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.”
“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.
CHAPTER 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?
