out; check one house off the list—he ritually made a note on the pad clipped to the back of his planner—and move on.
As Mike moved up the road, ringing doorbells and waiting, he kept a weather eye open for twitching curtains, unexpected antennae. A bored Boston grandmother at one apartment threatened to take too much interest in him, but he managed to dissuade her with the number-two pitch: was she satisfied with her current lawn-care company. (For telecommuting techies, the number-one pitch was a nonstick-bakeware multilevel marketing scheme. Anything to avoid having to actually interview anybody.) Finally he reached Miriam’s doorstep. The windows were grimy, and the mailbox was threatening to overflow: good.
This was the moment of maximum danger, and his skin was crawling as he slowly walked to the next door. If FTO
Three doors. Nobody coming out of the houses opposite, no sedan cruising slowly down the road towards him. His mind kept circling back to the ingrained grime on the windows, the crammed mailbox.
The houses adjacent to the Beckstein residence were all vacant. Mike turned and walked back to the next one over, then rang the doorbell again. When there was no response, he shrugged; then instead of going back to the sidewalk he walked around the building, slowly, looking up at the eaves. (Cover story number three: Would you like to buy some weatherproof gutter lining?)
The fence between their yard and the next was head-high, but they weren’t tidy gardeners and there was no dog; once he was out of sight of the street it took Mike thirty seconds to shove an empty rainwater barrel against the wooden wall and climb over it, taking care to lower himself down on his good leg. The grass in Miriam’s yard was thigh-high, utterly unkempt and flopping over under its own weight. Mike picked himself up and looked around. There was a wooden shed, and a glass sliding door into the living room—locked.
The key turned in the lock. Mike opened his case and removed a can of WD40, and sprayed it into the track at the bottom of the door. Then he took out another can, and a long screwdriver. First, he edged the door open a quarter of an inch. Then he slowly ran the screwdriver’s tip into the gap, and painstakingly lifted it from floor to ceiling. It met no resistance.
Silly String—quick-setting plastic foam—squirted out and drifted towards the floor in loops and tangles. About six inches inside the doorway, at calf level to a careless boot, it hung in midair, draped over a fine wire. Mike crouched down and studied it, then looked inside. The tripwire—now he knew what to look for—ran to a hook in the opposite side of the doorframe, and then to a green box screwed to the wall.
Mike stepped over the wire. Then he breathed out, and looked around.
The lounge-cum-office was a mess. Some person or persons unknown had searched it, thoroughly, not taking pains to tidy up afterwards; then someone else had installed the booby box and tripwire. It was dusty inside, and dark.
Getting down to work on the office, he wondered who’d turfed the scene. The missing computer was suggestive; going by the empty shelves and the boxes on the floor, it didn’t take long to notice that all the computer media—Zip disks, CD-ROMs, even dusty old floppy disks—were missing. “Huh,” he said quietly. “So they were looking for files?” Miriam was a journalist. It was carelessly done, as if they’d been looking for something specific— and the searchers weren’t cops or spooks. Cops searching a journalist’s office wouldn’t leave a scrap of paper behind, and spooks wouldn’t want the subject to know they were under surveillance. “Fucking amateurs.” Mike took heart: It made his job that bit easier, to know that the perps had been looking for something specific, not trying to deny information to someone coming after.
Fumbling through the pile of papers, sorting them into separate blocks, Mike ran across a telephone cable. It was still plugged in, and tracing it back to the desk he discovered the handset, which had fallen down beside the wall. It was a fancy one, with a built-in answerphone and a cassette tape. Mike pocketed the tape, then went back to work on the papers. Lots of cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lots of scribbled notes about articles she’d been working on, a grocery bill, invoices from the gas and electric—nothing obviously significant. The books: There was a pile of software manuals, business books, some dog-eared crime thrillers and Harlequin romances, a Filofax —
Mike flipped it open. “Bingo!” It was full of handwritten names, numbers, and addresses, scribbled out and overwritten and annotated. Evidently Miriam didn’t trust computers for everything; either that, or he’d latched on to a years-out-of-date organizer. But a quick look in the front revealed a year planner that went as far forward as the current year.
Outside, with the glass door shut and the key back on its nail in the shed, he glanced at the fence. His leg twinged, reminding him that he wasn’t ready for climbing or running. There was a gap between the fence and the side of the house, shadowy; he slipped into it, his fat planner (now pregnant with Miriam’s Filofax) clutched before him.
There was a wooden gate at the end of the alley, latched shut but not padlocked. He paused behind it to peer between the vertical slats. A police car cruised slowly along the street, two officers inside.