The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (22)

“You can be pretty annoying,” Letty said.

“How’s that?”

“By being right. That’s annoying,” she said.

“I don’t mean to annoy you but . . . what do we do next?” he asked.

“Let’s go look at Blackburn’s house,” Letty said.

“Grimes said the cops were already out there,” Kaiser said.

“They didn’t go inside,” Letty said. “If we can find a way, I want to do that.”

“Should we tell Grimes?”

“Mmm . . . no.”





SIX




Except for the cluster of taller structures downtown, Midland was a flat city, with mid-century single-story houses in sun-faded colors in the residential areas, lots of pickup trucks, burnt lawns, and metal business buildings with miles of chain-link fences around them.

Blackburn’s house was in Midland’s horse country, rambling houses set back behind fences from Cardinal Lane. There were pastures, bare for the most part, but the Blackburns’ house was set in a thin grove of pecan trees with a low split-rail fence running around the edge of the lawn. A sign next to the driveway said protected by satsec, which Kaiser said was a middling-level security service that rode on satellite TV systems.

The house itself was a white clapboard-and-stone ranch-style; the front door could be seen from Cardinal Lane. The back of Blackburn’s lot adjoined a pasture with another road on the far side of the pasture. The back road had to be the best part of a quarter-mile away, Letty thought, and it’d be unlikely that anyone would notice her messing with the back door, if she were to do that.

A parking pad in front of the garage was hidden from the street by a line of fifteen-foot-tall Italian cypress trees. Letty told Kaiser to back up to the garage doors, where the truck wouldn’t be easily seen.

Kaiser stopped the truck’s back bumper a foot from the garage door. “That good?”

“That’s good. I don’t know about locks, the technical aspects. Could you take a look?”

Kaiser showed her a skeptical face, but said, “I guess.” He got out of the truck, walked to the front door, pushed the doorbell, stooped to examine the lock, shook his head. He checked the lock on a garage access door, then came back to the truck. “Good locks. I don’t know if I could open them, even given some time. And you can see the doors from the street, a guy going by could see what I was doing.”

“Then get ready to leave,” Letty said. She put on the straw cowboy hat. “If I’m running, let’s leave fast.”

“What are you doing? Are you going to get us busted? Do the words ‘breaking and entering’ ring a bell? Does . . .”

“Remember, we’re from the government, we’re here to help,” she said. She touched his shoulder. “Try to center yourself.”

Kaiser rubbed his face. “She’s planning a felony and she wants me to do some hippie shit. Center myself?”

“Stop with the drama queen,” Letty said.



* * *





Kaiser had said that the locks were good, so she didn’t bother to examine them. Instead, she walked around toward the back of the house. Halfway around, she found a side door going into the garage. The door was thick, solid, with a Medeco lock. She bumped the toe of her shoe against it, and got back a heavy thunk. If the back door was the same, they might be out of luck, short of breaking the glass out of a window.

The back door was as solid as the side door. She squatted next to it, peering at the grass around it, and found nothing. There was an inch-wide board over the door. She stood on tiptoe and ran her fingers across it: nothing but dusty grime.

Retracing her steps around the house, she felt along the top of the garage-door trim, found nothing but more dust. Next to the door, though, she saw a smooth gray-green rock half-buried in the grass by the foundation, the only rock she’d seen in the yard. She toed it out of the grass, then picked it up—it was the size of half a baseball and half as heavy. She turned it over, thumbed the hatch she found on the back, and found a mildly corroded brass key.

Polishing the key on her jeans, she fit it in the door lock, jiggled it, turned it, and the door popped open.

“Nice,” she said to herself.

The garage was empty, as the police had said; and hot. Four narrow windows pierced the overhead door, so the cops probably looked inside, saw nothing, and called it a day. She crossed the garage to the door leading into the house, tried the key: the lock turned easily. She had in her pocket what she thought was the code for an alarm system, but when she pushed open the door, she was met with silence and a wave of cold air.

An alarm keypad was mounted on the wall near the front door. A note came up on the keypad: garage door open. She went back, closed both the back door to the outside and the connecting door to the house. The keypad blinked out a new message: 5:02 p.m. Sept 15, then blinked to another message, Chime Is On. The alarm was working correctly, she thought, but hadn’t been turned on.

When she unlocked and opened the front door, the keypad chimed once, and then went back to the date and time. She walked out to the truck and said, “We’re in.”

“Ah, boy.” Kaiser glanced up and down the street, as if expecting a flock of patrol cars. “You kicked the door? What happened to the security system?”