Page 56 of Devil in the Details

Even though he knew logically that she was just as protected as he was — maybe more, since she had a lot of holy water on hand — he found himself wishing she’d asked him to stay. In the guest room, obviously, because she wouldn’t have allowed anything else, but if he was right there, he would have been able to come to her rescue immediately if something weird happened.

You can do that anyway, he reminded himself. Lately, he’d been careful not to use his teleportation powers too much, just because popping up in places without any real evidence as to how he’d gotten there was sure to attract attention, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t blink himself right over to Delia’s house at the first sign of trouble.

No, there wasn’t any real reason for him to have stayed.

He just wished she’d asked.

The situation wasn’t extreme enough yet for her to have done such a thing, however, so he was left to remind himself that she was a big girl and could take care of herself. Still, a pretty important component of being a grown-up was knowing when it was time to reach out for help.

Even though Jim Whitaker had said he wasn’t going to start looking into Paul Reeves and Ty Carter until tomorrow morning, Caleb couldn’t help checking his email and his texts, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything while he was over at Delia’s. But his inbox didn’t have anything except a bunch of notices for various online sales…not for the first time, he wondered how the hell he’d even gotten on all those lists…and he knew he was going to have to wait for the week to really get started before there were any further developments.

Annoying, but there it was.

So he made himself watch some TV, and then eventually he headed upstairs to go to bed. Even as he did so, however, he couldn’t help thinking about Delia. Was she doing okay, or had she chided herself for letting him go rather than keeping him around for a while longer to help settle her head?

He had a feeling he’d never know.

Because she hadn’t been bombarded all night with random brain waves from her neighbors, Delia was feeling a bit more cheerful when she woke up the next morning. Not all the way, because she still wasn’t sure how any of this worked, and she supposed it was possible that a person needed to be much closer than just next door for her to pick up on their thoughts, but still.

Part of her didn’t want to look at her phone — she hadn’t heard a peep from Aaron Sanchez after that uncomfortable exchange at the end of their date on Sunday evening — but she knew avoiding her voicemails and texts wasn’t an option, not when a client could have reached out overnight. Although she tried to be as firm as she could about boundaries, she inevitably would still have that one person who didn’t think it was a big deal to call after ten or before eight, which was why she’d made the decision to turn off her alerts at night and make sure the phone stayed in a different room.

However, the only message she’d missed was a text from Prudence.

So far I haven’t found anything incriminating about Aaron Sanchez. The one thing that stuck out to me was that he suddenly paid off all his student loans about five months ago. But then I saw that his grandmother died around the same time, so I figured that he’d used his inheritance to pay them off.

On the surface, that theory sounded logical enough. Nothing Aaron had said about his grandmother had made it sound as if she was a woman of means, but maybe she’d been hiding cash in her mattress for decades. Delia knew he’d gone to UNLV, so it wasn’t as if he’d been carrying the kind of loan debt he would have racked up at a private college. All the same, if he’d had to finance all four years and didn’t have any grants or scholarships to take some of the load off, then he still would have been in the hole around fifty grand, maybe more if he hadn’t been living at home while he was going to school. Since he hadn’t brought up that particular detail about his college years, she couldn’t say for sure.

Also, Pru could have been talking about Aaron’s paternal grandmother, and Delia knew absolutely nothing about the woman. He hadn’t mentioned her at dinner, most likely because there hadn’t been any reason to.

A second text bubble continued Pru’s message.

I’ll keep looking. It might be hard to find out exactly how Aaron paid off those loans, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. And if I dig up anything else, I’ll let you know.

Nothing beyond that, but Delia knew her friend was doing her best. If there wasn’t anything to find, then obviously, they wouldn’t find it.

In the meantime, though, she needed to get ready for work. Her schedule today was just as crammed as it had been on Monday, so she wouldn’t have a lot of time to be chasing after various conspiracy theories anyway. No, she needed to keep her head down and get the tasks done that had to be done, and to let Prudence — and the private detective Caleb had hired, she supposed — do the footwork necessary to see if any of the people they were investigating actually had something to hide.

She had several house showings, two new listings to put together, and a client coming in to sign all the paperwork the mortgage company was supposed to send over — they’d promised it the day before but it hadn’t materialized, and she was praying it would show up today — so she was sort of glad that the next text from Pru didn’t come through until late in the afternoon.

Found something else. Aaron bought a brand-new BMW right around the same time he paid off his student loans. Since I can’t get into his bank records, I can’t say for sure where the money for the down payment came from. Still, it seems a little fishy.

Yes, it did. Again, he could have just gotten a chunky inheritance, but it still felt like a red flag firmly planted in the ground.

Any other big expenditures around that time?

He moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a condo in Henderson. Much fancier. I think he’s just renting it, though, because the county recorder shows the place as being owned by a company called Aegis Holdings.

Cold trickled down Delia’s spine as she absorbed that piece of information. Sure, some people probably would have said it wasn’t so surprising that Aegis owned Aaron’s condo, considering how they were actively acquiring properties in the greater Las Vegas area, and yet she couldn’t help thinking this was a lot more than a simple coincidence.

Thanks, Pru. That’s…interesting.

Interesting how?

I’m not sure yet. But it’s one more piece of the puzzle.

Well, like I said, if I find anything else, I’ll let you know.

Delia sent her friend a smiley-face emoji in response to that comment, although she was feeling anything but cheerful right then.

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