Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(24)

The waitress excused herself as an elderly couple entered the diner.

Lon watched her saunter off before pulling out a couple of bills and sliding them under his water glass. We raised our hands to thank June on our way out. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut until we got into the SUV.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.

“They found him in early January, and he was killed two weeks earlier. That would be right before—”

“Dare.”

“Wouldn’t be the first person he killed to keep quiet,” Lon agreed. “And if the PI had all that information on you, maybe Dare didn’t want others finding out.”

“But if this is our guy, and Dare killed him, what are the chances Dare left any information behind?”

“I doubt he did the deed himself. Probably hired a gun,” Lon said. “But you’re right. They wouldn’t have been sloppy. And the cops have probably gone over every inch of the house.”

We sat there for a moment. “But we’re still going to break in, aren’t we?”

A slow smile lifted the corners of Lon’s mouth as he turned the car’s ignition. “Damn straight.”

It took us a few minutes to find Diamond Trail on the GPS and another half hour to drive the length of it, but the two-story house was exactly where the waitress said it would be, half hidden by oak trees in a secluded area. It must have cost a few hundred thousand dollars to build, which made it less like a cabin and more like a house that had gotten lost in the woods and given up.

Lon drove up the steep driveway and parked on the side of the house, where we couldn’t be seen from the road. Leaves crunched underfoot as we trekked to the side door. It was sort of pretty here, with the craggy mountain rising in the backyard. Lon knocked, just in case, but no one answered. Shades covered all the windows.

“Can you hear anything inside?” I asked.

Lon glanced around, peering off into the woods and up the mountain. We hadn’t seen a single car once we turned off of Main Street. Guess he was thinking that, too, because a moment later, the horns were spiraling out. Super. Now I had to guard my thoughts.

“It’s good practice,” he said. “You’re supposed to be learning to guard yourself against your mother if she ever tries to tap into your head again.”

I glared at him. “Just tell me what you hear.”

“Nope,” he said, fishing around in his pockets for leather gloves. “Empty.”

“What if there’s an alarm on the door?”

“You feel any electricity?”

Oh. I reached out for current, and apart from some weak sources in the house and the SUV—all batteries, most likely—the nearest substantial cache of it felt far enough away to be in the lines at the road.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if got shut off for nonpayment,” Lon said, reading my thoughts. “The backup for alarm systems usually only lasts a day or two.”

Assessing our options, we hiked around the house and stopped in front of sliding glass doors, where Lon shielded his eyes to peer into shadows.

“How’re we going to get inside, anyway? Break the glass?” I pulled the handle to make sure it was locked and felt something give way. The door cracked, jerked, and slid open. Didn’t expect that. I stumbled, and when I looked to see what had happened, I saw the damage. “Shit.”

“Christ, Cady.”

The metal framing was bent. I’d torn the whole damn lock off.

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” For a moment, I remembered the table leg in the diner and panicked. “Maybe whoever killed him tried to break in here and damaged it already.”

“Maybe,” he said as he shifted down from his transmutated form.

“Let’s just get this over with.” Taking off my sunglasses, I led the way inside and whistled. “Nice pad. Being a PI pays well.” The whole rustic-cabin thing was a false front. Inside, it was all modern and sleek, straight out of an architecture magazine.

“God only knows what Dare was paying him.”

A large open living area with high ceilings spilled into a kitchen almost as nice as Lon’s but with much less personality. From there, we quickly went from room to room on the bottom floor, then headed upstairs when we found nothing of interest.

“Bingo,” Lon said when we strode into a home office. An oversized world map hung next to a calendar over an L-shaped desk that looked as if it had been stripped.

Lon ran his fingers over a bundle of limp cable cords sticking out of a hole in the desktop. “All his equipment’s gone. Either the guy who killed him took it for safekeeping, or the police seized it for evidence.”

We opened up all the drawers in the desk and two freestanding filing cabinets. Apart from some loose change, gum, and a few pens, nothing was left. “It had to be Dare,” I said. “We’d probably have more luck knocking on his widow’s door and asking her for help.”

“Already tried while you were in the hospital. She didn’t know anything. I went through two warehouses looking for anything he had on you. Didn’t find a thing.”

I closed an empty file-cabinet drawer and glanced at Lon’s face, feeling self-conscious and . . . odd. Why did he go to so much trouble to help me? I wasn’t sure I deserved it. When his gaze rose to meet mine, I quickly looked away. “Seems crazy that a man like Wildeye—or Wilde, whatever—could be so good at gathering information even the feds couldn’t find on my parents, but all it took was him dying for everyone and their brother to walk in and steal it.”