He’d hoped that last night’s forced entry to Zula’s apartment would be the last time he’d have to expose himself to the possibility of seeing something horrible. Now here he was climbing another staircase toward another possible crime scene. This time he considered it much more likely he’d see something that would scar him for life. But it was his responsibility to shove his face into this particular psychological buzz saw and so he reckoned he should get on with it.
What he found, though, was not what he’d expected. Peter’s apartment contained no persons, living or dead. Nor were there any signs of violence or struggle, with two exceptions. One—which he had anticipated—was the missing windowpane, which had clearly been used by someone to break into the loft. The shattered glass was still sprayed over the floor below it.
The other was a wrecked gun safe standing against the wall in the corner of the loft. Something comprehensively bad had happened to it. Its finish had been burned away in a line that went all the way around its top, as though it had been attacked with a thermonuclear can opener. The entire top of the safe had been sliced off and thrown on the floor, where hot metal edges had burned into the wood. Instinctively Richard scanned the ceiling for smoke detectors and noted that they were all dangling open, their batteries removed.
This part seemed almost like a waste of time, but he stepped forward and looked down into the safe and verified that it was empty.
He walked back down the stairs and found the welder. “I could use your professional opinion on something.”
“Plasma cutter,” was the welder’s verdict, after he had come up the stairs and got a load of the ruined gun safe.
“Do you have one?”
“No!” said the welder, and shot him a look.
“I wasn’t accusing you,” Richard said, holding up his hands. “I was just curious what they look like.”
“It’s a box,” the welder said, holding up his hands to indicate size. “About yay big.”
“Portable.”
“Totally.”
“Portable enough to take it through yonder window?”
“That would be a bit of a stretch. I would recommend stairs.”
“So someone probably used the window to get inside and get a door open, then carried the plasma cutter up the stairs.”
“Yeah,” said the welder, “but I don’t think your average burglar carries one around on his person.”
“Agreed,” Richard said.
The welder looked over his shoulder, a little uneasily, at Peter’s apartment. “Seen anything else … funky?”
“No,” Richard said, “nothing funky.”
“Fuckin’ weird, man,” said the welder, and left.
Richard found his way to the front door, which had a deadbolt, a chain, and a pushbutton lock in the middle of the doorknob. The latter was locked, but the other two weren’t. After breaking in via the window, the burglar must have unlocked this door from the inside and used it to bring the plasma cutter in and out, and used the button to secure it behind him when he’d left.
So, to all appearances, the plasma-cutter gun-safe caper had happened when the place was already vacant.
But how did its being vacant square with the presence of three cars in the bay? And why would the sports car’s owner leave his key chain in the ignition? Generally, people needed their key chains for other purposes, such as getting into their houses.
Turning around, he noticed a red LED gleaming at him from the top of a shelving unit where Peter was in the habit of storing his raincoats, hats, and boots. He walked closer and found a little webcam, mounted there with a web of white nylon zip ties. An Ethernet wire trailed away from it and disappeared into a hole in the wall. Richard traced it back into the shop area where the cars were parked, and found a place, not far from the plywood panel with the telecommunications gear, where a computer must have sat at one time. It had been on the bottom shelf of a workbench. Above it were a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but their cables dangled into the space below. A power cable and an Ethernet wire were there too.
Richard assumed that the computer must have been taken, until a minute later when he literally tripped over it while circling the sports car. The CPU—a simple rectangular box—had been thrown down on the concrete floor and attacked with the plasma cutter: a single pass cutting down the side of it, slicing through the stack of drives.
Richard cursed. He’d imagined he was on to something. Peter had set up security cameras around his place. Perhaps one of them had captured some footage of interest. But the intruder had anticipated this and made sure that the hard drive was destroyed.
He orbited all the cars, peering in through their windows, not wanting to disturb the evidence any more than he already had. Peter’s had not been fully unpacked; whatever had happened must have happened shortly after they’d gotten back to the place on Monday night.
He was jotting down the license plate number of the car from B.C. when his ears picked up a familiar clicking and whooshing noise: the sound of a hard drive coming awake and going to work.
Following the sound, and assisted by some conveniently placed Ethernet cables, he got underneath the flight of wooden stairs that led to Peter’s loft, and found a little box, mounted to an improvised shelf and plugged into an outlet through a string of extension cords. It was a Wi-Fi access point. A little bigger than most nowadays.
It was bigger, he realized, because it wasn’t just a Wi-Fi router. It was also a backup device. It had its own built-in hard drive.