We stepped onto the porch.
“Nonsense. I have a little more finesse than that.”
We huddled next to each other while Christian rang the bell. He gripped the knob, planting his boot against the bottom of the door and giving it a hard push. The bolt split through the wood, and the door opened a crack.
He held it for a minute and switched to an American accent. “Penny! It’s been ages. Thanks for inviting us!”
I chimed in with a few fake greetings as we moved inside and he shut the door behind us. All the drapes were closed, but it wasn’t so dark that we couldn’t see the brown carpet, matching furniture, and an oversized chair in the right-hand corner—a blanket draped over the arm and paperbacks piled on the end table.
Christian dropped the bags by the door and theatrically strolled across the living room. He lifted a mug from the table and peered inside.
“What if she’s married or lives with someone?” I whispered.
“Don’t be daft. Just look at all the paraphernalia of a single woman.”
I sat down on the couch and watched Christian rest his arm on a bookshelf to give me the full explanation.
“Romance novels on public display in the living room? I’m guessing she’s not the sort of woman who has company over, or she’d have these bodice-ripper novels hidden beneath the bed. There’s nothing masculine within this room aside from the toenail clippers sitting next to her cup of amaretto coffee. And then we have exhibitC,” he said, pointing to a bra tossed on the floor.
“A man could have done that.”
“Aye. But Jaysus wept. Will you look at it? That’s not the sort of bra a woman would wear in front of a man. Imagine the mortifying shame of it.”
I stood up and tossed my coat and hat onto the bags. “We should get started. Any idea what we’re looking for?”
He strode past me and peered into a closet. “Something that links her to the murderer?”
“Brilliant, Detective Poe.”
He disappeared down the hall, and I sat at a small wooden desk and opened the laptop. The only thing she had pulled up was the Internet, so I looked through her browser windows. One was for online shopping, another was a weather forecast for Cognito, and the third was…
“What the hell?”
I leaned in, my eyebrows knitting together. It looked like an online dating site for Breed. Did such a thing exist? What had tipped me off was the special symbol in the background that I’d commonly seen on the windows of Breed establishments. I didn’t want to risk logging out to check how secure it was from humans accessing it, so I began scrolling down the page.
I chuckled at some of the names showing up as online. “ISpark4U? Oh God, this is so… weird. HotAlpha69… Hey, Christian? I think I found something,” I said without yelling. There was never a need with him.
Some of the people online were showing up as her friends, and her inbox was flooded with over a hundred unread messages. The last thing I wanted to do was click out of there by accident, so I closed the laptop and decided to let Wyatt search through it.
When Christian didn’t come, I got up to find him. At the end of a hall, I entered a bedroom on the left and discovered Christian snooping in the top drawer of a dresser.
He lifted a pair of large cotton panties. “Definitely single.”
“Meanwhile, I think I broke the case.”
He ignored me and pulled out a red G-string. “But by the looks of these knickers, she was holding out hope.”
“Are you done going through her underwear?”
“For your information, what a woman keeps in her private quarters can tell a lot more than all your fancy machines. Penny was a single woman who’d all but given up on finding love. But she was a romantic at heart based on those books she read, and these knickers are new—the tag’s barely crinkled. She recently met someone, and yet because it was shoved way in the back, she didn’t think she could go through with it. Maybe she had self-esteem issues.”
I blinked in surprise.Wow, this guy really knows his stuff.
“I found a dating website. Maybe one of those guys is the killer.”
“Aye. But you’ll want to skip over the numpties looking for a good shag. She wanted something special. See that table by the bed?” Christian pointed behind me. “Inside the drawer you’ll find a book of love poems with a rose pressed inside. Someone broke her heart, and she’s never gotten over it. The rose looks about as old as the book, which was printed in the eighteen hundreds.”
I had to give the man credit; he had a good eye. But his keen assessment made me incredibly uncomfortable about his preconceived notion of me. “Anything else?”
