Looking at her, Bryce could almost read her mind. “Your brother caught a break—this time,” he clarified. “But sooner or later...” Bryce told her, keeping his voice low so no one else could overhear, “he’s not going to be so lucky. Sooner or later—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. His cell phone began to ring.
“Maybe it’s Valri,” Scottie said hopefully, holding her breath as he took out his phone and answered the call.
“Cavanaugh. Right. Where again?” He suppressed a sigh. “Got it. Be right there.” He terminated the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket. His eyes met Scottie’s. “There’s been another one.”
Chapter 18
The scene of the latest break-in was a sprawling ranch-style house located on a quiet street situated on the north end of Aurora. The street trees were tall, having had more than thirty years to grow. They were in full bloom and bowed toward the trees opposite them like elegant courtiers greeting one another.
The entire scene appeared to be the epitome of tranquility and movie perfect.
It was hard to believe that a break-in had taken place here, Scottie thought, taking it all in as Bryce drove to the address he’d been given by the first responder on the scene.
Rather than park in the driveway, Bryce pulled up and parked next to the curb. “You up to this?” he paused to ask her.
She was already out of the car, eager to collect the newest pieces of information. “Try and stop me.”
“My dad didn’t raise any stupid kids,” Bryce answered with a laugh. As they walked up to the front door, they passed what appeared to be a fully loaded 2017 Mercedes in the driveway. “You’d think that if they were going to rob the place, they’d be tempted to take something like this,” he said, indicating the gleaming black vehicle.
“Tempted, maybe, but smart enough to leave it alone. This is a lot easier to track down than what they usually take,” Scottie told him as they approached the front door.
“You have a point,” he agreed, taking one last wistful look at the vehicle before Scottie rang the doorbell.
The officer who’d called Bryce opened the door to let them in.
“What’d they get?” Bryce asked the officer, walking into the house.
“Husband’s prized Standing Liberty coin collection,” the officer answered. “And a few pieces of the wife’s jewelry. She’s really broken up about it,” he added quietly.
“Thanks,” Bryce told the officer. “We’ll take it from here.” Walking into the living room, he took out his ID and held it up for the two people in the living room. Both appeared to be a little shell-shocked, especially the wife. “Detectives Cavanaugh and Scott,” Bryce said, letting the couple look at his ID and then putting it away again. “Why don’t you tell us everything that happened right from the beginning?”
“I’m not sure what happened,” the victim, Harry Vickers, snapped irritably. “Regina and I came home from a cruise and everything looked just the way it did when we’d left it,” he told them with a bewildered shrug.
“So when did you realize that you’d been robbed?” Scottie asked. In response to her question, the man’s wife began to softly sob. “Take your time, ma’am,” she urged the woman compassionately.
Impatient to get this over with, her husband took over the narrative. “We realized we were robbed when Regina went to check on her jewelry.”
“Check on it?” Scottie queried, not sure what the man was trying to tell her.
“My father gave me this little diamond cross,” Regina explained in a choked voice. She was obviously struggling to sound coherent. “It was my mother’s. I never took it off, but I was afraid I might lose it on the cruise, so I left it here with some other pieces—pieces I don’t wear,” she added as an afterthought. “I should have taken it with me,” she lamented woefully. She sounded more distressed than her husband was about his stolen coin collection.
“You had no way of knowing this would happen, ma’am,” Scottie said, trying to make the woman feel a little better.
Regina Vickers’s deep brown eyes filled with tears. “That doesn’t change the fact that the necklace is gone,” she sobbed.
“Anything else taken?” Bryce asked, trying to move the investigation along.
“Isn’t that enough?” Vickers snapped then instantly apologized. “Sorry, you just don’t expect something like this to happen to you. They wiped out my coin collection. I’ve been building it for years,” he told them. “I have pictures and detailed receipts from when I purchased each piece,” Vickers added.
“That’ll be very helpful,” Bryce agreed. “And they didn’t take anything else?” he asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to be sure.
“Isn’t that enough for you?” Vickers demanded.
“Just trying to get everything down accurately, sir,” Bryce told him.
“I know, I know,” Vickers replied, irritated. “It’s just that the damn security system never even went off. What point is having one if it’s not going to work?” the heavyset man demanded.
“The thieves obviously found a way to hack into the system to override it,” Bryce told the victim, trying to calm the man down. “You said you just got back from a cruise. How long were you gone?”
“Eight days,” Vickers answered.
“And you just got back today?” Scottie asked.
“I just said that, didn’t I? We got home two hours ago,” Vickers specified. Digging into his pants’ pocket he took out a handkerchief and pushed it into his wife’s hands. “Get a grip, Regina,” he said, no doubt at a loss as to how to comfort the woman. “I’ll buy you another diamond cross, a bigger one.”
“I don’t want another one,” she sobbed. “I want that one.”
Bryce glanced in Scottie’s direction. She knew he was thinking the same thing she was. If the Vickers had been gone eight days, the break-in could have happened at any time, possibly before the one that had occurred at the Williamses’ house. There was a great possibility that if one of the thieves had gotten shot, they wouldn’t be pulling off another break-in so soon.
And if that thief had been seriously wounded and the members had gone into hiding, they would be that much harder to track down.
So far, according to what Sean had reported, canvassing all the local hospitals and clinics for a possible walk-in, gunshot-wound victim had turned up nothing.
* * *
They asked the Vickers a few more questions and then, handing them a card and asking them to call if anything else occurred to either of them, Bryce and Scottie started to take their leave.
Vickers walked out with them.
“What are my chances on getting my coin collection back?” he asked. “It’s fully insured, so I won’t be losing any money in the long run. But some of those pieces took me years to track down. They’re irreplaceable.”
“Kind of like your wife’s diamond cross,” Scottie pointed out.
Vickers appeared annoyed and somewhat embarrassed. “Yes, I suppose so.”
As they walked past the Mercedes, Bryce couldn’t help asking one more question. “How do you like your Mercedes?”
Vickers looked at it as if he’d forgotten it was even there. “I haven’t had that much of a chance to drive it. Almost right off the bat, I had to take it into the shop. Damn thing has a mind of its own. I’m not sure I’d recommend getting one,” he said honestly.
Bryce paused by the car. “How so?”
“Well, it totally shut down when I was driving to my office about a month ago. The doors all locked themselves and then everything just died. Had to have it towed to one of those high-end repair shops. There still aren’t that many places that fix these things because of all the special electronics it has,” he told Bryce.
“Have you
had any more trouble with it since?” Scottie asked.
“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. We drove back from the cruise in it, but I have to admit I was a little leery about driving it,” Vickers confessed. “Handled like a dream, but it’s like when you catch someone in a lie, you know? It takes a lot to rebuild that faith you once had.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Scottie told the home owner. “Thanks for your time. We’ll be in touch,” she promised.
“What are you thinking?” Bryce asked as they got back into his car.
Lost in thought, Scottie blinked as she looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I could almost see those wheels in your head turning. Something’s got you going,” he told her, starting up his car. They pulled away from the curb and proceeded to drive out of the development. “Out with it.”
“I noticed one of those so-called ‘smart cars’ in the Taylors’ driveway when we went to take their statements. Why don’t we go back and find out if they had any car trouble recently? And then we can find out how many of the other break-in victims owned these fully loaded new cars. I’m betting maybe all of them.”
He heard the excitement building in her voice. “What are you getting at?”
She knew her idea was far-fetched, but in this internet age, far-fetched was only a few steps away from becoming reality.
“Aside from hacking emails and texts and checking social media postings, an excellent way to find out if someone is going to be away from home is to have a tracking device attached somewhere on a car. That’s something your friendly, neighborhood, specialized mechanic can easily take care of, attaching it to some remote part of the vehicle that doesn’t get to see the light of day, or noticed by the driver.”
She paused to let that mouthful sink in before adding what, to her, was the crowning piece. “Did you know that those new cars can be operated remotely by anyone who knows what they’re doing?”
Admittedly, Bryce was only vaguely aware of the leaps that electronics had made when it came to automobiles these days.
“That’s positively diabolical,” Bryce told her, digesting what she’d just told him. “You’re a scary lady, Scottie.”
“I’m not scary,” she denied. “I just know things you don’t.”
He’d always been a driver who liked to feel in control of his vehicle. His first car had been a manual stick shift he’d worked on in his garage with his cousins. “Makes me long for a 1967 Camaro.”
His choice surprised her. “You like those, too?” she asked.
“You better believe it. Kept trying to find one to rebuild all through high school, but never had any luck.” He realized he was getting distracted. “Okay, so, let’s go back and pay our break-in victims one last visit to find out how many of them own fully loaded, new, so-called ‘smart cars’ and if any of those had to be taken in for work.”
* * *
The answer turned out to be all of them. And each of them had taken their car in for what amounted to be minor adjustments to one of two local shops. Autos of the Future Repair Shop and another repair shop simply referred to as Matthew’s Car Service.
Unlike old-fashioned, hole-in-the-wall auto repair shops whose clientele was built up through word of mouth and whose very existence was a month-to-month affair, the two repair shops that serviced one or the other of the victims’ vehicles were the last word in sleek, modern and state of the art. They had to be, given the sort of vehicle they were dealing with.
Once he and Scottie had gone back to all the victims, they confirmed that each had had trouble with their vehicles sometime before the break-ins occurred.
“Looks like you’re onto something, Scottie,” Bryce told her. “Good catch.”
They took down the date of service and the name of the repair shop that did the service.
Equipped with that information, they went to talk to the shop owners and to the mechanics who had specifically worked on the cars in question.
That was when they discovered that both shops had one mechanic in common. Marty Stevens, a nondescript man who tended to fade into the woodwork, worked part-time in both shops and had done so right from the time the repair shops had opened.
“What he doesn’t know about these new high-tech vehicles isn’t worth knowing,” Neil Gallagher, the owner of Autos of the Future Repair Shop assured them.
“I think we may have found our man,” Bryce said to his partner as they approached the mechanic, who was working at Matthew’s Car Service that afternoon.
Marty was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside an ivory-colored BMW he was currently “repairing.”
Bryce squatted beside him. “Marty Stevens?”
Thin, wiry and barely five-five with rust-colored hair that easily fell prey to any hint of humidity in the air, Marty didn’t even look up. “Sorry. Busy. Can’t look at your car if that’s why you’re here.”
“No. We’re here about a car you already looked at. As a matter of fact, several cars you’ve already looked at,” Scottie told him.
That got the mechanic’s attention and he scrambled to his feet. “You have any complaints, talk to the manager. He handles the reimbursements,” he told Bryce somewhat nervously.
“We came to talk to you, Marty,” Bryce told him, keeping his tone friendly. “We’d like you to come down to the precinct with us and answer a few questions.”
“I can’t,” the mechanic protested. “I’m busy.”
“Oh, I think you can,” Bryce told him. “Now, you can come voluntarily or we can place you under arrest, the choice is yours.”
Marty seemed instantly skittish. Weighing his options for a moment he said, “I’ll come with you.”
“Good choice,” Scottie told him.
They escorted the mechanic out of the shop.
“Hey, he’s not finished yet,” the owner protested as he saw them leave with Stevens.
“Oh, I think he might be.” Bryce tossed the comment over his shoulder as they left.
* * *
“Something you’d like to get off your chest?” Bryce asked once Stevens had been brought into the interrogation room.
The mechanic appeared to shrink into his chair as he looked from one detective to the other. He rubbed his palms on the table, leaving wet streaks. “Yeah, I don’t like being questioned.”
“Because you did something wrong?” Bryce asked, moving his chair closer to the mechanic’s.
“Because you act like I did something wrong.” Perspiration was forming on Marty’s upper lip. “I didn’t overcharge that guy,” he protested. “That’s what the owner does. All the electronics in these new cars are tricky. You have to baby them, otherwise they go haywire.”
“‘Haywire,’” Bryce repeated, still sounding friendly. “Is that a technical term?” he asked.
Stevens swallowed. His Adam’s apple seemed to dance up and down. “Do I need a lawyer?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Bryce responded, “do you?”
Scottie took her turn, doing her best to sound friendly when what she wanted to do was to grab the mousey-looking mechanic by his shirt and shake him. “Look, Marty, we’re not looking at you for price gouging or for padding the final bill. That’s not what we do here. We just think it’s rather odd that all the vehicles you were asked to repair had tracking devices on them.”
The mechanic continued perspiring, his coveralls clearly sticking to him. “Yeah, in the dashboard. It’s a standard feature,” Marty said nervously, staring down at the table as he shifted in his seat.
“In the dashboard, yes,” Scottie agreed. “But that’s not the tracking device we’re interested in. The last one we found was in the wheel well. That’s not a standard feature,” she pointed out quietly.
“There was a tracking device in
the wheel well?” Stevens asked, doing his best to sound surprised. Belatedly, he raised his eyebrows.
“That’s pretty bad acting, Marty,” Bryce commented. “Want to give it another go?”
There was a note of building hysteria in the mechanic’s voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about ten to twenty most likely—for each break-in,” Bryce informed him calmly. “More if the judge doesn’t like your attitude.”
It was obvious that the mechanic was panicking now. “Wait, what?”
“That’s what breaking and entering is going for these days,” Bryce told him, making up the numbers to frighten the mechanic into a confession.
Stevens was almost beside himself. “I didn’t break in anywhere,” he protested, looking from one detective to the other, desperate to have one of them believe him. “I just fixed cars.”
“Fixed it so that your gang knew when the owners were away from their house and it was safe to break in,” Scottie said. She leaned in on the mechanic’s other side so that he felt as if they were closing in on him.
“I want a lawyer,” Stevens cried, his voice cracking. “I have a right to a lawyer.”
“Yes, you do. But you get a lawyer and we can’t help you,” Scottie said, still doing her best to sound as if she was being sympathetic.
“How? How can you help me?” Stevens asked, his head almost swiveling back and forth as he looked from one detective to the other, searching for a way out of his dilemma.
Scottie laid it all out for the mechanic. “You tell us who else is in on this, who broke into those houses and where we can find them and, for our part, we’ll tell the judge how helpful you were and recommend that they go easy on you,” she told the nervous-looking mechanic. “You won’t have to serve the full sentences.”
Stevens looked torn and exceedingly frightened. “I don’t know.” He turned toward Scottie. “She’ll kill me if she finds out I told you anything.”
“She? Who’s she?” Scottie pressed. Not waiting for a name, she asked Stevens, “Is it Eva?”
Cavanaugh on Call Page 18