Guilty Minds

I changed into my Allied HVAC uniform, assembled a small bag of tools, and said good-bye to Dorothy and went down to the Suburban.

As I drove up Connecticut Avenue, heading northwest toward Maryland, my iPhone rang.

It was Mandy Seeger.

“Did you call to gloat, is that it?” she said.

“I called because I want your help. It wasn’t your fault. Kayla lied to you. She was paid and blackmailed, both.”

“How-how do you know?”

“She told me so. She got paid twice. Not just by Slander Sheet. How much did you guys pay her, by the way?”

“Ten thousand bucks. What do you mean, she got paid and blackmailed? By who?”

“That’s just it. She doesn’t know.”

“Where is she? I tried to call her, but no answer. I thought she was screening her calls and didn’t want to talk to me.”

“She’s with me.”

“With you?”

“We’re keeping her safe. The people who paid her tried to grab her and take her out of town, fly her somewhere.”

“‘People’? Like who?”

“I’m trying to find out. I thought you might want to help me.”

Slander Sheet had just destroyed her credibility as a journalist and then fired her. She had to be hopping mad.

“Hell yeah, I want to help you. Not tonight, though. I’m wiped out. I can barely talk.”

“Tomorrow as soon as you’re up, give me a call.”

“I will. And-Heller?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

39

I found Schmidt’s house easily-I recognized it from Google-and drove past it slowly. The house was dark; the lights were off. I tried his home phone one more time, calling from my burner, and there was no answer.

It was a fair assumption that he wasn’t home, but I couldn’t be sure. Where was he? Hospital, maybe, getting something done to his hyperextended knee. Though there wasn’t much that could be done. Surgery, maybe, if a ligament was torn. A lot of physical therapy. Ice.

Tax and residential records confirmed that he lived alone, without a wife and/or kids. But that didn’t mean he might not have a girlfriend visiting, asleep in the house. Or he could be there alone and just not answering.

So I circled around and pulled into his driveway, behind the detached garage, where I parked. That seemed less suspicious than parking a few blocks away and approaching by foot. If neighbors were watching, they’d see a big, official-looking black Suburban in the driveway; nothing furtive about that. Hence the service uniform. The direct approach was often best.

I got out and went right to the front door, the way a legitimate repairperson would, and I rang the doorbell. Was the place alarmed? He was an ex-cop; I had to assume it was. I didn’t see any alarm sign on the front lawn or by the door. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything.

I rang again. To the left of the door was a window through which I could see into the house, into the foyer. Inside I could see a red LED glowing in the dark. Odds were good it was an alarm panel. Security experts believed you shouldn’t have your alarm panel within view of the entrance, because that made it too easy for clever burglars who might have somehow obtained the secret code. But Schmidt, the ex-cop, probably wanted it visible, an overt display, a deterrent.

I noticed a point-of-entry magnetic sensor on the window jamb. That confirmed that he had a classic, old-school security system. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, the old-school systems were just about impossible to beat.

There were often ways around them, though.

I returned to the detached garage. Its overhead door was locked. I pulsed on my small penlight, looked through one of the small windows, and saw what I expected: an automatic garage door opener.

That was good.

One of the tools I’d brought was a coil of steel strapping, the sort of thing that’s used to secure pallets of lumber and so on. At one end it was bent into a V. I straightened it and inserted it into the top of the door, between the door and the weather-stripping. Inside, hanging down from the door-opening mechanism, was a manual release, a string with a red handle on it. That was standard on all automatic garage door openers, for use in case of a power failure.

It took about a minute, but eventually my improvised slim-jim hooked onto the handle of the manual release, and I was able to yank it, hard.

Now it was a simple matter to raise the garage door by hand.

The garage smelled of gasoline and motor oil. I found the light switch and flipped it on. No car here. I looked in the obvious places for a key to the house. Nothing.

Then I noticed the eight-foot aluminum ladder mounted on large steel hooks on the wall. I took it down off the hooks, switched off the light, left the garage, and rolled down the overhead door behind me.

I carried the ladder around to the rear of the house and leaned it against the wall, in the shrubbery that ringed the house, just below one of the second-floor windows. It’s extremely unusual to find alarm sensors on the upper stories of a residence. It happens, but I’ve seen it only once.