“Text it to me. How long did it stay?”
“Around five minutes. I wrote down the times if you—”
“No, that’s okay.” Was five minutes long enough for someone to determine whether or not Dylan was inside the house?
“Did you see anyone jogging, somebody walking their dog, watering the flower bed, anything like that?”
“At this time of night?”
“Exactly. It would be out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing like that. But there was a package on Dr. Reede’s porch. I noticed it as I drove past.”
“A delivery?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” Based on that, Mitch himself would’ve reasoned that Dylan hadn’t been at home that evening. Whoever Malone had sent to check on her likely would have drawn the same conclusion.
He wondered if Malone knew yet that he’d been snookered by Dylan’s text about arriving home. He hoped so. He hoped the bastard was writhing in an agony of anxiety.
“Mitch?”
“Yeah, sorry. Still here. Just thinking all this through. Listen, for the time being, let’s keep this between us, okay?”
“Even from Bowie?”
“For now.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Discretion is part of your surveillance training,” Mitch said.
“All right. But can I ask why you sent me to her house in particular?”
Great!Clarence was getting brighter and growing a pair at the worst possible time. “It’s nothing bad. It’s just…”Think, Mitch! “Kinda embarrassing,” he said.
“Embarrassing? Why?”
“Come on, Clarence. You know. Guy to guy? She’s smokin’ hot and… Like that.”
“Oh,” Clarence chuckled, sounding relieved. “I get it. You wanted to know if she had company.”
“Now you see why I didn’t want it talked about? Guys in the unit would give me shit and never let up.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“My man! Thanks. Go on home, try to get some rest before your shift.”
They signed off, and Mitch took a long, deep breath.
He ran the license plate of the car. As expected, it was registered to an LLC that had a name comprised of capital letters that didn’t spell anything and probably stood for nothing, either.
He did a Google search of the address on the registration. It was a vacant lot for sale and had been on the market for more than seven hundred days. He called the phone number on the real estate listing, and a recording informed him that the number was no longer in service. “Shocker,” he muttered.
He shut down his laptop and turned out all the lights in the main room save for one small lamp. It didn’t shed much light, but enough to assist him in opening John’s bedroom door with as little noise as possible. Which wasn’t easy to do while holding a pistol in one hand. He made his way across the room to the bed, where he set the pistol on the nightstand and then lay down with as little jostling as possible.
In spite of his precautions, Dylan turned from her side facing away from him onto her back.
