I had vowed never to use my newfound private investigator powers for evil. Ergo, I had refrained from looking up Mendoza’s home address. If he wanted me to know where he lived, he would tell me, I had reasoned, and I had, very specifically, kept myself from being nosy.
And now I’d been nosy anyway.
“Nothing much we can do about that now,” he asked, “is there?”
No, there wasn’t.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Right now.”
I’d only been sitting here waiting to see if Megan came home. But if this was Mendoza’s home and she was the babysitter, there was no chance of that.
“How do you even know her?” fell out of my mouth, and Mendoza smirked.
“You have enough information to figure that out, I think. But if I can’t, I’ll tell you some other time. I have to go now, or I’ll be late.”
Yes, of course. “I’ll see you,” I said as I put the Lexus into gear. “Or not, as the case may be.”
Not here again. Certainly not here.
Mendoza just nodded, although that dimple in his cheek deepened a little bit. “Bye now, Mrs. Kelly.”
He rolled up his window and rolled away. I banged my head against the steering wheel a couple of times before I did the same, in the opposite direction.
* * *
I spent the rest of the day with Edwina, just the two of us. First we went to the park and had a nice walk all around the Parthenon and Lake Watauga. Edwina barked at the birds in the sunken garden and sniffed the Taylor Swift reading bench and just generally made a nuisance of herself while she pulled me along by her leash. Then we got back in the car to head home, and on the way there, of course we passed the Body Shop again. By now it was dark and shuttered, and the parking lot was empty.
We steered well clear of Charlotte Park—I wasn’t about to make that mistake again—but as we approached the intersection of Charlotte and Hillwood Drive, curiosity got the better of me. Instead of turning, I kept going straight. It wouldn’t hurt to just drive past the crime scene once, I figured, just to see how things were progressing. Whether the police had finished with it yet or whether they were still there.
“Just a quick look,” I assured Edwina, who was standing up on the front seat with her tail wagging and her tongue lolling out in a doggie grin. (I did have her harness clipped to the seat. The give was long enough that she could lie down if she wanted to, but if something happened—if I had to brake fast or, God forbid, if I hit something—she wouldn’t go flying into the windshield.). “We won’t stop or anything. We’ll just drive by. I just want to see what’s different since I was there this morning.”
She didn’t answer, of course. But she danced happily on the seat, and that was good enough.
It isn’t a far drive from Hillwood down Charlotte Pike to Sawyer Brown Road. Ten minutes later, maybe less, we were cruising up Nick’s street toward the duplex. Two CSI vans were parked in front, along with a patrol car. Yellow tape fluttered in the breeze, cordoning off Nick’s driveway and his side of the building.
I slowed to a crawl as we approached, and Edwina stood up on her hind legs, front paws on the edge of the window, for a better look. One of the crime scene techs was going through Nick’s truck with what looked like a fine-toothed comb—literally, or almost. I could see him brushing something carefully into an evidence bag.
“What do you think he’s looking for?” I asked Edwina. “Hair? Fiber? Evidence that someone other than Nick was in the truck recently?”
Edwina tilted her head at me, ears perked.
“Yes, you’re right. It could be anything. They’re probably just being thorough.”
There was no reason to think anyone but Nick had been in the truck, after all. He had driven it home himself last night, tailed by Zachary, and had left it in the driveway before going inside. No one else had been with him then.
“Unless Mendoza was right,” I added, “and Nick kept a gun in his glovebox. If someone reached in last night and took it, that could explain it.”
The other techs must be inside the duplex, because I couldn’t see anyone else. What I could see was Patches the tortoiseshell, sitting on Mrs. Miller’s front stoop like a furry little sentinel. When Edwina spotted her, she let out a sharp bark that made me wince.
“Shh. We’re trying not to draw attention, remember?”
Edwina barked again, and I saw movement behind Mrs. Miller’s curtains. Great. Now the neighbor was watching me watch the murder scene. I probably looked like some kind of ghoul, coming back to gawk at the scene of the crime.
Which, to be fair, I was. I just didn’t want anyone else to realize it. It wasn’t a great look for a forty-year-old woman.
Then again, she was lurking behind her own curtains, wasn’t she? Maybe she didn’t have a whole lot of room to talk, after all.
Edwina settled back down on the passenger seat, curling into a compact ball.
