Guilty Minds

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.

The window was unlocked. Also not unusual. I edged it open by pressing up against the muntin until the window came open an inch, then I grasped the bottom rail and pulled it up. Feet first, I slid in.

A guest bedroom, by the look of it. A neatly made bed, an end table, a desk and chair. Not much else. No signs of habitation.

It was dark inside the house and smelled faintly of mildew and cigarette. Wall-to-wall carpeting covered the hall floor. I switched on my penlight and illuminated a path. The next room was a bathroom. Next was another bedroom. This one looked like it was where Schmidt slept. A king-size bed, lamps on end tables on either side. A giant flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. In front of it, an exercise bicycle. A chest of drawers. I pulled open the top drawer and found socks.

I thought of something and checked under the pillow on the bed. On the right side was a weapon, a Glock 26 pistol. I pulled it out and stuck it into my tool bag. I had no weapon with me in DC — they were back home, in Boston — and it occurred to me that I might need one sometime.

I switched off the penlight and descended the carpeted stairs to the first floor.

Here I had to be careful. There might be motion sensors. They were cheap and easy to install and often considered part of the basic security package. I stopped on the third-to-last step and surveyed the darkness.

I saw the glowing red LED dot on the alarm panel in the foyer, but nothing else.

I switched on the penlight, traced it around the crown molding on the ceiling, looking for motion sensors, but found none. So I continued the rest of the way down to the landing. There I stood for a moment. The downstairs was neat and clean and looked almost uninhabited.

Through one open door I saw a roomy kitchen with a dining table covered in Formica. One door was closed. I opened it and found a half-bath. A roll of paper towels in a wall dispenser, one rumpled towel. I opened a second door, pointed my penlight, saw a desk and a file cabinet, another big flat-screen TV, a bookshelf. A safe. This was his study. The safe was probably where he kept his guns, the ones that weren’t hidden under his pillow. Maybe other things in there, too. On the desk were an old-looking laptop computer and a couple of framed photos. I glanced at the pictures. They showed Schmidt with his arm around a woman on a beach somewhere, probably Cancún. Another one was of Schmidt and a male friend, with a bristly mustache, who was triumphantly holding up a big bluefish. I tugged at the top file cabinet drawer, but it was locked.

A flash of light caught my eye. I looked up and saw the red light of a motion sensor come on.

My heart began to pound. I’d set it off.

Here was where he placed the motion sensors. Here, where he probably stored his sensitive stuff, the room he was most worried about.

A loud Klaxon blared from speakers throughout the house, a deafening clanging sound, and a tinny pre-recorded voice that proclaimed, “Leave immediately! Leave immediately!”

Then a phone trilled.

That would be the dispatch service, calling to check whether this was a valid alarm, or whether it had been triggered mistakenly by the homeowner.

I grabbed his desk phone.

“Bethesda Alarm Service,” a woman’s voice said.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said. “I screwed up. Can you turn off the damn alarm? I’m going deaf here.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Curtis Schmidt.”

“Sir, I’m going to need your code word.” She had an Indian accent.

“My code — dammit, I don’t remember, my wife chose that.” I remembered suddenly that Schmidt wasn’t married. But the alarm company wouldn’t have a record of that.

“I need to hear the code word, sir, or I’m required to notify the police.”

“I don’t — look, I’ll look around and see if she put it on a sticky note somewhere — can you turn this off in the meantime?”

“No, sir, we’re not allowed to do that until we hear the homeowner’s code word.”

“Will you hang on?”

“Yes, sir, certainly.”

I dropped the phone, looked around frantically, realized I had to get out of there at once. The response time for the Bethesda police could be as quick as five minutes and as long as twenty. There was no time to run upstairs and climb down the ladder, and the alarm had been triggered anyway, so I might as well exit through one of the doors on this floor. I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the framed photo of Schmidt and his buddy fishing, and I raced to the kitchen. I unlocked the double locks on the back door and pulled it open.

Outside the alarm was clanging loudly, piercing the still night, loud enough to alert the neighbors. I went around to the driveway, walking not running, and got into the Suburban.

I backed up the driveway to the street at a deliberate speed and drove off into the darkness.