The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (23)

“The alarm was turned off,” Letty said. She held up the key: “And I didn’t kick any doors.”

“You could have told me,” Kaiser said, climbing out of the truck. “I was sitting here sweatin’ like a nun in a cucumber patch.”

“Well, if I told you, you would have tried to talk me out of breaking in. Then we would have had to go through a lot of tiresome argument. This was easier. Listen, when we go in . . . don’t touch anything you don’t have to.”

“You got a lot of cop shit from your old man,” Kaiser said.

“Yes. I did.”



* * *





They walked quickly through the house—neither one of them mentioned it, but they were checking for bodies or blood and Kaiser had his carry pistol in his hand. An open dining/living room area had eggshell walls and walnut floors and built-in bookcases, mid-century furniture with exposed wooden and chrome legs and patterned fabric. Two long wings came off the central area of the house: a TV theater room and two guest bedrooms, along with laundry and storage areas, were down one wing, with the master bedroom and a home office/library down the other.

After the quick walk-through, finding no bodies, they moved through the house more slowly, still not touching anything. In the kitchen, Letty was walking past the breakfast bar: “Uh-oh.”

Kaiser stepped over from the living room: “What?”

She pointed at one of the breakfast-bar stools. The stools were pushed up close to the bar, which made it hard to see, but a woman’s purse was sitting on one, partly open. They could see a purse-pack of Kleenex sticking out, and when Letty used a fist to nudge the stool out a few inches, they could see the red-leather corner of a wallet.

“Somebody took her,” Letty said. “No way she didn’t take her purse. Whoever took her didn’t see it and didn’t think of it.”

“We need to call the cops,” Kaiser said. “What are we going to tell them about breaking in?”

“We didn’t break in,” Letty said. “We used a key from Blackburn’s office drawer, apparently left there in case somebody ever needed to enter his house while he was gone. They even left the alarm code with it.”

“That’s weak,” Kaiser said. “Besides, you didn’t find the key in his desk drawer.”

“Who knows what I found in the desk drawer? The cops would have to prove we did something wrong, and if the Blackburns are . . .”

“Dead?”

“. . . missing, then they’d have a hard time proving it. And why would they even want to prove it?” Letty asked.

“Okay. But I’m going to get down on my knees and pray that they’re dead,” Kaiser said. “Texas jails aren’t known for their recreational facilities.”

Letty: “Mmm. Listen. Now we have to go through the place more thoroughly—but still fast. Really fast. If they’ve been taken, it’s connected to the oil. What we want is probably on paper, or, more likely, a computer file. We need to go through the office again, and the master bedroom, where somebody might hide stuff. We don’t call the cops until we’re done.”



* * *





They found vinyl gloves under the kitchen sink and pulled them on, and moved through the house, fast, opening doors and drawers. The guest bedrooms were still, almost stagnant. They checked the closets, found them empty except for some hangers, and moved on.

The home office was missing a computer—they couldn’t tell whether it was a laptop or a desktop, but there was a space for it on a desk pad, a multi-outlet power bar on the floor under the desk, and a Bluetooth printer on top of a low wooden double-wide file cabinet.

Kaiser used his picks to open the file cabinets. There weren’t any gaps in the hanging files, and the files all seemed to deal with personal finances and purchases. Letty noted the account numbers at Citibank; the latest statements showed no large withdrawals, and a total of $112,000 in checking and cash savings accounts, and an investment account.

“I’d love to see his investment accounts, the details,” Letty said. “If you find anything that might be account passwords . . .”

They found no passwords. “Probably on his phone,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think there’s anything here.”

“You go through the storage cabinets in the hall, I’ll take the master bedroom,” Letty said, when they finished with the office.

Letty went quickly but carefully through the master bedroom without finding much of interest except a couple of sex toys in the bottom drawer of a dresser full of women’s clothing, a four-foot-tall, two-foot-wide safe, and, under a thick set of men’s underwear in another dresser, a loaded .357 Magnum with a short barrel and shrouded hammer, and a box of .357 hollow-point cartridges. She left them as they were, though she wouldn’t have minded having a .357.

She told Kaiser about the safe. He took a look and shook his head. “We’d need the combination. Or a lot of time and industrial drills.”

As they left the bedroom, she asked, “Did you check the garage?”

“No.”

“Go check it, but be quick. Men tend to hide things in basements and garages. Since this place doesn’t have a basement . . . and remember: it’ll be on paper. Or a computer thumb drive. Like that.”