it. A team of haggard-looking people in professional clothes trailed her, watching her every move. Most likely those were Baranovsky’s lawyers. He must’ve made provisions for his death.