Banishing the Dark
Page 24

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.”
Lon grunted, surveying the empty room. “He would’ve had a backup. Somewhere safer.”
“Another house or a warehouse?”
“Maybe.”
“I kept all my medicinals locked up in my bedroom closet . . .”
“They’re all in a safe in my closet now.”
We looked at each other before making a beeline to Wildeye’s bedroom. It was too dark with the power out, so I raised the shades on a wall of windows. Sunlight spilled in over the quiet room, giving us a stunning view of the mountain rising in the backyard. A nice little retreat. Neat. Tidy. But when we pulled open his dresser drawers, it looked as if someone else had already searched through their contents.
We checked the walk-in closet next. Nothing but clothes and shoes, I thought, peering into the dark space. It was hard to see without electricity, and I was about to ask Lon if he had a flashlight. Glad I didn’t, or I might not have noticed the faint white glow behind a row of hanging shirts.
I parted the shirts, sliding the coat hangers along the rail. “Hello, secret door.”
It was hiding magick, a nice two-by-three-foot ward. Same thing we’d seen on the yacht in November. An old spell that grizzled old magicians had used over the centuries to hide treasure and grimoires and secret sex chambers. Other humans wouldn’t see the telltale white Heka that kept the ward charged; other humans didn’t have the same supernatural sight that Earthbounds had. That I had.
My heart raced with excitement. Please let this be worth it.
“Haven’t seen an Earthbound since we got into town,” Lon said as he pressed around the wood paneling, looking for a way inside. “Maybe the murderer was human, too. Here we go.”
He pulled his hand away, and a hidden door in the paneling popped open. Shelves lined the dark space. Lon flicked on a penlight and moved the beam of light over the contents. Two guns. Bullets. A long metal box filled with cash, IDs, and passports. A few fat black organizer cases filled with USB drives. A box of files, which Lon hefted from the closet to the bed, and a skinny pocket notebook, which I grabbed.
I strolled to the wall of windows for light. The guy had terrible handwriting and some sort of shorthand I could barely decipher. Dates. Times. Names all seemed to be condensed to three capital letters. I flipped to the middle of the notebook, where the writing stopped: dates in December.
At first look, nothing seemed to pertain to me. A few of his scribbles looked to be street addresses—no cities. One block of text from late September caught my attention. The initials here were “DUV/BEL.” My real surname, Duval, and Bell? Had to be. Below it, he’d crossed out several words, variations on spellings. The last variation was ringed several times in looping inky circles: “NAOI NAAS.”