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“Three minutes,” Sky says and starts snapping pictures as soon as I put the other folders back. “For posterity,” he adds when I give him a look.
Fair enough. I check my notes again while Sky puts the painting back over the safe, leaving everything in place as if we were never even here. The whole point is to have Henry get as comfortable as possible before we apprise him of the precarious situation he’s put himself in. Part of me is giddy with excitement upon seeing Henry David’s face when he learns where he stands. He’s been badgering us for so long that I have little to no sympathy for the guy, especially after seeing how he handled Masterson and the cabal’s actions against his daughter.
I would throw him to the wolves, but I know Ariana doesn’t want her father to die.
We’ve got the bedroom safe next.
We move up the steps and find the bedroom right away, thanks to Ariana’s sketches.
“Under the bed,” Sky says and gets down on all fours.
I hear his hand patting the floor. I also hear the hollow space that he uncovers. “Here,” I whisper and give him the crowbar I have in the duffel bag.
Sky pulls the floorboard apart while I check the window. Both guards are talking by the pool and occasionally checking their phones. Neighbors are on the street, pointing their useless key fobs at their cars. The car alarms are still going off, and I look at my watch again. “Two minutes,” I state.
“I know,” Sky replies and takes a small box from under the floorboards.
It’s a portable safe with a keypad, the same tech as the one downstairs. Henry would want to be able to carry this stuff out safely if the shit ever hit the fan, so a portable safe is a smart move. I open my duffel bag, letting Sky drop the whole thing in. It’s heavy, but not as heavy as the burden of not doing this would be.
“We have to get out of here before the alarms turn off, but we might as well check the basement safe next and deal with this one once we’re home,” Sky says.
I follow him down the stairs, and we make our way into the basement. It’s dark and damp. Unlike the upper levels, there isn’t a single source of natural light here, so we need our flashlights to make sense of what we’re looking at and where we’re stepping.
“Hell, this place hasn’t been touched in decades,” I mumble.
“Over here,” Sky says, quick to spot a wall-mounted tool panel.
Behind the panel is our third objective. Another safe, this time with a touchscreen keypad. At the first tap, it displays a fingerprint icon, along with a couple more options below: biometric and PIN code. Sky chooses the PIN code, careful to use a knuckle and not the thumb of his gloved hand. We don’t want to leave any fingerprints around.
I give him the PIN code from my phone notes. “One, four, four, five.”
“I wonder what significance that number has?”
“I have no idea. Some political crap, maybe,” I reply. “Doesn’t matter. What’s in there?”
“Oh my, Henry’s been a very naughty boy.” A grin slits Sky’s face from ear to ear as he pulls a plastic bag out of the open safe. There are car parts in it, small pieces likely removed from Rose’s vehicle. I recognize a couple of them, and my mind is already making the right connections. “We’re going to need to dig deeper into the chain of custody here because Detective Amstaff was clearly bamboozled by at least one of his coworkers.”
“The folks in evidence custody,” I mutter.
We take photos of the safe’s contents, then put the plastic bag into my duffel along with the other evidence we are removing. I would kill just to sit back and watch the Feds raid the whole house, turning it inside out while Henry sits on the sidelines, constantly yapping about what a gross miscarriage of justice this is.
“All right, so far, so good,” Sky says, putting everything else back in before clicking the tool panel back to its original setting. “How much time?”
“Forty-five seconds,” I reply.
He points upstairs. “Follow me.”
“Always,” I shoot back.
“Kitchen door,” Sky says.
I’m already texting our IT kid as we climb the stairs back to the ground floor.
He knows what to do in order to draw the bodyguards away from the porch again. I just hope he’s got enough fire in him to get away before they catch him. We reach the living room and come to a sudden halt. I freeze at the sight of three men who aren’t supposed to be here. Masterson and the two bodyguards that we evaded outside.
And all of them have their guns trained directly on us.
“I had a feeling Mr. David was up to no good when he shook our tail,” Masterson says, both hands firmly gripping his semiautomatic weapon, clearly not service issued. That’s his personal piece. But it’s the self-satisfied smirk on his face that gets my blood boiling. “I’m guessing he’s out to get me, and you figured you’d draw him out so you can get him.”
