I paused for a moment, hand on the doorknob, thinking fast. It was possible that Mr. Lee, owner and manager of the garment manufacturing business that occupied the lower level of my building, had forgotten to lock it. It had happened before. It was also possible that he was in the building but that was unlikely. He sometimes came in on Saturdays to finish up paperwork but rarely, if ever, on Sundays.
My palms prickled with an intuition. Something was not as it should be. I decided to go around back and have a look instead of walking in the front door. There was an alley that ran behind the building. I walked to the end of the block, turned, and came back up the alley, moving slowly and keeping to the near edge of the neighboring buildings so I wouldn’t be visible from the rear windows.
There was an emergency exit that let out onto the alley from the first floor but I didn’t normally carry the key for it. I tried the handle silently and the door didn’t budge. It was locked as it should be. I put my backpack down behind the small dumpster Mr. Lee kept for fabric scraps and walked back to the neighboring building which had a fire escape ladder that gave access to the roof. The bottom of the ladder was high enough to discourage casual climbers but I was able to run, kick off the wall, and grasp the bottom rung. My neighbor’s roof was four feet higher than mine. I crept to the edge and dropped silently to my own roof. There were two skylights over my studio space at the back of the building. I approached one and looked down. My work in progress, sheathed in a spattered drop cloth, the back wall where I kept my tools—I couldn’t see much else. Still, my pulse was up and I felt strongly that there was someone inside. I went to the other skylight. From there I could see part of my kitchen but no intruder. A sudden, loud bang like a rifle shot made me jump. It was the front door of the building I realized after a moment. I rushed to the edge of the roof overlooking the street and arrived in time to see the driver door of a white van with tinted windows slam shut. The engine roared to life and the van pulled away, accelerating down the street. I squinted at the bumper. There was no rear license plate but there was an instantly recognizable rental company logo on the back. I watched it go, my mind racing. There were many possibilities to consider but first I needed to see what the intruder had been up to. I never kept anything of value in my home but a burglar wouldn’t know that. The places he had chosen to search could be instructive.
I went back down the way I came up, retrieved my backpack, and entered my building from the front. Most people think of it as one of the worst kinds of violation to have someone break into their house or car. I had no business being offended or outraged. As a professional, I just wanted to investigate my fellow professional’s work. The front door had two locks, the knob set and the bolt. They were both good locks but not immune to picking. I inspected them but could find no evidence that either had been forced. Mr. Lee might have left them unlocked, or the intruder could have picked them. Picking seemed unlikely though. It would have taken time and the door was in full view of the street. The foot traffic on the street was sporadic but I wouldn’t count on being able to pick my front door locks during daylight hours before at least a couple of people had wandered by. Also, the mystery intruder would have wanted to check that the place was empty before going in. He must have entered from the roof or a window, gone downstairs and unlocked the front door to make sure he had a clear exit path, then back upstairs to search. If he had been upstairs at all. I still didn’t know that. He might have been trying to burgle an industrial sewing machine.
I climbed the stairs. The interior door to my second floor flat was unlocked as well. There was no chance I had left it open. So, the intruder had definitely been inside. Did he have an accomplice in the van acting as lookout? I entered cautiously and climbed the stairs to the roof door. It was open. The lock had been drilled out. I had been too preoccupied to notice when I was on the roof only minutes before. Back downstairs, I searched quickly through every room. In the big main room where I had my workshop, office/sitting area, and kitchen/dining area, my filing cabinet had been rifled, kitchen cabinets searched, and all my tool chests opened. In the bedroom, everything had been pulled out of my closet and drawers and dumped on the floor. I had a storage bin where I kept all of the specialized gadgets—tools of my shadier trade—I had built or accumulated over the years. It had been pulled out and dumped on the bed. I sighed. It would take a while to get everything back in order. I could think about who might want to search my place while
