Quinn scanned the neighboring houses and noted that the curtains were drawn on the house to the right, while the view from the place on the left was blocked by the shed and the back of the garage.
“Any change in her position?” Quinn whispered.
Orlando looked at her phone. “Same relative area as before.”
“Okay. Up the left side and over to the garage.”
Staying low, they hustled across the yard.
When they reached the garage, Orlando said, “Did either of you get a good look at the swing set?”
Nate nodded. “Couldn’t be more than a few years old.”
“Grandkids from another child?” Quinn asked.
“The obit said Desirae was it.”
They moved up to the door at the back of the house, where Orlando used the detector to check for an alarm.
Her eyebrow rose when she viewed the results. “Same system we’ve got at my place.”
“Are you sure?” Quinn asked.
She nodded.
A Garber Sentry 231 was way more firepower than a person like Nadine Chastain, or most any civilian, needed. It was marketed only to high-end clients who wanted a more secure environment than what conventional systems offered. Most interesting was that the Sentry 231 had been around only about eighteen months. So who had helped Nadine make that choice?
The system took Orlando three times as long to disarm as the system at Eli’s place. Once she did, she picked the lock and they stepped inside. The only light came from the early afternoon sun streaming through the windows. That and the silence was more than enough to confirm no one else was there.
“Fifteen minutes and we’re out,” Quinn said.
They checked their watches and split up — Nate hitting the basement, Quinn taking the ground floor, and Orlando upstairs. Though Quinn had the largest area to search, he was able to quickly clear the entryways, guest bathroom, and dining room, leaving him with the kitchen and the living room.
It was amazing how many people hid secrets in kitchens, sometimes in plain sight in an old-fashioned address book, sometimes wrapped in plastic then frozen in a block of ice in the freezer, and sometimes taped to the bottom of a drawer. Quinn rapidly worked his way around the room, checking for all these possibilities and more, but if Nadine was hiding secrets about her daughter, she did it somewhere else.
He moved into the living room and did a quick scan. An old green cloth couch, a matching recliner, a coffee table, an entertainment stand with TV, a stand-up piano against the wall, a bookcase stuffed with glass figurines and other knickknacks, and a fireplace. He sensed something was missing, but it took him a moment before he realized what it was.
Photographs.
Usually a house someone had lived in for a long time was brimming with photos. But there were no framed pictures on the piano or in the bookcase or on the walls. Maybe Nadine was one who preferred her photographs in albums or kept them on her phone.
He searched the room, tipping back the couch and the chair, looking under the coffee table, and feeling for secret compartments in the entertainment center. Two figurines were sitting on a crocheted doily on the piano. He moved them to the side, glancing at them only long enough to get the sense they were some kind of Native American totems, and then pulled the doily off and opened the lid.
Strings and hammers and the usual things that were inside a piano. He moved his fingers under the lip that ran across the top, and stopped halfway across. A key was taped against the panel, out of sight.
Leaving it where it was, he activated his mic. “Either of you come across anything that needs unlocking? I have a key here.”
“Haven’t seen anything yet,” Orlando said.
After a few seconds of silence, Quinn said, “Nate?”
More silence.
“Nate, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Coming down,” Orlando said.
Quinn grabbed the iron poker from the hearth and hurried to the basement door, reaching it a few seconds before Orlando arrived. Stepping carefully, he went down first, surveying the room as it came into view.
It was an old, unfinished space full of ancient, overstuffed shelves and the smell of earth. Lighting was poor, a few naked incandescent bulbs in fixtures screwed to ceiling beams.
“Nate!” Quinn yelled as soon as he reached the bottom.
The sound of movement deeper in the room, then Nate stepped out from behind one of the units in the back. “What?”
“Why didn’t you answer me?” Quinn asked.
“I just did.”
“I mean a minute ago on the radio.”
“You never called me on the radio.”
Quinn frowned. “Check your battery.”
Nate turned on his mic and said, “Test, test. Can you read me?”
Quinn did, so he turned his own mic back on and said, “How about me?”
“Loud and clear.”
Quinn turned back to the stairway. Orlando was waiting halfway down.
“Go upstairs and shut the door,” he said. Once she did this, he clicked his mic back on. “Orlando, do you read me?”
No answer.
He looked over at Nate. “You got that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You try.”
“Orlando?” Nate said. “You there?”
Not a crackle.
Quinn went up a few steps. “Come back down,” he yelled.
Orlando opened the door and started down. “Did you try me?”
Quinn nodded.
“Didn’t hear a thing,” she said. She pulled out her phone and looked at the screen. “No signal.”
Quinn looked up at the ceiling. “There’s got to be some sort of shielding. The question is why?”
“That, I might be able to answer,” Nate said.
He led them through the basement to the aisle between the last set of shelves and the stone wall at the back. The nearest light was partially blocked by the shelves so the area was dim at best. Nate pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on.
“What are we looking at?” Quinn asked.
“Here,” Nate said, shining his light on the wall where a stone seemed to be missing.
“Check this out.” Nate reached down and picked something up off the ground. “High quality work.”
As he ran the light across it, Quinn saw it was the face of the missing stone. But by the way Nate was handling it, it appeared too lightweight.
“The problem was the grout,” Nate explained. “At first I thought it was a hairline crack running through it, but it was too even. I’d just figured out how to get it open when you came down.”
“So what’s behind it?” Orlando asked.
Nate aimed the light into the recess where the fake stone had been, and Quinn and Orlando crowded in behind him to look. A keyhole.
“I should be able to pick it pretty quickly,” Nate said.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Quinn said.
He made a quick trip up to the piano to fetch the key and then returned to the others.
“I guess that’ll work, too,” Nate said.
Quinn slipped the key into the lock and turned it as far as it would go. He felt around, found a handhold, and pulled.
The door swung out within an inch of the shelves. This created a temporary wall that blocked the view of the doorway from elsewhere in the room. Behind the fake wall was another door. No lock on this one, so Quinn turned the knob and pushed.
The space beyond was pitch-black. Quinn grabbed his own flashlight and pointed it into the darkness. He’d been thinking this was some kind of secret storage room, going back half a dozen feet or so. What he found instead was a set of stairs leading down into another room. He played the beam along the wall next to the doorway until he found a switch. As soon as he clicked it up, warm light filled the stairway and the room below.