Page 5 of Devil in the Details

Figuring he wouldn’t mind if she took care of that one small detail, she went ahead and splashed some water in the mug and then set it in the top rack of the machine. With that handled, she took more pictures, getting close-ups of the appliances and the fancy brass faucet that accompanied the farmhouse-style sink.

The flippers had done a good job, so Delia didn’t think it would be too hard to move this place quickly, especially since, while they’d included a few fun, gimmicky choices, most of the design was classic enough in style that it wouldn’t be out of date in a couple of years.

More snaps of the downstairs powder room and the family room at the back of the house, and then she made her way up to the second level. All the bedrooms appeared to be located here, three smaller ones arranged along the upstairs hallway, with the main suite located at the end of the hall.

Even though Caleb had told her it was fine to roam wherever she needed to get her photos, Delia still felt a little strange about going into his bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it was very neat, the bed made, and no random socks on the floor or anything else to show that a man lived here by himself.

Well, maybe quarter demons were neatniks…or maybe Caleb had known she’d want to come over here immediately to get pictures after he told her he intended to put the place on the market, so he’d made a special effort to be tidy.

Either way, he’d made her job a lot easier. She took dozens of photos, trying to get things set up from exactly the right angle so they’d translate well on a computer or phone screen. Doing so took her the greater part of an hour, but she wasn’t too concerned about that.

After all, she’d only been telling Caleb the truth when she’d said she didn’t have much planned for today. While she tried to get together with her friend Prudence a couple of times a month, they’d just gone out for drinks on Thursday night and hadn’t made any follow-up plans yet.

Besides, Pru hated venturing out on the weekends and always planned their girls’ nights during the week when they would have a better chance of getting a decent table somewhere and didn’t have to compete with quite so many tourists.

And it was okay with her. Although Delia hadn’t been called to cleanse any homes of their ghostly occupants for more than a month now, she’d still been busy with plenty of regular listings, especially since her mother, the other half of the Dunne & Dunne real estate team, had gone to Hawaii with Delia’s father for a belated anniversary trip and Delia was covering her mom’s clients as best she could. Doing double duty at the office didn’t leave her a lot of free time.

Even so, she couldn’t help thinking that it would have been nice if Caleb had invited her to go out to lunch or something. They’d done that quite a few times while working on the Pueblo Street house, and she’d halfway expected he would do the same today.

However, it seemed he was more interested in getting his current home listed than spending any additional time with her.

Which was fine. While she wouldn’t lie to herself and pretend she didn’t think Caleb was attractive, she also knew that getting involved with a guy who just happened to be a quarter demon probably wasn’t the smartest thing in the world. No, much better that their relationship remained strictly professional.

A quick scan through the pictures she’d taken told her she had more than enough for the home’s interior. Time to snap some photos of the backyard, especially the pool. Looking out through the French doors that opened onto the patio, Delia estimated that the one here wasn’t as big as the one at the Pueblo Street house, but then, the yard wasn’t nearly as large, either.

Still, having a pool, especially one that looked new and sparkly like the one in Caleb’s backyard here, was just another excellent selling point.

She headed over to the French doors, camera slung over one shoulder. Her hand went automatically to the deadbolt.

It wasn’t locked.

In fact, the door itself wasn’t shut all the way, had barely caught enough to keep it from blowing open in the wind.

Delia frowned. She supposed Caleb might have gone out for a morning swim and been careless about shutting the door on his way back into the house, but she didn’t think that was terribly likely. Although they hadn’t spent a lot of time in this particular house, she still knew he was careful about security — hence the panel for the alarm system that she’d noted in her interior photos, now safely shut off, thanks to Caleb’s phone app.

Well, everyone had a brain fart now and then, even quarter demons. She’d just make sure to lock the back door once she was done taking photos of the yard and the pool.

That took her another twenty minutes or so. Just as with the interior of the house, the backyard here was immaculate, everything swept, with no weeds in the beds of drought-tolerant plants and the pool sparkling clean. Clearly, Caleb didn’t have a problem parting with his gambling winnings to keep his property in good shape.

As she was approaching the back door, she noticed a couple of smudges on the glass that hadn’t been detectable from inside. Here, though, with the midday sun beaming straight down on that side of the house, those cloudy spots seemed very obvious.

In fact….

Were those fingerprints?

So what if they are? she asked herself. Caleb told me the cleaners came yesterday. If he went out for a swim this morning, it wouldn’t be too surprising if he got some prints on the door when he let himself in.

That sounded logical enough. Delia squinted at the smudges and held up her hand against them to see how they compared in size. They were a little bigger, enough so they certainly looked as if they could have been Caleb’s.

But what had she been expecting? Something monstrous, something that could have been made by a demon?

A few months ago, she would have laughed herself silly at the thought of even entertaining such a notion. Now, though….

Now she knew demons were real. Not just because of Caleb Lockwood’s part-demon heritage, but because she’d faced down the real thing in the executive suite at the Dunes casino and resort. Maybe once upon a time, Robert Hendricks had been a man, but he’d long since been taken over by the demon named Calach.

Or at least, that’s what Caleb had told her, and Delia was inclined to believe him. Quarter demon or not, he hadn’t steered her wrong so far.

That didn’t seem to be what she was dealing with here, though. No, as far as she could tell, her original suspicions had been correct, and he’d just been careless about closing the door on his way into the house.

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