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one of the chairs in front of the desk. I didn’t want to sit, but my cousin Amy always says “Pick your battles,” so I sat.
    This chair was enormous, too, and it swallowed me. I’m sure that wasn’t calculated to intimidate his visitors or anything. Carson had moved closer to his boss’s right hand, which I didn’t think was by accident, either, symbolically speaking.
    Maguire continued as if this were a perfectly normal meeting. “I’m sorry that you were inconvenienced, and that the misunderstanding led to such unpleasantness. But I need your assistance.
Without
the interference of the FBI.”
    I didn’t need a map as to why he didn’t want the feds up in his business. Whereas anything I Saw, psychically speaking, was inadmissible in court. “I’m not sure how I can help you, Mr. Maguire,” I said politely, since we were pretending this was all normal. “Your daughter isn’t dead.”
    He seemed unsurprised. “That’s good to know, since I received a ransom demand earlier today.”
    “I knew it!” I slapped the leather of the chair arm. “I
totally
called it.”
    Maguire merely raised a brow. “I can see I made the right choice bringing you in to find Alexis before anything bad happens to her.”
    My elation drained away. “Except what I do is kind of specialized. I can’t get any kind of read on the living.”
    “Can’t?” asked Maguire, then after a beat, “Or won’t?”
    He was studying me as if I was a peculiar specimen. Which, granted, I am. But there was something weighted about his gaze and the significant pause between words.
    “Can’t,” I stated firmly. The truth was close enough that I felt no guilt leaving exceptions off my résumé. I can read a man’s dying thoughts from the change that was in his pocket when the bus hit him. But trying to read the impressions of the living is like trying to answer a cell-phone call in an elevator at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
    What I was really leaving out, though, was how much the dead told me about the living. Like how the radioactive concentration of remnant energy in this room should make a normal person twitchy over time, yet there was Maguire, calm as could be. The man had iron will and Teflon nerves, and I was
so
screwed if he didn’t believe that my abilities were of no use to him.
    “Miss Goodnight—may I call you Daisy?” He took my agreement as a given, speaking with a we’re-all-friends-here candor that let me know exactly how much we were
not
friends. “I’m giving you the opportunity to be completely honest with me. If I find out you haven’t, I’m not going to be happy.”
    “Look,” I said, brazening this out. “It’s not a straightforward thing. We’re talking about the inexplicable forces of the universe here. Not the rules for
Donkey Kong
or something.”
    Carson coughed like he was covering up a laugh. Maguire glanced at him, more calculating than curious, and the younger man sobered up quickly.
    Maguire turned back to me, shifting topics suddenly. “Are you hungry? I can have sandwiches brought in.”
    I wanted to say no, because I didn’t think I could swallow past the lump in my throat. But my stomach didn’t know how screwed we were and gave a loud growl. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, and pulled out his BlackBerry to fire off a text.
    “Mr. Maguire,” I began as he sent in his Quiznos order or whatever. “I’m willing to see if I can sense traces of someone—alive or dead—on Alexis’s belongings. But I can’t promise anything.”
    “Oh, I think you will.” He looked up from the BlackBerry with a basalt stare—cold, black, and smooth. “It’s just a matter of finding the right motivation.”
    The knot of fear in my chest, the one I was trying to pretend wasn’t there, looped even tighter. I glanced at Carson, who had promised things would be all right. His gaze was on the floor, and a muscle in his jaw flexed rhythmically but unhelpfully. If he was trying to send me a