Excuse me, but I have to be somewhere shortly." Taking his cell phone out of his pocket as he left her, he dialed Mandi's number, even though he'd felt her watching since Beth and he had left her room with her luggage. Mandi answered, "Hi, Ed. Andrea's here. I've filled her in. Come on up to the room." "On my way, milady." A toddler on a leash managed to get loose and came running Cade's direction as his mother tried to call him back. When the kid neared him, Cade's arm flashed out and snagged the kid's collar. He constrained the thrashing little beast at arm's length as he continued talking to Mandi. "Gimme an extra few minutes, ma'am. I have to return something to someone down here." Laughing, Mandi said, "So I see. Good collar, Officer Ed." The woman arrived to collect her child and Cade got underway again. On the fourth floor landing, he thought he heard voices and looked up and down the stairwell. Nobody either way. He turned a bit and listened a little harder. Some guy was trying to arrange a rental car. The other voice he heard was apparently that of a rental agent on a phone, and the voices seemed to be coming from the other side of the fourth floor hallway door. No, not the door; to one side of it. Cade stepped that direction and clearly heard the agent tell the guy that the kind of car he wanted would have to be brought in from the airport. The agent's voice was much fainter than the other one, so he probably wasn't on a speaker phone. That seemed to mean that Cade was listening to both sides of a conversation over a regular phone or a cell phone. "Look, I'm in a hurry," said the guy. "I'll head down to the lobby and get a cab. You just tell me who I have to see what all I have to do on the way, okay?" Cade instantly opened the landing door and stepped into the hallway. The door to the room on his left opened and a guy with a suitcase in one hand and a cell phone to his ear hurried out of the room and down the hall. 'Damn,' thought Cade, suddenly far too aware of a myriad of sounds in the hall. 'What other changes could he expect?' Mandi's idea that he might need supervision made more sense as he tried vainly to filter out some of the useless noise around him. Training was what he'd need. As he approached his room, he stopped walking as he heard Mandi say, "Ed has been a bit difficult, Andrea. More than a bit difficult, in fact. I hate to say it, but converting him may have been a mistake." A familiar woman's voice responded, "Oh, he didn't strike me as being all that terrible. You heard what he said about my eyes, didn't you? And the way he said it? And he was so polite when he excused himself and moved on. He called me 'ma'am'. Jerks don't act like that, Mandi." "Uh, huh. He'll call you 'milady', too, but don't let it go to your head. You know that horse you call a 'hardmouth'? The one who sometimes decides to go