“Please do not go inside the home until an officer arrives, sir,” the dispatcher told him. Lucas seethed and ended the call.
Jeanie watched him with wary eyes. “You really think they’re still in there?” she asked, shifting her weight from one bare foot to another. Something about the way she was standing rubbed him the wrong way. It was almost as though she didn’t believe him despite how amped up he was. I’m not fucking crazy, he thought. Someone had stacked the furniture up to the goddamn ceiling, and unless they’d also spiked his coffee with LSD, he hadn’t hallucinated it.
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “Probably not if they’re smart.” And they had to be, because how did someone get around an installed alarm like that? Maybe you didn’t hear it go off, just like you didn’t hear your phone ring for the past week or so. No, that was ridiculous. The problem wasn’t him, it was whoever had broken into the house. These were professionals. Or maybe the alarm install guy missed one of the windows? Who knew what kind of Mickey Mouse certification was required to wire those things. There were all sorts of possibilities, none of which had anything to do with him.
“What did they do?” Jeanie glanced to the wide-open front door. The house alarm had silenced itself after its ten-minute earsplitting screech, but the panel continued to blink red in warning just inside the foyer. Lucas couldn’t stop staring at it. If he had been a superstitious man, he may have taken that flashing red light as a sign—don’t go back in there. Instead, each bright blink was like a matador waving a flag in front of an ornery bull. He felt violated. Threatened. The panel’s insistence was only making him want to rage that much more. He wanted to tear it from the wall and stomp it beneath his feet. Lousy, worthless piece of shit. Maybe the alarm was on the fritz just like his phone. Or this place sat on some weird magnetic ley line that screwed with all the electronics.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, turning his attention from the door to his kid. “It’s going to be okay. The police will be here soon.” But his response did little to satiate Jeanie’s curiosity. She frowned at him, then crossed her arms over her chest.
“How did you know someone was in the house, Dad? Did you see them?”
There it was again, that doubt. Don’t question me, he wanted to sneer. Her sudden lack of faith ticked him off. But the longer he stayed silent, the more aggravated she appeared. He exhaled and rolled his eyes up toward the star-spangled sky.
“Did they, like, steal something? Other than the car, I mean?”
“I don’t know, but they rearranged the furniture for some stupid reason. Stacked it up to the ceiling.”
Jeanie’s eyes went wide. She blinked a few times, went pale as milk. A second later she was squaring her shoulders and trying to disguise her surprise. “Well, if they didn’t come after us . . . that means they aren’t going to, right? Besides, if they took the car, the cops are going to be looking for them. They’d be stupid to come around here again.”
She made a move toward the front door, but Lucas caught her by the wrist to stop her. “Jeanie,” he said. “Don’t.” She gave him a look that he read easily. Didn’t you just hear what I said? She was fearless, unconvinced. Again, Lucas wanted to bark at her. Since when was she so goddamn defiant? But he managed to steady his nerves. Whoever had broken in must have taken off. The police would be arriving at any minute. Staying inside would have been insane.
Reluctantly, he followed Jeanie back into the house, but he stopped short just beyond the foyer. Jeanie was staring ahead at the living room. It was in perfect order. Not a stick of furniture was rearranged. Nothing was out of place.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he murmured.
Jeanie’s face was a reflection of how he felt. But rather than staying at his side like a feeder fish, she stepped farther into the living room, as if wanting to make sure what they were seeing wasn’t a trick of the light.
Lucas followed his daughter’s lead, but he did so with a decent amount of hesitation. He was trying to keep his suspicions grounded in reality, doing his damnedest not to let his mind wander toward the kind of stuff his twelve-year-old kid had been researching at Barnes & Noble.
This wasn’t paranormal. It was nothing but an asshole or two not having anything better to do. But the more he inspected the room for flaws, the more mind-bending the whole thing became.
Crouching down next to one of the armchairs, he gave it a little shove. The chair skipped on the carpet, leaving a perfect indentation of its footprint on the rug. If this was the work of a bunch of stupid kids, they had been pretty damn careful when it came to putting everything back the way they had found it. Except that it had been dark in the living room. How the hell had they been able to match up those indentations without any light?
And Lucas and Jeanie had been right outside.
Lucas shook his head. He pulled his cell out of his pocket, stared at a missed text message he hadn’t heard come in. Josh Morales.
We should talk.
Halcomb’s dead.
See you soon? J.
Lucas’s mouth went dry.
“Dad?”
Josh was working Marty’s beat. That put Josh next to Halcomb during the time of his death. What if Josh had seen the body? What if Josh had been there, and now he was home by himself, drinking, thinking about how an inmate had killed himself on his watch? What if he had done what Marty had sarcastically suggested and quizzed Halcomb on his beliefs?
What if it’s true? The stuff Halcomb is saying, the stuff about eternal life?
“Dad?”
“What?!” He shot her a glare.
Jeanie gaped at him, took a backward step. “Jeez, I just wanted to know if I can go back upstairs.”
“No.” His reply was instant. He cleared Morales’s text and reconnected his most recent emergency call.