Page 17 of Angel’s Doll

Doll thought he wouldn’t have changed the code because that was her job, but it was easier not to take any chance.

The main house is a lot of glass and pale stone, dark except for one security bulb. The garage stands separate, three doors wide, a straight run of wooden stairs climbing the side of it to a white door on a small landing.

She lived up those stairs from sixteen on. Old enough that the neighbors read it as independence instead of exile. I’d bet my ride Victor Hale never once climbed them to say goodnight.

Gloves again.

The lock is builder grade, keyed to match the big house, the kind a landlord puts on a unit he owns and enters when he pleases. It takes me eleven seconds.

Inside, I sweep the light once and stop.

I expected a girl’s apartment. This is a model unit. Beige walls, beige carpet, a gray couch squared to a glass table, a bed. Framed prints on the walls, and when I put the light on them I stop again, because they’re Halcyon renderings. The coastline project. Victor hung his own dead dream in her bedroom, four of them, matted and museum-glassed. For years, the only art this man gave her was advertising.

There’s a desk with a docking station and a coiled charger, home port for a company laptop. A window over it with no curtain, and I don’t need to cross the room to know what it looks at. The main house. Her light was visible from his kitchen. Nothing in this room got to be hers, not even the dark.

Somebody searched the place before me, and searched it angry. Every drawer of the dresser hangs open. The closet doors are wide, garment bags pulled down and gutted on the carpet, dresses I’d bet Victor chose slumped out of them like shed skins. The mattress sits crooked off the box spring where a hand shoved it and didn’t square it after.

Paper, phones, leverage. That’s what the search wanted. I get on my knees, put the light under the bed, and there they are against the far wall, shoved deep behind an empty suitcase. Two cardboard boxes, taped, the tape gone amber with the years. The search never touched them. Two taped boxes of a dead family’s mementos didn’t rate a second look from whoever tossed this room.

Victor never did learn what she actually owned.

I pull them out one at a time, flat drag, no jolt. They’re light. That’s the part that gets into me and sits down. Everything she has left of two parents, and I could carry both boxes under one arm. I don’t. I carry the first one in both hands down the stairs to Smoke, come back for the second, and that’s when the light catches a corner of a manila envelope taped flat to the underside of a bed slat.

An envelope. One word on it in fat kid’s marker, the letters careful and round. SLOANE.

A hiding place inside the hiding place.

I peel the tape gently. I don’t open it, because it has her name on it and mine’s not Victor.

It rides inside my cut, flat against my chest.

I’m on the landing with the box in my hands when the main house lights up.

“Company,” Smoke says from below, even and low. “Clock says walk.”

I walk. I’m halfway across the driveway when Victor Hale comes out his kitchen door in a bathrobe and driving moccasins, phone held high like a torch.

“I’m calling the police.” His voice is pitched for a boardroom, even on wet grass at five in the morning. “You people. Again. This is theft.”

I keep walking. I set the box on the truck bed gate, slide it in against its brother, and run the strap over both, snug. Precious cargo rides belted.

“Dial,” I say. “Explain to them what you traded to Ian Durey yesterday. I’ll wait.”

The phone comes down. Under the boardroom voice the man is gray, and it isn’t the hour. Up close he’s got a good barber and a weak chin.

“She sent you.” He tries a smile on. It doesn’t fit. “Sloane. Clever girl. You understand she does this, don’t you? Finds the biggest thing in the room and gets behind it. She’ll run your errands and learn your business, and when the weather changes she’ll trade you too. She’s mine, whatever she told you. I raised her. I fed her, dressed her, schooled her. Everything that girl has, I gave her.”

The want comes up my arms with a clear simple picture attached, and for one long breath I price it. His jaw. The wet brick. Nobody watching but Smoke.

She asked for boxes. Not blood.

I put the want down, safety on, still loaded.

“Everything she owns is in this truck,” I say. “Family helps family.”

He flinches at his own line coming back on him. It lands harder than my hands would have. The best part is he knows it, and I get to watch him know it.

“Time,” Smoke says.