At any rate, his kidneys were now free and clear and he was back in business. He parked his little red “Blann’s Pest Control” truck in the driveway of a small home on a golf course five miles north of the Gulf. The entire development was a gated community, but then Delgado knew the gate code. A company from the Bahamas built the place. A company from Nevis owned the company from the Bahamas. Somewhere far up the chain of title sat Vonn Dubose. The owner of this particular home was in court, where she spent her working hours. She recorded important matters for Judge McDover, who’d made the original suggestion to buy the place.
Delgado wore a cute uniform, red shirt and matching cap, and he carried a bulky spray can as if he just might annihilate every insect along the Florida Panhandle. He rang the doorbell but knew no one was home. He deftly slipped a thin screwdriver between bolt and latch and turned the knob. With the proper key, he could not have opened the door any faster. He closed it behind him and listened for a warning from the alarm. After a few seconds it began beeping. In thirty seconds all hell would break loose. He stepped to the panel behind the door and calmly punched in the five-number pass code, which he had hacked from the security company. Delgado took a deep breath and appreciated the complete silence. If the code had not worked, he would have simply left and driven away.
He put on a pair of tight rubber gloves and checked to make sure both front and rear doors were locked. He could now take his time. There were two bedrooms. The large one was obviously used by the owner; the smaller had a set of cheap bunk beds. Delgado knew the woman lived alone. She was forty-three years old and divorced, no children. He went through two chests of drawers and found nothing but clothing. Same in the closets and in the two bathrooms. In her small, cluttered home office he found a desktop computer and a printer sitting on a set of low-slung file cabinets. Slowly, methodically, he went through every drawer, every file, every sheet of paper.
—
There was a man in her house! JoHelen Hooper tapped her iPhone. The home security app alerted her that her system had been disarmed at 9:44, two minutes earlier. She tapped again and found the footage. The camera hidden in the ceiling fan of the den caught him as he shuffled by, headed for the rear. White, male, age about forty, with a goofy red shirt and cap, pretending to be someone else. The camera hidden in the air vent above her bed caught him as he entered her room and began carefully going through her drawers. He touched everything.
She swallowed hard and tried to maintain her composure. She was sitting less than twenty feet from Judge McDover, in the main courtroom in Sterling, waiting as a group of harried lawyers huddled by the jury box and tried to make decisions. Thankfully, there was no jury; Her Honor was only hearing motions.
In front of JoHelen was her steno writer on its tripod stand. On her table was a notepad, some paperwork, and her iPhone, which she tried to look at casually without seeming alarmed. Alarmed! There was a man in her house slowly going through her underwear. Now he’s closing that drawer and moving to the one below it.
A lawyer started speaking and JoHelen began recording. It was a worthless hearing in a meaningless case and if she missed a word here or there she could always check the audiotape. Her mind was spinning and she was terrified, but she stared at the lawyer, focused on his lips, and tried to concentrate. The app would record all footage from the four cameras hidden in her home, so she would miss nothing when she reviewed it during lunch.
Be calm, be cool, look bored as you capture their legal gibberish at two hundred words a minute. After eight years of flawless court reporting she could almost do it in her sleep. Sleep, though, would now be another issue.
Her big moment had finally arrived. For the past week, Her Honor had tipped her hand with her abrupt change of temperature. Never known to be warm and fuzzy, she had always been pleasant and professional with JoHelen, and they had enjoyed each other’s company as they often gossiped and laughed about things that happened in court. They were not close friends, because Claudia was too aloof for ordinary relationships. She saved her attentions for Phyllis Turban, a person JoHelen knew well but by reputation only.
Since the day the officials from BJC arrived and handed over the complaint, Claudia had not been herself. She had been edgier, somewhat distant, as if distracted and worried. Normally, she kept her emotions on an even keel and was not given to moods. Lately, though, and especially in the past few days, she had been short and abrupt with JoHelen, and even tried to avoid her, while at the same time trying to gloss over her feelings with a phony smile and the occasional pandering comment. For eight years, the two women had spent almost every working day in the same room. JoHelen knew something had changed.
What about the alarm? It was a new system with monitors on every window and door, installed by Cooley two months earlier. To bypass it meant the guy in the red shirt and cap was a professional.