Criss Cross

Chapter 78

It felt like the sun was coming in through the window and shining right on my eyelids.

I squinted and saw it was still dark in the room. But someone outside was shining a powerful, narrow spotlight beam on me.

I threw myself over and onto the floor, yelling, “Bree!”

No answer.

The light vanished.

“Bree!”

Our bedroom door opened, and in her bathrobe, she looked out at me crouched on the floor.

“Shhh!” she said. “It’s only five thirty. Everyone’s still sleeping.”

I hissed, “There was someone outside just now, shining a light in on me.”

That changed everything. We scrambled into clothes, got our service weapons, and went outside.

Judging from the angle, we figured the light had come from the roof of the Morses’ house, next door, and well above the scaffolding that workers were erecting to sandblast the exterior walls.

We knew their lockbox combo, so we got the keys and went inside, guns drawn.

The house was empty. The interior windows, walls, and floors were covered with plastic sheeting coated with sawdust. There were small piles of construction debris here and there, swept up but not removed.

We found plenty of footprints of different sizes both downstairs and upstairs and definitely in the bedrooms that had dormers overlooking the roof. The plastic sheeting over one of the dormers had been cut away. From the window, we couldn’t see anyone out on the roof or any dusty footprints.

Still, the only window in the house that wasn’t covered with plastic was this one.

I climbed out on the roof and moved to where I judged the flashlight had been held. I found traces of sawdust being blown away on the breeze.

“Someone was out there,” I said when I climbed back into the house. “But the evidence is disappearing fast.”

We went back to our own house, and Bree said, “It was him, M, wasn’t it?”

“We have to assume so.”

“I hate that he’s watching us.”

“When I think about it, I want to punch a wall.”

“What about the cameras you were talking about?”

“Ordering them today. And for this place too. I’ll bill the owners.”

“Do we move Nana Mama and the kids? Send them to your dad’s in Florida?”

It wasn’t a bad idea, though I knew it would drive all three of them nuts for various reasons. “Let me think about that.”

My phone rang. Keith Karl Rollins.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“I need only five hours a night,” the FBI cybercrime consultant sniffed. “And I thought you should be the first to know.”

He left me hanging. I said, “First to know what?”

“The Ethereum cryptocurrency used to pay the ransom on Diane Jenkins started to move late last night from all those accounts. I tracked the transfers through twenty-four different stops, most of them designed to strip metadata. A few of my bugs got through, though, and you won’t believe where the funny money finally ended up.”