At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(61)

“And here,” Evan said, “I thought I was the brain and you merely the beauty.”

Addie growled.





CHAPTER 19


An hour later, and before he was entirely sure how she’d corralled him, Evan found himself yawning and shivering with Addie in the front seat of her SUV.

After Evan had locked up the mews and they’d returned to the quiet of his house, he had gone out front and retrieved the wooden figure. He’d stuck it in the entryway closet and promised Addie he would change his security codes. His thoughts had gone briefly to Officer Blakesley—the person most recently at his front door. But it was hard to imagine that a man on his way to a poker party was dropping off creepy dolls. He could dismiss the two figurines he’d received as the bizarre gesture of an irate student trying to give him a scare, someone who had been up to his house at some point for an end-of-semester party. But that wouldn’t explain the figure Sten had found outside Ragnar?k.

Another mystery in a day filled with them.

The doll taken care of for the moment, he and Addie changed into dry clothes—she kept an extra pair of sweats and a toothbrush at Evan’s for when she crashed in the guest room—and she had helped herself to Evan’s bottle of ibuprofen. She’d turned down his offer of a drink and a seat by the fire and hustled him into the front seat of her Jeep.

“We have work to do,” she’d snapped over his loud protests. “Aren’t you just a little spooked that your stereo was playing Viking music? Don’t you want to know if Helskin is responsible?”

“I fail to see how driving by his house will enlighten us in that regard. That’s assuming he even gave the correct address on that form.”

“Shut up and fasten your seat belt.” She slammed the door.

Now, a quick half hour later, they sat parked in a Southeast Side neighborhood of mostly post-WWII frame houses strung along streets of half-assed landscaping, broken streetlamps, and chain-link fences. Assorted detritus filled many of the yards—sun-faded plastic lawn furniture, cracked garden hoses, old tires. Maybe Helskin was a descendant of the people who had once worked in the mills. Maybe he was a vagrant. Maybe they were on a wild-goose chase.

Addie had killed the headlights even before she turned the corner, and now she pulled to the curb in front of a house with a foreclosure sign stuck into the front lawn. The location placed them across the street and a couple of houses down from the Helskin residence and gave them a clear view of his house.

In the front yard, despite the wet weather and the lateness of the hour, a rousing keg party was going down. Seven or eight men—it was hard to tell in the dark and the shadows—sat around a small firepit or moved in and out of the decrepit house. They were obnoxiously drunk and loud, their voices carrying in the autumn air. Nothing stirred in the rest of the neighborhood, not so much as the twitch of a curtain. If Helskin’s neighbors were complaining, they were calling in their concerns to the police rather than voicing them directly.

Evan thought that wise of them.

He comforted himself with the thought that, given the amount of alcohol circulating, the men would be unlikely to notice two people sitting quietly in a dark SUV.

“Nice night for a party,” he said.

“And you thought there’d be nothing to see.” Addie sounded smug.

So much for the simple drive-by, he thought. When Addie turned off the engine, he said, “What are you doing? No engine, no heat.”

“Can’t have any exhaust showing. Not when you’re running a stakeout.”

“I feel obliged to point out that it’s an unreasonable two degrees Celsius.”

“How cold is that in Fahrenheit?”

“Not terrible if you’re a polar bear. We mere humans might lose a few fingers.”

“Wuss,” she said in a voice that completely lacked sympathy.

“I must also point out that we won’t be any use to this investigation if we’re dead from pneumonia.”

“Poor baby.” Her voice turned slightly softer. “There’s a blanket in the back seat.”

Evan decided to man up, as Addie had suggested earlier in the evening, and make do with his coat and hat.

The wind and rain had stopped. A bruised-purple night pressed against the windows; the only light in the neighborhood came from Helskin’s home, a split-level eyesore that even at night looked downtrodden and ill-kempt. Four trucks filled the driveway. Addie took a small pair of binoculars out of the console and ran the license plate on the nearest vehicle—a late-model black pickup with a Michigan plate. It came back registered to Helskin. She jotted down the license plate numbers of the others.

Evan peered past her shoulder. “How can you even see the plates, much less the numbers? Even with binoculars?”

“Carrots,” she said. “Beta-carotene. And a lot of practice.” She ran the plates, then frowned and harrumphed and frowned again.

“Not good?” Evan asked.

“Nothing but lousy traffic violations.” She scrolled through the screen. “Although back in Michigan, Helskin’s neighbors filed multiple noise complaints against him.”

“Clearly the record of a violent psychopath,” Evan said.

She sulked. “People change.”

“We can only hope,” Evan muttered. “Why don’t you see if his name shows up in any poetry magazines?”