“I’d assume that there’s some sort of vetting process residents have to go through before they throw a party?” Marlow said, his head tilted to one side.
“That’s right,” Cade said. “It’s not prison. They can have people over, but they need to let us know ahead of time. The guards wouldn’t have let a bunch of D-list celebs down from LA in just because they said they’d been invited. Even Nader’s not that stupid.”
“Even if Haley could have done it through Macroy’s mail, it probably would have hit social media by now,” Marlow said. “It’s the Reserve. D-listers would want pictures to prove they were here. So, this built up over a few days.”
Cade kicked a cabinet door shut. It bounced back open again. His temper wanted to say it looked like she’d been here for a year, but practically…
“We do sweeps of empty houses,” he said. “Once a week, to make sure nothing has been disturbed or needs attention. She could have, maybe, dodged it the first time. Not the second. I’d guess four to five days would be the maximum she was here for, from the debris.”
“And she didn’t particularly care what Macroy would do to her when he got back,” Marlow said.
He tapped his foot on the bin to open it and peered into it, then without a word, headed back out and down to the main room. Cade turned the water off in the sink and went after him.
“What is it?” Cade asked.
Marlow knelt on the floor and leaned down to look under the couch. He stuck his hand in and pulled out a heavy glass tumbler with a residue of sticky cherry-red cordial in the bottom. He sniffed it.
“Cranberry juice,” he said. “She might have left the house a mess, but it’s a sober mess.”
Cade frowned but nodded his agreement anyhow. The relapsed junkie would have made a nice, tidy story, but there were no empty bottles of booze, no drug paraphernalia, and while the place was a mess, it wasn’ttrashedlike a tweaker’s place.
“So, what the hell was she doing here?”
“Getting her own back?” Marlow said. He moved a cushion and pulled out a dog-eared copy ofNecromancer. “If Farnham was right, maybe she still blames Macroy for the loss of her career.”
Cade thought about the bright-eyed, air-brushed girl on the poster in Macroy’s office and grimaced. “Or for something else.”
“Maybe.”
Marlow opened the book and pulled out a scrap of paper whoever had read it used as a bookmark. He replaced it with a bit of tassel pulled off a cushion—as if Haley would ever worry about a lost place in a book again—and set it down on the floor.
“If your people didn’t know she was here,” Marlow pointed out, “they wouldn’t know she needed to leave. It’s possible she was still here when the moon was up.”
Cade couldn’t argue with that. “Yeah,” he said. “But no one here could be held responsible. They didn’t know she was here, and there’s no sign of forced entry. If she went out that night, she went out on her own.”
Suicide by moonlight. It was rare—there were easier ways to go, ones that left a corpse that wouldn’t make your granny cry—but it happened.
Marlow scratched his lower lip and looked grim. It sharpened the soft, easy-going lines of his face, pulled the angle of his jaw and cheekbones into high definition. Cade was slightly surprised to realize Marlow was actually handsome. He hid it well, most of the time.
“Unless someone did know,” he said.
“Who?” Cade asked.
He didn’t expect Marlow to answer; that was why he had Lem digging up dirt on the SDPD Night Shift going back a decade. For a second, as Marlow opened his mouth to say something, Cade thought he might be wrong.
Something shattered in the back of the house. It shouldn’t have. The glass windows were reinforced and tempered, able to survive an impact with a pissed-off wolf that had just seen its reflection.
Cade kept his gun in a shoulder holster tucked against his ribs under his jacket. It turned out that Marlow favored a clip-holster in the small of his back. He might have had a second’s edge on his draw.
It didn’tmatter. This wasn’t the old days. A fast draw wasn’t going to give Marlow the edge in a duel.
Cade knew he was still going to put extra hours in at the gun range this month.
He caught Marlow’s attention and raised his hand to sign directions that sent Marlow around the outside while Cade went through the house. Technically he didn’t have any standing to give orders, but in his experience, the key to leadership was to not give anyone the chance to argue.
Gun held low by his thigh, Cade stuck close to the wall as he headed toward the back of the house. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marlow glare at him, grimace, and then back up toward the front door to do as he was told.
Cade’s feet slid over the tiled floor as he paused at the doorway, shoulder against the frame. The familiar pulse of adrenaline hummed in his ears, a vibration that settled in the bones of his jaw as he checked the hall.
