Page 24 of Speak of the Devil

In some towns, sure. In Las Vegas…not so much. He’d said he’d come into money but hadn’t elaborated, so it could have been anything from an inheritance to a few weeks of really good luck at the blackjack tables. While the casinos always came out on top, that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of people who won millions anyway.

Caleb Lowe could have just been one of those lucky ones.

Still….

Delia set her glass of water down on a coaster, then got up from the couch and headed into the extra bedroom she used as an office so she could fetch her laptop.

A couple of quick searches didn’t pull up anything about Caleb Lowe — or rather, she found plenty of individuals with that same name, but none of them were the man she knew. No social media, no newspaper mentions of winning big poker tournaments or anything like that.

So what? Plenty of people managed to keep a low profile and didn’t waste their time on Facebook or TikTok or whatever.

But her instincts kept telling her something else was going on here.

Luckily, she had someone who could help.

Prudence Nelson had been the bassist in Final Girl, and after the group broke up, the members still kept in touch. Sarah, the drummer, had moved to L.A., so Delia’s contact with her was mostly through social media, and Toni, the lead guitarist, had gotten married not too long after the band split and started a family…but Pru had decided to get her private investigator’s license and be her own boss.

Delia had only asked for Pru’s help a couple of times, mostly because she hadn’t wanted to seem if she was taking advantage of her friend’s unique access to information. Every once in a while, though, she came across a client who got her spider sense tingling, and that was when she felt as if she needed to reach out.

Right now, her spider-sense was going kind of crazy.

And she knew Pru would probably be home, just because she hated crowds and did all her socializing on the quieter nights of the week. No way would she be fighting the Friday night throngs when she could stay safely in her house.

Sure enough, she picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Delia. Who do you want me to snoop on now?”

Since that was just Pru being Pru, Delia didn’t take offense. “My new client. On the surface, he seems okay, but…”

“…but you’re getting the sense that something isn’t on the up and up,” Pru finished for her. “What’s his name?”

“Caleb Lowe,” Delia replied. “He’s around thirty or thirty-one, I think.”

“Does he live in Vegas?”

“Yes. Fairly new to town, though. He bought a house here about a month and a half ago, but I’m not sure whether the information would be on the county recorder’s site yet. They’re pretty backed up.”

“I should still be able to find something. Give me a sec.”

A faint clunk of a sound, probably Pru setting down her phone so she could use both hands to type on her keyboard. Delia had been over to her townhouse plenty of times, so she knew her friend used one of the spare bedrooms as an office and had a big iMac on one desk and a PC with multiple screens on the other. Maybe she had a laptop, too, but Delia had never seen it.

Only a couple of minutes passed before Pru picked up her phone again.

“His driver’s license was issued in late November. And yeah, found his house, too — 2642 Saguaro Court.”

So the assessor’s office had cleared some of their backlog. Well, home sales always slowed down around the holidays.

Something about the address seemed vaguely familiar to her, but she put that aside for now, figuring she could look it up herself once she was done talking to Prudence.

“This is weird, though,” Pru went on, and Delia found herself sitting up a little straighter on the sofa.

“What’s weird?”

“I can’t find a single thing about this guy before he got that driver’s license. I mean, he has a Social Security number and a credit score, but his credit report is awfully blank for someone who’s rattling around in the low 800s.”

That was strange. Delia knew that part of having a high credit score was having responsibly held credit for multiple years, and not just having credit card bills or car or house payments that had been made on time. It should have been impossible to have such a high score without any evidence of the credit that had been used to build it.

“Witness protection program?” she suggested, only half joking.

Pru chuckled. “That makes as much sense as anything else I can think of. I’ll poke around some more, though — this is just surface-level stuff.” She paused there before adding, “Did you sell him a house?”

---