Free The Unseen by Hines

occasionally wagging its tail.
    He considered his options. He didn’t have the names of the couple who lived here, so he couldn’t do a phone call. He could probably do a reverse-lookup on the Internet, using the address to get a phone number. But he’d have to find a nearby Internet café or public library to do that, and he didn’t want to get sidetracked just now.
    Maybe he could just walk to the front door and ring the doorbell.
    Maybe. But he was looking pretty ragged right now—he’d already wandered the neighborhood as a homeless vagrant, and it was unlikely anyone would open the door for him. He really needed to head to a Salvation Army for a couple new sets of clothing.
    In the end, he decided just to do the back door of the garage again, see if any cars were inside. If the garage were empty, he felt there was a good chance the home would be empty.
    Without pausing, he walked across the street, opened the front gate, went directly to the hedge at the fence line, and followed it to the backyard. He paused, listening for a few moments, then went across the backyard to the patio and the back garage door. A small water fountain trickled on the patio. Nice. One more bit of nature out here in the ’burbs.
    Once again, the garage door was unlocked. The garage was empty; last night one car had been there, even though there were two stalls. And even though he hadn’t seen the front of the home last night, he’d noticed no cars parked directly in front of the house this morning.
    Inside the garage, he crept to the door that led into the house. Would they keep this door locked?
    The knob twisted easily in his hand. No.
    With the door open a crack, he listened for sounds inside the house. No TV, no footsteps. Just the steady thrum of the refrigerator’s compressor nearby.
    He slipped through the door and shut it softly behind him. Now he was standing in a small mudroom, with a coat closet to his right and a few pairs of shoes on a mat directly in front of him. No children’s shoes, he noted.
    Lucas walked out of the mudroom into the kitchen area, just past a short, five-foot wall. He remembered the kitchen layout with perfect clarity from the night before: the sink would be back to his right from this doorway, adjoining the garage. The refrigerator and some cupboards were on the other side of the short wall he’d just walked past. Opposite, the oven, stove, and under-counter cabinets, as well as some hanging cabinets. To the left, at the far end of the kitchen from the garage, the counter ended in an L-shape, forming the area where the couple had been eating the night before. Beyond that lay the rest of the house.
    He stepped into the kitchen. No lights on. Good sign. He relaxed, knowing no one was home, and ventured through the kitchen to the living area just beyond.
    A small black cat came out of one of the bedrooms and rubbed against his legs, purring. He reached down to pet it a few times, then went down the hallway where it had come from.
    Several framed photos hung on the painted wall here. A wedding photo, several old black-and-white photos of ancestors and relatives, and a photo he was particularly drawn to: a couple, the woman smiling at the camera—almost laughing—and the man staring at the same spot with a hard intensity. The woman in the photo was the woman he had seen last night. He knew her face well, because she had stood so close to Donavan’s surveillance camera.
    But the man in this photo, wearing a suit and standing behind the woman, was not the man he’d seen. This man was black-haired, lantern-jawed, tall.
    The man in the home last night had blondish hair, seemed stockier, shorter.
    His eyes moved to the wedding photo. It was definitely the woman and the dark-haired man, not the guy from last night.
    So the two people in the house the night before weren’t a couple.
    At least, they weren’t a married couple.
    Interesting.
    Lucas felt