“But there aren't any cameras inside?” Noah asked.
“Afraid not, Boss. On the other hand, they're using a standard cable company Wi-Fi system. When I get into it, I should be able to access any web cams inside the house. That might give you some internal views.”
“That would be good, if you can. What about the security alarms?”
“I got access to the company's main servers,” Neil said. “I can turn off the alarms, either altogether or just by disabling one door or window.”
Noah nodded. “Good, that may come in handy. I need to figure out a way to get those two children out of the house before we do anything.”
“Um, on that,” Neil said. “Turns out Mrs. Gomez has a nanny, a local lady she hired through a service. I noticed in the file that it mentioned her, so I'm wondering if maybe she takes the kids out, sometimes. Maybe she takes them to the park or something, you know what I mean?”
“Good thinking. Try to find out for me, will you?”
They went over the security video from the other houses, but just seeing the outsides didn't help a lot. “I wonder if there's any kind of recorded blueprints for those houses,” Noah mused aloud. “I'd really like to have some idea of the interior layouts. I want to get these bombs in there, but I want to make sure they get the job done.”
Neil cocked his head and grimaced. “I'll do what I can,” he said. “Maybe I can find out who built the houses. If it was a development company, they might have blueprints stored somewhere digitally that I can crack into. Don't get your hopes up, though.”
“I understand, just do what you can,” Noah said. “What about the neighborhood? How close are the other houses?”
“Gomez lives in what looks like a pretty expensive neighborhood,” Neil replied. “From what I can see from the security cameras, the Gomez house probably sits on a couple of acres, at least. It's at least a hundred yards to the nearest house on either side. Some of the others live not far away, but the Perez family is all the way across the city.”
Moose had left a few minutes earlier, heading to Jefferson City in the van to begin buying up flowers, so Noah left Neil to his work as he and Sarah went to scout the area. He had programmed all of the addresses of the houses into the GPS in the dash, and it took them only a couple of hours to locate and drive by all of them. Sarah cut through alleys and changed the color of the car between each one, so no one would notice the same car driving by more than one of them.
“If you're going to use the explosives,” she asked at one point, “why are you looking the houses over so hard?”
“The explosives are good,” Noah said, “but in order to do their jobs, they need to be placed where they'll have the most devastating effect on the structure. If I set one off and it only takes out part of one room, then at least some of the targets are likely to survive. We got five locations to deal with, so I can't be everywhere at once. When the bombs go off, I need to be as sure as I possibly can that they get the job done.”
“That sounds like you need more than one bomb in each house. How do you plan to accomplish that?”
“Well, we can simply deliver a lot of flowers,” Noah said. “Or we can give them something that's big enough that when it goes off, there won’t be any part of the house left standing. That's what I've got to figure out. Then there’s the problem of giving them things they’ll accept. We can’t just deliver flowers without saying who they’re from or what they’re for.”
Sarah drove in silence for a few minutes, then looked over at Noah. “When my dad did a one-year stint in the federal prison,” she said, “one of the things he told me was that almost all of the Mexican inmates were part of this cult, something called the Holy Death. From the way he made it sound, just about every drug dealer in the Hispanic world worships death. I wonder if these people do.”
Noah looked over at her. “I've heard of that, it's called Santa Muerte. Some of the guys in my unit in the Army were into it.” He reached into his pocket and took out his phone. “Neil? See if you can find out if any of these people are into the Santa Muerte religion.”
“Santa Muerte? If my Spanish is any good, and I know it is, that translates to holy death?”
“Yeah, they actually worship Death, like it’s some kind of a saint. They pray to it, asking for favors, all kinds of stuff. Let me know what you find out.” He ended the call and turned to Sarah again. “Holy Death followers tend to keep an altar. The guys I knew in the Army, they kept theirs in their lockers. Some of them were pretty complicated.”
Sarah nodded. “Yeah, that's what Dad said. They kept a statue, a skeleton in a long dress, and had all kinds of things around it.”