Page 58 of Skin Game

“Elton,” Casey said with a sigh. No, he wasn’t.

“Five minutes. I’ll turn the stove off and get my boots on.”

While he waited for Elton and law enforcement to show up, Casey walked the perimeter of the property but found no sign of Gabe. This was good, he told himself. He was tempted to investigate further, but it was dark, and he was more likely todestroy any evidence left behind than make a miraculous discovery.

Elton and one of the new-hire deputies arrived at virtually the same time. Casey was thankful the deputy had skipped the siren and lights. After all, there was no one in the house to scare away, and the neighbors would find out soon enough.

Rolling down his window, Elton leaned out and asked, “Have you tried calling him again?”

Keeping out of the deputy’s way, Casey walked over to Elton’s truck. “Only about twenty times. Wherever he is, he’s not answering. Or he doesn’t have control of his phone. I found his keys on the ground.” Casey held them out as proof.

Elton’s caterpillar-like eyebrows drew together. “I don’t like this.”

“You don’t like it?” Casey asked. “I hate it.”

“Mr. Lundin?”

Casey turned around as the young deputy approached him.

“Acting Chief Deputy Eagan is on her way. Um, do you think you can take a look and see if anything is missing before she arrives? Might help us get started on sorting out what happened here.”

Casey glanced at Elton. “Wait here. I’ve already been inside once.”

“Use that fancy phone of yours to take a video so I can see too.”

Gabe was right, they’d created a monster. But taking a video was also a great idea.

“Will do.”

Casey cringed again at the wreckage when he and the deputy re-entered the house. Pressing Record, he held his phone out to document the damage; when they found Gabe, he might find it useful. He refused to entertain the idea they might not find him.

The intruders had destroyed Gabe’s secondhand Ikea couch, the cushion stuffing spread across the room. His small butgrowing collection of paperback mysteries and thrillers had been swept off the shelves and tossed to the carpet. Some of them had been ripped apart and stomped on, their pages violated. Had the intruders been looking for something or just trying to cause as much damage as they could?

“Gabe isn’t going to be happy about this.”

When they found him. When they found himalive. The alive part was very important.

The bedroom had endured the same sort of willful destruction. Drawers had been ripped out of the chest and the contents thrown across the floor. Casey couldn’t tell if anything had been taken or not; it was all a jumble of socks and underwear and pillow innards.

Stopping the recording, Casey returned to the living room with the deputy, whose name he really should have tried to learn, but he couldn’t be bothered at the moment. He let his gaze drift slowly around the room, taking in the minute details now that he wasn’t looking for intruders.

“Shit.”

He knewexactlywhat was missing.

The boxes they’d picked up on Tuesday were gone. Nowhere in sight. All six of them.

“Some moving-type boxes are missing,” Casey told the deputy. “They were right here.” He pointed at the empty spot next to Alfred.

“Gabe brought them here the other day. They were his mother’s,” Casey added, although he doubted the deputy cared much about who the boxes had originally belonged to. Gabe would probably be upset that the intruders hadn’t taken Alfred too.

Through the window that wasn’t obscured by a pizza box, Casey saw that another police cruiser had arrived, Deputy Eagan behind the wheel. The chief deputy got out and approached the front of the house, a flashlight clutched in one hand. Caseyappreciated how she scanned the area, but he could have told her she wouldn’t find anything.

He stepped through the propped-open door and met her outside.

“Karne going missing is very not good.” She shot Casey a gimlet stare. “We have an ID on the victim from the beach.”

“Oh? What is her name?”