Sam and Donnie headed over to the apartment building where David Wilson lived. Sam had been there before. She was optimistic in her ability to make her way past the doorman at the time. Now, however, she felt her odds were better than average.

  The building was a multi-story high-rise. Carved stone gargoyles sat where gutters would have been on a cheaper building. Their stone faces snarled down at Sam and Donnie as they approached. Sam remembered her lessons and suggested they take a trip around the perimeter of the building just to be sure nothing unusual stood out to them. She hadn't done this the last time she stopped by.

  The building's exterior butted up against several other buildings, leaving no alleyway. That meant they couldn't simply jimmy a lock and pop their way in.

  "Alright, Sam," said Donnie. "Looks like it's time for you to show me what you learned. I have a couple of ideas, but how do you think you should get past the doorman? Did you notice, is it the same guy you saw before?"

  "Yeah," said Sam. "It's the same guy. He must work weekdays. I reckon what we can do is feed him a story that is at least partway true. Follow my lead."

  The pair made their way back around to the front of the building where they greeted the doorman. He smiled lazily at them. His boss must've told him to be more personable, and a bare semblance of an impersonal smirk was the best he could manage.

  "Can I help you?" he said.

  "Yeah," said Sam. She curled her mouth up into what she hoped was a friendly smile. She let her good eye squint up because she noticed that folks who didn't smile with their eyes seemed creepy. She hoped she was conveying friendliness and not the same look a fat man has before digging into a steak.

  "To be honest, I'm a little worried about my friend. I don't know if you remember me. I came by last week to see David Wilson, 14B. We called up and he never answered. Now, I was supposed to meet with him, but if I'm being honest, I haven't heard from him, and this is a particularly unusual situation.

  "I was just wondering if I could convince you to go up and check on him. That's my only reason for stopping by today. I just wanted to see if we could persuade you to go up, knock on his door, see if you could get him to answer. If he's there, he's there and just doesn't want to talk to me. But frankly, I wonder if you've seen him come or go in the last week?"

  The doorman looked from side to side, determining if any of the passersby were going to be coming into his foyer, judging whether or not he had time to deal with his newest problem.

  He waved them both inside and said, "You two just go ahead up. If he's not home, he's not home. I haven't seen him come or go and I don't really want to deal with having to haul out a dead body if he's up there making a stink. Mr. Wilson is usually pretty punctual. I haven't seen him either. He's a good tipper. Otherwise I wouldn't care."

  Just like that, Sam and Donnie were past the doorman. Sam congratulated herself on the small victory. They'd be able to investigate David Wilson's apartment without interruption now.

  "Hey, Donnie, what were your ideas?"

  "I was gonna pretend to have a seizure on the sidewalk while you went up and did the investigation."

  "Good lord, Donnie," replied Sam.

  "It would have worked," Donnie said, shaking his head.

  They reached the fourteenth floor. Engraved brass signs indicated which way Apartment B was. They found themselves in front of the door where Sam picked the lock to pop open David Wilson's front door.

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  Darkness greeted them inside. They both stepped into a small hallway and allowed their eyes to adjust to the dimness before finding an electric light switch. They flipped the lights on. Disarray greeted them. The place looked like a tornado had passed through. Everything from the shelves had been tossed onto the floors and every surface picked clean. Sam started to step in; Donnie held her back.

  "Hold on. This is a new situation. Now we know we're looking at a probable crime scene," he said. "I have to teach you how to deal with this situation.

  "Now, the first thing that we would have done had we been able to see inside is determine if anybody was still in here. It's possible that the culprit would have still been inside, wrecking stuff and looking for whatever they're looking for. We know that's not the case because we can hear; it's quiet. I can also see in the dim light that there's a bit of dust settled on top of some of the things that have fallen. Nobody's been here in days and days.

  "We need to make some observations. We need to figure out what type of toss this is. Step in beside me as far as you can in the hallway. Take a look at what I'm going to point out to you. This was amateur. This was somebody looking for something in a hurry before they had to get out of dodge."

  "How can you tell?" asked Sam.

  "Well, a professional does it differently. They'll slash pillows, pull up floorboards, look under baseboards. Drawers are completely turned over, not just pulled out like you see over in the cabinet there.

  "There's other types of toss, too. A jealous lover could come in and wreck a place, which looks like a toss. And you can fake one. Sometimes smart criminals do that to hide evidence. This ain't that."

  "So," Sam said. "This looks like an amateur. I see what you're talking about. It's not thorough, it's not systematic. It wasn't done in anger, but it was done in haste. You can tell because there are still things sitting on surfaces. Someone had a limited amount of time here or was scared of getting caught."

  "Good eye," replied Donnie. "That's right. Now our choice is: do we let the city soldiers know about this, because now clearly we're dealing with more than missing people, or do we keep on investigating on our own? I'm pretty sure I know what you're going to say."

  "Then let's look through," said Sam. "See if we can figure out what happened."

  Donnie nodded.

  "Okay then," he said. "The procedure is similar to an undisturbed scene, but now what we're going to look for is specific. What was searched? What wasn't? What's still there? Did the searcher miss anything? Did the searcher leave anything behind? Check doors and windows for how they got in and out. Remember: every piece of evidence, every observation, goes in the notebook."

  The pair got to work. To Sam's eyes it appeared as though someone was looking specifically for information, not valuables. Every book in the room was tossed onto the floor. Some were opened. It appeared as though someone was looking for notes inside the books and wanted to quickly keep track of everything they had searched through, so they just threw each book on the floor after examining the contents. Drawers were open but not pulled out. The contents were scattered, showing that they had been rummaged through but not carefully emptied in the way a professional might have.

  Valuables, such as there were in the apartment, were left alone. From their profile of the man, they knew David Wilson was tidy. He would have kept the contents of his drawers not necessarily well organized, but at least not in the random piles that they found.

  They made their way from room to room, noting their observations in each. At the back of the apartment was David Wilson's bedroom. The door was shut; they opened it. The contents of the bedroom were also tossed about. Sam noticed the sheets on the bed were pulled to the ground and a lamp on the nightstand was smashed on the floor. The sheets were bundled tightly on the ground as if they had been pulled by limbs and trampled on by shoes.

  "Hey, Donnie," said Sam. "Take a look at this. Take a look at the sheets. Grown man being pulled out of his own bed. Putting up a bit of a struggle, knocking over the lamp, then losing the struggle over here by the door."

  "Yeah, that's about what I make of it, too. Maybe Wilson wasn't taken at his office. Maybe whoever came in here took him from this bedroom. But how would they have done that? Would they have come back here to toss the apartment after taking Wilson? It's the only way it would have made sense. Otherwise he'd have woken up."

  "Well, let's not forget," reminded Sam. "They were making contracts with Bathym the Vast, whose power is to take a person from one place to another instantly."

  "So you think somebody used magic, popped in here, took Wilson, then came back again looking for something else. What do you think they would have been looking for?"

  "I'm not sure," replied Sam. "But I got an idea. Let's get back to my office. I'm gonna send Lisa over to City Hall to see what we can find out. If Harold Maris has bought any real estate nearby — if you're making a contract to make a place bigger on the inside, you'd want to own that place, right?"

  "I bet we're going to find out Harold Maris has made a recent real estate purchase in this city."