The Switch

20

Driving home, he could feel the pressure of everything — the financial troubles of Tanner Roast, the loss of the Four Seasons thing, and now Sarah’s demand — weighing down on him. He felt, momentarily, as if he were trapped in an avalanche, tons of earth and rock sliding down on him and burying him, crushing him.

When he arrived home, he unlocked the front door and stepped inside to the cool, dark foyer.

And he knew something was off.

He knew it instinctively, in his lizard brain, before he knew it rationally. There was some kind of change in his sensory field, and it took him a moment to realize that he was smelling something different. The faint rotten stench of food garbage overlaying the normal, regular house smells, the odors of lemon polish and old wood and must and a trace of mold.

Had something happened to the garbage in the kitchen? But it couldn’t be: he didn’t have any food garbage anyway. Anything food related went down the garbage disposal.

Then it was the slight movement of air that drew him toward the back of the house, to the sitting room and the pair of French doors that opened into the small city garden. He kept the doors locked, of course — this was urban Boston, after all — but as he approached he realized that one of the panes of glass was missing. Had it somehow fallen out or— He came closer. He felt the colder air from outside flow in, carrying that foul, overripe garbage scent. His next-door neighbor had put out his trash a day early. Mildly annoying, but ordinarily he wouldn’t have smelled it in here.

Except for the missing pane of glass.

The glass hadn’t broken. It looked like it had been cut out, sheared neatly, by a glass cutter.

And then he wondered...

He pulled up one of the door handles and the door came right open. But I locked the French doors; there is absolutely no question about it.

His heart began to thud. He could see what had happened. It was obvious: someone had cut out a pane of the French door, reached in, and unlocked the doors.

He looked around slowly for evidence of the intrusion that must have happened today. He didn’t immediately see anything. His giant eighty-inch flat-panel direct LED Samsung TV, which had cost some big bucks, was still there, and he didn’t notice any of the audio components missing. He didn’t own jewelry, besides cuff links, and he didn’t keep a stash of cash around the house. Sarah had taken most of her jewelry with her when she moved out. What did he have that was valuable enough to be stolen?

Could it possibly be...?

He left the sitting room and took the steep stairs to the second floor. This was a South End Boston town house, a row house four floors high. Vertical living. It wasn’t always convenient. You want a drink of water in the middle of the night, you either go to the bathroom sink or go down two flights to the kitchen.

On the second floor was his home office. This is where they’d look first. Nothing appeared to be missing. The laptop wasn’t here; he’d stopped off to leave it in the office safe. The computer here was a Power Mac, a tower on the floor next to the desk, a big monitor, a wireless keyboard. All of that was still there.

He clicked the space bar to wake the computer, rouse it from its groovy psychedelic screen saver. He didn’t password lock this computer the way he did his laptop, so it came right to life.

He grabbed the mouse and found that he couldn’t get the cursor moving the way he wanted. Something was screwed up about it. He moved the mouse around the mouse pad and the cursor danced awkwardly across the screen in a way seemingly unrelated to his hand movements.

Ah.

The mouse had been inverted. The faint gray apple logo was at the top, not at the bottom. Someone had moved the mouse around and put it back wrong.

Which meant that someone had been searching for something on his computer.

He quickly looked through the rest of the house and saw no other evidence of intrusion. Maybe evidence was there, but he didn’t notice anything missing.

They’d determined that the easiest point of entry was at the back, the French doors. They must have entered the back garden through the side gate, which didn’t have a lock, decided that cutting a pane out of the French door and reaching in would be quicker and easier than picking the door lock. Which meant they didn’t care about leaving evidence that they’d been here.

But nothing in the house was trashed, no scary “messages” left for him, no horse’s head in the bed. They’d searched the house, focusing on the home office, searched the computer.

They were looking for the laptop.

The office had a decent security system with an alarm; it would not be easy to break into, and you’d have to blow up the safe to get it open, probably. At the house he had a basic alarm system, which he set only when he was going out of town. Making it fairly easy for “them,” whoever they were, to break in.

And then he remembered that the home security system included a couple of hidden cameras, disguised as smoke detectors, at the front and the back of the first floor. They were set to go on at eight in the morning and go off at seven P.M. You could reset the system to record at different hours, but he’d lost the stupid booklet that came with the system. Sarah had insisted they have it installed after reports of a couple of burglaries in the neighborhood. It was old-school, used a digital video recorder, didn’t record to the cloud the way the new Nest cameras did. Tanner usually forgot it was on. He’d never had a break-in; it just wasn’t something he thought about.

He trotted down the stairs to the closet next to the kitchen, which had been converted to a pantry with shelving. The top shelf, though, had been given over to the security system’s components. He opened the stepladder and climbed up to the DVR. After pressing a few buttons, he figured out how to rewind the recording. The odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a recording with today’s date. Did that mean the thing had stopped working? He found a recording for yesterday and the day before.

They’d disabled the recording.