Her satchel was on the floor in front of Hector. She fumbled briefly with the straps, reached inside and found her phone. Fletcher was still on her list of contacts under Personal.
“Should have moved him to Business,” she told Hector.
She punched in the number. Four rings later she was dumped into voice mail. She did not leave a message.
“To be fair, I suppose it’s possible that he’s not actually having sex with a new girlfriend,” she said. “Highly unlikely but possible. Maybe he just fell asleep in front of the TV. Guys do that.”
Hector looked at her, patient as always. She did not do a lot of stakeout work. With the advent of the Internet it had become increasingly unnecessary. If you wanted to verify that a person who was filing a medical disability claim with his insurance company didn’t really have to wear a neck brace all you had to do was check out his home page at one of the social networking sites or find his blog. Invariably the claimant had posted numerous photos of his recent skiing vacation or hiking trip together with a chatty little comment about how much fun he’d had and how he planned to spend the money he would get when the insurance company settled his claim. And she never did divorce work, period. It was one of her rules.
She almost never took cases like the one she was on tonight, either. They were always messy. But she’d made the fatal mistake of letting herself feel sorry for Fletcher.
“I admit I have a soft spot for him,” she said to Hector. “That’s because for a few brief, shining moments I was convinced that he was Mr. Perfect. I was actually thinking of giving up celibacy for him. It’s not his fault it turned out that I was wrong.”
She sat quietly for a few more minutes, contemplating the almost-dark house. Invisible energy feathered her senses.
“There’s something screwy with this picture, Hector.”
Hector yawned.
She tried Fletcher’s number again. Still no answer. She closed the phone.
“Okay, that’s it, we’re going to wake him up,” she announced. “I don’t care if he is having great sex. It will serve him right if we interrupt his postcoital glow.”
She plucked the leash from the dashboard and attached it to Hector’s collar. They got out of the car. She took a minute to transfer the tiny camera and her phone to the pocket of her trench coat.
She stashed the satchel in the trunk and picked up the end of Hector’s leash. Together they crossed the street in the middle of the block and went up the front walk to the door of Fletcher’s house.
The flickering glow of the television set showed at the cracks in the curtains. The bluish light appeared eerie for some inexplicable reason. Once again, she felt the hair stir on the nape of her neck. Instinctively she ramped up her senses a little and looked around. There were several layers of psi prints on the steps and the doorknob but none of the dreamlight looked fresh or dangerous. Most of the residue had been left by Fletcher.
“Nerves,” she said to Hector. “Probably shouldn’t have had that second cup of coffee.”
She leaned on the bell for a while and listened to the muffled sound of the chimes inside. There was no response. Her skin prickled. She looked down at Hector. He appeared monumentally unconcerned.
“Well, you never did like Fletcher,” she said. “If he actually was in trouble in there you’d probably just lift a leg and pee on him.”
She tried the door, expecting to find it locked. It was. Fletcher had become very security conscious recently.
She glanced back down at Hector. He was idly sniffing the ceramic planter on the front step. As she watched, he marked the territory, but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Nothing about Fletcher interested Hector.
“But he’s a client now,” she explained. “We can’t just ignore this.”
Hector looked bored.
She dug into another pocket of her trench coat and found the high-tech tool that her cousin Abe had given her as a birthday gift. “Any respectable PI should be able to pick a lock,” he’d explained. “This little gadget will open just about any standard- issue door lock. Think of me whenever you use it.”
She thought about Abe now. He had a talent for locks and related technology. But, then, his branch of the family tree boasted a number of what Arcane liked to call crypto-talents. In previous eras they had been known by less politically correct labels: cat burglars and safe-crackers. Cryptos came in many iterations and permutations, but they all had one thing in common: they had a preternatural ability to get through locked doors, including the cyberspace variety. Like her, Abe made his living in a fairly respectable fashion: he designed computer security systems.
She pushed the door open, cranked her senses a little higher, and looked into the darkened foyer. She could hear the television clearly now. The fast, sparkling dialogue of a vintage film blared. Fletcher was not a fan of old movies. That meant he probably was asleep on the sofa.
“Fletcher?”
There was no response.
Another wave of jitters swept through her, but she could see no reason for it. Not only was Hector quiet, but her other vision revealed nothing alarming. There were no dangerously hot footsteps on the foyer tiles.
Hector gazed intently into the small, shadowed entry. He was showing some interest now, but no more than he would have upon entering any new environment, she decided. Of course, given his profound disdain for Fletcher, it would not bother him at all if Fletcher was lying dead or ill on the floor of the living room.
Dead or ill. Her stomach knotted with acute anxiety.
Fletcher was in his early thirties. He worked out three times a week, and he watched his diet. But it was not unheard of for an otherwise healthy man to collapse from an undiagnosed heart condition or an aneurism.
Another wave of unease swept over her. She moved into the foyer and groped for the wall switch. The dim light from the sconce illuminated the entry and a small portion of the living room. She could make out a man’s legs on the floor. The rest of the figure was concealed by the sofa.
“Oh, my God, Fletcher.”
She dropped the leash and rushed forward, simultaneously plunging her hand into her pocket for her cell phone.
She fell to her knees beside Fletcher’s too-still form and fumbled for a pulse. Relief surged through her when she found the slow but steady beat at his throat. The hall light and the glow of the television revealed no signs of blood. She wondered if he’d had a seizure of some kind. She punched in the emergency number on her phone.