Metal clicked in his hand, and he swept me inside before closing it behind us.
“I’m not cut out for this.” I wiped my forehead dry on my shirt sleeve. “I’m three seconds away from a panic attack.” I puffed out my cheeks and bent over to brace my palms on my knees. “You might want to reconsider this partnership thing if B&E is a job requirement.”
“You are nothing like what I expected, Luce Boudreau.”
“I get that a lot.” I squinted up at him, thankful for the nightlight illuminating the hallway. “One day the peer pressure is going to get to me, and I’m going to embrace my inner psychopath so I can start living up to everyone’s expectations.”
“As entertaining as it is to watch you hyperventilating over breaking the laws you’re sworn to uphold, we don’t have much time. We need to locate the files and make our exit.” He gave me a measuring look. “Can you handle this, or do you need to wait here?”
Glaring at him, I straightened. “Pardon me for being a law-abiding citizen.”
“We’ll remedy that in time,” he promised as he skulked deeper into the house.
Sucking up my pesky morals, I set off in the opposite direction. The house was a modest two-bedroom, one bathroom, and the number of spaces where she could have hidden items of value were finite. I lucked across the converted home office and started riffling through the papers scattered across her desk. Nothing caught my eye, so I started pulling out drawers and then moved on to the file cabinets.
Warm breath fanned my ear. “Find anything?”
“Wu.” I clutched my chest. “Do not sneak up on me.”
“Apologies,” he said without sounding sorry at all. “Well?”
“Nothing.” I noticed his hands were also empty. “What about you?”
“No luck so far.” He drifted to a bookcase and started leafing through the pages of a hardback thriller. “Why don’t you check the bedroom? I’ll pick up where you left off in here.”
The dismissal irked me, but it wasn’t like I enjoyed snooping. “How long were you watching me?”
Wu lifted his head but didn’t answer my question. He didn’t even come close. “I can smell what you’ve touched. I can tell where you’ve been.”
Heat sizzled across my nape in reminder of exactly how well charun noses worked. “I’ll just… go do that.”
The bedroom was crammed with furniture and the detritus of life. There was a queen-sized bed, a squat nightstand, and a walk-in closet in place of a bureau. I tackled the bed first, but Summers hadn’t hidden anything under her mattress or the frame. The nightstand was stuffed to overflowing with fast food receipts but not much else. I checked the underside of each drawer but came up empty there too. The closet was full of nice pantsuits for work, and there was a basket of faded tees and shorts in the bottom. I shuffled everything around, but nothing caught my eye. I returned empty-handed to the office and found Wu examining the contents of a folder.
I leaned a shoulder in the doorway. “Have any luck?”
He glanced up, his expression unfathomable. “She has a file on you.”
“What?” I snatched it out of his hand and skimmed it front to back. “Phew. You had me worried there for a minute. This is nothing malicious. Just newspaper clippings.”
His expression indicated he begged to disagree. “It’s an invasion of your privacy.”
“Says the guy who outfitted me with a phone for the sole purpose of stalking my every move.” I handed it back to him. “Privacy is an illusion, and it’s getting thinner and thinner these days.”
“That was not my only reason.” He returned the incriminating papers where they belonged. “I gave you a direct line to me. Only three other people on this terrene can say that.”
“Keep spoiling me, and I’m going to feel obligated to make you a friendship bracelet.”
Wu sighed, a sound I was coming to enjoy provoking, and crossed to me. “She must have kept the prints on her person. We’ll check her vehicle next. The digital copies can be wiped as soon as we have the hardcopies in hand.”
We cleaned up after ourselves and left the way we came. Wu caught me studying the disrupter thingy and walked me through disengaging it. Ready to be on his way, he didn’t notice when I pocketed the nifty device. Leaving him in my dust, I sprinted to the SUV, climbed in, and breathed a sigh of relief that we had made it in and out without getting caught. I was still luxuriating in our success when he joined me.
“When do we search her car?” I strapped in, ready to Flintstones this SUV out of the driveway and back into nice, anonymous traffic. “Please tell me we’re not going to stakeout her street until she comes home.”
“All right, I won’t tell you.” He backed out, found another empty driveway, and parked there. “We need to wrap this up tonight. We’ll take shifts. I’ll go first.”
Grateful I hadn’t had coffee for hours, I reclined the seat. “Wake me when it’s go time.”
“You would trust me to watch over you?” A mixture of surprise and pleasure and some undefinable something that fled too fast for me to identify splashed across his features. “You would leave yourself defenseless against me?”
“What a very charun thing to say. I don’t trust you too far, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to murder me in my sleep.” Leave it to him to twist a simple nap into an exercise in trust he hadn’t yet earned. For one thing, murder would stain his fancy shirt. For another, he had made the mistake of letting me know my value. He wouldn’t harm a hair on my head. Not unless I stepped out of line. “Okay, how about this? A member of my coterie is out there right now, watching us. Lift a finger against me, and they’ll break it off and beat you to death with it. Does that make you feel better?”
“Actually, yes.” Proof I retained some sense of self-preservation coaxed a smile from him. “That explains why I smelled fur.”
“Thom’s on duty tonight?” I yawned so hard my eyes watered. “He’s bitey. I wouldn’t recommend pissing him off if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he murmured. “Sleep well.”
Putting another skill Rixton had taught me to good use, the ability to sleep anywhere and at any time, I linked my hands at my navel and dozed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A hard jostle knocked me awake, and I blinked up at a tan ceiling in confusion. The tingling awareness I wasn’t alone had me cranking my head to the left, and I yelped when I spotted Wu behind the wheel.
He didn’t so much as flinch. “Bad dream?”
“What time is it?” I blinked until the blurry numbers on the clock made sense. “I was out for five hours? Why didn’t you wake me?” I pulled the lever on the seat and sat upright. “What about Summers?”
“Do these look familiar?” He reached between the seats and produced a file with the single set of prints Rixton had given her along with the glossy originals. “When we wipe her this time, it should fix the problem.” He angled his head toward me. “Right?”
“Wrong.” I rubbed my face. “Rixton has a few more copies. I’ll disappear those tomorrow.”
His fingers wrapped the gearshift until his knuckles whitened. “Do you think he would have distributed them yet?”
“Usually he’s on the ball, but we’re juggling a hellacious caseload. He’s working long hours, and he has a newborn at home.” Rixton didn’t believe in doing things half-assed, so he would wait until his head cleared before making his case about the possible connection between all three fires. “There’s a better than good chance he’ll wait until the shift meeting to make his move.”
The tension in his fingers lessened. “Did you give anyone else prints?”
“I emailed copies to Miller and Santiago, but their computers are vaults.” You didn’t do the type of work they did without making sure all the doors you kicked down in pursuit of information wouldn’t fly open on your own computer. “You don’t have to worry about them. I promise if I need to reference the photos, I’ll do it online in a secure environment. I won’t make more prints. Deal?”