The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (24)

“Where do women hide things?” Kaiser asked.

“Bedroom and the kitchen,” Letty said. “The refrigerator, among other places. I’ll check all that. I think it’s more likely that Boxie would do the hiding, not his wife, if it involves stealing oil.”

“Your dad teach you that? About the garage and the bedroom?”

“Yes, he did,” Letty said.

She followed him down the hall toward the kitchen and the garage door, and he said, “I’m fuckin’ freezing.”

“Yeah, they like it cold. But it’s a dry cold.”

“Very funny. Dry . . .” He stopped and peered at a wall thermostat. “Holy cats, they have it set at sixty. I didn’t even know they went that low.”

“Leave it,” she said. “Let’s not change anything we don’t have to.”



* * *





They continued on to the kitchen, where Letty began going through the cupboards as Kaiser continued on to the garage.

The Blackburns’ kitchen cupboards and refrigerator held no secrets, as far as she could tell, but when she pulled open a drawer to reveal the kitchen wastebaskets, banana peels, coffee grounds, and porkchop bones, she poked around and found two broken cell phones.

She picked them carefully out of the garbage, found that both had been smashed with something heavy, like a hammer. She put them back in the garbage with enough food scraps and greasy paper towels on top to look real, yet with enough visible that the cops couldn’t miss them.

Always a good idea to give cops something to find; her father had taught her that, too.



* * *





Kaiser came out of the garage. “Nothing. I got to thinking, though: both cars are missing. If they were kidnapped, that means there must have been at least three people doing it. One to drive the vehicle they came in, two to drive the Blackburns’ cars away. So they scouted and planned it. This wasn’t an impulse thing. Of course, if it was the Blackburns running, there’d be no problem, they each took a car.”

“Why would they smash their phones to bits before they ran?”

“What?”

She told him about the phones in the wastebasket and he went to look. “They could have done it themselves. They could have bought burners so they couldn’t be tracked . . . but nope. There’s the purse, too. They’re dead.”

“Probably.” Letty closed her eyes. “Okay. What did we miss?”

Kaiser shook his head and said, “Listen, Letty, if we’re looking for a computer file on a thumb drive, it could be anywhere. If Boxie hid it and he’s smart—and he is—we’re not going to find it, not unless we come in here with a team and pull everything apart. The baseboards, all the books, the power outlets, empty all the socks and the sport coat sleeves. We could do that, but not if we don’t want the cops to know we did it.”

“All right,” Letty said. She scanned the kitchen. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“There’s a crawl space under the roof,” Kaiser said. “Out here, in hot places, they’re usually full of insulation, so I didn’t check. Think we should? There’s a hatch in the garage.”

She definitely thought they should look. They took a stepladder off a wall hook and moved it over to the hatch. Kaiser climbed it and yanked open the hatch, and found himself face-to-face with a two-foot layer of pink fiberglass insulation. He took his phone out of his pocket, turned on the flashlight app, and shined it back under the roof. “Nothing but insulation, far as I can see. Nothing disturbed, nothing stinks. There’s a little dried sparrow shit.”

“All right. I’ll call Grimes, tell them what we’ve found, and then call the cops,” Letty said. “Let’s not talk about digging around in the house. We came, we saw the purse, we called the cops. You better take the gloves and stick them in the truck. Out of sight.”

“You’d make a good criminal,” Kaiser said, as he came back down the ladder.

“Yeah, well . . .”

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “I was in jail once, in El Paso. Stationed at Fort Bliss. Went across the river and got stewed, screwed, and tattooed, came back and said something funny to a cop. Wound up in jail overnight. Found out I’m claustrophobic. In jails, anyway.”

“One of the things you want to do if you’re a criminal is you want to avoid jails,” Letty said. “If you get caught, pretend you didn’t know what was happening. You know, ‘I saw the door was open, I went in to see if anyone was hurt.’ Play it stupid.”



* * *





Letty called Grimes, told him that they’d found a key and a security code in Blackburn’s desk and that they’d entered the house. “They’re probably dead,” she said.

“What? What? Why do you think that?”

She told him about the purse and the broken phones, and that they’d been gone several days but hadn’t set the alarm. “We need to get the cops over here.”

“Did you . . . see blood or anything?”

“Nothing like that. The place feels like they just left . . . Didn’t even bother to empty the garbage.” Letty pressed the edge of her phone against her forehead, working through a thought.