“Well, your dad’s not here,” I said with finality. “No one touches this car while we’re inside.” With that, I walked into the house without a formal invitation from Miller.
“Sorry,” I heard him sigh behind me, as I walked around the enormous, and no doubt priceless vase displayed in the middle of the foyer. “I’ll take the fall with Dad if he finds out.”
“Your father seems like a real control freak,” I said when Miller joined me. I looked hard at the mark on his cheek again.
“That’s one way of putting it.” His tone was completely neutral. “So, nothing’s been taken as far as the staff could tell. Do you want me to stay here while you look around?”
“You know what, Trouble? I think I’ll keep you with me this time.” It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him to stay where he was told—although I didn’t. But the idea of leaving him alone in this big empty place didn’t sit well with me. So I did a quick sweep of the first floor with Miller along for the ride.
First floor was clear. The whole mansion was eerily quiet as we mounted the staircase to the second floor, not a single sign of the staff I knew must be around. What it must have been like to grow up in a place like this? My early childhood in Vegas had been quiet, just me and my dad, and we’d focused on training. Once I’d been taken in by my uncle, I’d had half a dozen cousins as close as siblings. At its most crowded, the house’d had seven kids shoved into three rooms.
Thishouse? It could have held a hundred children and, I suspected, still seem as quiet and soulless as it did now. It was beautiful but hostile, like the planet Mars. A place for humans to admire, but not a place for them to live. It wasn’t a home; it was a temple to Miller’s father. The hallways stretched out with built-ins that showcased Edgar Beaumont’s many awards. Scores of them, each statuette under its own little spotlight and kept scrupulously dust-free.
I hadn’t seen this last time I’d been here. Miller had taken me up to his rooms by a different route.
Miller stayed quiet until we reached his wing. “Here we are,” he said then, sounding almost relieved. Fingerprint dust was all over the console. “Should I reset the alarm?”
“Not yet.” He reached out for the door handle and I put my hand on his wrist before he could open the door. “I’ll go first.”
I took out my piece and his eyebrows shot up. “The police have been through here pretty thoroughly,” he pointed out.
“And you trust their judgment?”
No further persuasion needed. Miller changed positions with me, and I quietly opened the door. Inside, the air smelled faintly of synthetic blueberries, with a danker undertone of weed. I checked each room and each closet and under each bed—Miller had not one, but two spare bedrooms in his part of the house, along with his own master bedroom—and every other space I could see that might be tempting as a hiding place.
Empty.
We made our way back to his bedroom, where I got Miller to check his walk-in closet, particularly any jewelry he had.
“I don’t have much of what you’d calljewelry,” he said, pulling out a velvet-lined drawer. “Just a bunch of cuff links and tiepins that I’ve never worn.”
It was as he said, although many of the pieces included tasteful accents of diamond, sapphire, ruby, that I had to think would have made them tempting targets for jewel thieves. I stared down at the platinum and gold shining against rich blue velvet and thought hard. “So whoever it was, they put in the alarm code wrong?”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess?”
I shut the drawer and looked at him. “And when did you last change the code?”
“I changed it last Saturday night,” he said slowly. “When you, uh. You told me to.”
I had a sudden vision of Miller sucking me on his knees over there in his art room, and winced. Thankfully, he didn’t see.
Had that night really been so recent? It felt like I’d known Millermuchlonger.
“And who had the code after that?” I asked.
“I sent it to everyone I thought would need it. By which I mean, the house staff.”
House staff. That term again. Miller and I lived very different lives. “And before then, when was the last time you changed it?”
“Not for years.”
I led him back into the master bedroom. “Your old code, Trouble. Who knew it?”
“I mean, lots of people.”
My attention was drifting around the room, stopping on the paintings on the wall. They were the same style as the wall mural in Anaïs Beaumont’s dining room in Malibu. They wereverygood. “Sling some actual names at me. People who knew that code.”
“Nate. Annie. She might have told Roxanne Rochford, or Roxy might have seen me enter it. When Annie and I were still hanging out, Roxy would come over sometimes.”
