tall, dark and dangerous (Nancy Drew/Ned Nickerson) - complete

chapter 8

Nancy thanked the bellhop and said that Humphrey must have stayed the night with a friend, forcing a smile until he left. Then she did a more thorough search of the room once she was alone. His luggage and clothes, toiletries, were all still there. The last time she had seen him—Nancy closed her eyes tightly and thought back to the night before, when he had followed her onto the elevator. Pale yellow polo shirt and black pants. She remembered thinking that the yellow really didn't do any favors for his complexion.

She sighed and shook her head. The polo shirt wasn't in his discarded clothes, so wherever he was, he was probably still wearing it.

And if he had a one-night stand and he's on the way back now...

Nancy didn't really care. She had already waited too long, and she had a bad feeling that the night before he had run into trouble, but hadn't figured it out in time to call her. And if the murderer had him...

Don't think about it, she told herself. He's okay. And I'll find him.

While it would have been awful to find his phone in the room, at least that way Nancy would have a record of his recent calls. Since the hotel charged for calls using the room phone, she doubted she could find out that way. Frustrated, she glanced around the room again and spotted a blank pad on the desk. If he had sat down there and jotted down anything...

She sat down quickly and ran her fingertip over the surface of the pad, then held it up and angled it into the light, but didn't see any impressions, even faint ones, on its surface. Hurriedly she dug through her purse and pulled out a small pencil, then gently ran the edge of the lead over the surface of the paper. She made out a few faint lines, but when she picked up the pad and scrutinized them, they were only rectangles and triangles. Someone, maybe not even Humphrey, had probably idly doodled them while on the telephone.

Nancy let out a frustrated groan. The government lead was the most promising one she had, and she needed to research it, but it would probably be even faster to locate Humphrey. Nancy flipped the security bar so she could get back into Humphrey's room, then quickly retrieved her own laptop with its bag and power cord and brought them back.

He had spent of their time in New York hanging out with Cantoni, and maybe they had made a date for Sunday, one she didn't know about. Nancy didn't have Vincent's card, though, since Humphrey had handled contacting him. She found a number that looked promising online, and after thirty minutes of working her way through the labyrinth of contact information, she managed to leave a message with his secretary to have him call her back as soon as he possibly could, about a business matter.

Once she hung up, she felt so frustrated and anxious that her hands were trembling a little. "Okay, focus," she murmured. "He'll walk through that door just as smartass as ever any minute. In the meantime, though..."

Nancy went through her papers and found the list of primary investments for each of the partners. She pinned her hair up, uncapped a highlighter and went to work, and when she was finished, she had at least tentatively eliminated Parker and Nickerson from her suspect list. Neither of them seemed to have side projects that the government could possibly be interested in, or at least not ones that seemed to cross Mark Armstruther's interests. Mark was far more interested in tech, but tech with consumer applications, from everything she could see. Ned, she noted with a smile, had invested in projects with NASA applications, but they were strictly non-militaristic.

She wasn't sure why, but she had a hunch that it hadn't just been a government project, but one with military applications. That would explain Mark's reluctance. She was just considering calling Mark to see if he would confirm her logical leap when her phone rang.