When Skeeter reached the Neo Edo Hotel, he found Kit in his palatial office, bent over his computer. Skeeter paused just long enough to kick off his shoes before stepping onto the pristine tatami rice mats. “Where’s Kaederman?” Skeeter asked tersely, searching the corners of Kit’s office with an uneasy gaze. “I thought he was coming up here.”
Kit glanced up. “Kaederman,” he said flatly, “went to bed. That man is the laziest detective I’ve ever met.”
“How’d we luck out? At least he’s nowhere around to hear the news.”
“What news?” Kit leaned forward, eyes abruptly glittering.
“Ianira’s in London. She went through in a steamer trunk. One of Benny Catlin’s. I’m sure of it. You remember that pile-up of luggage at the platform, when one of the trunks nearly slid off.”
“Yes, you mentioned it belonged to Benny Cat— Oh.” Kit could out-swear Yesukai the Valiant. Then he grimaced. “Skeeter, you had no way of knowing, not at the time.”
“Maybe not,” he muttered, pacing from the enormous desk to the withered landscape garden of raked sand and carefully placed stones to the wall of television monitors which kept Kit abreast of events all over Shangri-La Station. “But if I hadn’t been so damn muddled, I’d have figured it out a lot sooner. And the trail wouldn’t be so cold!”
“Well, beating yourself up over this won’t do Ianira any good,” Kit pointed out gently. “At least we have a pretty good indication Ianira was alive, inside that trunk, given Jenna’s reaction. I begin to wonder if anyone from the Ansar Majlis was with that girl when she went through the Britannia,” Kit mused. “Other than a couple of hit men who died messily? And since she went through on her own, that really makes me wonder where Marcus and Armstrong went after hopping their train in Colorado. Once Armstrong eliminated the man who shot Julius, they certainly lost no time hightailing it out of there.” Kit frowned slowly as he sat back in his chair. “Unless,” he mused, “they weren’t running away at all.”