Page 13 of Devil in the Details

“See you then,” Hank replied, then turned and headed back into the room where people were signing up.

Maybe he was affiliated with the tournament in some way, or maybe he was just the event’s unofficial greeter. He did seem pretty at home here.

Caleb headed for the exit. No, he didn’t have any errands to run — that had been a complete fabrication — but he hadn’t seen the need to hang around and keep chatting. People who seemed friendly with no real motivation for being that way always put him on his guard. Hank Bowers might simply have been a genial sort of guy…or maybe he liked to engage with the people who’d come in to register for the competition so he could size them up beforehand and see if they had any weaknesses he could exploit.

Possibly that was a pretty jaded way to look at the situation. On the other hand, Caleb hadn’t run into too many purely good people in this world. Rosemary McGuire, the woman he’d thought he loved back in L.A., the one who turned out to have an angel for a father?

Sure.

Delia Dunne? Probably. She was much more smoothly efficient than Rosemary could have ever hoped to be — and Caleb guessed that Rosemary hadn’t been a punk rock chick in high school like Delia — but his new friend still seemed to be motivated by a sense of justice, of making sure things were right in the world, even if her mechanism for doing so was simply finding a family the perfect house where they could be happy.

Which sort of begged the question as to why she was all right hanging around with a quarter demon like him. He didn’t think it was purely business, not when they could have parted ways just as soon as the purchase of the Pueblo Street house was complete. Instead, she’d stuck around and provided design advice…had even helped him move his most valuable possessions into the new place without a single complaint.

Then again, maybe all that was just part of her bid for sainthood.

Smiling to himself, he headed outside, pulling his sunglasses from where they’d been hanging from the neck of his T-shirt so he could plant them on his nose to protect his eyes from the fierce sun overhead. It wasn’t nearly as hot as it would get in the next couple of months, but even though the temperature outside was comfortable enough, the light was extremely bright.

So bright that it was easy enough to see the smudges on the driver’s-side door of his Range Rover near the handle once he got close enough. Eyes narrowing, he bent down to take a closer look.

Those smudges looked suspiciously like the ones Delia had first noticed on the patio door at the old house.

Straightening, he glanced around the parking lot, but no one was nearby. That didn’t mean much, though. If they were really dealing with a demon here, it could have blinked itself away less than a second after it had touched the Range Rover’s door.

A scowl pulled at his brow as he clicked the remote to unlock the vehicle. His T-shirt was untucked anyway, so he wrapped the hem around his fingers as he opened the door and got in. Even doing that much might have wrecked the prints — or whatever those smudges were — but it wasn’t like he could just stand here in the parking lot forever.

No, he wanted to go home and check to see if those blurry smudges were also suspiciously missing their prints.

He had a feeling he knew the answer already.

Chapter Four

Evan Matthews pulled up to the house on Piñon Drive at precisely ten o’clock on Monday morning. He was driving a shiny white BMW 7-Series, and when he emerged from the car, he looked almost exactly the way Delia had imagined him — expertly cut brown hair with a few touches of gray at the temples, expensive shirt and dress slacks but no tie, shoes she guessed had probably cost four figures.

At times like this, she wondered if she might have been doing this for too long. Things were getting way too predictable.

No wonder she liked hanging out with Caleb Lockwood. He was sort of the monkey in the wrench…but in a good way.

“Hi, Evan,” she said as she came down the front walkway to meet him. “Any trouble finding the house?”

“None at all,” he replied, then reached out so he could shake her hand. “This is an easily accessible neighborhood, which makes the house even better suited for a vacation rental.”

“Then let me show you the interior and the backyard,” she said. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

“I’m sure I will.”

They went into the house, where Delia described all the recent renovations and how the home had been featured on an episode of Flip or Flop Las Vegas, which she thought would be an additional selling point. Evan Matthews appeared to be of a similar mind, because he nodded and looked pleased after hearing that bit of information.

“People do like to stay in places that have a bit of notoriety,” he said. “It’s something our marketing people can play up in the listing — if we decide that the house suits, of course. Let’s take a look at the upstairs.”

Dutifully, Delia led him to the second level, where he seemed to be happy with the size of the bedrooms and the number of bathrooms. True, it wasn’t like a lot of newer houses, where each bedroom had its own en suite bath, but there was the powder room downstairs and then the bathroom in the main suite and one in the hall for the remaining bedrooms, so that would probably be enough to accommodate everyone.

Well, unless they were like her college friend Madison, who could easily spend an hour and a half blow-drying and then straightening her hair. Delia had never been sure whether the task truly required that much effort, but Madison wouldn’t step foot outside unless she was absolutely sure she’d vanquished the last of the frizzies.

And Evan seemed equally happy with the backyard, which, in addition to the pool, had an outdoor kitchen built into the covered patio. It probably wasn’t quite as over-the-top as the one Caleb had put in at his new house, since that kitchen also had an Ooni pizza oven and a Big Green Egg in addition to the built-in barbecue, but still, this should be more than enough to satisfy any vacationers who chose to stay here.

“I think it could work,” Evan told her after they’d gone back inside and she’d closed and locked the French door that opened onto the patio — and double-checked it, since she didn’t want a repeat of whatever might have happened here a few days earlier. “I’ll need to present the property to the board before we can make an offer, of course. But I should know something by the end of the week.”

In her mind, she’d had fantasies of him whipping out a checkbook and writing a huge check right then and there, but that wasn’t really how these things worked.

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