“You think he was selling the defense contract technology Stanton’s company is developing?”
Nick nodded grimly. “Yeah, I do. Odds are he either tried to cheat them, or he changed his mind, so his buyer killed him. I’m guessing they thought he had the information on him, but he didn’t. That’s why they came back for his body.”
“So, what are we talking here? A flash drive? A memory chip? It has to be something small enough to swallow if that’s where they were looking. And his room hadn’t been tossed.”
Nick shrugged. “I’m not a techie. We’ll take it to Garrett, see if he knows. See what they’ve got off that laptop.”
Kelly nodded and stuffed his phone back into his pocket. They left the mess they’d made. There was no one to complain about it now anyway.
Kelly glanced at the freezer as they headed for the steps. “Hey, maybe one of them will donate a liver to your dad.”
Nick looked over his shoulder at Kelly, his eyes wide.
“I’m just saying. Three perfectly good livers sitting in there,” Kelly said, completely deadpan. “Nobody’s using them. I’ll go get one for you.”
Nick gaped at him. “How the hell did you ever pass your psych evals?”
“I cheated off your papers.”
Nick rolled his eyes and started up the stairs.
“The Navy gives bubble tests. When in doubt, go with C.”
“Kelly.”
“Get it? Navy? The sea?”
“Kels, shut up.”
“Oh, come on! You love puns.”
Nick laughed, unable to stop himself.
Kelly plucked at his shirt as they headed up the steps, stopping him. Nick looked back at him, one eyebrow raised, expecting another joke. But Kelly was turning to head into the kitchen again. “You know, the cook hadn’t been dead but for a few minutes when we came down here yesterday.”
Nick nodded, his eyes darting toward the bottom of the steps. It dawned on him where Kelly was going with that. “How’d the killer get out?”
“Yeah.” Kelly glanced up at Nick. “The steps are the only way in or out, we would have seen them leaving from the hall upstairs. Or hell, maybe even passed them on the steps.”
Nick waited a breath, then stepped to stand beside Kelly.
“You think it’s possible they hid well enough for Ty to miss them?”
“No,” Nick said immediately. They descended the stairs again, standing at the bottom to look around the massive kitchen. It was mostly open. The cabinets had glass faces, and the counters and islands all had open shelves beneath. “There’s nowhere to hide down here, not unless you get into one of the ovens.”
Kelly grunted. “And there was definitely no one in the freezer; I went in there.”
Nick paced a few steps into the kitchen, craning his head to seek out impromptu hiding spots. “I mean, you could do it, I guess. There’s . . . I don’t know. You’d have to be really slick.”
“Or small,” Kelly added. “I bet a woman could have hid down here.”
“But someone that small wouldn’t have been able to pick Milton up and hang him on that meat hook. There were two people. No way they could have hid, not from Ty.”
“True,” Kelly said, his shoulders slumping.
Nick’s attention turned from the shiny appliances and bright white counters to the stone walls of the room. He peered upward, noticing the architecture for the first time, the way the room itself was laid out. “This was a chapel,” he said in surprise.
Kelly glanced up, pursing his lips. “So?”
“Well, a Scottish church built in the late nineteenth century, there would have been a pulpit on the right side of the chancel. Sometimes the pulpit had a space beneath it or behind it.”
“How do you know that?” Kelly asked.
“I think I saw it in one of those house makeover shows,” Nick admitted, shrugging. He retained all kinds of normally useless information from books, podcasts, and TV shows he kept on as background noise when he was working. He’d never lost a trivia game.
“Okay, which side was the right side?”
Nick pointed toward the wall that abutted the rest of the house. They scanned over the stone carvings, the same angels they’d seen on the fireplace in their bedroom. Nick didn’t see anything that looked like a hidden or raised space where the pulpit would have stood, but he saw something else he recognized.
“Ball and chain,” he said, smacking Kelly’s arm.
“You can’t call me that unless we’re married.”
Nick smirked and stepped closer to the wall, running his hand over an angel with a chain through its wing. “Ball and chain,” he repeated. “Like in our room.”