Page 38 of The Fighter
“No, he went out with the guys.”
I smiled. “Really? I thought you two were glued together. Have you even been apart after your wedding?”
Willow laughed. “It was an emergency. Zasquash, Leo, and Solo went out for beers. Apparently one of them had a really shitty day.”
“Who did?”
“I think it was Leo, but it might have been Zas.”
“Wait a minute, did you say that the three of them went out to a bar?”
“Yes. Solo is so sweet. He’s been checking in on me every half hour and he just sent me a video of the three of them singing. They are pretty drunk.”
“Huh…” Maybe I didn’t need strong arguments to convince Leo. Maybe I just needed to know his address and go get what belonged to me while he was distracted.
CHAPTER 11
The Break-In
Raven
Leo lived in an old house about ten minutes outside the city. What surprised me the most when I saw his house was the state of his garden. It was September and from the length of his grass he hadn’t cut it since early August. Leo worked a lot, but for someone so focused on details at work, it surprised me to see that he didn’t take much pride in the outside of his house.
The good thing about the location of his house was how isolated it was. There wouldn’t be any neighbors asking me questions about why I was out on my own without protection. The guards at the manor had offered to escort me when I left tonight, but I’d told them I was flying home to my parents’ house and that there was no need.
There was no light coming from Leo’s house and his drone wasn’t here either. With what Willow had told me less than thirty minutes ago, I felt confident that Leo was still at a bar with Solo and Zasquash. Just to be sure, I knocked on the door and as expected, no one answered.
Taking a step back, I looked around, searching for cameras or signs of alarm systems, but I saw nothing.
Pressing down on the handle of the door, I groaned low when I found it was locked. At least it was a one-story house and not a tall apartment building, and it didn’t sound like he had a large dog guarding his house either.
To go around the house, I had to climb a tall fence and as I swung my leg over, my pants got stuck and I lost my balance, sending me to the ground ass first, with the sound of my pants tearing open from the knee to my pocket. Getting up fast, I brushed myself off and looked around to make sure no one saw me looking like a complete amateur.
“All right, get yourself together,” I muttered low and tiptoed to the nearest window to look inside. There was no movement, so I tested to see if the window was unlocked. It wasn’t.
Still searching for an opening, I continued to every window on the back side of the house and when I got to the fourth window, it slid up as I lifted it. “Yes!”
Leo had taken something precious from me, and from all the great crime movies I’d seen, I knew that sometimes great police officers had to work around the law to find the murderer. I needed that research and he wouldn’t even know that I’d been in his house because I would leave everything where I found it and continue my work with only the photos of my research that I would take tonight.
After crawling through the window of his house, I turned on a lamp and looked around in his living room. It wasn’t fancy but cozier than I would have expected. I walked over to study a picture on his wall, tilting my head from one side to the other. It was abstract in nature and I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be.
Who would have thought that Leo was into art?
Reminding myself that I didn’t have time to study Leo’s décor, I began searching for my research. It wasn’t hidden in his couch or in any of the cabinets in his living room, so I continued into his kitchen. The moment I turned the corner I gave a small shriek at the sight of the figure standing still against the wall.
Because of the darkness, I had mistaken the home-bot for a person. I gave a low chuckle in relief that it wasn’t Leo waiting to whack me on my head.
“Geez, you scared me for a second,” I muttered to the robot, but it was in recharge mode and didn’t respond.
My research wasn’t in the kitchen either. I crawled up on the counter to get high enough to check every cabinet, but it wasn’t there. I checked the fridge too but found only food and beer in there.
The only two rooms left were his bathroom and his bedroom. I hesitated before walking into Leo’s bedroom because even in my eagerness to solve this murder mystery it felt like a major violation to snoop around in his bedroom.
Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself and justified what I was about to do by telling myself that Leo had brought this on himself when he took my research.
The door squeaked as I pushed it open. When I turned on the lights, I saw that his bed took up most of the room in here.
Leo hadn’t made his bed which shouldn’t have surprised me after seeing the length of the grass in his garden. There was nothing special about this room except that my research might be here. Walking around the bed, I lifted the mattress and looked underneath it, but there was nothing. His nightstands on the right side of the bed had books, paper towels, and some cough medicine in it. When I opened the nightstand on the left side of the bed, I pulled out a shirt. It wasmytorn tank top.
