Page 93 of To Have and to Hold

“Spence, wait! This can’t be right!” Knox burst out of the cab after me but his sprints couldn’t catch up fast enough. His voice carried.

“I’m done thinking,” I said and yanked the police tape off the front door. The cops still combing the place shouted their surprise and went to stop me, but Knox waved them off. The door was stuck, but three shoulder-ringing pounds and I was in.

Knox followed behind. “We’ve searched every inch of this place—are still searching. You’ve been in here and you saw how many people were crawling all over this house.”

I rounded on the stairs, bypassing a few crime scene techs. “Then we missed something.”

“How?” Knox stomped behind my ascent. “We have the blueprints! We checked all the rooms!”

“Clearly not all of them.” I reached the top landing and shoved open doors, using touch as well as sight to canvass the rooms.

“There’s no way she’s in Ed Carver’s house, Spence. Jesus—would you be careful? You could trip something hidden and blow both of us apart.”

I stood from my crouch under the bed. “I thought you said this house had been checked thoroughly.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” Knox said as I passed him and went into the next room. “I’m on your side, even though you’re convinced you have to be some kind of vigilante with this.”

“Where’s Levi? Emme!” I called, pushing off the banister and searching the next room.

“On his way,” Knox said.

“Not fast enough. Emme!”

“She’s not going to respond to you, Spence.”

I swiveled on him just before barreling down the stairs. “Everything points to her being here. You know why? Because Arabella Delacourt owns DKI Rentals.”

“Who the fuck is Arabella Delacourt?”

“Eugenie’s dog.”

Knox blinked. “Do you need to be sedated?”

“Noelle always talked to Eugenie Abrams about her dogs, since that’s about the only topic that gives that woman a little color. Her cocker spaniels. One is named Arabella, the other Socrates.”

“Uh,” Knox said. “Huh.”

“It has to be them. All sub corps under Arabella Delacourt Enterprises are owned by that couple. One of those sub corps owns this place. The same residence Ed Carver was living in, the same place the Beauregards lived in and sold to the Abrams. You wanna tell me this is another coincidence?”

“No,” Knox said, with a frustratingly calm demeanor. “I’m telling you we scoped this house, we utilized the blueprints and we inched across these floorboards looking for the tiniest incendiary devices, never mind Emme herself.”

The muscles in my jaw knotted. “Then we’re not seeing what’s right in front of us. I’m going into the basement.”

Knox exhaled, but didn’t argue. He loosened his belief long enough to allow me to explore and get it out of my system before he reigned me in and we started from scratch again. Not that I would circle back to the beginning, but it was soul-destroying to think we came this far and had to turn back at another dead end. Each time we did, Emme’s hand was dragged farther and farther away.

I skipped the main floor, deciding to search the basement first. It was where Ed Carver was found, and with that body floated one word, over and over: Diversion.

The evidence was stacked so cleanly: the kidnapper’s phone call to me, Ed Carver’s name tossed out, his past with Emme, the bomb at his door, his dead body in the crawl space. Each event was like a barricade, each block disguising the truth. Abrams had stacked the odds against him quite well, but not good enough, not if one was capable of withdrawing a building block and peering through the hole.

Once downstairs, I scanned the one room. Large and unfinished, with an opening to a crawl space on the left where Ed Carver’s body was found and had since been removed. It was taped off, with evidence markers along the basement floor tracking small smears of blood. The crawl space door—an entrance the size of a hobbit’s home—was wide open, and I pictured Ed’s foot poking through the frame instead of the CSU guy still in there collecting swabs.

Building block.

Where would the police go but straight to an obviously displayed body on the ground? They would secure the area, check for the murder weapon, tag any pieces of potential evidence. As Knox argued, a great amount of effort went into documenting a crime scene. A workman’s bench was straight ahead, tools lining the wall with the help of screws. Reams of paper and an unplugged, dusty computer from the 1990s sat beside it, along with cardboard boxes, some torn, others pristine. A strange sort of grit that seemed to haunt all basement floors covered the ground, but with all the recent comings and goings, the footprints meant little, even the ones preserved and tagged for evidence, as they only went to the workman’s bench and back.

Yet, this body was placed here for a very specific reason. Not in the middle of the room, but directly across from the stairs. Plain wooden shelves lined the walls, holding buckets and cleaning products, mops and brooms. By all accounts, a regular basement owned by a guy who was not so regular. Who could have decided to creep into a crawl space and die.

“Find anything?” Knox asked as he trudged down the stairs, but it wasn’t patronizing. He simply sounded exhausted.

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