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?”
“The alarm was turned off,” Letty said. She held up the key: “And I didn’t kick any doors.”
“You could have told me,” Kaiser said, climbing out of the truck. “I was sitting here sweatin’ like a nun in a cucumber patch.”
“Well, if I told you, you would have tried to talk me out of breaking in. Then we would have had to go through a lot of tiresome argument. This was easier. Listen, when we go in . . . don’t touch anything you don’t have to.”
“You got a lot of cop shit from your old man,” Kaiser said.
“Yes. I did.”
* * *
They walked quickly through the house—neither one of them mentioned it, but they were checking for bodies or blood and Kaiser had his carry pistol in his hand. An open dining/living room area had eggshell walls and walnut floors and built-in bookcases, mid-century furniture with exposed wooden and chrome legs and patterned fabric. Two long wings came off the central area of the house: a TV theater room and two guest bedrooms, along with laundry and storage areas, were down one wing, with the master bedroom and a home office/library down the other.
After the quick walk-through, finding no bodies, they moved through the house more slowly, still not touching anything. In the kitchen, Letty was walking past the breakfast bar: “Uh-oh.”
Kaiser stepped over from the living room: “What?”
She pointed at one of the breakfast-bar stools. The stools were pushed up close to the bar, which made it hard to see, but a woman’s purse was sitting on one, partly open. They could see a purse-pack of Kleenex sticking out, and when Letty used a fist to nudge the stool out a few inches, they could see the red-leather corner of a wallet.
“Somebody took her,” Letty said. “No way she didn’t take her purse. Whoever took her didn’t see it and didn’t think of it.”
“We need to call the cops,” Kaiser said. “What are we going to tell them about breaking in?”