Vinnie looked up, grinned and walked over to let him in.
“Hey, Aidan, guess what? Kendall called a friend at the paper. She’s going to do a piece on the benefit. The band would be thrilled to come and pose—”
“Where’s Kendall?” Aidan demanded.
“She left. Someone called her, and then she just told us to clean up, she was going over to Sheila’s.”
“Sheila’s?”
“A friend of hers, hot little blonde,” Mason told him.
“You let her go off alone?” Aidan asked angrily.
They looked at each other. “Um, yeah,” Vinnie said. “She is an adult.”
Aidan was being unreasonable, and he knew it. “Where does Sheila live?”
“I’ll write it down for you,” Vinnie offered, and hurried to get a pen.
Kendall let out a cry of alarm, then stood dead still and listened. Nothing.
She wished she had thought to bring a flashlight.
Too late.
Trying to retain a calm center, she made her way out of the kitchen, feeling her way along the hallway wall. Her heart was thundering. All she wanted was to get the hell out of the darkness of the house and into the nice reassuring darkness of the yard. She inched forward, bit by bit.
She thought she heard something from the back of the house and paused to listen. It was a creaking noise. So what? she asked herself.
Old houses creaked.
But there was a feeling in the air. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t smell anything in the air, and yet…
She knew.
Someone was in the house with her.
She gave up all thought of keeping quiet and, guided by the glow of the streetlights coming in through the front windows, ran for the front door. She fumbled with the bolt, certain that any second someone would come flying down the hallway and slam into her, pinning her against the door.
She wrenched it open and went flying outside just as a car came jerking into the drive.
Aidan’s car.
She raced toward the driver’s side. He stepped out before she got there, and she threw herself into his arms.
“Sheila is dead,” she told him. “I know it. And someone is in her house.”
19
Aidan didn’t want to leave Kendall alone, and he didn’t want to take her inside with him, but speed was going to be of the essence. And even if he’d had time to call for backup, he didn’t know who to trust anymore. The police? The FBI? There was nothing for it. She was going to have to come with him.
He ran for the house, telling Kendall to stick close behind him. The front door was gaping open. He pulled out his laser light with his left hand and his Colt with his right, then stepped inside, tense and wary.
He felt for the light switch and flipped it. Nothing.
He walked down the hallway, feeling her right behind him, doing exactly as she had been told. The laser illuminated the kitchen. Empty.
Dining room, empty.
He didn’t need to go any farther. He could see the back door, open to the darkness of the night.
“Call the police,” he told Kendall, handing her his cell. They would get whatever patrol car was in the area, but that would be fine.
He heard her punch in 911, then give the address, adding that they didn’t need an ambulance.
He stepped out into the backyard and knew that unless he had an army with him, he wasn’t going to find anyone, so he opted for standing on the back step, Kendall right behind him, and shining the light around, rather than going farther and risking trampling a clue.
He ran the light over the trees and bushes, but saw nothing. He aimed it upward toward the electric poles, tracking the beam along the line until he saw the wire leading to the house, which had been neatly severed.
“Someone was here, right?” she whispered.
“Yes, definitely.”
They went back inside, and he started looking around the downstairs more carefully. He saw the note on the kitchen bulletin board and couldn’t stop suspicion from niggling in his brain.
But Mason couldn’t have cut the electric wire, because there was no way he could have gotten out here quickly enough, arriving ahead of Aidan himself.
A patrol car arrived a few minutes later, the officers polite and competent, accepting his ID and listening as Kendall explained that Sheila Anderson was her friend, that she hadn’t returned to work that morning as scheduled, so Sheila’s boss had called to ask her if she knew anything. She was calm when she explained that she had a key to the house, and that she had called the hotel where Sheila had planned to stay, and that she had never shown up.
Then Jeremy arrived, alerted by one of his friends on the force, and Aidan left Kendall with one officer as he and his brother went off with the other to survey the property. He had just noted a broken branch on an oak when Jeremy called out, “Footprint.”
All three men hunkered down for a closer look. “Strange footprint,” Aidan pointed out.