“You’ve forgotten how to shake a tail?” Simon asked. “Talk to Carl. Carl Howe. He owes me enough that he’ll turn a blind eye.”
Dev made a guttural, irritated noise. “This whole mess is a pain in the ass.”
“You think?” Simon said. “Tonight. Eight o’clock at my place.”
“Fine,” Dev said. “Simon, you know I’m not involved in this. I wouldn’t risk it, for Callie’s sake.”
“If you were,” Simon said. “I’d still help.”
He hung up and shoved the phone into his pocket. The cigarettes bugged him. He supposed if Clayton had taken up drinking, he might have taken up smoking too. It wasn’t as though Simon could judge on that front. It was just that smoking took more commitment to start with—wine went down easy—and it was harder to hide.
Back before he’d quit, he and Nora used to go through packs of gum just to avoid the pointed coughs and sniffing. It wasn’t as though either of them had ever pretended they were health nuts either. The coughs would definitely have been more pointed for Clayton. Depression was a private thing. Looking at the symptoms just made it feel worse.
Simon gave himself a mental shake and shed his suspicion. Maybe the pack belonged to a neighbor or a plumber, or one of the cops who’d been through. Even if it was a clue, it wasn’t one that meant anything right then.
There was another door in the corner of the room. He nudged it open and found the place where Clayton had spent most of his time. It didn’t smell bad, just… in use. He noted the aroma of coffee and food, a worn leather chair with wrinkled creases from a single ass. There was a huge TV framed with gaming systems, a Blu-ray system so high-end it looked retro, and a camera on the floor in front of it. Simon crouched to pick it up, and the latch flapped open to reveal an empty memory-card slot.
“Damn,” he muttered.
He set it back down and was about to stand up again when something caught his eye. Sitting on a shelf next to a stack ofNightmare on Elm StreetDVDs was a picture of a slim dark-haired woman—girl, Simon supposed—in an old white frame. Even in a still image, her narrow blue eyes were intense and the set of her mouth stubborn.
Becca. It always amazed Simon that people who’d known them both calledhimthe dangerous one.
He stood up and reached for the picture. It had been taken a while ago, probably at college and without Becca knowing, since she wasn’t doing the grimace that passed for her “say cheese” face. Of course, for Clayton to be Dev’s friend, he’d have been Becca’s too. Back then Dev hadn’t made many on his own.
Well, Becca might have thought they were friends. If Clayton had kept a picture of her in his private space, she’d probably meant more to him than that.
For a second, thoughts of an affair skittered through his head. But that was unlikely. Becca had been in love with Dev since she was fifteen, hated compromise since she was five, and ripped the head off her My Little Pony rather than share it. If she wanted Harry Clayton, she’d have gone for it and damn the consequences. Hell, she hadn’t let consequences stop her from refusing further cancer treatment. If death didn’t put her off doing what she wanted, then divorce certainly wouldn’t have.
“Isn’t that your sister?” Jacob asked.
He was lucky Simon had registered the sound of his footsteps, otherwise he would be picking his larynx out of the back of his spine.
“Yeah.” He put the picture back in its place. “She’s how Dev and Clayton knew each other.”
There was a greasy fingerprint on the top corner of the frame, and the oils stained the age-porous wood. The direction of it made it look like the picture had been held upside down. Simon picked it back up and turned it over. The plywood back was stained with fingerprints, and the metal tags holding it in place had fresh scrapes of bright metal.
“I guess she’s where he kept his secrets too,” he said.
Chapter Thirteen
JACOB SHOULDhave taken the downstairs. Rich people had dens, offices, libraries. That’s where they kept the good secrets. All he’d found upstairs were retro soft-porn magazines, a drawer that suggested Clayton had a sleepover friend—the sexy undies could have been just for him, but the packet of sanitary napkins suggested someone fairly confident of their welcome—and a Kindle with some moderately interesting late-night reading on it.
“That guy you were asking about earlier? Did you meanL-A-UorL-A-W?” Jacob asked as he watched Simon use his key to pull the flat metal tags straight.
“U. Why?”
Jacob pulled the Kindle out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “Clayton had a bunch of his articles on here.” He turned the device around so Simon could see the screen. “Along with… ah…. Mathilde Delacourte and…. Gregory Whittle. They’re nothing to do with computers. It’s all weather and rocks. No evidence that Lau was ever here, but Clayton certainly had an interest in him. He downloaded this stuff a week before he hired me.”
Simon pulled the back off the frame to reveal a memory card taped to it. He picked it off, turned it over in his hand, and frowned at it as though he could intimidate the secrets out of it. Then he tucked it into the condom pocket on his jeans.
“Time to go,” he said, reattached the back of the frame, and returned the picture to the shelf. “If there’s anything else, we aren’t going to find it.”
Jacob paused for a second to glance at Simon’s sister. He wondered if she’d have liked him. The answer was probably not—he didn’t think his own sister would like him if she didn’t share the same asshole genetics—and it was a weird question. Since when did he care what anyone thought of him?
He shoved the niggling question in with other things he didn’t want to think about—was it weird to have had a crush on a Muppet as a kid, should he try to be less like the dad he hated, at some point did you have to age into loafers—and followed Simon out of the AV room. Or tried to. He bumped into Simon’s back just across the threshold. The impact jarred an apology out of him.
“Sorry, I—” His attention flicked past Simon’s shoulder and caught on the black gape of muzzle aimed at them. “Fuck.”
