EglanTine, he tapped in. Three dots flickered at the bottom of the app as Grade started to reply. Clay hung on to see what he had to say. His eyes flicked from the phone, held loosely in his free hand, to the road and back again. Finally the gray speech bubble popped up on the screen.
Dogleg? Just when I thought this job couldn’t get any better.
Clay laughed and reached over to drop the phone onto the passenger seat. It always amused him that as much as Grade hated Sweeny, he still hated Doglan more on principle.
Grade pulled his other glove on with his teeth and dropped the driver’s side window, the motor almost silent as the glass slid into the door. He hung his arm out, tapped his fingers on the metal side of the car, and glanced sporadically at the dial to keep his speed to the reasonable side of too fast.
***
It was a nice house.
Not exactly Circuit Court Judge nice, but still pretty nice.
1019 Eglantine Waywas a two-story farmhouse-style house set back from the sidewalk on a fair-sized plot of land. The grass was mowed, the flower beds weeded, and it looked exactly the same as a dozen other houses on this stretch of road.
Grade’s dirty white van looked out of place parked outside. The first thing that any suspicious neighbor would clock when they looked through their curtains.
Clay hesitated for a second as he flexed his hands around the steering wheel. This would be a hell of a way to find out Grade was bad at his job. But what the hell, he decided, he’d always expected to go to jail for something. He put the window up as he rolled the Bentley along the road until he could pull up onto the drive.
There’d been a garage opener tucked into Melanie’s purse, Clay had found it when he’d hunted through for her ID, but he didn’t need to hunt it back out. As he pulled up to the doors, the scratches and dents picked out in the headlights, they started to roll up automatically. Clay was briefly impressed, but on second thought, there were some obvious fucking drawbacks.
While he waited for the doors to open all the way, he reached over to check his phone.
There was a one-word text from Grade that just saidhere.
He called.
“I’m outside,” he said when the ringtone cut out. “What now?”
“Leave the car in the garage,” Grade said. “Hold on… No, not that. Go check her bedroom for any jewelry. Yeah, Clay, sorry about that. Meet us inside.”
He hung up.
Clay hitched his hip and tucked the phone into his back pocket. He didn’t plan to bring it up—when someone lived in a glass house of badly repressed trauma, they shouldn’t throw stones—but sometimes he wondered which Grade was the mask. The one that was dryly funny and full of prickly self-regard about how smart he was or the quietly efficient butcher whose emotional range was a flat line?
Both of them turned Clay on, so it wasn’t a problem for him. He just wondered. He drove into the garage and pulled up to the boxes stacked against the back wall of the space.
A glance in the mirror and a brief pause confirmed that the door came down on its own as well—once whatever sensor it used was satisfied it wasn’t going to clip something. Clay waited until it clunked into place against the floor and then got out of the car. He shifted the front seat back to where it had been when he’d gotten in, dropped the steering wheel, and grabbed Melanie’s bag off the front seat. It dangled from his hand as he headed into the house.
The lights were on inside, illuminating the long stretches of honey-gold wood and the soft green-painted walls. Clay paused in the hallway. Before he had to try and track them down, Grade leaned out of the kitchen.
“Down here,” he said softly.
Clay glanced into a room as he walked past. The books had been pulled off shelves and scattered on the floor, cushions ripped open and gutted of their stuff. A handful of drawers had been pulled out of the cupboards and upended on the floor.
“Not much of a housekeeper, was she,” Clay said dryly as he stepped into the kitchen.
Grade snorted as he pulled open a cutlery drawer and got out a knife. He held it like he’d never cut anything in his life, not even a sandwich. Clay bit the inside of his lip as he resisted the urge to correct his form.
“Melanie Ledger is going to look like she died after interrupting a robbery at her house,” Grade said.
He stabbed the knife into the wooden counter. It was a nice knife too, German from the heavy curved blade. Clay made a mental note not to let Grade ever cook at his house.
For one thing, he thought tartly, that was definitely the point that fuck buddy hopped straight to boyfriend.
“I thought the whole point was low-key?” he said. “No scandal. Natural causes.”
Grade stopped what he was doing and squinted at him. “The man was beaten to death with a wine bottle. What am I supposed to pretend that was, an attack by an alcoholic bear?”
