staring closely at an instrument he used to direction-find cell phone signals. “I’d say you’re good to go.”
“Toni? Anything?” I spoke into my hands-free headset. Toni was parked about two blocks south on Fortieth. Her job was to look for the white BMW or the red Honda in the event that they returned home. If she saw them, she was to sing out on the radio.
“Clear,” she said.
“Doc?” Doc was parked on Sixty-Fifth, where he had a clear view of cars approaching Fortieth from the west.
“Clear,” he said.
“Okay, boys and girls,” I said, hopping out of the van. “I’m going in.” I slid the van door closed. “Kenny-you’re the last line of defense. If Doc or Toni misses anybody, you’re the only one left to call me up and tell me someone’s coming. Don’t you fall asleep or let your mind go wandering off. You got it?”
“Ready, boss,” he said. The words sounded faint and quiet in my headset. I walked across the edge of the park and across Fortieth. The house looked empty.
I continued up the pathway to the front door and stepped up on the porch. I listened hard, but could hear nothing coming from inside. I stepped up and knocked on the door. If anyone answered, I’d pretend I was with Rainier Valley Water Damage Repair and was looking for a nonexistent address. I wore a uniform shirt that had
I waited, but no one answered. “Nobody’s home,” I said. “I’m going around.”
I had reached the side of the house when my radio crackled. “Danny?” Toni said.
I froze. “Yeah.” The BMW was returning?
“Make sure your cell phone ringer is off.”
“Jesus Christ, Toni-you scared the shit out of me,” I whispered.
“Sorry.”
“My cell phone ringer is off. Thank you.” I walked down the side of the house and reached a gate about midway. I looked over the back and checked for dogs. A yappy dog, or worse-a big mean one-would have ended this operation before it even started.
Thankfully, there were no dogs. I opened the gate and went inside. The home was well screened from its neighbor by a hedge of red-tipped Photinias that must have been fifteen feet high. There were probably whole colonies of animals that lived inside the hedge that never saw the full light of day their whole lives. It was thick enough to be completely opaque.
There were three windows on the side of the house on the other side of the gate. I checked each of them carefully as I passed. We were pretty certain the house was not alarmed. When we’d watched the house over the weekend, they certainly didn’t act like it was alarmed when they left. Usually, when someone sets an alarm before they leave, they hustle on out in order to beat the arming countdown. It’s a pretty distinctive set of motions. In the case of this house, Martin and the others would leave the door open, come and go, forget something and go back, all the while with the door open and no apparent concern for an alarm countdown. As we expected, there were no alarm company signs, no window foil, no magnetic contact switches, no apparent embedded magnets. No guarantee, but a good sign. All the windows were locked, though.
I reached the rear of the house and checked out the backyard-no dogs, no people. I made the turn and stepped up onto a deck. I continued checking windows. The home looked secure until I reached a window that definitely was not original. Instead of the casement-type windows I’d seen on the other openings-the kind where you spin a little crank to open and close it-this window was a cheap aluminum-framed slider. Once locked, casements are almost impossible to jimmy open without breaking the glass. Aluminum sliders are usually a piece of cake, though. I simply pushed hard on the window frame, causing it to bow until the locking lever cleared the frame. Then, I slid the window open, just like that. Fortunately, it slid quietly.
I pushed the curtain aside and leaned inside. The window opened into a utility room with a washer and dryer. Another door on the opposite side of the room led into the house. I checked my landing area, then I sat on the window ledge and simply spun on inside.
I walked across the room and listened for a second before opening the door into the house. I stepped inside and found myself in the kitchen. I didn’t move-just listened for a full minute. Satisfied for the moment, I stepped forward and scanned the area. I saw no signs of a security system, no cameras, no sensors, nothing. I whispered, “inside” into my microphone.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Clear.” That’s what I wanted to hear.
I began my search. I didn’t want to be in the home longer than ten minutes, tops. I moved quickly, my first priority to locate Isabel if she was there.
She wasn’t. The house wasn’t very big. It didn’t take long-maybe five minutes-to do a quick perusal of the entire home, including the small basement, and see that no one was there. I went through a second time, a little slower. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the house was much neater than I’d imagined. There were two bedrooms-a master and what appeared to be a guest bedroom. The master had a stack of porn DVDs on a nightstand, but all in factory cases-nothing homemade. The guest bedroom didn’t look like anyone was staying there-the closets and the drawers were empty. Back in the living room, I noticed marijuana paraphernalia and a mirror with what appeared to be cocaine residue, but I don’t guess that was very remarkable. There was a small desk with a laptop, but no notebooks or ledgers. I took photos of all of this on my cell phone as I went.
“Ten minutes, boss,” Kenny’s voice came over the headset.
“Roger. Just finishing up. There’s nothing here.”
I hadn’t touched anything, so there was nothing to replace or turn off.
I retraced my steps and, one minute later, the house was locked back up, and I was standing by the gate. “I’m out,” I said. “Am I clear to cross the street?”
“Go,” Kenny said.
“Nothing,” I said. It was four o’clock, and we were back in the conference room at the office. Kenny had downloaded the photos from my cell phone, and we were all looking at them on the large monitor.
“They keep the place pretty clean,” Doc said.
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “The place looked like a model home.”
“Except for the bong and the mirror,” Toni said.
“True. Except for that.”
“Other than those things, you didn’t see any drugs?” Richard asked.
“I didn’t really look too hard,” I said. “I looked inside drawers, but I was looking for something that would have connected the place to Isabel. I didn’t go sifting through everything looking for drugs. I checked upstairs for an attic-none I could see. I checked for a basement, and there was a little one, but it was basically empty-just some boxes. Mostly, I checked all the rooms looking for Isabel. Like I said, nothing. I checked closets for clothes that might have belonged to Isabel. There was an empty bedroom, but the closet and the dresser inside it were empty as well. It’s possible that Isabel might have stayed there, but she’s certainly gone now, and there’s nothing left behind.”
“We have to remember that she didn’t start off with much,” Toni said. “Apparently, just a backpack and the clothes on her back.”
“That’s true,” I said. “She was packing light.”
It was quiet for a few seconds while we considered our options.
“I want to say that you all did really well today,” I said, after a moment when nothing else was coming to mind. “I felt like the op was secure-no problems.”
“Sorry for scaring you,” Toni said.
I smiled. “That’s okay. Better safe than sorry. Probably only cost me two years off the back side.”
She smiled.
“I guess we can look at the bright side,” Richard said. “Even in finding nothing, we discover something. Since the house had a guest bedroom, it’s possible Isabel spent some time here when she first went missing. That could turn out to be a pretty valuable piece of information.”
I nodded. “True enough. We’ll get another crack at it tomorrow. Tomorrow morning at eleven, I want to go
