"Haven't seen her. She was visiting friends, I think? Might have just lost track of time. I think we might as well start working on the books while we wait for her?" And Anemone starts pulling things out of her backpack and arranging them so people can look.

"Yeah, maybe. I've got the addresses she was headed to if she's gone much longer."

Carrie gets out the photos but leaves the ones that aren't from the party face-down in a separate stack.

"We know Ayers took his sabbatical in Ethiopia, presumably that's related to the Akumsite Empire one?"

"Probably. --Oh, the address book has addresses for Echavarria and also for the guy that Ayers was going to meet in Ethiopia. Who lives in Italy, apparently. Or did, ten years ago. Also these books are pretty creepy, just so you know."

Anemone is not going to give a harsher warning than that. How creepy could these books be, they're books.

Mordred picks up Ziggurats of the Pre-Helladic Period, Zoe the Maw of the Mouth, Anemone the Akumsite Empire book, and Carrie Fishing the River of Stars.

A half hour later--

"Lacie's not back yet. We should send someone to go find her."

"We should probably all go together? She's probably fine, but we do know that people are targeting us - "

"Well, it's a trade-off, right-- but if she's just lost track of time we haven't lost much and if it's worse than that then it's more important than getting everything read tonight--"

"Yeah, I think the books can wait. I don't think we're going to find all the pieces of this in LA, and if we have to finish them on the plane back that's not a big deal, you know."

"We wanted to get things in LA done as efficiently as we could to try to be ready by the time we went to get Lev?"

"Yeah I agree but I don't know that the books are necessary for looking through all of our LA leads?"

Zoe calls the contact that Lacie was going to speak to. 

The contact says that the last time she saw Lacie she was going to have lunch with her foster father Samson Trammel.

Well, that's not good.

Lacie left her foster father's phone number; Zoe calls Mr. Trammel.

"Hello, this is the Trammel residence, I'm the maid Mrs. Magwood."

"Hello, we're looking for Lacie? She was supposed to have lunch with her father, Samson Trammel, and then meet us afterwards, and we haven't heard from her."

"Miss Ferrier left to go speak with some of her friends," the maid says. "I do hope there wasn't an accident."

"--Yes, we're the friends she's supposed to be speaking with. We haven't seen her. When did she leave?"

"About 1pm," the maid says.

It's 3:30 pm.

"Do you know how she left? Who was driving her, what route they took, anything like that?"

"No, I don't know, I'm sorry."

"Okay, thank you. And there's nobody who would know that information? Even what the car looked like? I'm sorry, we're just really worried."

The maid leaves for a moment and returns with, "She got in a taxi."

"Thank you for your help." To the others: "Lacie left her foster dad's house in a taxi over two hours ago."