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She didn’t recognize the number, although it had a local 702 area code.

I heard from a friend that you provide a particular kind of help. Do you have any time today to look at a property for me? It’s not too far from downtown.

Nothing else in the message…not that she needed too much more clarification. “Particular help” had to be code for her ghost-clearing sideline, although things had been pretty quiet on that front for the past month or so. However, since she knew that part of her business had its ups and downs just like everything else, she hadn’t been too worried about the current lull.

Especially since the last time someone had hired her for that sort of work, he’d turned out to be a demon in disguise.

She wanted to think the odds of that happening again were pretty low, but she couldn’t know for sure. And while part of her wanted to tell the unknown texter that she was busy today, she also knew she couldn’t turn down someone in need.

So she picked up her phone.

I have some time this afternoon. Would two o’clock work for you? I’ll need the address.

Two o’clock is fine. The house is at 1412 Desert Wind Drive.

Got it. I’ll see you there.

Thank you.

That was the end of the exchange. Delia gazed down at her phone’s screen for a moment and wanted to shake her head. A lot of people would have suspected the whole thing was a setup for human trafficking or something equally vile, but she knew that people who reached out to her for ghost-whispering help were often on edge and nervous, and tended to forget important pieces of information.

Like their name, for example.

Anyway, she had a police whistle on her keychain and kept a canister of pepper spray in her purse, so she wasn’t too worried. Also, she and Pru had taken a krav maga class at the local community college a few years ago, and while Delia knew she’d forgotten a chunk of what she’d learned, she still thought she had enough moves in her arsenal to fend off any would-be rapists or traffickers.

She wasn’t worried about the ghost itself. Ghosts — and now demons — were the reason why she always carried holy water with her.

However, those precautions didn’t mean she wouldn’t also take out some cheap insurance, just to be safe. She went back to the text thread with Pru.

Thanks for the info on Aaron. BTW, I’m doing the ghost thing this afternoon at two. 1412 Desert Wind Dr. If I don’t check in with you by three, can you follow up?

Apparently, Pru was already awake, because her text came back right away.

No problem. It’s been a while, right?

A little over a month. But sometimes it just works out that way.

Which was fine by her. Yes, once she’d figured out her unusual talent and what exactly she could do with it, she’d tried to make herself available to the people who needed their homes — prospective or otherwise — emptied of any spirits, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be freeing houses from their resident ghosts day in and day out. Even when a ghost turned out to be mostly benign…unlike the serial killer who’d haunted Caleb’s house…working with them could still be a taxing process.

A nice, long break was just fine by her.

That break appeared to be over, though.

She headed into her office and woke up her iMac, then checked the address against the MLS database. Yes, the property was currently in escrow and was repped by an agent Delia had worked with in the past, Jackie Villanueva. Since Jackie knew exactly what Delia could do with haunted properties, it seemed odd that she hadn’t sent her client over much earlier in the process, before any money had exchanged hands.

Then again, she had no real idea what might have happened. For all she knew, the spirit had been quiescent as long as it knew the house was standing empty, but now that it had realized someone would be moving in soon, it had decided to make its presence known.

Whatever was going on, she supposed she’d find out soon enough.

So far, Caleb’s internet sleuthing had turned up a big, fat zero. No, he hadn’t thought that any of the people he was investigating would have a flashing red “demon” on their driver’s licenses or something, but he’d at least hoped to find something slightly anomalous.

But he hadn’t seen anything to make him think that Paul Reeves or Ty Carter were anything out of the ordinary. Maybe if he had access to the sorts of databases that Prudence did, he’d be able to locate something incriminating. Right now, though, those men looked like a couple of upstanding citizens and nothing more. Paul Reeves owned a carpet cleaning business based in Summerlin, and Ty Carter was a tennis pro at DragonRidge Country Club, a very high-end establishment.

No doubt all those bored, Botoxed rich men’s wives were lined up to get lessons from the guy. Caleb still didn’t like the vibe he’d gotten from the man — or at least, it had managed to somehow disturb him without actually feeling sinister — but bad vibes weren’t a crime, or even an indication that someone might be a demon.

That didn’t mean he was about to give up. After all, he knew better than anyone else that demons were awfully good at coming up with fake mortal identities when necessary, so this surface-level stuff wasn’t anything close to conclusive.

Except that there wasn’t much else he could do, not without outside help. He supposed he could have looked up Prudence Nelson online — the woman was a P.I., after all, and must have some kind of website — but for some reason, that felt like horning in on Delia’s territory. He thought it better to talk to her first before he hired Pru to investigate those two men.