Page 89 of Two Kinds of Stranger

‘No, no, sweetheart. Your dad and I are just talking. You go back to sleep.’

We drove on in hushed conversation the rest of the way, until I pulled up outside Christine’s house as the rain eased off. I didn’t park in the driveway, just kept the car on the street. I wanted to check something. We got out, and as soon as I stepped on the flagstone path to the house the security lights kicked in. Two beams from either corner of the house, blinding us.

‘We can rule out entry through the front door,’ said Harry.

I asked Amy for her set of keys. We went inside, and the alarm system began to beep. Amy ran to the panel on the wall, entered a code and the alarm system beeped loudly once, then fell silent. I checked the corners of the ceiling in the hallway and the kitchen.

Motion sensors.

Amy went upstairs to grab some of her stuff. I’d told her not to bring too much. Just the essentials for a few days, tops, at my place.

I picked up a chair from the kitchen, put it in the corner and stood on it, so I could take a good look at the sensor. There was no wiring behind it, leading into the wall or the doorframe. I noticed sensors on the windows too. I got down off the chair, checked them.

‘The sensors must be on batteries. How do they connect to the central security panel?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Harry. ‘You need Bloch for that.’

‘Must be by radio signal or Wi-Fi,’ I said.

I checked the shelf in the kitchen and saw the lockbox for the gun. It was still there. Untouched. The police had raidedthe house this afternoon, and they had impounded both cars, taken the clothes in the closet, the laundry baskets and their contents. Everything would be checked for gunshot residue, and any blood, hair or fibers that could be traced to the victim. But they hadn’t taken the lockbox for the gun. They had the weapon already. I guessed there was not much evidential value in taking the lockbox from where it was normally kept.

I checked in the kitchen cupboards and found a box of disposable gloves and plastic freezer bags, put the gloves on, reached down the lockbox and put it in the plastic bag and sealed it.

‘If he didn’t come in through the front, where is the point of entry?’ I asked.

‘Here,’ said Harry.

He was standing at a window in the hallway that led from the kitchen through to a dining room at the back of the house. There was a window large enough to crawl through, and a sensor beside it. Kneeling down, Harry examined the floor.

‘They’re not footprints, exactly. But there’s some soil and scuff marks. Like someone was wearing swim shoes,’ he said, then stood, unlocked and threw open the window. Placing his hands on the sill, he leaned out.

‘There,’ said Harry.

I took photographs of the floor with my phone, then went out through the front door and walked around the side of the house along the gravel. A strip of lawn, punctuated with some small shrubs and flowers, separated the gravel path from the house itself. I saw Harry leaning out of the window. He was pointing down at the lawn.

There were impressions in the lawn. No tread, not that I could see. But the shape of a pair of feet.

‘Barefoot?’ I asked.

‘No, some kind of moccasin with no tread and no grip. The kind that some special forces use. Because there’s no heel and no tread, it’s much harder to track.’

I took photos of the lawn and the foot impressions. A man, certainly. About my height maybe, judging by the size of the prints. No point in taking impressions, they were so flat there was no way to discern the print. Looking toward the rear of the property, I set off that way and found a large, well-tended backyard–lawns and shrubbery. Tall hedges set out the boundary edge of the property along with high fences on each side, to separate them from the neighbors.

The hedges were thick, but there were gaps in certain places low down near the ground. Certainly big enough to squeeze through. I brought out my phone, opened the maps app and tapped to bring up my location. A two-lane highway stretched behind the suburban development, probably why the construction firm planted all of these thick high hedges–to drown out the noise from the traffic. The map didn’t show anything on that highway, apart from a gas station.

I crouched down, crawled through a gap in the tree line and when I stood up, my knees were soaked and caked in mud, as were my hands and jacket, which had picked up all the rainwater left on the lower branches.

An area of patchy grass, mud and scrubland separating the trees from the road. The gas station was visible further on up the highway. I looked around, saw some tire tracks about fifty feet away on the grass. Took out my phone, snapped some pictures and sent them to Bloch and Lake, then crawled back through the trees to the yard and made my way back to front of the house.

Harry was waiting on the front porch.

‘What the hell happened to you?’

‘I was checking round back. I think I found where the killer parked, on the other side of the treeline by the highway. Then hesqueezed through the trees and came up on the house from the rear so he could steal the gun. I got some pictures of tire treads, but I don’t think it will do much good. Nothing special about the tread pattern, probably widely available. But it might help me explain to a jury what really happened.’

‘You mean it might help Kate explain it to the jury.’

I shook my head, said, ‘Sorry, I’m just too close to this one. The more I think about it, the more I think I should represent Christine and Kevin.’