Page 39 of Immortal Unveiled

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Kim brought the car to a stop in front of the office of the storage facility, her heart still beating like a jackhammer, and hopped out of it. She walked around it and marched into the office. Behind the counter, the kid from the previous night typed something on the computer and looked up.

“Mr. Songhurst left me a message to come here right away,” Kim said before Brian had a chance to greet her.

“Oh, yeah, you’re Miss Britton, right? From yesterday.” He grinned. “I remember you.”

She nodded impatiently. “Mr. Songhurst said there was a break-in?”

“He had to leave, but he said to show you.” Brian walked out from behind the counter. “He discovered it when he made his rounds this morning. I told him it couldn’t have happened yesterday; otherwise, you would have said something, right? I mean, you were there with your friend, and I was still in the office for a half hour. You would have told me if you’d found the unit broken into, right?”

Walking outside ahead of Brian, Kim said, “It was definitely fine yesterday when we left. And we locked the unit and put the key into the lockbox like you told us to.”

“Yeah, I pulled the key out this morning,” Brian confirmed. “I told Mr. Songhurst that it’s not my job to check the units before I leave for the night. What are security cameras for, right?”

Kim sighed. The kid’s incessant chatting was starting to get on her nerves. All she wanted was to get to the unit to see what had gone missing.

“Of course, the cameras,” Brian said and pointed to the one near the office, “are just for show. They don’t connect to anything. What a cheapo!”

Kim shot him a stunned look.

Brian slapped a hand over his mouth. “Oh, you’re not gonna tell him what I said, are you? I mean, nobody is supposed to know that the cameras aren’t hooked up. Oh shit, I’m gonna lose my job over this.”

“No, you won’t. I’m not gonna say anything to your manager.”

Brian blew out a breath. “Phew! Thanks!”

Halfway down the path, Kim could already see the dented roll-up gate of her mother’s storage unit. Somebody had used a crowbar or something similar to break the lock and damaged the door in the process, preventing it from closing or opening fully.

She had to duck slightly to step into the unit. When she reached for the light switch and flipped it, nothing happened.

“Yeah, light’s burned out too,” Brian, who’d slipped inside next to her, said. “I brought a flashlight.” He switched on the flashlight and handed it to her.

Everything had been overturned and rifled through. Her grandmother’s mirror was shattered, the upholstery of the rocking chair torn open, the stuffing removed. The boxes from the shelves had been tossed to the floor, its contents now strewn about haphazardly.

“Somebody was definitely looking for something,” Brian commented. “I saw this old movie once.” He pointed to the rocking chair. “About twelve chairs where one of them had a treasure inside, and some guy was looking for it, but the chairs had all been auctioned off to different people. Yeah…”

“Mmm.” Kim dropped her head. Yeah, somebody had been looking for something. “Why now?”

“What?”

But she didn’t reply to Brian’s question. It wasn’t meant for him. Why had somebody broken into the unit the night after she and Manus had visited it? Why now? Why not right after her mother’s death?

She knew the answer to it: because nobody had known about the unit before. Kim had only found out yesterday. And the only other person who’d found out about it at the same time was Manus. Manus, the private investigator who had promised to help her.

But what if he wasn’t helping her? What if he wasn’t who he said he was? What if he’d come back after leaving her bed in the middle of the night, so he could search the unit thoroughly for whatever he was looking for? Oh God, she’d slept with him, had let him reel her in with his sob story, a story that was surely a lie. How stupid she’d been! How gullible!

She couldn’t ignore any longer what was staring her right in the face.

Manus had just become the main suspect in her mother’s murder.

“What do you want us to do with the unit?” she suddenly heard Brian ask next to her.

She turned to him. “I don’t know yet.”

“Mr. Songhurst said you’ll need to vacate it soon.” He pointed to the broken items. “You can use the big dumpster out back if you want to toss something.”

“I’ll decide on it later. I’ll call Mr. Songhurst once I’ve arranged everything.” Her mother’s old things could wait. Right now, she had something more important to do.