I took out my gun before I levered the door handle open with my elbow, and we entered the foyer. It was professionally decorated and colorful: pops of dusty ocher, sky blue, mustard yellow. To the right was a door that led into the garage, and straight ahead was a hanging walkway, anchored to the ceiling by thin metal rods, that I assumed led through to the bedrooms. On the left side of the foyer there was a floating wooden staircase down to the levels below.
Everything seemed designed to give visitors vertigo.
The thing that really drew the eye, though, was a tasteful black-and-white nude study of Anaïs Beaumont herself, hanging on the wall to the right side. Miller did his best not to look at it, and I pretended there was nothing weird about his sister having a naked photo of herself hanging in the entrance to her house.
Miller had turned to stare at the alarm box.
“You going to turn that off, or should we prepare for company?” I asked.
“It wasn’ton,” he said quietly. “Annie only ever bothered turning it on when she wasn’t here—she never reset it if she was home. Do you think…maybe she’s in here?”
I had a vision of him finding his dead sister’s body somewhere in the house.
He was already moving to the right, opening the internal door to the garage, where he stopped and stared. “Her car is still here.”
Over his shoulder, I saw the sleek, red convertible twin to Miller’s car.
“I’m going to check the rest of the house.” I pulled him back into the foyer and shut the garage door. “You stay right here. Don’t move.”
I went across the walkway into the rooms behind the garage. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, one study.
No Anaïs Beaumont.
I backtracked to the foyer, shaking my head at Miller to let him know there were no signs yet, and then I went down the stairs. It was a compact but luxurious house, even the storage area right at the bottom. There was nothing in there but flattened cardboard boxes, but the floor was covered in quality Spanish tiles, just like the living areas.
The first floor was partly open plan, except for a separate formal dining room through an archway. And the back wall of that dining room was painted in wild swirls and splashes of paint in colors that matched those throughout the house, though the mural lacked the same sense of restraint or symmetry. That made itmuchmore interesting, and I wished I had more time to investigate it. But I had to move quickly.
The kitchen, eating and living areas were all in one large room. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors traveled the entire wall, showing off the Pacific Ocean outside, retractable so that the indoors and outdoors could become one. Directly outside was a slate-floored patio that led into a deep blue pool, long but not wide, which looked like it was part of the ocean itself.
The sky on the horizon was cloudy and gray. The last few days when I’d checked the weather reports, there’d been talk about a supercell storm gathering and heading toward LA. It was getting closer, day by day.
What caught my attention most, though, was the neat, perfect circle that had been cut out of one of the glass patio doors to allow access to the opening mechanism inside.
CHAPTER18
JACK
I was satisfiedthat the place was empty, so when I heard Miller’s footsteps tapping down the wooden stairs, I didn’t have the heart to tell him to get back and stay where I’d told him. Besides, I preferred having him in view.
“I don’t see any signs of—” he began, and stopped short when I nodded towards the glass cut-out. “What the fuck?”
“Nice job, eh?” I asked. He frowned hard at the circle and then at me as I continued, “That’s as neat a break-in as I’ve ever seen.”
“Let’s go check upstairs,” Miller said, his voice soft but unmistakably angry.
There were two staircases, so we took the closest one that came down into the family room, a spiral of wrought iron with wooden steps. The main bedroom, a study in neutral beige, held the only sign of a disturbance. The drawers of the dresser under the window had been emptied onto the bed so that there was a pile of bright satin intimates tangled up in each other.
Miller stopped dead in the doorway behind me to stare at it. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “If it weren’t for that glass being cut out downstairs, I’d say she was just, you know. Packing. In a hurry.”
“Okay, but then there’s this,” I said, motioning him over to the walk-in closet. It was half the size of the bedroom and contained rows and rows of what I assumed were designer clothes. At the end, up against a floor-to-ceiling mirror, was a tall white dresser, which had also had all its drawers pulled out.
“Herjewelry,” Miller said, pushing past me to stare down at the sparkling things all over the floor.
“Anything missing?”
“Are you kidding me? Annie had a thing for jewelry. I wouldn’t have a clue if there was anything missing. Besides—”
“Why dump it out on the ground instead of into a bag,” I finished for him. “Yeah. For a burglary, this sure is a strange one.” I didn’t mention the missing elephant in the room, because Miller had gone pale and was chewing on his lip. “Hey,” I said softly, and couldn’t resist reaching out to touch his cheek for a moment. “You okay?”
