* * *
KAI
Earlier.
“Thanks for calling me.I know it’s late,” I say, tearing my eyes away from Raven and turning my back to the guests, walking farther away so I can talk to Grayson. “Any updates?”
“Uh… Yes. Raven Wilson’s house hasn’t been visited again. Your place was swept for bugs by my people. Your guests are still there. They have no idea. I sent my people in with the cleaning crew.”
“Okay.”
“The circuit camera was indeed messed with. They replaced the footage with another day. So Monday and last Wednesday are now identical.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“A neighbor had noticed a suspicious car in front of his house. It was away from Raven Wilson’s place and stayed there for some time. It happened on Monday.”
“Interesting. How did you get that information?”
“The man called the police.”
My eyebrows flick up.
“Just for that?”
“He’s a war veteran. Spends a lot of time at home. Likes to know who’s doing what on his street. He didn’t want a police crew to check or anything, but he placed the call and let them know. The local police know him. He has friends there, and I know those people, so I called and asked them if there had been any suspicious activity. You never know with these things. So… It was. Not suspicious activity. They couldn’t find anything wrong. But they had a plate number from Raven Wilson’s neighbor. The man who called them. The car is registered to Johann Stein. That’s not who entered Raven Wilson’s home. The owner is an eighty-six-year-old who rarely drives out of town. He lives farther east on Long Island. According to the woman’s neighbor, the person who drove his car that day was a forty-something-year-old male.”
“Did you talk to him? Her neighbor?”
“Yes. I said I was a detective. He likes to chat. He also likes to pay attention to those details that most people would ignore. He said the guy was a military man. I wasn’t surprised he was or that Raven’s neighbor knew all that. The way he moved and dressed made the intruder fairly inconspicuous. He just picked the wrong place to park his car. He wore boots, cargo pants, and a winter jacket with a hood and a muffler around his neck or a ski mask over his face.”
I prop myself against the railing, focusing on that image.
“Yes,” he continues. “The man looked like he knew the area. Didn’t look around or search for an address. He just parked his ride and walked down the road. The neighbor walked outside and tried to locate him. Unfortunately, by the time he exited his place, the man was gone. He found it odd since it’s a dead-end road with only a few homes before you have to turn around. He suspected he went into one of his neighbors’ homes, but that made him even more suspicious because he couldn’t understand why the man had parked his ride in front of his house and not the place he had visited. The other thing that raised a red flag was that his neighbors weren’t home. Not even Raven Wilson. He said he noticed her car, but it wasn’t the first time she’d had problems with her ride. He suspected someone had picked her up and given her a ride to town.”
“Yeah… She was with me that day. But the man knew she’d go to Manhattan. Are you sure there were no electronic devices in my house?’
“I’m sure. They could’ve hacked a computer. Get the information from a schedule.”
“Phones?”
“Only if someone had tampered with them. They needed access to them. I doubt.”
I suck in a long breath.
“Well. They have a lot of information, not only about her and me, but also about my friends. Someone broke into Francisco Barreto’s building and was spotted on his floor. He has nothing to do with any of this, but my guess is… They’re still searching. And now they think we have it. By we, I mean me and my friends. They must’ve found something that day. I don’t know what exactly. They suspect that Raven and I don’t know what it is, and because of that, it could be anywhere. There is no other way I could explain their targeting of Francisco.”
“Does he know about this?”
“He has no idea. And he’s not interested in the story either. He’s here with me in Miami. I want to keep the connection between the two stories under wraps for now. The fewer people know about it, the better it is.”
“Sure. I understand.”
“What else did her neighbor say?”
“The intruder spent two hours and sixteen minutes on his street.”
“Quite a bit of time…” I comment. “Did he see him when he left?”