Page 43 of Property of Crypt Keeper

“Jesus, when was the last time you slept?”

Hack barely looked up when I came in, and he didn’t reply to my attempt at a joke. Which meant he was deep in something.

“That bad?” I asked.

His fingers kept moving across the keyboard. Suddenly, he stopped, dragged his hands down his face, and met my gaze. “You ever get the feeling the universe is telling you to mind your own damn business?” he muttered.

“Constantly.” I shrugged. “I usually ignore it."

“Yeah,” he muttered darkly. “Might wanna start listening.”

Glancing into the hall, I shut the door behind me. The clubhouse hummed with distant noise—music, laughter, pool balls clinking—but in here, it felt isolated.

Heavy.

Hack finally turned in his chair.

“I started with the aunt,” he began. Grounded. Simple. That was how this often started. Just another background check. Maybe another fake identity, or maybe another ghost. One never knew.

“What’d you find?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

“Nothing.”

That wasn’t unusual. Most people had no record. They were law-abiding citizens and stayed off the radar of the darker side of society.

“What kind of nothing?”

“I mean nothing. The kind of nothing meaning this woman appeared out of thin air,” Hack replied. He tapped a key, and one of the monitors shifted to a driver’s license photo of the woman who’d dropped Zara at the clubhouse.

“Okay? Gray hair. Nervous eyes. Forgettable. Purposefully so?” I guessed. “But she has a driver’s license that passed our initial scans. So where did that come from? Because if it’s a fake, it’s incredibly good.”

“This identity was definitely fabricated,” Hack explained. “Social security number belongs to a dead woman in Alabama. Driver’s license was issued three years ago through an actual Louisiana driver’s license office that’s now closed, from an employee who never continued on at another facility. Or any other business. They died in a car accident shortly after this was issued. Oh, and the address on the driver’s license is a shell office that doesn’t technically exist anymore.”

My jaw tightened.

“Employment records? Surely she was earning money somewhere for her to pay rent.”

“That’s where things got weird.” Hack leaned back. “She had a listed employer. Small accounting firm outside Baton Rouge.” He snorted softly. “Only it’s not an accounting firm.”

“What is it?” I crossed my arms, bracing myself for whatever bullshit Hack had uncovered.

“Another shell.”

Of course it was.

“But they had a real phone number,” he continued. “So I called it.”

I frowned slightly. “You called them?”

Hack grinned without humor. “I figured what the fuck? It was worth a shot. Pretended I was from a hospital.”

That got my attention. “What’d you say?”

“Told them I was trying to reach her about her cancer results.”

My brows raised as I stared at him.

Hack shrugged. “People panic when you say cancer.”