“Shit,” muttered Mike under his breath. Holding the flashlight in his mouth, he reached into the knapsack and pulled out two combination locks—he hadn’t remembered the color of the lock so he had gotten a red and a black one but now he noticed that the lock he had cut off the cabinet had a green dial. “Shit shit,” he whispered. He decided that the black lock was most likely to pass a cursory inspection. He placed the bolt cutters in the knapsack, followed by the green and red locks—they knocked together, making a loud thunk just as he heard footsteps in the room over the garage. Mike froze. He heard the steps passing back and forth in the room above, accompanied by the click of china—the housekeeper must be unloading the dishwasher. As quietly as possible he slipped the black lock into the handles of the cabinet and snapped it shut. He put the flashlight into the knapsack and slowly zipped it shut. He grasped the garbage bag and lifted it up and as he did so the two cans of paint shifted, knocking against each other. He froze as he heard the footsteps in the room over him stop. He stepped to the side of the cabinet so that it stood between himself and the stairway to the first floor and crouched down as he heard the footsteps approach the door to the garage.
The door opened and Mike could see the shadow of a woman cast down the steps from the light behind her. After a beat the garage light clicked on. Mike held his breath. After a few seconds the light went off and the shadow on the stairs disappeared as the woman closed the door.
For a few more minutes Mike heard the sounds of the housekeeper walking back and forth in the kitchen but then he heard very faintly the sounds of a child crying and the steps receded toward the front of the house. Picking up the knapsack and the garbage bag he stole to the door and, slipping out, closed it quietly behind him.
*****
Scott had circled the block four times before he saw Mike at the designated pick-up point. Scott pulled to the corner and Mike dropped the garbage bag and knapsack in the back seat of the Audi and then climbed in the front passenger seat.
“What took you so long?” asked Scott.
“She came back to the kitchen,” said Mike. “I had to wait for her to leave. Drive away.”
Scott pulled carefully back into traffic. “Did you get it?”
“I did find some blue things in the cabinet.” He rubbed his hands across his face and then turned and grinned at Scott. “That worked like a charm.”
“This is fun,” said Scott, smiling back. “I feel like Tom Cruise in that movie!”
“Mission Impossible.”
“Exactly!”
They took Walnut Street to the Schuylkill Expressway to Route 202 South, the traffic blessedly light.
When they got home Mike took the garbage bag to the garage and pulled out the items.
“A glue gun?” said Scott, raising his eyebrow.
Mike shrugged. “It was blue. I didn't have a lot of time to consider.”
They stood, fists on hips, considering their plunder.
“Maybe there’s something in the room of the house that is painted this color that we’re supposed to find,” said Scott.
“Jeez, I hope not,” said Mike, “one breaking-and-entering per lifetime is enough for me.” He pondered. “That would seem unnecessarily complicated, if there was something in another room, why not just send Ann the message when she was in that room.”
“Maybe so the seller’s real estate agent wouldn’t know.”
Mike looked skeptical. “Let’s open them up and see if there’s anything inside.”
They got a newspaper out of the recycling bin and spread some pages on the garage floor. Scott got a screwdriver from an infrequently used toolbox under the kitchen sink and Mike pried the lids off the paint cans. One had only a small amount of paint in the bottom and after tipping it back and forth—the paint didn’t move—Mike set it aside. The other can, however, was almost full and he used the screwdriver to stir the paint, eliciting a squawk from Scott.
“Use one of those wooden things!”
“I don’t think we have one of those wooden things,” said Mike. “There’s something in this one.”
“What?” said Scott, peering over his shoulder.
“We need something to pour the paint into.”
They found an empty plastic kitty litter bucket and slowly poured the paint out of the paint can until they could see a shapeless mass at the bottom of the can. Mike reached in gingerly and, grasping the object by a corner, lifted it out onto the newspaper. When he wiped the paint away with a paper towel they could see it was a Ziploc bag.
“What’s in it?” asked Scott, squatting down next to Mike.
Mike tried to clear the outside of the bag with a fresh paper towel.
“It looks like jewelry,” he said.
“Let’s open it,” said Scott.
Mike sat back on his haunches, wiping his fingers on the towel.
“Let’s not open it yet,” he said. “We need to decide what we’re going to do with it. Maybe there are fingerprints or something like that that the police could get from whatever’s in there. We might mess it up if we try to take it out of the bag.”
They both sat contemplating the bag for a time, then Mike said, “Let’s put it away while we think about it.”
They put the Ziploc bag into an empty Testoni shoe box and put it, along with the other items they had taken, back in the trunk of the Audi. Then they went upstairs to the kitchen and Scott poured them each a glass of wine.
“To our new occupation as cat burglars,” said Scott, and they clinked glasses. “Are you going to call the police?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike, sipping his wine. “They would probably just arrest us for breaking and entering and not do anything to the husband.” He considered some more. “What I’d like to do is take it to Ann, I think she might be able to get something from it.”
“Like what?” asked Scott.
“I don’t know, but I’ve told you about how having Beth Barboza’s softball bat helped her find Beth. I’ll bet that jewelry belonged to the wife and Ann could get more information from it.”
“But what more information could there be?” asked Scott. “They already found the wife’s body. And I would think that finding her jewelry in the house would be pretty incriminating for the husband.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “I need to think about it more.”
In fact, as the excitement from the success of their venture wore off, Mike realized that there was probably little he could do with their discovery. Even if he did take it to the police, it was probably inadmissible as evidence considering how it had been obtained. And it’s not like they needed to find a body—Elizabeth Firth’s was no doubt safely ensconced in a family vault—but Mike couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that they might have done more harm than good with their adventure, and at the same time didn’t want to stomach the idea of a murderer going free when they had the proof he was guilty.
He took another swallow of wine.
Chapter 37
The next morning when Biden returned home he found Joan with Sophia in the kitchen, Sophia in the high chair with a bowl of cereal in front of her. Biden kissed Sophia on top of the head.
“How’s my favorite girl doing?” he said.
“She’s good,” said Joan. “We watched some cartoons this morning.” Biden knew Joan didn’t approve of his frequent absences from home but at least she didn’t refer to them.
“Sounds like fun,” said Biden to Sophia, turning to leave the kitchen.
“That man who looked at the house yesterday came back after you had left, he lost something while he was here.”
“Did you let him in?” asked Biden sharply.
“Of course not,” said Joan, affronted.
“No, of course not,” said Biden. “What did he lose?”
“A St. Christopher’s medal,” said Joan. “I found it in the gym. He waited outside.”
“Hmm. Well, thanks for taking care of that.”
Biden pondered that while climbing th
e stairs to his room. Maybe he would take the house off the market for a while. At first he had wanted to be out of it but as the weeks went by that motivation seemed less and less. It was paid for so it wasn’t costing him anything to stay. And he was getting tired of people walking through the place—first the police and then a bunch of prospective buyers, maybe even curiosity seekers. He would talk to Pironi about holding off on more showings.
He showered and changed. After finishing the breakfast that Joan brought him in the dining room and reading the newspaper, Biden decided to go to the club and see if he could find a golf game to join. Getting his golf shoes from the bedroom and his bag from the closet in the back hall he told Joan he’d be back in a few hours and headed to the garage. He loaded the bag into the trunk and got into the car, hitting the door opener. The light from outside lit the garage and as he waited for the door to open his eye wandered across the metal cabinet and then returned to it. Something was different.
He turned off the car, got out, and went to the cabinet. Something was different but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. For the first time in many weeks he grasped the lock he had added to the cabinet months ago and began spinning the dial but before he was done entering the combination he knew what it was—it wasn’t his lock.
He dropped the lock and stepped back as if he had been stung. Then, knowing it was futile, he finished entering the combination and gave the lock a tug. Nothing. His hands shaking, he entered the combination again with the same result.
He stood back, breathing heavily and staring at the lock. Then he closed the garage door and went upstairs to the kitchen.
“Joan, do you know the combination for the lock on the cabinet in the garage? I can’t seem to remember it.”
“No, Mr. Firth,” said Joan. “I don't think I ever knew the combination.”
He returned to the garage and opened the trunk of his car which still contained the bolt cutters he had bought in Tupper Lake. He applied the cutters to the lock and after some effort it gave way. He pulled the lock off and, taking a deep breath, opened the cabinet.
Where the paint can that had held Elizabeth’s jewelry had been there was now a circle of dust-free shelf.
Biden went back to the car and got in, gripping the steering wheel and staring at the open cabinet. Why had he felt compelled to keep the jewelry? Everything else had gone perfectly, how hard would it have been to throw a couple of thousand dollars of jewelry—many tens of thousands of dollars of jewelry, another part of his mind corrected—into the Schuylkill River? But he had thought the hiding place was foolproof—it had fooled the police, hadn’t it? Who could have known that anything was in there? And it wasn’t like the whole cabinet was ransacked, it looked like there were only a few things missing. And then it occurred to him who might have known there was something in there—Ann Kinnear.
He got out his phone, his hands shaking, and speed dialed Mark Pironi.
“Pironi here.”
“It’s Biden Firth.”
“Hey, Biden, what’s up.”
“Mark, were any of the people who came to the house ever alone in the garage?”
“Not on my watch,” said Pironi. “Why?”
“I bought a new GPS a couple of weeks ago and it was still in the box in the garage and now it’s missing.”
“Shit, that sucks,” said Pironi.
“How about when that Kinnear group came, were they ever alone down there?”
“I don’t think so,” said Pironi, thinking. “We all went into the alley for a minute but I think we were all together. That woman had that spell in back and the buyers’ realtor, Joyce, went in to get her a glass of water, I suppose that while that was going on someone could have picked it up … but if it was still in the box it would be a pretty bulky thing to hide, I think I would have noticed something.”
“How about that guy yesterday?”
Pironi was silent.
“Was he in the garage alone?”
“Well, he had this thing about hearing footsteps between floors, he wanted me to go into the kitchen to walk around to see if it was noisy in the garage.”
“He cared about how noisy footsteps would be in the garage?” said Firth.
“He wanted to check all the floors,” said Pironi. “He definitely didn’t come out of the garage with a box, I would have seen it.”
“How long was he down there alone?”
“Maybe a minute, tops.”
“What was his name?”
“Scott Pate.”
Biden gripped and ungripped his hand on the steering wheel. “Listen, Pironi, I don’t want anyone walking through my house unescorted. I’m sick of having my stuff gone through and I don’t want some conspiracy theorist, or some ordinary fucking thief, picking up a souvenir of their visit, am I making myself understood?”
“Sure, Biden, I get it …”
“Anyway, before this even happened I was thinking of taking the place off the market. Don’t schedule any more showings. I’ll give you a call after I’ve had a chance to think about it.”
“Sure, Biden, but …”
Biden hit the End button.
He went upstairs again—fortunately Joan and Sophia weren’t in the kitchen anymore or Joan might have wondered why a forgotten lock combination had put her employer in such a state—and went to his computer in the library. He did a search for “scott pate” and didn't find anything interesting, just a home address in West Chester. He pondered that for a moment and then did a search for home address for “mike kinnear.” The results displayed.
“Shit,” he said, burying his face in his hands.
Chapter 38
After a night pondering his options, Mike decided to drive up to the Adirondacks with the bag of jewelry. He wanted to see Ann in person since he knew that trying to explain to her why he had felt it necessary to break into the Firth house was going to be a tricky conversation best not attempted over the phone. He called her up to tell her he was coming.
“I have a couple of days with no appointments and Scott’s out of town, mind if I come up?”
“Sure,” she said, “we can go kayaking. Want to see if Walt’s available? He might be able to pick you up tomorrow morning.”
“No, that’s OK, I won’t mind the drive.” He also didn’t mind the idea of having some time to himself to mull over what plan he should propose to Ann, and how to do it.
As he neared King of Prussia where he would normally pick up the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he abruptly switched lanes and instead took the exit to the Schuylkill Expressway and Philadelphia. Soon he was driving slowly down the street in front of the Rittenhouse Square townhouse—at the end of the street he pulled into a space in front of a fire hydrant and killed the engine. Should he drive down the alley? It seemed ill-advised ... it was unlikely that he could just sneak back into the garage and replace the items. Hell, he didn’t even know the combination to the lock he had put on the cabinet. He toyed briefly with the idea of just leaving the can of paint next to the back door—that would certainly bring things to a head. But he realized that now he didn’t want the case solved as much as he wanted Ann out of it. He got out his cell phone, almost hit the speed dial for Scott, then tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He could hardly decide what to do without ’fessing up to Ann and getting her input. With a sigh he started up the Audi and headed back to the Schuylkill.
Chapter 39
On the way to West Chester, Biden stopped at a convenience store and bought a map; God, he was tired of doing everything the hard way. Was it even true that they could tell if you had entered a particular address into your GPS, or that they could track your movements via data in the GPS databases? Maybe that was just an invention of the crime shows. He realized he shouldn’t have searched for Pate’s and Kinnear’s addresses on his own computer—he hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got to their house, but if the disappearance of the paint can was somehow related
to Pate’s visit—maybe Joan hadn’t locked the front door when she went upstairs looking for the lost item and he had gotten in then, or maybe he let in Kinnear who had then left by the back door—then maybe it wasn’t too late. If he had taken it to the police, Firth figured he would have heard from them by now. Maybe their plan wasn’t to take the bag of jewelry to the police at all—after all, there would be questions about how they had come into possession of it—but to use it some way in support of their supernatural “consulting business.” Another thought struck him—maybe they meant to blackmail him! He laughed mirthlessly—they could try, but they would find that that well was dry.
The map led him to an upscale modern townhouse; he slowed as he passed it, then circled the block and pulled up across the street. What was he looking for? Not likely Mike Kinnear was going to pick that moment to get the mail … although, if he did, Biden thought, being seen there wasn’t a great idea since Kinnear might wonder why Bob Dormand, their Harvey Cedars client, was parked in front of his house. He pulled away and drove aimlessly around until he found a pay phone inside a supermarket at a nearby shopping center. He called the number he had copied down from his internet search.
“Hello?” It didn’t sound like Kinnear.
“Hi, Mike?” said Firth.
“No, this is Scott.”
“Hi, Scott. Is Mike there?”
“He’s not here right now, could I take a message?”
“Damn. Do you know when he’s going to be back?”
“Who is this?”
“Oh, sorry, this is Bob Donald, I’m a friend of Mike’s from way back. I was visiting my parents in the area and I thought I might catch up with him. I’m leaving tonight, do you think he'll be back before then?”
“No, he won’t be back today but I can have him give you a call if you want.”
“Sure, that would be great.” Firth read a phone number off a flyer on a bulletin board next to the pay phone. “If I don't catch up with him this time I’ll give him a call next time I’m in town.”
The Sense of Death: An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel (The Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels Book 1) Page 22