“It’s all right,” Will said quietly. “It was demons who burned down Audrey’s house, not Caleb or any of the other cambions.”
“Do you know that for sure?” she responded as she slipped the house keys into her purse.
His gaze shifted from her to the door and then back again. “Maybe not for sure, because I wasn’t there, but it really doesn’t seem as if the cambions were involved in any of that mayhem.”
In a way, that made sense. Demons could come and go without leaving any evidence. Caleb might have done much the same thing in the Glendale house, but he was still flesh and blood, was pretending to be a regular human being with a driver’s license and — she assumed — a Social Security number and all the other trappings of a normal adult in the United States. Why risk leaving behind a fingerprint or a stray hair or a piece of lint or whatever it was that CSI units used to track down a perpetrator when you could have a nice incorporeal being do your dirty work for you?
“You have a point,” she admitted. “And I suppose that doing anything to this house would draw way too much attention.”
“Exactly.”
Will sounded so confident, she didn’t quite have the heart to point out that demons didn’t always follow human rules of logic. And although she didn’t want to sound callous, she thought privately that if demons or cambions or some sort of otherworldly vandals decided to torch Michael’s beautiful house, better that they do so without her in it.
Of course, she couldn’t know for sure whether she’d be any safer at Will’s house, but she tried to tell herself that they probably hated Michael more than they hated her or Will, just because Michael really had done them some damage by banishing Belial to Hell. Whereas she…well, she’d pretty much done everything she could do to help them, including leading Caleb right to Colin’s former home in Glendale so he could scoop up the Project Demon Hunters footage.
Holding back a sigh, she went down the porch steps and over to where Will’s car was parked at the curb. “I’m driving,” she said.
He looked so resigned, she almost wanted to laugh. “I know.”
They got in, and she guided the Challenger away from the curb and headed west. The two houses were so close together that there was no need to go back out on any main streets; she zigged and zagged her way over to Wilson, and in less than five minutes, she was pulling into the driveway of Will’s modest Craftsman-style home. Just as she turned off the ignition, her phone rang from within her purse.
“I should get that,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the elusive Detective Phillips.”
Rosemary didn’t recognize the number when she glanced down at the screen, but she made herself answer anyway. If it was a robocall, she’d just hang up.
But no, that was the detective’s no-nonsense voice coming from the speaker. “Ms. McGuire, I think you need to come out to the property in Glendale.”
“Um…why?” she said, shooting a puzzled glance at Will. He lifted a brow but remained silent, probably realizing that it was better for him not to speak while she was on the phone with the authorities.
“I’d prefer not to discuss that on the phone. How soon can you be here?”
Shit, she thought, mentally casting around for excuses and realizing she really had none to give. Shit, shit, shit. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe twenty minutes? I’m with Will Gordon right now and don’t feel comfortable leaving him alone. Can he come with me?”
“If he’s up to it,” the detective said. “Maybe he can help shed some light on the situation. I’ll see you soon.”
The call ended there, and Rosemary lowered the phone from her ear, knowing her expression had to be a study in confusion. “He wants us to come to the Glendale house.”
Will’s dark brows drew together. “Did he say why?”
“No.”
A pause, and then he shrugged. “Then I guess we’d better go and fight out.”
Rosemary’s slender fingers were tense on the steering wheel, but she drove calmly and competently enough as she pointed the Challenger west toward Glendale. Will remained silent, somehow realizing that to talk about what might be waiting for them in Colin’s former house would only make her more anxious. His own thoughts raced as he wondered if the police had found some piece of evidence that might connect them to Caleb Lockwood, or whether they’d discovered that the crawlspace access had been tampered with.
The problem was, Will had been either unconscious or simply not present while all that was going on, and so he had absolutely no idea whether any damning evidence existed or not. All they could do was go to the house and hope that they’d been worried for no reason, that the detective simply wanted to meet Rosemary there so he could go over the crime scene with her in person.
If that was how these things even worked. He didn’t watch crime television shows, and he’d never been the victim of a crime — well, except for someone breaking into his car years and years ago when he was a student at Boston University — and so he honestly had no idea what to expect.
When they turned the corner onto Las Flores Drive, Rosemary made a shocked sound. Instead of the single unmarked car they’d been expecting, there were several black and white squad cars and an ambulance parked in the driveway and on the street in front of the house, in addition to a black Ford Taurus that Will guessed was the detective’s vehicle. The perimeter of the property was blocked off with yellow crime scene tape, and a group of people — neighbors, probably — stood off to one side, gawking at the hubbub.
“What’s going on?” she asked in a low voice, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know. We just need to stay calm and see what Detective Phillips has to say to us.”
White-faced, she parked the Challenger in the nearest available space and then took the keys out of the ignition. They got out and began to walk toward the house, only to have the detective meet them at the bottom of the driveway.
“Ms. McGuire, Mr. Gordon,” he said, his expression blank and unsmiling.
“Did something else happen here?” Rosemary inquired. Her expression was one of curiosity and not concern, but Will could see how tense her delicate jaw was — and he guessed Detective Phillips could, too. “Was there another break-in?”
“Not exactly,” the detective replied. His glance moved toward Will. “How are you feeling, Mr. Gordon?”
“All right if I don’t move too fast,” he said easily, not sure whether his casual demeanor would fool anyone. But he didn’t want to act as though he was overly worried by the activity on the property. After all, he hadn’t done anything, so why behave as though he had?
“Then I’ll try to walk slowly.” The detective gestured for them to follow him down the driveway and through the front door. “I got permission from the owner’s sister to enter the property and begin the investigation, so I came by as soon as I was able to get a spare set of keys from the man who was acting as Colin Turner’s property manager.”
Rosemary sent Will a quick sideways glance. About all he could do was manage a very small lift of his shoulders, worried that Detective Phillips would see even that small gesture. How the detective had managed to track down Emma Weston, Colin’s sister, so quickly, Will didn’t know. The house had technically been owned by a trust, and it had taken Michael Covenant’s researcher Fred days to find out who was actually behind that trust.
But the “how” of it all probably didn’t matter too much at the moment. The far more pressing question was, why all this commotion over a simple break-in at a house that didn’t have anything to steal? True, there had been an assault, but it wasn’t as though anyone had been killed or even seriously injured.
“I came in and took a look around,” Detective Phillips said as he led them through the empty living room and toward a sliding glass door that looked out on the backyard. When Will had come here with Rosemary, they hadn’t gone outside, and so he didn’t even know what the yard looked like. Now he saw that it was small and neat, lik
e the house, with an oval pool taking up most of the space. “Then I went outside.”
The sliding glass door stood open, letting in a cool, damp breeze. Increasingly mystified, Will and Rosemary followed the detective out to the patio.
His blood seemed to freeze. Off to one side, looking incongruous next to a lounge chair with a blue and white striped seat, was a gurney. A cloth covered it, but you could tell there was a body underneath.
Cold fingers gripped his, and Will looked down to see Rosemary clutching his hand. He gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze, but since his own heart had begun to beat a little faster and a chill was working its way down his spine, he really wasn’t sure how much reassurance he’d actually provided.
Detective Phillips walked over to the gurney, then reached down and pulled back the sheet, revealing a man’s pale face. His dark eyes stared sightlessly at the gray sky, and his dark blond hair was still damp and pasted against his skull. He must have been in the water for some time, because his face looked gray and pinched, and yet somehow bloated.
Rosemary let out a shocked cry and raised her hands to her face. The drowned man on the gurney was a stranger to Will, and yet he thought he could guess who it must be.
“You know this man, don’t you, Ms. McGuire?”
For a few seconds, she was silent — not out of reluctance to reply, Will thought, but because she still hadn’t quite come to terms with what she was seeing.
At last, she nodded. “Yes,” she said, her voice so faint, it was hardly more than a whisper. “That’s Caleb Dixon.”
Chapter 8
Was this really happening? The world seemed to spin around her, but she made herself gulp in a deep breath of cool, damp air and focus on the horrible sight of Caleb Dixon — no, Lockwood, she reminded herself, a little proud that at least she’d had enough of a grip on herself to give Detective Phillips the fake name Caleb had been using — lying on that gurney, obviously dead.
No, it couldn’t be possible, though. She’d seen him disappear right before her eyes, mocking her as he vanished with Colin’s hard drive in his hand. How on earth could he have ended up dead in a swimming pool?
Besides, could quarter-demons even drown? She had absolutely no idea how strong Caleb had been, so she didn’t know whether he had his own particular set of vulnerabilities like any other mortal, or whether there was something else going on here that she just couldn’t figure out.
In silence, Detective Phillips handed over a sodden, crumpled piece of paper encased in a clear plastic bag. Staring down at it, Rosemary realized it was a picture of her with Caleb. A moment passed before she could gather her racing thoughts to realize the photo was a selfie he’d taken with her when they’d gone to the street fair in Monrovia. At the time, she hadn’t thought much of it, mostly because she figured that, as a filmmaker, Caleb liked to document places he’d gone and people he’d seen. He’d obviously printed out the photo, although she couldn’t quite guess why.
“We found this in Caleb Dixon’s wallet,” the detective said. “Can you tell me where this was taken?”
She blinked, and tried to keep her voice from shaking as she replied, “At — at the street fair in Monrovia. Caleb and I went there about a week and a half ago.”
“And how do you know Caleb Dixon, Ms. McGuire?” The detective’s tone was gentle enough, as though he was doing his best to respect her obvious shock, but she could tell that he wanted answers and wasn’t going to let her leave until she provided them.
“I — ” She reached up to push a wayward curl back off her forehead. The headache that had disappeared a few hours earlier had now returned with a vengeance. Probably the shock of seeing Caleb’s body, along with her lack of sleep, but the combination was painful. She had to think fast, though. She’d only told the detective that she’d surprised an intruder here and hadn’t gotten a good look at his face, so she figured it was probably safe enough to provide a little truth…with a lot of fiction mixed in. “We dated a little.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
The image of Caleb’s dark eyes dancing with devilish delight as he held the hard drive flickered through her mind, but Rosemary thrust it away and forced herself to focus on her last public interaction with him. “Um…almost a week ago now. We had dinner at Eden Garden in Glendora on Monday night. But we had an argument and, well, we broke up.”
“I see.” Detective Phillips had his notebook out again and was making some rapid notes. “Did anyone at the restaurant see you fighting?”
“No,” she said quickly. “We actually argued after, when he took me back to the house.”
“What was the argument about?”
Her gaze flickered to Will. She hated to drag him into this, but the story she was concocting would at least explain why he’d come with her to the house on Saturday night. “Mr. Gordon, actually. We’d met at a church function and started to get friendly, and Caleb got jealous. I tried to tell him that he and I had only gone out a couple of times and our relationship definitely wasn’t exclusive or anything, but he didn’t want to hear it. I had to tell him to leave.”
The detective’s cool dark gaze moved over to Will. “Did you know anything about any of this, Mr. Gordon?”
Will shook his head, his gaze nearly as impassive as that of the man who faced him. “No. But Ms. McGuire and I had just started seeing each other, and so I really hadn’t asked her much about her private life.”
“Caleb must have been jealous,” she said, praying her story would sound plausible to the stony-faced detective. “He must have followed me here on Saturday night to see what I was doing, who I was with.”
Detective Phillips’ head tilted to the side the barest fraction of an inch as he appeared to consider what she’d just said. “Could he have been the one who assaulted you?”
Rosemary made a helpless gesture with her hands. Had that looked too dramatic? She didn’t know; she’d never had to lie to the police before. “Maybe. I don’t know. It seems really out of character for him, though. I mean, he wanted to make movies. He didn’t seem like the violent type.”
“Are there any injuries to his fists?” Will asked then, his eyes narrowing slightly. “That is, I was hit pretty hard. Wouldn’t there be some sign of that on his hands?”
“Possibly,” Detective Phillips allowed. “The body was in the water for at least twelve hours, although we’ll have to wait for an autopsy to get a more accurate duration. We’ll look for wounds on his hands, though.”
“Or maybe,” Rosemary suggested, figuring it couldn’t hurt to muddy the waters a bit, “maybe he came back to poke around and surprised the same guy who attacked us.”
“Another possibility.” The detective made a few notes on his pad.
“You don’t think we’re suspects, do you?” Will said. He still looked very calm, but Rosemary could see the way his hands clenched into fists for a second and then relaxed.
“Oh, probably not you, Mr. Gordon,” Detective Phillips said, his tone unconcerned. “You were suffering from a concussion and in the hospital.”
“And I was there with him,” Rosemary cut in, although she realized she should probably stop there before she got herself in trouble. At least, any more trouble than she was already in. “In fact, I was talking to you, detective, at about the time Caleb probably drowned.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know for sure when he fell — or was pushed — into the pool. Yes, I spoke with you at the hospital, but I don’t know what you did after that.”
“I went back up to see what was going on with Will,” she said. “The nurses on the floor will tell you that — and so will Dr. Littleton, the doctor who was handling Will’s case.”
“Well, then,” the detective said as he returned his notepad to his pocket, “I suppose you don’t have anything to worry about…unless the autopsy shows that Caleb went in the pool some time after you discharged Mr. Gordon from the hospital.”
Rosemary wasn’t sure wh
at to say in response to that comment. Yes, she could protest that she’d been at Will’s bedside all night, except that wasn’t the precise truth. She’d come back to this very house and sealed up the crawlspace. Had Caleb been floating in the pool the entire time she was here? The very idea made gooseflesh creep along her arms, but she supposed it was possible. She hadn’t looked out into the backyard at all, had only gone back and forth between the hallway where the entrance to the crawlspace was located and the kitchen and the garage. There hadn’t been any reason to go near the sliding glass window in the living room; in fact, she’d actively avoided it, since there weren’t any window coverings installed, thanks to the house being between tenants, and she hadn’t wanted to risk someone catching a glimpse of her as she moved around the place.
Will shot a troubled glance at her before turning his attention to Detective Phillips. “You honestly don’t think Rosemary had anything to do with this? For one thing, I don’t even see how she could have overpowered someone like Caleb Dixon. He looks like he’s at least ten inches taller and seventy pounds heavier.”
This reasoned argument didn’t seem to make much of an impression. The detective shrugged and shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, then said, “You’d think that, but I’ve seen a lot of strange things on this job.” His gaze flicked to Rosemary and he added, “You’re not under arrest, Ms. McGuire. We’re done here. But make sure you’re reachable in case I have any further questions once I get the autopsy results.”
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