Envy fa-3

by J. R. Ward

  Reilly fled that scene fast, and heto the kitchen, not out of any design, but just because that was where her feet took her.

  Cursing to herself, she knew she had to put her detective hat on. Boxes . . . where would the moving boxes be?

  “Is this the cellar?” someone asked as they opened the door to the hall bath.

  She almost pointed the guy in the right direction, but held off. The last thing she needed to do was demonstrate how well she knew the house.

  “It’s over here,” somebody else replied as they opened a different door and hit a light switch.

  Reilly went over and followed that officer downward. As she stepped off onto the concrete floor below, the musty air tickled her nose and the chill made her pull her coat in closer.

  “And I thought the upstairs was empty,” the officer muttered, his voice echoing around.

  You got that right, she agreed. Aside from the furnace, and the hot water heater, there didn’t appear to be anything in the basement.

  Even still, they walked around, taking separate routes, and then she stood to the side as he took a flashlight out to check behind the HVAC stuff.

  “Nothing?” she said.

  “Nada.”

  After they returned to the first floor, she stayed in the kitchen, and got a look at the back of every cupboard Veck hadn’t used and the bottoms of all the drawers he hadn’t filled and the empty rods of the closet he hadn’t hung anything in. Officers were taking photographs of all the vacancies, and there were the sounds of people walking up above on the bare floors.

  God, had she ever really been with this man? she wondered.

  No, she thought. She’d been with the image he’d wanted her to see.

  With a shudder, she went up the stairs and glanced into the master suite. The bed was messy and there was another pack of Marlboros and an ashtray on the side table. Two duffel bags were in the corner, and she went over and nudged open the one that was unzipped with her foot. Leathers. Fatigues. What looked like a black AC/DC shirt. Black socks.

  The kind of stuff you’d take for an overnight, except nothing that she’d seen Veck wear before—but like that counted?

  Frowning, she edged past the other officers and leaned into the bathroom. Two toothbrushes on the counter with a tube of toothpaste. A third brush standing upright in a glass.

  Who the hell else was staying here?

  And why was there a towel over the mirror . . . ?

  As a flashbulb went off from behind her, the flare was caught in the panes of the window she’d seen him through that first night.

  Grimly, she wheeled away and went out into the hallway. There were two other bedrooms with nothing in them, and another bath. With nothing in it.

  “Been up in the attic yet?” she called to the other officers. When they shook their heads, she reached up with a gloved hand and pulled down the folding stairs.

  Stepping aside, she let a colleague go up first with his flashlight. God, with this much available storage space, you’d think no one would bother to take anything to the third floor, but Bails had said he’d humped boxes on stairs—and there was nowhere else to check.

  “Nothing,” came the male voice from above.

  Reilly took to the ladder-like steps, clawing up them with her hands and following with her feet. In the attic proper, the other officer had turned a bald lightbulb on, and the thing was swinging on its tether, going back and forth and pulling shadows out from the rafters.

  After glancing around, she knelt down and ran a finger across the wooden planks that had been laid over the insulation. Dust. Lots of dust.

  Frowning, she inspected the flooring that was around the opening they’d come up through. Her footfalls and those of the other officer left a distinctive pattern in the thick, pristine layer of particles.

  What the hell? she thought.

  Not only was there nothing up here; nothing had been up here since well before Veck had moved in.

  “ ’Scuse me,” she murmured, before slipping back down the folding stairs.

  She went into the first guest room she got to. Inside, there was only wall-to-wall carpet with footprints on it—no indentations left from boxes having been stacked anywhere. And in the bottom of the closet? More of the same: smooth, unmarked rug, the kind of thing you got when you’d vacuumed a while ago and left the fibers alone to recover from the tracks of your Dyson.

  Getting up on her tiptoes, she looked at the shelf. No streaks from things having been pulled off and removed.

  The other bedroom was the same.

  Downstairs, she went into the kitchen, passed through the mudroom and headed out the far side into the garage. No lawn equipment or tools or birdseed. Just two bins for garbage, both of which were empty.

  “When’s the trash pickup?” she asked, not expecting anyone to answer.

  It was a fact worth knowing, and no doubt someone would be finding out soon enough.

  Returning to the kitchen, she stood in front of the open cupboards and drawers. It was clear that he’d given permission for them to search the house because he’d known damn well they wouldn’t find anything—and she’d been aware of that coming over here.

  But she had the sense that nothing had been here to begin with. She hadn’t seen any boxes anywhere when she’d been over, but more to the point, there appeared to be no evidence that anything much had been moved in. Yeah, sure, he’d had a good twelve hours to get rid of stuff . . . but you couldn’t manufacture things like layers of dust and unscarred carpets.

  Maybe Veck had tweaked to the juvie report’s falling out of something . . . and thrown the documents out. Except what the hell had Bails been talking about when it came to the boxes? And why would he have lied? The two were well-known for being friends, and the guy had been legitimately crushed.

  God, there were just too many black holes everywhere.

  With a curse, she checked her watch, then took out her phone and dialed de la Cruz’s number. The detective had stayed behind at the station house, and when she got voice mail, she didn’t bother leaving a message.

  He’d know what she was looking for.

  Outside, she got into her car and sat behind the wheel. Eventually, she looked over at the house. In the bright sunlight, the shadows were nearly black—

  Her cell phone went off and she answered it without checking who it was. “Reilly.”

  “I have the results of the polygraph.” De la Cruz sounded as tired as she felt. “Just came in—and I figured that was why you called.”

  “It was. Can you tell me?”

  “He passed everything—all of it.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How is that possible?” Except the instant she asked the question, she knew it was BS. A good liar, an exceptional liar, could fool the machine. It was rare, but not impossible.

  With a groan, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Hold on, just to be clear, they asked him about the visit to the Bartens’, the earring, the evidence room—”

  “Everything.”

  “And he denied it all, and the machine said he was telling the truth.”

  “Yup. Except for one question.”

  So he was a stupendous liar—“Wait, he failed a question?”

  “No, he didn’t deny something. The examiner asked him whether he’d intended to kill Kroner that night by the motel. And he said yes, he had.”

  Reilly shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would that be the only thing he admitted to?”

  If he was lying about everything else, why wouldn’t he cover his ass on that one as well?

  “I don’t know,” de la Cruz muttered. “I got no answer for that. . . .”

  CHAPTER 42

  “ Couldn’t they shut the goddamn cupboards?”

  As Adrian stood in Veck’s kitchen, he stared across the empty, all-open everything, watching as the poor bastard closed shit with hard claps.

  On some level, it was hard to
get jazzed about anything—and that included not just someone else’s drawers, cabinets and closets, but the war in general. The only thing likely to get his attention was if Devina showed up again, but that demon seemed to have gone into hiding.

  Never a good thing.

  Next to him, Jim was hanging back as well, letting Veck do his thing to put the house back together. When the detective went upstairs, the savior glanced over.

  “Devina had better make her fucking move soon or his head’s going to explode.”

  Ad grunted in agreement. “But not much we can do about it.”

  He and Jim had also backseated it during the interrogation and the lie detector test and the further interro, until Ad had become convinced that they were never getting out of the police station. In the end, however, Veck had been released. All the cops had against him was circumstantial shit, and with the results of the polygraph in, there was not enough to charge him or even put him on a forty-eight-hour detainer.

  Good news on some level—better to have the showdown with Devina away from all those uniforms. But the detective was pushed to his limit, and Adrian knew all too well what that was like.

  Abruptly unable to stay still, Ad went over to the refrigerator and cracked the thing. Not much inside—no surprise there—but even if there had been a boatload of lo mein, he didn’t have any impulse to actually eat.

  Even breathing was just something he did out of habit at this point.

  Matter of fact, he’d heard once that there were stages of grief. Was he in depression now? He certainly wasn’t as pissed off as he had been when Eddie had first . . . whatevered. At the moment, all he had was a cage of pain around his lungs and the sense that he was dragging a river barge behind him.

  Shaking his head, he deliberately put that shit out of his mind. Introspection was not his friend right now—

  Too bad the resolution didn’t stick.

  Glancing over at Jim, he said, “Do you think he’s all right left alone?”

  “Veck needs the space.”

  “Wasn’t talking about him.”

  “You mean Eddie?” Jim crossed his arms and cursed. After a moment, he said, “Actually, yeah, I think he’ll be all right. Devina’s not incented to fuck with him because as long as he’s with us, it’s an open wound that won’t heal. She takes the body or compromises it? That’s a short-term thing.”

  Ad walked over to the window and looked out. Five o’clock and the light was just starting to drain from the sky.

  Man, he was jumpy all of a sudden. “She has to know where he’s being kept.”

  “But I marked that door. Anyone gets in there”—the guy pounded his chest with his fist—“I’m going to know.”

  Ad paced around a little, feeling like he had ants on the inside of his skin. Eventually, he muttered, “Look, I’m just going to head over there and check on him. I’ll be right back—”

  Jim stepped in front of him. “Eddie is okay. And I need you here. Shit is about to go down.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “This is exactly what she wants. You need to realize that.”

  Adrian didn’t want to throw down with the guy. They already had enough tempers flaring, thanks to Veck going WWE with the attitude—and Ad had enough sense to know that he was unstable himself, capable of flaring up or burning out with the flip of a coin.

  But he couldn’t shake the abrupt need to return to the garage.

  “Look, I’ll be right back. Promise.” He met the savior’s eyes with his own. “I swear on Eddie’s soul.”

  “Goddamn it,” Jim muttered.

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Without waiting for another round of disagreement, Ad spirited himself out of that house. And as soon as he took form on the garage’s front lawn, he knew he’d been right to come: there was another presence inside the apartment with Eddie.

  Instantly falling into fight mode, he outed his crystal dagger and—

  “What the hell?” he muttered, lowering his weapon.

  At that moment, Colin opened the door at the top of the staircase and stepped out onto the landing. “That would be ‘Heaven,’ thank you very much.”

  The archangel was not in namby-pamby whites, but the kind of clothes you could fight in: loose pants and a tight shirt. And he was alone, at least as far as Ad could sense it.

  “What are you doing here?” Ad asked, even though he knew there was only one explanation.

  “Watching TV.”

  Adrian went over to the bottom of the stairwell. “Jim doesn’t have cable.”

  “So one can imagine how dissatisfied I am.”

  “Nigel’s let you guard him?”

  “He knows I’m here, yes—”

  The wind abruptly changed direction, shifting so it came out of the east—and it brought bad news with it: Riding along the invisible currents, weaving in and out of the gusts, was a subtle groaning sound.

  “Fucking. Bitch.” Adrian nailed Colin with his stare. “You stay with Eddie.”

  “Thank you for the order,” Colin said dryly. “But that is why I came.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  There was no time to kiss ass any further: As the wind intensified and the moaning sounds turned into shrieks, Ad didn’t just curse Devina and her warlords—he wanted to kick himself in the head. This was precisely what Jim had said was going to happen: The pair of them apart, him dealing with a bunch of soulless, boneless bastards as Jim undoubtedly handled the actual crossroads.

  He’d played right into the demon’s hands.

  And he was going to have to stay in her palm.

  He sure as shit wasn’t leaving now: Colin was powerful, but there were limits—and they’d already lost Eddie once.

  Not going to happen again.

  Moving fast, Adrian flashed into the garage. Over in the truck, there was a duffel full of leather riding gear, and he quickly yanked on studded gloves that went all the way up his forearms, and then pulled out the black duster Eddie had used for long trips on the bike.

  On his way out, he passed by a pitchfork—and doubled back to grab it. Shit knew he felt like stabbing the crap out of something—and he’d just seen how much fun lawn tools could be.

  When he stepped outside again, Colin was nowhere in sight, which was good timing and exactly what he wanted: All around, minions were pulling up out of the shadows, forming into eyeless killers that were just his fucking cup of tea.

  Adrian inflated his lungs until his chest stung and then he let out a war cry that shook the tree limbs around the garage, blowing them back so far a few of them even snapped.

  And then he went in.

  Locking a death grip on the worn wooden handle, he lunged forward, nailing the closest minion right in the gut before angling the tool heavenward—until it jacked right into the rib structure of the torso. With the tines locking in place, it was a case of up-and-over as he slung the bastard into left field like it was a bale of hay. Then it was the small matter of tucking the business end under his arm so that he caught the SOB riding up on his ass in the thighs.

  Adrian wheeled around, yanked out the tool, and went over the head, bringing the curved spikes down laterally on the crippled bastard. They penetrated through the face, such as it was, and went into the chest cavity from above, reducing Devina’s fighter to a mud puddle.

  The squeal was so fucking satisfying.

  Disengaging again, widened his stance and angled himself so that the pair of minions that were trying to split his attention got what they were asking for: Keeping his head straight forward, he measured them in the peripheral vision of both eyes.

  He was banking on a third coming from behind.

  It was just too cocksucking obvi.

  Flexing his knees, he threw himself into the air, backflipping over the one he’d guessed right about—and then stabbing it in the back and twisting hard. As the impact registered, the minion went into a full-body spasm, acidic blood going flying to the point where he had
to disengage and get gone. Diving around the side of the thing, he ducked into himself and hit the ground on a roll.

  When he sprang up onto his feet, he was prepared to take on the other two.

  Instead, he faced an army.

  Minions had boiled up from every shadow in the yard and they surrounded him, their numbers so deep, they were in and among the trees on the edges of the garage’s lot.

  There must have been thirty. Forty. Fifty.

  Facing the overwhelming force, a resonant calm flooded through him, kind of like he was bleeding out. Eddie was going to be okay; Colin was going to make sure of that. And Ad was going to give that archangel enough time and space to get the pair of them out of here.

  As for him? He wasn’t getting out of this in one piece, and he was just fine with the way he was going to go.

  This was the way to die: defending your territory and taking out a fuckload of the enemy on the way to your grave.

  This was honorable.

  As Adrian got ready to go into the thick of it, he thought, for what was going to be the last time, that he wished his friend was with still him. At least they wouldn’t be separated for much longer, however.

  Downtown at HQ, Reilly found herself on the verge of leaving and going home. For about an hour and a half.

  There was nothing for her to do. She hadn’t been assigned a new case yet; she’d finished up her work on her other ones; and God knew she was off Veck’s. And yet she was sitting at her desk as though someone had superglued her butt to her chair, her colleagues having filed out a while ago.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t just staring into space. She was back on Veck’s father’s Facebook page like some nut-job addict.

  Going into the links section, she clicked through to a few sites, but none of them gave her what she was looking for. Then again, nothing with www. was going to help her out: Her answers as to why Veck had seduced her, and why she’d fallen for it, and why he had to be just like his father, were not on the Web.