“I’m no snitch,” I said mostly out of habit. Then again, I couldn’t think of a better way to screw with McCallum than to tell everything I knew to the police. That might get me a very quick trip to the bottom of the ocean without any diving gear, but it would be worth it if the snake spent even a few minutes behind bars.
The look that King sent me was like someone who had thrown a life preserver to a drowning man, only to have the victim ask for it in a different color.
“Either way, it’s going to be up to OC and the DA if you get charged,” King said.
“Mandatory minimums,” I muttered. I walked around the desk, keeping my back to it so I could use my hands. Blindly, I fumbled for the drawers, pulling a few open before turning around to check inside.
Empty. There wasn’t anything inside the desk that might hurt McCallum if it got discovered by the police. That was to be expected, but the fact that they were entirely empty…
“Well, it looks like your time has been wasted. McCallum skipped town.”
“What?” King came around the desk and glanced inside. Then, pausing to pull out a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket, he opened a few more drawers. Everything had been cleaned out.
He pulled a radio off his belt and brought it to his lips. “Smith, do you copy? Over.”
Static hissed back at us, but no response from his partner. King frowned and glanced at me. “He should have been right behind me. He was checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house.”
For a moment, we both stared at each other, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. What were the chances that McCallum’s house was haunted, too?
The last time we’d met, King had been a ghost skeptic, but these days, if he was working with Paranormal Crimes, in all likelihood he’d seen a few more of the dead floating among us. I listened to the house, the spirits quiet and still. Nothing was being disturbed by heavy footsteps from a cop searching the house.
“Is Smith with Paranormal Crimes or Organized Crimes?” I asked.
“OC,” King said. “He’s the one who’s actually working this case, I’m just loaned out for back up.”
“Then he’s probably searching the house for evidence,” I said. “Me being here is a great excuse for him to be able to enter anything he wants to into evidence. Anything he finds that McCallum isn’t supposed to have…”
My mind immediately flashed to the fae artifact I had given McCallum. It had been a beautiful circlet, something about it strange even for fae artifacts. Something about it…
“That would be inappropriate,” King interrupted my line of thought. “Technically, he should only be taking things related toyourcrime.”
I smirked. “Let me guess. When you saw me about to break in, you wanted to stop me before I actually got inside the house, but Smith wanted you to wait until I was inside. Until you had to come inside after me.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed.
“Don’t feel too bad, Detective By-the-Book. I’m sure he has good reasons. McCallum is a nasty piece of work, and anything you can do to get him off the streets is only a good thing.” I gave him a sympathetic look, though. King seemed like the type who didn’t appreciate the grayer sides of policing.
Or maybe he was right, and I was the one who was being too sympathetic to tainted cops. Maybe if all cops were like King, McCallum wouldn’t have as many informants on the force, and he would’ve been caught years ago before he could hire me and then leave me for dead in the hills outside of town.
“Let’s go.” King grabbed my arm and guided me around the desk, careful of the drawers I’d opened.
“So, is burglary going to go on my arrest report, too?”
“Technically,” King said. “You didn’t take anything.”
“Because there was nothing there to take,” I pointed out. “Because you guys have been staking out a house that McCallum abandoned. Didn’t the cops who were on the shift before you let you know?”
King shook his head and I made a sympathetic sound. “McCallum probably gave them a nice bonus for looking the other way.”
There was no way that McCallum had left without a few trucks behind him. With the amount of items he’d taken with him, it would have been pretty obvious that he was bugging out. I would bet that one of his security guys had come out to the cops he clearly knew were staking him out and handed over some envelopes with a lot of dead presidents in them.
Since there was no way that the cops on duty could know Smith was going to use my breaking and entering as an excuse to get inside the house, they probably thought it would take the police a few days to realize that McCallum was missing. At that point, no one would be able to pin it on them for having missed his exit.
King’s hand tightened on my arm. For all my joking, I had a very serious problem. Aside from the head injury, the bruising from when King tackled me, and the fact that I wanted to rip Derek McCallum’s head off, I was going to be arrested. I’d never been arrested before, despite a colorful school history, and a job that always took me a little bit too close to the edge of the law.
“So, how sold are we on this breaking and entering thing, given that the house is abandoned?”
The look that King sent me was amused and annoyed at the same time. “Even an abandoned house belongs to someone.”
