Page 8

Chapter Eight

He took her to Battista’s Hole in the Wall, an Italian restaurant that Delia and her family had often visited when she was growing up but which she hadn’t been to for a while. She was a little surprised that Caleb knew about the place, since it was kind of off the beaten track.

Then again, internet searches pretty much ensured that anyone could find even the most obscure dining spots.

Because it was still early — they arrived at Battista’s at about a quarter after six — they were given a nice booth off in a corner. If this had been a date, Delia would have been glad of the privacy.

As it was….

Caleb didn’t seem to notice anything fraught about the situation, though, and only asked if she’d been here before and, if so, whether she had any favorites.

“Their cannelloni is delicious,” she said. “And I love the eggplant parmesan. But really, you can’t go wrong with pretty much anything on the menu.”

“Plus, no worries about ordering the wrong wine,” he replied with a grin.

Not at Battista’s, where house wine was included as part of your dinner. You could always order a cocktail instead, but she was just fine with having some chianti with her meal. After that encounter with the angry ghost by the swimming pool, she knew she needed some kind of muscle relaxant.

“They kind of took the guesswork out of that part,” Delia said. Should she ask him about wine, and whether he knew much about it?

No, that seemed like too personal a question. So far, they were talking about surface-level stuff, and she wanted it to stay that way. Then she could tell herself this wasn’t a date, just a business dinner provided by a grateful client.

Even if Caleb Lowe was by far the best-looking client she’d ever had. When they’d walked into the restaurant, several heads had turned, and Delia was pretty sure those patrons hadn’t been looking at her.

Why would they, when her companion was a guy who looked like a male model?

Their waiter came by and took their orders — Caleb opted for steak, while Delia decided to indulge herself with the cannelloni, mostly because it had been so long since she’d had it that she thought she should revisit the dish to see if it was as good as she remembered.

Once their wine had been dropped off, Caleb said, “How soon do you think I can get started on the renovations?”

Another nice, safe topic. After all, it wasn’t as if she thought they should talk openly about what had just happened at the house on Pueblo Street.

Not that Delia was still entirely certain about what had gone down an hour ago. Yes, she was pretty sure the ghost had been sent off to the next plane…but she also couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the banishment had felt almost too easy, as if her own powers of persuasion weren’t the whole reason why the spirit had decided to move on.

“Probably around a month,” she replied. “Even without having to get financing, it still can take a few weeks to get the title transferred. Waiving the home inspection will speed things up a little, though, and I can make some inquiries with contractors I’ve worked with in the past to see if they’re available.”

This offer seemed to reassure Caleb, because he relaxed against the back of the booth, saying, “That would be a big help. I’ve heard horror stories about people who’ve hired the wrong general contractor and gotten into a world of hurt.”

“Yes, there are plenty of those to go around,” she said. “But I’ve got some good contacts, so we’ll make sure the team who comes in to reno the place won’t leave you stranded.”

They chatted then about the house flips she’d done with her mother, the information appearing to reassure him that much further — not only because it proved she had experience with this sort of project, but also because she knew the right places to go for materials, and who was reliable and who wasn’t.

As they talked, though, Delia couldn’t help wondering just what she was getting herself into. Wasn’t she supposed to walk away after the deal was done and let the buyer handle any renovations?

Most of the time, yes. But somehow she found herself all but promising that she’d hold Caleb Lowe’s hand through the whole process.

Suckered in by a pretty face, she supposed…even while she couldn’t help thinking it might be a little bit more than that.

However, the rest of their meal was uneventful enough, and once they were done, they got in their separate vehicles and headed for home. Yes, they’d meet on Monday so they could sign the offer, and Caleb could give Paige Loomis the bona fides from his bank to prove he had sufficient funds for the transaction, but at least Delia would have a little decompression time to try to analyze everything that had happened over the past few hours.

Her neighborhood was about twenty minutes from Battista’s, so she got to the house a little past seven-thirty. She set her purse down on the dining room table and headed over to the sideboard where the fish tank rested, then sprinkled some food into the water.

“Chow time,” she said cheerfully as the tetras and cichlids surged toward the surface to get their nibbles.

That duty handled, she went into the kitchen and poured herself some water from the pitcher in the fridge. Although she’d only had one glass of wine with dinner, she was thirstier than she’d expected and drank almost the whole tumbler, then refilled it.

Most of the time when she’d found a house for a client, she was relaxed and happy afterward — and not only because of the big commission coming her way. No, she was always glad to help people find their forever homes…and that included the ghosts she sent on to the next plane.

Something about this situation felt almost surreal, though, and she didn’t think it was just because of the way the ghost had attacked her.

Caleb’s hand on her arm, sending a shiver through her body that she didn’t think was only because she had been shocked and afraid.

Two violent ghosts in a row. Did that mean anything, or was she just having a run of bad luck?

She took the glass of water with her into the living room and sat down on the couch. The night was chilly enough that she could have turned on the fireplace, but for the moment, she was all right with merely resting on the leather sofa she’d bought a few months earlier and thinking over everything that had happened today.

Was it weird that a thirty-year-old man with no discernible career had this kind of cash to throw around?

In some towns, sure. In Las Vegas…not so much. He’d said he’d come into money but hadn’t elaborated, so it could have been anything from an inheritance to a few weeks of really good luck at the blackjack tables. While the casinos always came out on top, that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of people who won millions anyway.

Caleb Lowe could have just been one of those lucky ones.

Still….

Delia set her glass of water down on a coaster, then got up from the couch and headed into the extra bedroom she used as an office so she could fetch her laptop.

A couple of quick searches didn’t pull up anything about Caleb Lowe — or rather, she found plenty of individuals with that same name, but none of them were the man she knew. No social media, no newspaper mentions of winning big poker tournaments or anything like that.

So what? Plenty of people managed to keep a low profile and didn’t waste their time on Facebook or TikTok or whatever.

But her instincts kept telling her something else was going on here.

Luckily, she had someone who could help.

Prudence Nelson had been the bassist in Final Girl, and after the group broke up, the members still kept in touch. Sarah, the drummer, had moved to L.A., so Delia’s contact with her was mostly through social media, and Toni, the lead guitarist, had gotten married not too long after the band split and started a family…but Pru had decided to get her private investigator’s license and be her own boss.

Delia had only asked for Pru’s help a couple of times, mostly because she hadn’t wanted to seem if she was taking advantage of her friend’s unique access to information. Every once in a while, though, she came across a client who got her spider sense tingling, and that was when she felt as if she needed to reach out.

Right now, her spider-sense was going kind of crazy.

And she knew Pru would probably be home, just because she hated crowds and did all her socializing on the quieter nights of the week. No way would she be fighting the Friday night throngs when she could stay safely in her house.

Sure enough, she picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Delia. Who do you want me to snoop on now?”

Since that was just Pru being Pru, Delia didn’t take offense. “My new client. On the surface, he seems okay, but…”

“…but you’re getting the sense that something isn’t on the up and up,” Pru finished for her. “What’s his name?”

“Caleb Lowe,” Delia replied. “He’s around thirty or thirty-one, I think.”

“Does he live in Vegas?”

“Yes. Fairly new to town, though. He bought a house here about a month and a half ago, but I’m not sure whether the information would be on the county recorder’s site yet. They’re pretty backed up.”

“I should still be able to find something. Give me a sec.”

A faint clunk of a sound, probably Pru setting down her phone so she could use both hands to type on her keyboard. Delia had been over to her townhouse plenty of times, so she knew her friend used one of the spare bedrooms as an office and had a big iMac on one desk and a PC with multiple screens on the other. Maybe she had a laptop, too, but Delia had never seen it.

Only a couple of minutes passed before Pru picked up her phone again.

“His driver’s license was issued in late November. And yeah, found his house, too — 2642 Saguaro Court.”

So the assessor’s office had cleared some of their backlog. Well, home sales always slowed down around the holidays.

Something about the address seemed vaguely familiar to her, but she put that aside for now, figuring she could look it up herself once she was done talking to Prudence.

“This is weird, though,” Pru went on, and Delia found herself sitting up a little straighter on the sofa.

“What’s weird?”

“I can’t find a single thing about this guy before he got that driver’s license. I mean, he has a Social Security number and a credit score, but his credit report is awfully blank for someone who’s rattling around in the low 800s.”

That was strange. Delia knew that part of having a high credit score was having responsibly held credit for multiple years, and not just having credit card bills or car or house payments that had been made on time. It should have been impossible to have such a high score without any evidence of the credit that had been used to build it.

“Witness protection program?” she suggested, only half joking.

Pru chuckled. “That makes as much sense as anything else I can think of. I’ll poke around some more, though — this is just surface-level stuff.” She paused there before adding, “Did you sell him a house?”

“We’re in the process,” Delia said. “He’s paying cash…he told me he’d just come into some money.”

“Well, that’s easy to do in Vegas,” Pru replied. “But usually you don’t see people in the WPP having that kind of money to throw around.”

Delia didn’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but yes, that didn’t feel quite right. It seemed to her that people were generally given new identities and jobs and a place to live, not hundreds of thousands of dollars — maybe more — to invest in whatever income property caught their fancy.

“You think he might be on the run?” she asked, and now Prudence laughed outright.

“I suppose it might be a possibility,” she said. “But if he was really trying to hide out, he wouldn’t be buying property. Even when you pay cash, there’s still a paper trail.”

A very big one. Also, Caleb seemed fine with a remodel that would involve him interacting with a bunch of contractors…and sticking around for the six months or more that all the work would require.

That didn’t feel to her like someone trying to maintain a low profile.

“Anyway,” Pru added, “it’s not like you have to keep working with him after the sale is final, right?”

Well….

“I sort of volunteered to help him with finishing the reno,” Delia said. “It’s a massive project.”

“Since when are you a general contractor?”

“I’m not,” she replied. “Mostly what I’m going to do is set him up with the right people. But still, it’s not like this is going to be over once he signs the final paperwork.”

Although Delia couldn’t see her friend, she had to believe her expression turned sly.

“I suppose there are worse things in life than having to work with a hottie like this guy.”

No point in asking how Pru had known that, not when she’d pulled up Caleb’s driver’s license online and therefore knew what he looked like.

“He’s just a client,” Delia said, knowing she sounded a bit too severe.

“Uh-huh. When was the last time you went on a date?”

“Look who’s talking, Ms. ‘I’m sitting at home with my computers on a Friday night.’”

“Going out on the weekend is highly overrated,” Pru replied serenely. “Anyway, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about you.”

“And I’m telling you that Caleb Lowe is a client and nothing more.”

Was she protesting too much?

Maybe. If forced, she would admit that she found Caleb attractive. But there was also something about him that didn’t feel right, even if she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it might be.

“Well, he won’t be a client forever,” Pru said, her voice way too cheerful. “Then we’ll see how you really feel about Mr. Hottie McHotterson.”

“He could be gay,” Delia said.

Not that she got that vibe from him, despite the perfectly coiffed hair and the expensive watch.

“He could,” Pru agreed. “But you don’t think so.”

“No. Anyway, none of this is super-urgent. I just thought it would be a good idea to find out a little more about the guy in case there’s something weird here that I need to be careful about.”

Of course, if she was really trying to be careful, she would have turned down his offer of dinner…or maybe even told him that she didn’t think she could help him with his house-hunting quest and that he should find another agent.

But it wasn’t until they’d gone to the house on Pueblo Street together that she’d even started to sense there might be more about Caleb Lowe than met the eye, way too late to tell him he should work with a different realtor.

“I’ll keep poking at it,” Pru said. “If I find anything, I’ll let you know. Maybe we can get together for margaritas on Sunday night?”

Technically, Sunday was still the weekend, but most of the rabid partygoers wouldn’t be out and about when they had to get up and go to work the next day. And although Delia knew she’d be meeting with Caleb and Paige Loomis to sign the paperwork and get the ball rolling, that wouldn’t be until late morning at the earliest.

Plenty of time to recover from a pitcher of margaritas.

“Sounds good,” she replied. “Seven o’clock at Ghost Donkey?”

“It’s a date.”

They ended the call there, and Delia put her phone down on the coffee table. It still felt a little weird to reach out to Pru like this, even though she knew she was just keeping her bases covered. Ignoring her instincts was never a good idea, and besides, it wasn’t as if she was asking her friend to dig up every single piece of information she could find about Caleb Lowe, right down to the name of his pets when he was back in grade school. No, she just wanted some kind of an idea about where he’d come from…and the source of his money.

After all, the last thing she needed was to be working with someone who’d stolen from drug dealers or the mob or whatever.

Life was complicated enough without getting dragged into that kind of drama.

Having reassured herself that her motives were pure, Delia got up from the sofa and went down the hallway to her bedroom. An hour or so of watching TV in bed sounded like the best way to wind down what had turned out to be a much more hectic day than she’d planned.

And then she’d sleep and hope she wouldn’t dream about the nightmarish sensation of those two angry hands pushing against her back…or about the strength of Caleb Lowe’s fingers as they grabbed her by the arm and saved her from serious injury, if not worse.

The way his dark eyes had met hers across the table at Battista’s.

Damn it.

You will not get involved with a client, she told herself. You will not.

She just wished she believed herself.