Page 6 of The Attercop

“Ah…I think so.”

Charlie picked up a thin real estate brochure that was sitting on the coffee table and handed it to her.

“Can you show us?” Charlie asked.

Declan wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

“Okay. Ah…” she said, bending down and placing it at a slight angle in front of the office door. She looked at it for a second. “No. Not quite.” She tucked one corner under the door. “There. It was like that.”

“Are you sure?” Charlie asked.

“Pretty sure,” she said, then looked over to Declan.

“I think what Charlie’s figured out is that the page slipped under the door from your office, as opposed to being dropped in the waiting room. And odds are…Charlie, do you want to tell us what you’re thinking?”

“If you keep your client files in your office—”

“Which I do,” she said.

Charlie continued. “Then the page from Declan’s file—which I can only imagine is sizeable—”

“Smartass,” Declan said with a grin.

“—came from inside your office as well. And since the corner of the page was still under the door, it would seem reasonable that the person looking at the file had dropped it inside your office, and the pages spread across the room. The one that slipped under the door went unseen which also would imply that the person who broke in did not leave by the front door, or they would have seen it and picked it up.”

“My very own Sherlock Holmes,” Declan said and patted him on the back. Charlie unsuccessfully tried to suppress a grin.

“Well, I’m pretty sure that the front door is not how they got in anyway. Follow me,” she said.

Michael opened the door to the inner office. Declan immediately saw the missing pane of window glass.

“Before you ask, no I don’t have glass breakage sensors on the security system, just a contact sensor. It was also on my to-do list. The window did have an alarm sensor on it but, for some reason it didn’t go off.”

“Those things are fairly easy to bypass,” Charlie said as he pulled out nitrile gloves from a small black satchel he’d brought with him from the car.

Declan turned to Charlie. “Can I have one?”

Charlie pulled another pair out of the satchel and passed it to him.

“That boy comes prepared,” Michael said, nodding toward Charlie as they entered the inner office.

“Where is the file that this page came from?” Charlie asked.

She walked to the wall behind her desk. “In this filing cabinet. It’s always kept locked, and I checked—it was still locked when I came in this morning.”

“Those kinds of old locks aren’t difficult to pick,” Declan said.

“I probably shouldn’t have opened it, but I did,” she continued. “Your file is still there, though I’m sure someone has looked at it. I push a file folder down in the drawer when I replace it. Yours was riding a bit higher than it should have been.”

Declan examined the file drawer. “Has anything else been touched?”

“I’m sure whoever was in here tried to access my computer. I always put my mouse back on the top of the CPU when I’m done, but this morning when I came in, it was on the desk.”

Declan nodded. “Charlie, if you look at the computer, can you see what’s been accessed?”

“Yeah. To save time, Michael, would you log in, please? Here,” he said, pulling out another pair of gloves.

“How many of those do you carry?” Michael asked.