The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  She picked out several devices she thought would be useful where she was going and then doubled her order before she paid and drove back to her hotel near the airport. She spent a few hours testing, planning, and then sleeping to prepare for her night’s work.

  When midnight had passed and there were fewer people out on the roads, Elle drove from her hotel to the area northeast of the airport where the security company’s building was. She was pleased to see that the night was dark and the air around her was a thick fog, as it sometimes was near the airport. To her the planes parked near the terminals looked half hidden in banks of glowing mist, but the lights that sometimes were reflected downward off low clouds to illuminate the world were not visible. She parked beyond a building that looked similar to the one where she was going, put on her backpack, and picked up her metal sheet.

  She had made some modifications. Her sheet metal rectangle had been spray-painted black on one side and white on the other, and cut into it was a slot that looked like the opening of a letterbox. Her gear was all neatly arranged in her backpack. Being precise about packing things was something she had learned about working in the dark.

  She walked along smoothly and easily until she was in sight of the building, and she kept up her pace as she studied the structure. She had inferred on the first night when she had seen the building that at least eight of the twelve black SUVs were always parked in the lot at night. Most residential burglars tried to arrive during the day, when the owners of houses were away at work. It was burglars of commercial properties who arrived at night. This company must have had mostly residential clients, because the black SUVs were in the lot again, but only three private cars.

  Also, she had noticed on her first visit that the front and sides of the building had no windows or doors. What this meant to her tonight was that nobody was casually gazing out a window and noticing her. The only door was the big one at the rear of the building facing the edge of the airport. When she reached the nearest corner of the building she sat and craned her neck, looking for the places where the cameras along the eaves of the building were aimed. She took off her pack, reached in, and took out a spray can of furniture stain. She stepped around behind a camera at the corner above her, leaned her sheet metal rectangle against the wall of the building, and stepped up into the slot she had cut, using it as a ladder. She sprayed the bulb-like housing and stepped down.

  The stain would not be opaque, so if someone inside glanced at a monitor, he would still see squares for all the cameras, but one would be too dim and blurry for him to make out anything in its feed. Her experience of human beings told her nobody sitting through a graveyard shift guarding a stucco building against nothing was going to go outside with a ladder and clean the lens right now. Whatever the malfunction was, it would wait until daylight, when it would be other people’s problem. Let them fix it or call a repairman.

  She waited for a few minutes until she was sure nobody had noticed her and then went to work. She had chosen this side of the building because it was where the vertical vent pipes on the roof all occurred. Vertical vent pipes meant kitchens or bathrooms. They were necessary to allow air in so the water ran quickly down the drains. Usually a vent consisted of a simple pipe in the wall behind a sink.

  She started at a spot with one drain vent, which made her hope for a kitchen. Kitchens, even small ones, had cabinets and counters along at least one wall. She found a round metal cover—a trap arrangement that hung down and covered a fan when it wasn’t spinning and opened outward when the fan was running. She leaned her metal sheet against the outer wall, stepped into the slot, held up the cover, and looked inside. As she had guessed, the vent was under a hood above a stove. She studied the room, paying close attention to where the stove and sink were, and even closer attention to where the cabinets were. She could see that the kitchen was fairly long and across the hall from another room. The end to her left was not near anything but the small waiting area near the main door.

  She crawled to the best spot along the outer wall, where she could not be seen by a camera, and used her knife to learn about the building. The outer layer was stucco that had been smeared over a layer of chicken wire that held it in place. She cut those layers away with wire cutters. Underneath them she found what she had suspected might be here. The inner layer was a sheet of corrugated steel bolted to a frame. The building had been constructed a long time ago, possibly even during World War II, when thousands of airplanes had been made in factories near the airport and shipped, along with every other possible commodity, to the Pacific theater. It had probably been erected in haste like a Quonset hut, because the corrugated steel had a coat of old olive paint that had chipped and rusted a bit before the stucco had been added.

  She had chosen to bring an acetylene torch because it was the quickest and quietest way to get though a steel barrier. It took a few minutes to take out and assemble the welding kit—connecting the valves and regulators to the tanks and the hoses to the torch—and put on the safety goggles. Next she leaned the sheet metal against the pack to form a shield and hide the light and sparks she was about to produce. She turned on the tanks, clicked the spark striker, and then adjusted the flame to a small, steady triangle and cut the first line in the corrugated steel. She cut a square about two feet on a side, pulled it out with pliers, and then waited for it to cool while she dismantled and stowed the welding torch and tanks and selected the equipment she would need next.

  She went back to the vent on the side wall to look into the kitchen again. There was no sign that anyone had heard or smelled anything. She used the drill on slow speed to make a line of holes in the thin synthetic wood backing of the cabinet and then a hacksaw blade to connect the holes.

  When the piece of corrugated steel was cool enough to touch she leaned into the hole she’d cut it from, turned on her small flashlight, and examined the inside of the cupboard. There was plenty of room for her, so she crawled in. The only parts of the space under the counter that were crowded were about twelve feet away under the double sink. The two U-shaped drainpipes, garbage disposal, boxes and bottles of dish detergent, cans of cleanser, packages of sponges, rolls of paper towels, and other things had all been stored there, where they were used. Closer to Elle, the only obstacles were in the five inches of space above her head taken up by drawers for silverware and utensils. This was not a kitchen that was used much for cooking.

  She used her flashlight sparingly, cupping the lens in her gloved hand so there was just enough light for her to see where the electrical outlets along the wall were. Before she did anything else, she sat still for a long count of a hundred and listened. There was no sound of another human being, so she slowly pushed one of the cabinet doors open an eighth of an inch.

  The room was still deserted. It was furnished with three tables and a dozen chairs; a refrigerator, stove, and microwave oven; and a couple of coffeemakers. Through the open doorway to the hall she could see on the wall a whiteboard with a handwritten schedule. Beside it was a closed office door labeled EDWARD RANSOM. That had to be the name of the boss.

  She still heard no activity in the building. She pulled the cabinet door shut and reached outside the building to bring in the electronic devices she had bought. She began with a small, flat, white square-shaped device designed to transmit sound signals to a remote computer. When she plugged it in, it looked like nothing, a barely visible object that might have been placed in a socket by the management to prevent the overloading of circuits. She plugged two pinhole cameras into other outlets, taped their thin insulated wires to the upper side of the divider between two drawers, and aimed them into the kitchen through holes she drilled under the edge of the counter.

  She waited about a half hour before her next foray outside the cabinet. She stood on a chair from the kitchen and placed two more pinhole cameras in the main hallway ceiling tiles—one aimed at an office at the end of the hall, one aimed inside an empty office that included a big desk. She placed a fifth in
the short L-shaped space leading into what looked like the radio dispatch center. She placed four in the suspended acoustic tile ceiling that ran the length of the hall, wherever she could find a socket that served a fan or a light. That left her with one more, and she saw no good place for it so she put it in her pocket and made her way back into the kitchen cabinet under the counter.

  She cleaned up the sawdust from the drilling, then lay down in the space under the counter and took a last look at everything she’d done.

  Using plug-in devices meant they were never going to lose power and range as they reached the end of a battery’s life. They could be permanent if she wanted to leave them, and she certainly had no desire to come back here to retrieve them.

  She crawled outside the building onto the lawn, replaced the fake wood backing and the corrugated steel sheet to plug the hole she had cut, duct-taped them there, and then spray-painted the surface with white paint she had rough-guess-matched with the color of the building.

  She shouldered her backpack, picked up her sheet metal barrier, and headed through the field of view of the blinded security camera. She stopped to preserve the metal sheet in case she needed it again by shoving it under the dumpster beside a building a hundred yards away.

  Elle’s hotel on Century Boulevard was easily within a mile of the security company’s building. The range of the audio bugs and the pinhole cameras was guaranteed to be three miles, and when she tested them, she found that all the signals came in strong. She had all of them recording to her laptop computer.

  After speeding up the replay on each site to run through what she had recorded, she could see that this was going to be a long and frustrating way to learn anything. The late-night shift consisted of a man about sixty years old who had craggy features like a sculpture carved from wood, a plump Hispanic woman in a tan uniform who occupied the dispatch room, and a black man who spent most of his time in the office with the older man. They both seemed to be doing bookkeeping, because they were reading small sheets filled out by hand, hitting the number keys along the tops of their computer keyboards, and occasionally printing out the results.

  The two men chatted only when they both happened to end a unit of work around the same time. The woman appeared only when she walked across the open door on the way to or from the bathroom or kitchen. Then they would all greet one another, but nobody would stop to talk about murdering anybody.

  Elle would let her devices transmit to her receiver site for the next day and night and see what they caught. Meanwhile, she got ready to return to the Kavanagh house.

  22

  It was morning, and being at the Kavanagh house again brought back every feeling of the first morning she had come here. The fact that Elle was able to enter the building by exactly the same route meant to her that the police had never learned that she had been here and searched inside. She felt a little disappointed in them. She stood in the attic and then went to the spot where the folding staircase was secured. She opened the trapdoor an inch and listened, then lowered the staircase to the second-floor hall.

  She descended and walked along the second-floor hall to the upper landing of the spiral staircase from the foyer. The neoclassical statues and the paintings were gone. The natural light from the windows in the vaults above the ceiling shone on bare hardwood floors. The strip of sockets along the crown molding for the spotlights above the portraits had no lights connected anymore, and the wall mountings that had held the portraits now held nothing.

  Elle reminded herself that never on earth had anything remained unclaimed for long. Somebody inherited, bought, or stole it. The art had been moved out after Nick Kavanagh died. He had been a gallery owner, so most or all of the paintings in the house had undoubtedly belonged to other people. He had merely been storing and selling them for the owners, who probably had them now.

  She swiveled her head. The rosy-skinned French demoiselles she didn’t miss. She stepped into the short bare hallway to the master bedroom.

  The room was transformed. The windows overlooking the garden were shuttered and fastened. The nautical paintings that had given the room blue skies, white clouds, white sails, and sea spray—the illusion of a panoramic view of the world—were gone. Now the room was four bare walls with more fixtures where nothing was hung.

  The furniture was still here, moved to the center of the floor unchanged except for the big bed. The mattress and springs and the blood-soaked sheets and pillows were gone, and the bed had been dismantled. The spattered headboard was now clean, leaning against the tall, heavy dresser with the similarly cleaned footboard.

  The whole house was dead now, part of a man’s lifetime that had ended and must already be half forgotten, replaced by a scandal. She had seen cleared-out places before and had been prepared for the change. She was not a person who let herself be surprised over and over by things she should have expected.

  She had taken a risk coming back to the scene of the murders in the hope that the ornamentation would be gone and whatever remained here would be unhidden and undisguised and help her learn something. She wandered around the room, making sure that the floor where she walked had no dust that would retain an imprint of her shoes.

  When she saw the pinhole camera she knew she had found the thing that had gone unnoticed before. The white power strip along the top of the crown molding extended to all four walls. On it were sliding white plastic covers that were to be moved aside to bare a socket or pushed back to cover it, depending on whether an artwork was to be lit. She ran her eyes along the white power strips and saw that each of them had a couple of small white squares with tiny white glass dots in the center.

  She had never seen one of these devices in her life until the previous day in the shop in Sherman Oaks. She had bought ten of them herself. The man who had handled the sale had said they were the best pinhole cameras available. And they were certainly very good. She had nine of hers watching the office near the airport right now, and the images were clear and crisp.

  As she considered the situation she made sure she showed no reaction. She could be on camera right now. Was on camera. She knew that. She just didn’t know whether there was still anybody on the receiving end, watching or recording the house, now that the owner was dead. She kept the thoughtful, empty expression on her face as she turned and walked out of the room to the upper landing of the spiral staircase. She turned to move along the hallway. Were there other pinhole cameras in the power strips out here?

  Yes, there were. She saw one, and that was enough to make it unnecessary to look for more. Nick Kavanagh’s assurance to Valerie McGee Teason came back. He’d said the whole place was wired with alarms to protect the paintings he brought home. That must have been what the installers told him the power strips were for—that they provided current to the small spotlights over the paintings, but they also provided it to alarms that went off if a painting were removed or tampered with. And it was probably true. But the strips could also provide power to pinhole cameras and microphones. If he’d known that, he obviously hadn’t given it sufficient thought.

  She took out her phone and held it to her right ear as though she were making a call, waiting for someone to answer, but she was recording a movie of the power strip above her as she walked toward the hallway where the staircase was. She said, “It’s me. No message,” and put the phone away. She remembered the blond woman, Anne Satterthwaite Mannon, saying, “How did you even know we were here?” Now Elle knew how.

  The security company had known because it had watched more than just paintings. Maybe the killer hadn’t been in a hurry to have the camera that Elle had taken from the bedroom, because it was one of many. If Elle had known how many there were, she might not have bothered either.

  Out. She had to get out of this house. She had no idea what else the security company had installed, but the whole building might be bugged, booby-trapped, or anything else. Security people could be watching her right now on computers in their building near the airport,
or even on computers in their cars. She had an impulse to unplug the power strips, tear out the cameras and microphones, but that would only let them know she knew. It was better if they didn’t. They might make some defensive move or decide killing her was urgent.

  She scrambled up the attic steps, pulled up the stairs, closed the trapdoor, and stepped to the window to raise it enough to crawl out. She went out and closed it, but then she realized that they might already have noticed the window was open a crack, so she opened it again. As soon as she was out on the roof she began to feel less trapped. The faint breeze through the tall trees beside the roof cooled her face and hair. She crawled backward, lowering herself to the edge and down to the lid of the black trash can. She had to be more light-footed than she’d been on the first two trips, because there was nothing in the trash can and it wobbled a bit. She jumped off it to the patio.

  She jogged along the driveway to reach the sidewalk at an angle, so if a person hadn’t already been watching her he wouldn’t be sure she hadn’t come across the drive instead of down it. She ran at her usual pace and minded her running form, so if anyone saw her there would be no mystery about her. A person’s only possible credential as a legitimate runner was being good at it.

  She reached her rental car, got in, and drove. She kept going at the best speed she could manage without being noticed and then threw in a few turns and evasions. Then she realized she was only acting out of long practice as a burglar. But right now she wasn’t really a burglar. She was an investigator, and this was a chance to prove one of her theories. It required that she take one more chance. She turned and drove back toward the Kavanagh house along the quiet streets south of Sunset. She and the various Mercedeses and Jaguars and BMWs of Beverly Hills braked at the four-way stop signs on each intersection and waited to give each other the chance to go first, then proceeded with caution. It gave Elle the chance to look both ways at each stop to spot the enemy.