Catch Him(29)

“Did David leave?”

“Who the fuck is David?”

It was in that moment alarms sounded in her head. Without saying anything she moved past Sergeant Neil and the angry man back to the bedroom. It was empty, the bed was made.

She started opening the dresser drawers, and the smells that hit her from the clothes there were wrong. Not David’s smell. Instead, a hint of a cologne that was completely foreign to her.

“What in the fuck are you doing? Get out of my shit.”

It was the angry owner. He was behind her in the bedroom shouting, but she couldn’t listen to him. She needed to find David’s stuff. She needed David to come back and tell his friend that he had called the police for no reason. This needed to be some colossal joke. She moved back into the bathroom. At least there she would find her stuff. Her deodorant, her moisturizers.

Except it was gone. All of it. Even the toothbrushes. In fact there was an antiseptic smell that hit her nostrils, stinging them. As if the bathroom had recently been cleaned with bleach.

David was gone. Her stuff was gone. The bathroom had been cleaned. And there was an angry man following her around who claimed to own the house and not know who David was.

“This isn’t happening,” she muttered to herself. “Where’s my toothbrush?”

“Your toothbrush! What the fuck does that mean?” the angry man asked.

She stared at the empty bathroom counter. “It should be in the cup. Next to his. Together.”

“Are you fucking losing your shit? Clue in, little girl. Someone fucking broke into my house, tripped the alarm and got away with it. Now I have an empty safe and no fucking answers.”

“Mr. Huntley.” Sinead’s sergeant joined them in the bedroom. “Understood. As I mentioned, we’ll get to the bottom of the security system. In the meantime we’re going to need your cooperation. We’ll call in the crime scene team and they’ll run for prints…”

“Fuck that. This was obviously a professional job. Do you seriously think the Mill Valley Police Department is going to find this guy? Find my stuff?”

Sergeant Neil’s voice tightened after that. “You called us, Mr. Huntley.”

“No, I didn’t,” he snapped back.

“Sir, that’s true.” Ted came into the bedroom. “A noise complaint was made by one of the neighbors. The alarm from the security system had been triggered. It had been going off for hours.”

“I get off a six-hour flight and I come back to this. Cops in my house, my safe blown, and you tell me someone from your department had the security system turned off three weeks ago.”

Because he knew all the answers, Sinead thought, but she couldn’t form words yet. Not while her brain was still trying to understand what the empty bathroom counter meant. What the homeowner not knowing who David was, meant.

It was bad. She could process that much. It was very bad. Suddenly she felt like she was falling into that abyss she’d thought about before. Only as the darkness started to overcome her, she was quickly realizing there was no bottom to this hole. She was just going to keep falling. And falling. And falling.

“We contacted the security company,” Ted informed the sergeant. “Their system wasn’t registering that the alarm had gone off today. However, they did note it had been tripped a few weeks ago. An officer responded to the call, but ultimately the security questions were answered correctly and it was turned off. We’re waiting on the badge number of the officer who answered the call.”

Sinead didn’t think before she said what was true. “It was me.”

The two officers and the man called Huntley turned to her.

“His name was David Whitmore. He’s a friend of yours. You were swapping houses while you were on vacation. He had a key…”

“I don’t know a David fucking Whitmore.”

Sinead looked at the man. She thought about the wedding pictures David had shown her. This was the man in those pictures. And David had been able to answer all the security questions. That didn’t make sense unless David knew him.

She was about to explain the pictures when Sergeant Neil stepped in front of her. “Officer O’Hara, please report back to the station. You’ll give a full report there. Mr. Huntley, how would you like us to proceed?”

He looked disgusted. Beyond disgusted. There was real anger in the man’s eyes. Sinead’s instinct was that if the other two officers weren’t in the room with her, he might have physically assaulted her.

“I want you to fire her fucking ass.”

Sinead blinked again.

“Officer O’Hara’s role in this matter will be investigated. In the meantime should we start taking prints?” Sergeant Neil asked him.