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He just shook his head and concentrated for a moment on carving the chicken and laying a lush slice of breast on my plate. Next, he did the same for himself, then cut a small piece off one end. Before he popped it in his mouth, he said, “All right, possibly I was slightly irked that you’d interfered with the investigation again when I expressly told you not to.”
I paused. Archie had made himself scarce during my dinner preparations, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking down the hall, listening to everything Calvin and I said. Actually, for a man in cat form, Archie didn’t show much interest in human food. I asked him about it once, and he’d given the cat equivalent of a shrug and told me he didn’t want to torture himself with “real” food when there was so little chance of him becoming a human being again any time soon.
Those words had sent a spurt of guilt through me — I knew I hadn’t devoted as much time to solving his problem as I probably should have — but I’d only shrugged and said that made some sense, and left it there.
But since Calvin was staring at me, fork in one hand, obviously waiting for me to make some sort of a response, I knew I had to say something.
“Well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything, except Josie told me Athene had checked out of her Airbnb — one of Josie’s friends owns it — and because I was worried that something might happen to her, I tried checking around. It was just coincidence that she’d ended up renting a room from Hazel. I didn’t even know she was thinking about doing that.”
As I spoke, though, I remembered Hazel making an off-hand comment about investigating alternative ways of earning some cash, since the money her art brought in tended to be sort of hit or miss. The commission to paint the ceiling of my store had brought in a nice chunk for her, but jobs like that didn’t come along all the time, and although her paintings were in galleries all over Arizona, again, those sales weren’t what you could call steady income.
But she’d never mentioned renting out her spare room, and so I figured I was telling the truth when I said I had no idea about those plans.
“Hmm,” was all Calvin said, which could have meant anything. Or maybe that was his way of letting me know he still wasn’t happy about what I’d done, but he also wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“Still no sign of Lucien’s missing car?” I asked, and he shook his head. Now his expression was resigned, as if he knew he couldn’t keep me from talking about the case no matter what he did.
“None,” he replied. He lifted his glass of pinot and took a sip. I waited, trying to seem casual, when in reality, I found myself almost mesmerized by the movement of his throat as he swallowed, the faint kiss of wine on his sculpted lips. The guy was seriously distracting. “It’s strange, just because a car like that isn’t exactly common around here. Also, Mercedes are some of the most difficult cars to break into. It’s almost as though whoever took it had their own key fob.”
“Couldn’t someone, I don’t know, have hacked the car’s computer?” I seemed to remember reading something like that a while back, although I had to admit that Globe didn’t seem like a hotbed of computer-hacking car thieves.
“I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not very likely.” Calvin set down his wine glass. “We’ll figure it out eventually.”
“What about Violet?”
His shoulders lifted. No uniform this time, only a dark button-up shirt, faded jeans, and scuffed black cowboy boots. I’d already gotten used to the cowboy boots and turquoise jewelry that many of the town’s denizens tended to sport, but on him, the boots didn’t look silly but downright sexy.
Of course, Calvin could probably manage to look sexy in a pink bunny suit.
He said, “Someone at a gas station on Highway 70 thought they saw a young woman matching her description heading east. I don’t know why she’d be going that way — there isn’t much out there.”
That did sound strange. You’d think if Violet was trying to get out of town, she would have been going in the opposite direction, heading west toward California. “Did she say anything about where she was going?”
Calvin shook his head as he took a bite of rice pilaf. “No. She went inside the convenience store because she paid cash for the gas and bought a bottle of water, but she didn’t say much. The attendant remembered her because he thought she seemed young to be driving out there by herself, and also because you don’t see many red BMW convertibles around here.”
No, that particular part of the world was pretty short on fancy German cars, my own Beetle notwithstanding. It was definitely the land of the pickup — Ford, Chevy, or Dodge — or the SUV, in those same flavors but with some Jeeps thrown in for variety. You’d think a bright blonde nineteen-year-old in a red convertible would stick out like a sore thumb.
If it had been someone else, I might have thought she was headed out to meet up with relatives or friends, but I knew Violet was from Southern California, just like me…or Lucien.
“So…what’s next?”
Calvin lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll see what the lab has to say about the medallion — and your knives. They should be released to me by the end of the day tomorrow.”
Well, that was something. Not that I’d planned any rituals where I needed the athame, but I didn’t like having it and its companion missing from my altar. I had a particular order to the items I placed there, and with two of them gone, it felt like there was a huge hole in that part of my life.
“That’s good to hear,” I said, and figured I might as well leave it there. “Any other leads?”
“Dinner’s great,” he said distinctly, and I grinned. Not subtle at all, but I got the point.
“Thanks,” I said. “The pilaf’s an old family recipe.”
“It’s delicious.” He ate some more, then went on, “I wasn’t expecting you to cook for me, but thanks for this.”
Oh, I’d love to do a lot more than just cook for him. For the moment, though, I was happy enough to see the way he enjoyed the food. “I like to cook. Usually what I do is make a big batch of something so I can sort of live off that for the week and supplement it with salads or takeout or whatever. Do you cook?”
“Not really. Cops tend to live on takeout. Once a week, my mother sends a care package home with me so I don’t starve.”
His comment made me wonder why he had that gourmet kitchen if he never really used it. Asking seemed a bit too personal, though, so I decided to let it go for the moment. Anyway, considering how his biceps bulged against his shirt sleeves every time he lifted his fork or reached for his glass of wine, he didn’t look as though he was too in danger of starving. And I didn’t know why his comment about his mother startled me. After all, I guessed he was probably no more than five years or so older than I, which meant his parents were most likely still around.
