Reaching the office, the door was slightly ajar, and I nudged it open with my shoulder. My vision swam as I realized that all the papers on McCallum’s desk were gone. There was nothing there.
“Open his desk,” I said.
King raised an eyebrow and I jerked with my chin towards the massive wooden desk.
“The thing is, I’m arresting you for breaking and entering. If you start opening things and taking anything, then it’s upgraded to burglary which comes with a different set of mandatory minimums.”
“I’mnot opening his desk,youare.”
King held up his hand. “You wantmeto burglarize Derek McCallum?”
“I think that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Half-concussed, I’d been slightly confused when King magically appeared out of the shadows to tackle me, but now I was beginning to get a better shape of it. He wasn’t in the blue uniform of a cop walking the beat. In fact, he was wearing a suit with a tie and his badge displayed from the front pocket in the jacket. I was sure that it pained him to wear a badge there instead of a tasteful handkerchief.
“I think the reason you caught me was because you were already here. You saw what I was going to do and you watched me do it so that you and your partner and whoever else is on the way would have an excuse to enter Derek McCallum’s house. After all, you are allowed to go onto private property if you’re stopping a crime. You were staking out McCallum, and I’m your golden ticket into his place. How my doing so far, Officer King?”
“It’s actually Detective King now,” he corrected. “Pretty good, though. We’ve been staking him out all night, but he hasn’t been home in a few hours.”
“Ohhh, fancy. Where did the detective’s badge come from?” He didn’t seem like the type who would have stayed a beat cop for long, anyway.
“After the haunted house, Paranormal Crimes had me transfer over and gave me the new rank.” He raised his chin, almost a challenge.
“So, it sounds like you should thank me, then,” I said. “How about you start by getting these cuffs off me?”
The look that King gave me was a mix of amused and genuinely offended. Yeah, I hadn’t thought that he was the kind of cop who would let someone go because he thought that he owed them. He’d probably arrest his own mother if he caught her jaywalking.
“Why is Paranormal Crimes interested in Derek McCallum? Is he doing something magically illegal?”
King hesitated, clearly unwilling to give away police secrets. After a pause, he shrugged. “I’m just here temporarily. It’s actually Organized Crime who’s in charge of the case. If you have any information on him…”
“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…”
