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Felix looked back at me, eyes wide. I couldn’t let him out of my sight.
“I go where he goes. Nonnegotiable.”
Ortega held up his hands. “Okay, okay. We can talk when you’re done.”
We left Ortega and the other officer in the living room, scratching his head, probably wondering where to even start.
“Gotta warn you”—Officer Johnson shook her head—“the rest is just as bad. What do you want to see first?”
“Office.” I couldn’t help but notice the urgency in his tone.
“Okay.”
If the living room was carnage, Felix’s office had been decimated, the skeletons of a few wide-screen monitors all that was easily identifiable, their screens shattered and the interiors exposed. Colorful boxes had been ripped apart, the contents smashed and broken and littering the room.
What was left of a laptop was in the center of the disaster, the hard drive ripped from the back and the whole thing in pieces. The tower of another computer had been destroyed too, the hard drive ripped out like that one guy’s heart fromIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Felix started to sway, and I caught him before his knees gave out. “You’re okay.”
He bent his head to rest on my chest, and I felt tears soak my shirt. I wanted to pull him away, to get him out of there, to take him home, wrap him in bubble wrap, and keep him safe while I found the assholes who’d done this. But we had to know if anything had been taken.
“Felix, I know this is difficult, but can you tell if anything is missing?” Officer Johnson was still being kind, which I appreciated because between the obvious death threat and the wreckage that was everything Felix had owned, this had to be right up there with one of the worst days of his life.
Felix pulled away and wiped his eyes, and I dropped a kiss on the top of his head just for luck and because there wasn’t a damn thing else I could do at the moment.
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat and looked around again. “The hard drives are gone. Which means it wasn’t a hacker who did this. They would have known I wouldn’t have anything saved locally. The hard drives they have are useless.”
Officer Johnson made a note. “Anything else?”
The wall behind Felix’s computer station had been shelves full of action figures and collectibles. Now all the boxes were smashed, the inhabitants destroyed. He bent to move a few things aside, but Officer Johnson put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you touch anything until we fully process the scene. This is just a quick look around to see if anything obvious is missing.”
Felix nodded and stood. “Just the hard drives. From what I can tell.”
“Okay. You’ll get to give it a better look later. For now, I’m going to let Ortega know the hard drives are gone. Might give us a better idea on motive.” She gave Felix a sympathetic look he didn’t see because he was looking at the mess, then walked back into the hall.
The second she cleared the doorway, Felix’s head shot up, and he moved as quickly as he could toward the closet at the far end of the room. The door was open, but it didn’t look like there had been much inside.
He kicked a box on the floor in front of the door and swore. “This was a mint-in-box attack armor Batman. I really hate these fuckers. I paid three hundred and fifty bucks for him.”
I had no idea what that meant or why he’d spend so much on an action figure he wasn’t going to take out of the box, but it meant something to Felix, so it meant something to me.
When he reached the closet, he looked over his shoulder. “Let me know if you see her coming back.”
“Okay. What are you doing?”
“Gotta see if whoever trashed my place got the real drives.”
From where I was standing, I could see into the hall and into the closet, and I watched Felix kneel and pry loose a piece of the baseboard, then the flooring to reveal a safe with an electronic pad in the floor. He punched in seven digits, and the lock beeped.
“Excellent.” He scooped the contents out of the safe. “We should probably not tell Officer Johnson or Detective Ortega about this.”
I mimed zipping my lips as Felix closed the safe and put the floorboards back into place. He stood and tucked whatever he’d taken into his pants and hoodie pockets.
“Perfect timing.” The words were for Felix’s ears only as Officer Johnson’s face appeared around the doorframe.
“Did you find anything else missing?” She had held her pen poised over her notepad ready to add anything Felix had to report to her list.
Felix shook his head. “No, almost everything that was in here is accounted for, just ruined.”
