Page 149 of You Betrayed Me (The Cahills 3)

He hadn’t been twenty minutes away.

Probably not even ten, because when James got home, he found Crocker’s ancient Ford pickup in the driveway and Rowdy himself seated in James’s recliner, an opened bottle of beer on the table beside him, reading glasses propped on the end of his nose while his fingers flew over the keyboard of James’s laptop. His brown hair was long and shaggy, falling over his forehead, his jaw covered in half a week’s growth of beard, and he wore camouflage pants and jacket over a black Megadeth T-shirt that had seen better days.

Ralph gave a quick bark at the sight of him.

“You’re okay,” Rowdy said to the dog without glancing up from the screen. He grabbed his bottle, took a long swallow of beer, and said, “Don’t you have anything to eat around here?”

“What the hell are you doing?” James asked.

“What’s it look like?” Rowdy peered over the tops of his reading glasses and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Uh . . . helping?”

“By breaking into my house and—”

“—and grabbing a brewskie while cleaning up your damned computer? Well, yeah, if you’d call what I did ‘breaking in.’” He frowned up at James and gave an exaggerated sigh. “A key on the sill over the back door? Really? Why not just post a neon sign with an arrow that says, ‘Look Here for Key’?”

That burned James; an intruder would have to walk through the woodshed or around to the very back to another door just to get to the locked door.

“You said you had information.”

“I do. And a helluva lot of it,” Crocker said, leaning forward and snapping the footrest of the recliner down as he sat upright. He set the computer on a side table. “Let’s go get you a beer, and we’ll discuss.” Grabbing his own bottle, he headed for the kitchen, his heavy work boots clomping down the hallway.

Just like he owned the place.

James followed. “Have you found Megan?”

“No.”

“What, then?” James tried and failed to keep the irritation out of his voice. He’d known Rowdy since junior high, expected some of his high jinks. It was all part of the Rowdy Crocker package. But it was still irritating as hell.

“You know that Charity Spritz was murdered?”

James nodded, still bothered. “Heard it on the news, just in the last hour.”

“You have any idea why she was in the Bay Area?” Rowdy was already at the fridge and pulling out two more bottles.

“I can guess.”

Rowdy glanced over his shoulder. “I can do better than that.” He found the opener he’d left on the counter and opened both new bottles, then finished his first bottle and left the empty in the sink.

“I’ve set up in the dining room. That’s where I saw your computer and thought I’d clean it up; you know, you should get a better security system for it. Any hack could get into your files.”

“Just like any hack could get into my house?”

Rowdy barked out a laugh. “If the shoe fits . . .”

They settled at the table, where Rowdy’s open laptop sat next to his iPad and two cell phones. “Rudimentary, I know. But it’s what we have to deal with.”

James could only imagine what Rowdy had in his own home, a cabin in the woods that was supposedly “off the grid” but was actually equipped with the latest in technological equipment, everything from cameras to recording equipment, computers with layers of security, and the kind of spying equipment a CIA operative would drool over—or at least that’s what Rowdy claimed.

Taking a chair next to him, James drank from his bottle as Crocker settled in, working the keyboard, and Ralph curled at his feet under the table.

“Okay, as I said, I haven’t located Megan. Not yet. But I will tell you this, the police have just found her car.”

“They have? How do you—?”

“Remember my ‘don’t ask’ policy.”

Crocker demanded ultimate secrecy.

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