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“There’s a little more to it than that,” he remarked drily as a slow-moving truck, its cab scraping the branches overhead, rumbled by.
“And ask questions and gather information and chase people down. If I had a car and Internet access—a smartphone would really do it—I’d be ready to go.”
“You also need a license,” he pointed out.
“If I had my license, I could be driving my own car, and I could maybe have already found my cousin.”
“A private investigator’s license,” he corrected.
She frowned at him. “You have to go to school for that?”
“Take some classes, sure.”
Casting him a leery glance, she said, “I have my GED.”
“Did you go to high school?”
“I was home-schooled by my aunt.”
“Aunt Catherine?” He was looking through the windshield, his binoculars in his lap, his gaze on the door of the Cochran home.
Kimberley had a fairly specific routine. To the gym in the mornings, coffee with friends—a lot of air kissing went on among them—and then back to the house. Tennis on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dorell Cochran had moved out and so her time was her own, but she hadn’t met any paramour as yet.
He could feel Ravinia’s attention sharpen on him. “Yes, Aunt Catherine.”
He kept his gaze centered on the end of the long drive, which curved up the hill to the Cochran home. They were in Sherman Oaks. A number of expensive homes perched on the ridge above him. Parking was prohibited on the four-lane road that led past the drive, but he’d found a few places on a side street that offered an unobstructed view. He’d been pretty lucky so far in finding an observation point, but Dorell Cochran was impatient to learn whom his wife was seeing and was making noise about cutting off funding. If he did, so be it. Rex couldn’t manufacture results. A lot of PI work was a waiting game.
“Who are you waiting for?” Ravinia asked.
“A woman whose husband thinks she’s having an affair.”
“Is she?”
Rex shrugged, shifting in the driver’s seat. “Maybe. He thinks so. I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.”
“How long are we going to be here?”
“Told you it’d be boring.” He glanced her way. She’d pinched her lips together and was glaring through the windshield. “What’s your story?” he asked her again.
“I told you. I just want to find my cousin.”
“So, tell me something about yourself.”
She raked him with a sideways glance from suspicious blue-green eyes. “I’m from Oregon.”
“You already told me that. You lived around a town called Deception Bay on the Oregon coast. What else?”
She thought that over. “Okay,” she said as if she’d decided something. “If I tell you something about myself, you have to tell me something about yourself.”
Rex raised the binoculars to his eyes and swept them across the front of the Cochran house. “Fair enough.”
“All right. Well then, I guess I’ll tell you that . . . my aunt is worried about her daughter, my cousin. My aunt gave her away at birth but feels that she might be in danger.”
When she stopped abruptly, Rex put down the binoculars. “From what?”
“Oh . . . you know . . . forces of evil.”
“Like in a video game?”
