Her cell phone appears in her hand.
“I’ve just had a break-in at my shop,” she says, sounding puzzled. “Wow. First time since I’ve opened.”
“It’s probably a false alarm, right?”
“Maybe. But the cops are on their way. Do you mind if we go check it out? You can stay here if you’d rather.”
“No, no,” I tell her, glad for an excuse to get out of this crazy goldfish bowl. “Let’s go make sure everything’s okay.”
Nadine smiles with gratitude. “Thank you.”
As I escort her toward the rooftop doors, I risk one backward glance. Thanks to Jet’s height, I can see her eyes between the heads on the dance floor. She’s no longer looking at the spot Sally was standing in a minute ago.
She’s watching Nadine and me leave.
As I pass through the doors with Nadine’s hand clasped in mine, I realize how true Jet’s realization was down on the mezzanine balcony. She’s tied to Paul and his family by more than paper. The bond that binds her to the Mathesons is blood—effectively unbreakable. I’ve always known this at some level, I suppose, but in my euphoria at possessing Jet again, I let myself believe that some magical solution would reveal itself later. But later has become now, as it always does, and I see no solution. Not even the hope of one. And as for Buck’s death, at this moment, nothing links the Poker Club to it other than their collective relief that he’s dead.
And there’s no law against that.
Chapter 21
Only one city police officer responded to the alarm at Constant Reader, and he found both the front and rear entrances locked. The alarm had been triggered by a motion detector on the ground floor. After a quick search, Nadine discovered that a second-floor window had been forced. Oddly, that window was fourteen feet above the pavement of the rear parking area. To gain access that way, the intruder would have had to either bring his own extension ladder or do some creative climbing and risky acrobatics—wasted effort employed in the robbing of a bookstore.
All Nadine can find missing is the tower unit of her computer server. The cash register hasn’t been disturbed. We stand with the cop in the midst of the bookshelves, trying to figure out why someone would steal her computer. The cop has already grown impatient. He seems resentful about having to fill out a report.
“Are you sure that’s all that’s missing?” he asks.
“I think so,” Nadine says. “I mean . . .”
“What have you not checked?” I ask her.
She purses her lips, bemused, and turns in a circle. “Nothing. I mean, unless . . .”
“What?”
“The safe?” she asks, almost humorously.
“Check it.”
She goes into a small office tucked between the bookstore and café portions of the shop, and I follow. The safe appears to be undisturbed.
“It looks okay,” she says.
“Open it,” I advise her. “Just for kicks.”
She looks back to make sure the cop can’t see, then spins the dial right, left, and right again. When she opens the door, I hear a long sigh.
“Well?”
“Somebody was in here,” she says. “Shit.”
“What’s missing?”
“A couple of external hard drives.”
“What was on them?”
She’s shaking her head in silence.
“Nadine?”
“The backups of my business software, plus my financial records for the past two years.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all?” She looks over her shoulder, her face taut with frustration. “I am so fucked.”
“How so?”
“It’ll take me weeks to get back up and running. Back up to speed, I mean. I have my basic software on disk, but I’ve lost so many transactions, records . . . God, what a nightmare. And before you ask, I kept those drives here because this is a fire safe. I don’t have one at home.”
The cop’s voice comes over my shoulder: “So that’s all of it, ma’am? A computer and two hard drives?”
“Looks like it, yes.”
“It’s just . . . sometimes people have firearms stolen, and since they’re not licensed, they don’t like to report it.”
“No,” Nadine says wearily. “No gun.”
“All right. If y’all are okay, I’m going to head out. There’s been kind of a rash of these things tonight.”
“What things?” I ask. “Breakins?”
“Yeah.”
“What else got broken into?”
The cop pauses halfway to the door. “Couple of law offices downtown.”
Nadine and I share a puzzled look. “Law offices? What was taken?”
“Same thing. Some computers. Disks and files and such.”
What the hell? “That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?”
The cop shrugs, then takes out his cell phone to check a text message. “I guess. We get all kinds of crazy stuff in this town. Last week some guys backed a truck through a brick wall to rob the fishing store.”
Nadine rolls her eyes at me.
“Okay, well, I think we’re fine,” I tell him. “Thanks for responding to the call.”
After walking the cop to the door, I come back and find Nadine sitting at one of her café tables.
“How do you feel?” I ask, just to get her talking.
“Violated.”
“It’s always that way with burglaries.”
She looks around the store with what seems like hopelessness. “What the hell, Marshall? What do you think?”
“I think it’s pretty damn weird that they broke into your safe. Even weirder that they didn’t bust it open with an ax. Somebody cracked it. A pro.”
“Are you sure?”
“Had to be. Somebody’s looking for something. Breaking into law offices around town?”
“I’m not a lawyer anymore.”
“Have you done anybody a favor? Legally, I mean. Like someone gave you a tape of their husband having sex with his secretary, something like that?”
She looks like she’s about to laugh. “God, no.”
“Well. Until we get this figured out, you don’t need to sleep at home.”
She starts to object, but then she realizes I’m right. “I have a friend I could stay with, but it’s a little late to call.”
“You can stay with me tonight. I have an extra room.”
She gives me a long look. “You sure?”
“Of course.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Nobody would mind?”
“Hell, no. It’s just me.”
“Okay, then. I’ll need some clothes. Toiletries.”
“We’ll run by your house. I’ll go in with you.”
“Let me lock up here. Or should I say, shut the barn door after the horse has bolted?”
“That’s about it. Hey, can I grab a muffin from the case? I didn’t eat any hors d’oeuvres at the party.”
“Grab me one, too. Cranberry.”
Nadine lives in her mother’s house on Hallam Avenue, in the Garden District. It’s a tall blue Victorian covered in gingerbread, with a whimsical turret at one end of the porch. It’s here that Nadine hosted her popular book club during the two and a half years her mother lived with cancer. While Margaret Sullivan was alive, Nadine lived in a small house nearby, but as the end approached, she sold that and moved into the home in which she’d grown up.
“Do you have a security system here?” I ask as she unlocks the door.
“No. Always meant to get one, but I never have.”
“It’s time. Do you have a gun?”
She switches on the lights, revealing a house that appears to be in perfect order. “I do. It was my mother’s. Or my father’s, actually. He left it behind.”
“Get the gun when you get your clothes,” I advise. “You don’t want it stolen if somebody does hit this place.”
“Aren’t you coming upstairs with me?”
“Absolutely.”
After we go up, I check the bedrooms for signs of being searched. I see none. Nadine grabs a gym bag and throws in some clothes, then packs a hanging toiletry bag.
“Ready,” she says.
“The gun?”
“Oh, yeah.” She goes over to her bedside table and takes a small black semiautomatic from the drawer, then starts to put it in her bag. It looks like a .32 caliber, a traveling salesman’s gun.
“I’ll take that,” I say, walking to her. “In case we meet anybody on our way out.”