Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

I opened the drawers of the bureau and nightstand that matched the bed. The nightstand was empty; the bureau held a few changes of clothes. T-shirts, jeans, a couple of hoodies.

Had this been the freedom Caleb had wanted? The freedom to not care about material possessions? Had he found peace in this desolate neighborhood? And if so, why would anyone have bothered to kill him?

The bedroom’s second door led into the kitchen, completing the circle through the interior. I walked through, found a small storage closet behind it that led to an exterior door. There was a mop, a bucket, and a worn pair of snow boots.

I felt Ethan come in behind me.

“Some clothes in the bedroom,” I said, pulling open the door of a metal cabinet, finding it empty. “That’s about all I’ve found. What about you?”

In the answering silence, I turned around. Ethan had walked to the refrigerator, opened it.

It was absolutely stocked.

There were bundles of produce—carrots with the green tops still attached, glossy eggplants, heads of cabbage—besides piles of steaks and dozens of brown eggs in a carefully placed pyramid. There were blocks of cheese, a dozen bottles of water, a plate of what looked like profiteroles, and several bundles wrapped in aluminum foil. The scent of spiced meat wafted out. I’d have bet good money they’d been prepared by Berna, Gabe’s strong-willed and culinarily skilled relative.

“No processed foods in this man’s diet,” Ethan said.

“And a big appetite. Of course, he’s a shifter.” That meant he was an animal of some type, although we wouldn’t ask Gabriel. The animal variety was considered very personal among Pack members.

“So we have an empty house and a stocked fridge,” I said. “By all accounts, Caleb Franklin slept here, ate here, stored the barest necessities here. Didn’t seem to do much else here.”

“No,” he didn’t,” Ethan agreed.

I looked around. “Whatever got him killed, there’s no evidence of it inside.” I glanced back at Ethan. “You want to finish up in here? I want to take a walk around the yard.”

Ethan nodded. “I’ll take a pass. Be careful out there.”

I promised I would and walked back to the front door, then outside. I needed to think like him. He might not have had a Pack, but as the stocked fridge showed, he was still a shifter.

I hopped down the steps, walked around the house. There were shrubs in front of the foundation every few feet, and a few trees just beginning to bud around the edge of the narrow lot.

The backyard was small, bordered by the back neighbor’s chain-link fence, which was covered in brambles and vines. There were a couple more trees back here, as well as a cracked and peeling redwood picnic table. A swing hung from one tree, a simple wooden plank attached to an overhanging branch by a thick, braided rope, probably hung for the same child who’d once owned the white bedroom furniture.

I tugged on the ropes to check they were solid, knocked on the wooden seat. I gingerly sat down, pushed back in the soft earth with the toes of my boots. The swing moved back, then forward, then back again, the rope creaking with effort. I stretched out my arms and leaned back to look up at the tree limbs overhead.

The child would have played out here, the trees creating the walls of the castle only she could save. That was how I would have played, anyway. Our backyard had been empty of fun—no trees, no swings, no sandbox. Just the lawn my father paid someone to trim into a perfectly manicured rectangle.

I sat up again, head buzzing from the motion. That was when I saw it—a square piece of plywood stuck over the painted brick foundation. The plywood was new, still showing its price in bright orange paint.

Maybe our shifter had a den, I thought. I walked toward it, knelt in front in the soft, new grass. There were no screws or locks; it had merely been set in place, propped up by a concrete block. I moved away the block, then the plywood, and peered into the crawl space. The ground beneath the house was packed dirt and dotted here and there with rocks and broken bricks. It smelled of wet earth.

The plywood had been larger than the void it covered, which was only about sixteen inches square. Big enough for pests to crawl into, but Caleb Franklin didn’t strike me as the type to care overmuch about something nesting down there.

The hole wouldn’t have been big enough for him to slip through. But maybe it was big enough for him to reach into.

With a silent prayer to whatever gods would keep the rest of the house’s spiders out of my hair, I braced my hands on the foundation and poked my head inside.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to darkness-inside-darkness—and just a moment more to spy the metal cashbox just inside the foundation.

If I’d been a child in my imaginary castle, this would have been my long-lost treasure.

I reached inside, fingers grasping at something stringy before my fingertips landed on cold metal. I found the handle and pulled it out just as footsteps echoed behind me.

I stood, dusted the dirt from my knees with one hand, and walked to the picnic table. I set the cashbox on top of it.

“And what do we have here?”

“There was new plywood,” I said. “I was hoping I’d find a hidey-hole, and it looks like I did. Or found something, anyway.”