“But what if that someone is a very bad guy?” I asked. “So bad that the cops are staking him out?”
“You just said that my partner is going to use this as an excuse to enter some of McCallum’s things into evidence. He can’t do that if there’s no arrest,” King said. “You’re getting arrested for this, Ferro.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. King guided me towards the back of the house where I’d broken the door to get in. “What if we just called it trespassing?”
“That’s for the DA to decide,” King said. Passing through the entryway, King frowned. “Smith should be here.”
Loosening his grip on my arm, he pulled out his radio again. Pressing down the button to speak, he said, “Smith, do you copy?”
We both looked up when we heard the echo of King’s words above us, somewhere in the cavernous vaulted ceiling of McCallum’s entryway.
Three
Even with the lights on, I could barely make out anything that far up. It was as though MacCallum had purposely lit his house so that from the ground level you could only see about ten feet up. His massive vaulted ceiling was all shadows.
MacCallum’s house was in the new Hacienda style that was taking over the older mid-century modern common in the hills. It was a ranch-style house, all on one floor, spread out over a massive property. I’d seen his backyard once, and it looked more like a golf course than anything a real person should have. At the time, he’d been swearing at one of his henchmen because gophers were digging holes in his precious turf.
Why he cared, I couldn’t fathom. Maybe he was actually playing golf on it. Maybe none of the country clubs in the area would let a man like McCallum through their doors, so he had to satisfy himself by playing mini golf at home. I imagined him installing a windmill that he had to putt through and stifled a laugh.
The entryway and a couple of massive living rooms closer to the front of the house had vaulted ceilings that made the place feel more like a palace than a home. McCallum’s office was in the back of the house, facing his mini golf range. We had to pass byan indoor swimming pool and a kitchen as big as my apartment to get back to the entryway. It did not sicken me that McCallum had two pools on his massive property, but only because it gave me more places to drown him when he got back.
King pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on, scanning the beam across the ceiling. “You heard it too, right?”
“You mean the fact that your partner’s walkie is somewhere up there? Yeah,” I confirmed.
Frowning, I looked around the house again. We were in the entryway, and I could see the door to the garage a room’s length away. Nowhere did I see anything that looked like a security panel to set a manual alarm. In fact, there wasn’t anything that looked like cameras, lasers, motion sensors. Was McCallum just that confident in his security guards?
No. Even if he had people here 24/7, they would still want something to make sure that all the doors and windows stayed closed.
Nick’s hand on my arm tightened like a blood pressure monitor. His voice, when he spoke, was low, practically a whisper. “Ferro, I need you to do exactly what I say right now. Can you do that?”
I looked up at the ceiling to see what had gotten him so spooked and my whole body felt like I’d decided to take a dip in the Arctic.
There, wrapped in some sort of white material, was a human shaped object. I could see black dress shoes poking out from the bottom. Something had attached the mummified form to the ceiling, pinned there like a butterfly on display.
The form twitched.
“What—”
“Ferro, I want you to walk out the way you came in, and when you get outside, call 9-1-1,” King said. I heard some metallic jangling behind me and felt the cuffs slip off my wrists.
As soon as my hands were free, I shook my arms. But, like I knew he would, King had been careful about the cuffs. There wasn’t even a mark to show that I had been wearing them.
“You want me to leave you inside with whatever monster McCallum left to guard his house?” I asked. “Because I’m not doing that.”
“Ferro —”
I might not like King after he arrested me, but there was very little chance I was going to leave him inDerek McCallum’s housewhen there was clearly something nasty on the loose.
Nine times out of ten, that was how the movie got its next victim. The person who said, “This doesn’t look good. I’m going home where there isn’t a murderer on the loose,” was always the one who ended up hanging from their neck in the next scene.
I had no desire to be the creature’s next victim. If it was a creature. Maybe McCallum had some magic going on that mummified anybody who tried breaking into his house. If we walked around and looked at all the ceilings, would we see a collection of potential burglars and cops serving arrest warrants?
“Let me just try something,” I murmured.
I bent down, pressing my palms to the wooden floor.
“Witchcraft?” King said. But I saw him pulling out a notebook and a pen, and I raised an eyebrow.
