“But someone that small wouldn’t have been able to pick Milton up and hang him on that meat hook. There were two people. No way they could have hid, not from Ty.”
“True,” Kelly said, his shoulders slumping.
Nick’s attention turned from the shiny appliances and bright white counters to the stone walls of the room. He peered upward, noticing the architecture for the first time, the way the room itself was laid out. “This was a chapel,” he said in surprise.
Kelly glanced up, pursing his lips. “So?”
“Well, a Scottish church built in the late nineteenth century, there would have been a pulpit on the right side of the chancel. Sometimes the pulpit had a space beneath it or behind it.”
“How do you know that?” Kelly asked.
“I think I saw it in one of those house makeover shows,” Nick admitted, shrugging. He retained all kinds of normally useless information from books, podcasts, and TV shows he kept on as background noise when he was working. He’d never lost a trivia game.
“Okay, which side was the right side?”
Nick pointed toward the wall that abutted the rest of the house. They scanned over the stone carvings, the same angels they’d seen on the fireplace in their bedroom. Nick didn’t see anything that looked like a hidden or raised space where the pulpit would have stood, but he saw something else he recognized.
“Ball and chain,” he said, smacking Kelly’s arm.
“You can’t call me that unless we’re married.”
Nick smirked and stepped closer to the wall, running his hand over an angel with a chain through its wing. “Ball and chain,” he repeated. “Like in our room.”
Kelly came closer and took the gun from the small of Nick’s back, stepping away and raising it, at the ready. Nick gave him a nod, then pulled the wing of the angel and flattened himself against the wall as something inside the stone clicked. It grated across the floor, making both Nick and Kelly cringe from the sound. Kelly kept the gun up, though, aimed at the darkness revealed inside the wall.
When it became obvious that it was empty, Kelly lowered the gun and they shared a glance. “Great,” Kelly huffed. “Our killers know the place.”
Chapter 9
Ty let his head hang, rubbing at his eyes. He looked up at a heavy sigh from Zane.
“More dead ends?”
“There’s just too much chaff, here,” Zane said in frustration. “Without something to go on—a number, a keyword—there’s no way to find anything.”
He gave up on the folders and instead pulled up Milton’s email. They were scanning through it when something heavy clanked behind them. Ty whirled, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. Zane stood as well, but neither of them was armed. They tensed, preparing for whatever came out of the wall.
The leather-covered panel beside the fireplace swung open, and Kelly stepped out, gun in hand, sweeping the room before he pointed it at Ty and Zane. He straightened quickly, lowering the gun.
“Hi,” he said.
Nick stepped out behind him a moment later, brushing cobwebs off his shoulders.
“What the hell?” Ty shouted. He looked around, searching for something, anything, to throw at them. “You scared the shit out of us, what if we’d been carrying? We could have shot you!”
“Yeah, but you didn’t,” Kelly said.
“How did you two end up in the walls again?” Zane asked, sounding like a weary mother scolding her children.
“Doc realized we should have seen the killer when we went down to the kitchen. So we started looking for places he could have been hidden.”
Kelly grinned widely. “We found another entrance instead.”
“How?” Ty demanded.
“The carvings of angels with a ball and chain,” Nick said. He glanced over the fireplace beside him, then pointed to one of the carvings. “They’re the way in.”
“I’ve seen about half a dozen of those in the house.” Zane sounded scandalized. “I even saw one on the exterior, at the corner wall near the patio.”
“Escape route,” Nick guessed.
“Wait, wait,” Ty finally said. “So you two found these passages by accident. How do our killers know they’re there?”
Nick shrugged and scratched idly at his forearm. “Family? Staff?”
“I wonder if they’d be in any public plans of the place,” Zane added. “A little research could have exposed them.”
“That’s unlikely,” Nick said. “These were basically a maze of panic rooms. They were built to protect the family from war, invasion, revolt. They would have been secret.”
“We’re going to have to sit the family down and see who knows about them,” Kelly surmised. He checked the gun and then stuffed it back into Nick’s jeans.
“What about the phone?” Ty asked.
“It kind of . . . blew up,” Kelly answered.
“But we did get photos of some things before it went. From what we can tell, he used texts to set up a meeting last night. He either had a signal booster or he was the one blocking everyone else’s signal. He was selling something to someone on the island.”
“That’s why he was all packed up,” Ty said. Kelly nodded. “He was getting his money and getting out. So how’d he end up dead instead?”
“Deal gone bad,” Nick said with another careless shrug. “Change of heart. Who knows?”
“No indication of what he was selling?” Zane asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
Zane nodded. “Let me get back to this, then.”
Nick and Kelly came closer as Zane sat once more, and they all watched the screen as Zane pulled up the list of emails again. Ty scanned the subjects and the occasional first line of each. They all seemed to be rather innocuous work-related missives, except for the few that looked like online shopping receipts.
Finally, Ty patted Zane’s shoulder and pointed at one of the emails. “See what that one says.”
“A shipping confirmation from Brookstone?”
Ty rolled his eyes. “Just . . . humor me.”
Zane shrugged and pulled up the email. But as they looked at the shipping confirmation, they realized it wasn’t actually confirming the purchase or shipping of any goods. It was merely a time, date, and address from which the package had supposedly been shipped.
“It’s a fake,” Kelly said in surprise.