The Camel Club

“Yes.”

“We’ll communicate by cell phone. If you see anyone coming, call us immediately and we’ll take the necessary actions.”

“What are you going to do?” Caleb asked. “Break into the man’s house?”

“You know, Oliver, he’s probably got an alarm system,” Reuben ventured.

“I would be surprised if he didn’t.”

“So how do we get in, then?” Reuben asked.

“Let me worry about that.”

The house was indeed dark and presumably empty, since there was no car visible and the house didn’t have a garage. While Milton and Caleb stood guard in a hidden location near the entrance to the road, Reuben and Stone drove up on the Indian, parking it in a clump of trees behind the house and making their way on foot.

It was a two-story old clapboard with chipping white paint. Stone led Reuben to the rear. The door here was solid, but there was a window next to it. Stone peered through the window and motioned Reuben to look too.

A greenish glow emanated from a new-looking object on the wall opposite the door.

“He’s got a security system, all right,” Reuben muttered. “Now what?”

Stone didn’t answer him. He peered closer at the screen. “We’ll have to assume he has motion detectors. That complicates things.”

Suddenly, something flew at them from the inside of the house accompanied by twin slashes of emerald. It hit the window and bounced off. Both men leaped back, and Reuben was already turned to run when Stone called out to him.

“It’s all right, Reuben,” Stone said. “Mr. Reinke has a cat.”

His chest heaving, Reuben staggered back up to the window and looked through it. Peering back up at him was a black tabby with a white chest and huge luminous green eyes. The room they were looking into was the kitchen. And the cat had apparently launched itself from the countertop when it noticed their presence.

“Damn cat. I bet it’s a female,” Reuben said, grimacing.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because women have always tried to give me heart attacks, that’s why!”

“Actually, the presence of the animal simplifies things greatly,” Stone said.

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“Security systems with motion detectors do not cohabit very well with cats.”

Reuben snapped his fingers. “Pet corridors where the motion doesn’t hit.”

“Exactly.” Stone was pulling something from his pocket. It was the black leather case he had taken from his secret room. He unzipped it. Inside was a first-class burglary kit.

Reuben stared at these felonious instruments and then looked up at his friend and said, “I don’t want to know.”

The window to the kitchen was opened within ten seconds.

“How’d you figure the window wasn’t wired to the security system?”

“Wired windows and a motion detector is a bit of overkill,” Stone replied. “And a house this old has plaster walls which are very difficult to run wire through. I doubt our Mr. Reinke could justify the price. And I checked for a wireless security pod on the window before I jimmied it.”

“Okay,” Reuben demanded. “I do want to know. How the hell do you know about stuff like wireless window security pods?”

Stone glanced at him with an innocent expression. “The library is open to the public, Reuben.”

They climbed inside and the cat met them immediately, rubbing up against their legs and waiting patiently to be stroked.

“All right, before we enter any room, we need to find the motion detector. Then I’ll send the cat across the room and we’ll follow its lead,” Stone said. “Be prepared to crawl on your belly.”

“Great! I might as well be back in Nam,” Reuben groused.

A half hour before Stone and Reuben broke into Tyler Reinke’s house, the back door of Milton’s place was forced open and Warren Peters and Tyler Reinke slipped inside and shut the door behind them. It had not been that easy, since Milton had six locks on every door, and all the windows were nailed shut, something the fire marshal doubtless would’ve disapproved of. They had already checked the power box going into the house for any signs of a security system and had found none.

Reinke was limping from where Alex Ford had punched him in the knee. And there was a bullet hole in Warren Peters’ coat sleeve where one of the Secret Service agent’s shots had almost found its mark. They’d stumbled upon the two when they went to Georgetown for another look at the boat, only to find that Ford and Adams had beaten them to it.

Both men were furious about their failure to kill the pair, and it was fortunate indeed for Milton Farb that he wasn’t at home right now.

The two men pulled out their flashlights and started searching. Farb’s place wasn’t that large, but it was filled with books and expensive computer and video equipment for his Web design business. Also located there was the one thing Reinke and Peters hadn’t counted on: a wireless infrared surveillance system that looked like overhead track lighting. Located in each room, it was now recording their movements, and had also sounded a silent alarm to a security firm that Milton had hired because of several previous burglaries. The system ran off a regular household outlet with a battery backup. He’d stopped using a loud alarm because in his neighborhood the police took their time coming and the alerted thieves had always been long gone before their arrival.

As the pair searched the house, their amazement grew with each new discovery.

“This guy’s a freaking nutcase,” Peters said as they explored the kitchen. The canned goods in the pantry were all neatly labeled and placed in excruciatingly precise order. The utensils hung from a rack on the wall arranged from largest to smallest. The pots and pans were organized the same way on a large rack over the stove. Even the oven mitts were lined up with precision, as were all the dishes in the cupboards. The place was a monument to fastidiousness of the most zealous kind.

When they went upstairs and poked around Milton’s bedroom and closet area, it was more of the same.

Reinke came out of the master bathroom shaking his head. “You’re not going to believe this. This bozo has torn off each sheet of the toilet paper and stacked them in a wicker box beside the toilet with instructions on disposal. I mean what do you do with toilet paper except flush it!”

In the bedroom closet Peters said, “Yeah, well, come in here and tell me who puts their socks on hangers?”

A moment later they were both staring at the socks and the tri-folded underwear and shirts that all hung on wooden hangers in precise order, with the shirts fully buttoned, including the cuffs. And they were organized by season. The men weren’t guessing at this, as Milton had helpfully posted pictures depicting winter, summer, spring and fall.

Finding nothing useful in the master bedroom, the two NIC men slipped into the other room upstairs that had been fitted out as an office. They both were immediately drawn to Milton’s desk, where every item there was laid at right angles to its neighbor.

And finally in this house of perfect order they found something that they could actually use. It was in a box marked “Receipts,” on a shelf behind Milton’s desk, and the receipts, they quickly determined, were divided by both month and product. From the box, Reinke plucked out a credit card slip that had a name on it.

“Chastity Hayes,” Reinke read. “Want to bet that’s his girlfriend?”

“If a guy like that can have a girlfriend.”

Each probably thinking the same thing, they shone their lights on the wall of Milton’s office. The pictures there were arranged in a very elaborate configuration that Peters recognized first. “It’s a double helix. DNA. This guy is a total freak.”

Reinke’s light flickered across one picture and then came back to it.

“Love, Chastity,” Reinke read at the bottom of the picture, which showed Chastity in a revealing bathing suit and blowing a kiss to the photographer, presumably Milton.

“That’s his girlfriend?” a stunned Reinke said as he eyed a picture of Milton next to the one with Chastity in