Page 33 of Devil's Due

“Have you talked to your friend Detective Brown recently?”

“Welton? No. Why?”

“This guy’s carrying his card.”

“Probably filed a missing persons on his wife. Ten to one, he’s buried her in the backyard. Thinks he’s clever. Brown may be using us to keep him busy while he does a murder investigation. That would be his style.”

“I don’t appreciate having my time wasted.”

“Think of it as becoming a cog in the great wheel of justice.”

Lucia said something pithy in Spanish, which Was a waste, since Jazz hardly spoke a word. “So why would this guy engage with us, especially for money?”

“Makes him look honest when they dig his wife up from the melon patch.”

Lucia turned slightly and glanced over her shoulder. Davis was leaning back now, straightening his baseball cap with his right hand.

And something clicked. Something she was sure Welton Brown must have noticed, as well.

“Keep digging,” she told Jazz. “I don’t mean in the melon patch.”

“Funny.”

She ended the call and walked back, slid into the seat and gave him a cool, professional smile.

“How’d you get the bruise on your hand, Mr. Davis?” she asked. He looked down and instinctively turned it palm upward, hiding the damage. “It looks like you got it about the time your wife dropped out of sight.”

He didn’t glance up at her. She saw the tension in him and felt a sudden shift in the room, as if gravity had subtly altered.

“I got into a fight,” he answered.

“Let me put this to you as strongly as I can, Mr. Davis,” Lucia said. She deliberately dropped her voice, slowed it, held his eyes with her own. “If you hurt your wife and she is in hiding, I will not track her down for you. Do you understand me?”

“I got into a fight at work. Look, it didn’t have anything to do with Susannah, I’d never do anything to hurt her.”

She could feel something weighing her down now, a conviction that was drawn from a thousand hints. The way his eyes cut away at the last second. The bruises. The too-direct stare during a denial. Tiny facial tics as he tried to fake sincerity.

She cut him off. “Our rates are a thousand dollars a day.”

Davis sat back, mouth open, and then did that lightning-quick shift of his eyes again. “I see. So it’s all about the money, right?”

“We work for a living, yes.”

“If I give you the money, you’ll find Susannah?”

Not, she noticed, save her. Not find out what happened to her. Just, simply,find.

She smiled thinly and stood up, settling her purse over her shoulder. “Not for any amount, Mr. Davis,” she said. “Because I don’t believe you. Either you’ve killed your wife or you’d badly like to finish what you started. Either way, we’re not interested in helping you.”

She expected him to grab, because—if she was right—that would be his automatic response. And he did. His hand shot out and closed on her arm. Squeezed—not with crushing force, because he was aware of Omar, who was straightening up behind her, and the security guards behind the desk. But with enough strength to send a hot jolt of agony up through her shoulder.

She didn’t let it affect her cool, professional mask. “You’ll want to take your hand off of me now, Mr. Davis,” she said. “Before something unfortunate happens.”

“I said I need your help!” He didn’t sound helpless; he sounded angry. She understood that anger could be a correct response, especially when a loved one was missing. But his anger was off-key. Narcissistic.

“Yes,” she agreed, and pulled her arm free. “You did. Now I’d advise you to go look for an attorney.”

Seen up close, those eyes were probably his greatest asset. The kind of little-boy eyes that lulled women into trusting, into believing his apologies, into letting down their guard.

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