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They reached the overgrown yard without further incident—barely. Jem grinned out at them from one of the windows, and he opened the back door as they came up the steps.
“Rookie mistake,” North said as he stalked past Jem. “You’re leaving fingerprints everywhere.”
“Oh dang,” Jem said, scratching his beard. “I knew I forgot something. In case I ever come back and murder someone here, I’ll do some pre-cleaning first. Hey, Tean, did you know fences could go horizontal like that?”
The house was empty, and it had a musty, closed-up smell laced with a hint of animal urine. Empty houses were always a bit unsettling for North: the bare rooms, the undressed windows, the hint of past lives that hadn’t been completely scrubbed away. He liked this one even less, with its big picture window looking out onto the dead-end street.
Tean sat on the floor to the side of the picture window, where he could look out at the street with relatively little risk of being seen himself. When North looked at him, Tean pointed to the house directly across the street.
The house was dark, but North could make out the details in the wash of the streetlights. It was a story-and-a-half bungalow with slumping windows and a big dormer window that reminded North of a cranky eye. He blamed that particular lunacy on too much time with Shaw, too much secondhand weed, and it being way too long since he’d had a decent night’s sleep. The white board-and-batten needed freshening up, and the lava rock beds around the house were choked with weeds almost as tall as the overgrown lawn. Blinds hung in the windows, and from all North could tell, the house was dark.
“He’s in there, huh?” North asked.
Tean nodded. “He walked around back, but we’ve seen a flashlight a couple of times. We were about to call John-Henry when Jem spotted your car.”
“Spotted makes it sound like there was a chance of missing it,” Jem said. “You don’t spot a beached whale.”
North glared at him, but Jem only grinned bigger, exposing two slightly crooked front teeth.
“Don’t call John-Henry,” North said. “Not yet.”
“I don’t know,” Tean said. “We called him earlier, and he said we did the right thing—”
“If you call him, you’re going to send Gid running, and we won’t learn why he’s here. What happened earlier? Why’d you call John-Henry?”
“Who’s this guy anyway?” Jem asked. “I thought you were trying to track down that inmate.”
“His name’s Gid,” Shaw said. “He has a gun! He made us go in a laundry room, and then North said something about dirty shorts—I wasn’t really listening—and then Gid asked who we were, and I said—”
“He’s got some connection to a megachurch.” North caught a glimpse of the flashlight on the other side of Adam Ezell’s blinds. “Welch, the inmate, drove straight there. We lost Welch, but we picked up Gid, and now he’s poking around the house of a missing deputy. What the fuck do you think that’s about?”
No one answered, but after a moment, Tean said, “You didn’t put any of that in the group chat.”
“Sorry, I was busy not getting shot, and then I was busy interviewing suspects, and then I was busy getting that bone-climber Cassidy off my ass, and then I was busy following Gid back here so he could do some very sus shit. Next time I take a crap, I’ll try to update everyone. Is that ok with you?”
Out of the corner of his eye, North caught the change in Jem’s expression: how it flattened, hardened, and in a way that left North slightly off-balance, looked nothing like the goof who had once worn a pair of Muppet Babies sleep pants to Waffle House. “Watch it—” Jem began.
But Tean gave a tiny shake of his head and said, “We’re supposed to keep each other updated. You should have told us what was going on.”
Shaw made an unhappy noise. “He’s right, North. I’ll do it right now.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” North said. “What happened earlier?”
This time, Tean and Jem traded a long look.
“Another person went into Ezell’s house,” Tean said.
“It was in the group chat,” Jem said, “but you didn’t see that, of course.”
North kept his attention on Tean. “And?”
“We tried to follow him, but we lost him—he took off like there was an emergency.”
“What was he doing inside Ezell’s house?”
Tean shook his head.
“You should have taken photos, or at least a physical description—”
