“Lock’s been jimmied,” Evie called cheerfully. “You might want to not touch anything until you look for fingerprints.”
“The house is full of fingerprints, and we can’t identify the ones belonging to the Posts, so that’s a waste.” Jax studied the lock and cursed juvenile delinquents. “Probably kids, anyway.”
“Kids would have trashed the place.” Correcting his assumption, Evie ran her hand over a dusty countertop. “When was the last time the cleaning service was here?”
Okay, so he was a lawyer, not a detective. Maybe the door had been like this for months. The notion that someone had just walked in and looked around... Made him very uncomfortable.
“First of every month, so three weeks ago.” And they would have reported a break-in, dammit.
Feeling a little edgy when a psychic flake was pragmatically examining surfaces for dust and fingerprints instead of exclaiming over the maple and marble kitchen, Jax headed down the hall to John Post’s study.
“Then someone was here recently.” She pointed out a smear in the dust on a polished mahogany breakfront.
“That’s where my mom’s silver was kept.” Loretta jerked open a door. “It’s gone.”
“Because it’s in storage. That’s my job—protecting your assets.” Which meant getting Loretta out from under foot while he looked around. “Why don’t you run upstairs and start stacking up the things you want to take with you? We’ll buy boxes if we need to.”
Pansy-blue eyes framed by black plastic glared at him as if he were officially insane. “I want to see my daddy’s desk, too.”
Evie whistled and sauntered ahead, checking behind doors, apparently hunting for ghosts and goblins. “They even looked behind the mirrors,” she called. “Fingerprints all over them.”
Crap. “Those were some clumsy crooks.” Disgruntled, Jax opened the office door.
The place had definitely been disturbed.
“They tried to be careful, but they were in a hurry. Maybe because someone told them we were coming?” Evie crowded into the doorway beside him. “The desk drawers are almost closed, but the chair’s been moved. I can see the dents in the carpet. Not too long ago, either. I smell cigarette smoke, unless Mr. Post smokes?”
His adoptive father smoked, but this didn’t smell the same. But now he was drinking in Evie’s scent of ylang-ylang and shampoo. Jax wanted to pick her up and turn her around and send her out before she smoked his brain. “Unless they took something, there isn’t much point in calling the police. And there wasn’t anything here to take.”
“My daddy hates cigarettes.” Loretta tried to peer between them.
“Any ghosts hovering?” Jax asked dryly, examining the plush carpet for footsteps. One person, it looked like.
“Man’s size twelve—a heavy man?” Evie crouched to measure a footprint with her fingers. “Not a ghost.”
She gestured for Loretta to enter. “I think you may amplify my abilities, so I need your help. I want you to call up a memory of your father in here, if you can. Close your eyes. I’ll take your hands and do my psychic thing, okay?”
With a sigh, Jax got out of their way, crossing the room to study the desk before he touched it. Whoever had been here hadn’t bothered with gloves. They’d left smudged prints on the polished mahogany. If Evie could smell the cigarette, they’d just missed running into the bastard.
Using one of the cheap pens scattered on the desk surface, Jax pulled open the middle desk drawer. Post had left his password book in here. Jax had lost all respect for the client’s intelligence at that point. He’d changed all the passwords and locked the book in storage, so if the thief was after that, he was out of luck.
“Mr. Post, if you can, will you show us what you want us to see?” Evie spoke in a hypnotic voice that didn’t match her normal bubbly one.
Reluctantly, Jax backed away from the desk to watch whatever the hell she was perpetrating now.
She was holding Loretta’s hands. The kid had her eyes closed but Evie didn’t. She looked over the kid’s shoulder, speaking as if she saw someone there. Jax almost snorted at the less-than-dramatic performance, but he occupied himself checking the rest of the drawers.
Evie abruptly dropped Loretta’s hands to fumble behind the desk. “Here?” she asked of the air.
While he worked, Jax kept a suspicious eye on her.
A slender side panel of the desk popped open as if she’d sprung a latch. Jax almost swallowed his tongue. Evie swung the mahogany door aside to reveal a document safe.
Adocumentsafe. He studied the desk’s construction and could see nothing that would have revealed the narrow hidden box. How the hell had she known...?
Evie dropped down in a crouch to examine the safe’s dial as if she were an expert safe cracker. She looked like a pixie in that gauzy top with the mop of curls in her face.
“Left, ten?” She turned the dial accordingly.