Blood Orchid (Holly Barker 3)

“What about Daisy?” Holly said, nodding at the dog.

“I’ll align the motion detectors to start reading at three and a half feet; that’s over Daisy’s head. Something else, I’d rig a video camera at the top of the stairs, attached to a VCR, covering most of the ground floor, and have it triggered by the motion detectors—but only when the alarm system has been activated by you. We’re only talking about another five hundred or so, and if somebody gets in, you’ll have him on tape.”

“I like that,” Holly said. “How much?”

Sweat looked at his pad. “A lot of the wiring is already in, so, let’s see. . . You’re talking about four grand, and I’ll give you a police discount of twenty-five percent, so three grand, all in.”

“Done,” Holly replied. “When can you do the work?”

“It’ll be complete by the time you get home tonight. I should meet you here and show you how the system is set up.”

“Okay, the place is yours. I’ll be home at six, and I’ll give you a check then.”

Sweat gave her a little salute and went to his van.

Holly went to work.

She had been working on her personnel files for a couple of hours when the phone rang.

“It’s Phil Sweat,” he said. “I need you to come out here.”

“Can we talk about it on the phone?”

“No.”

“All right, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She arrived back at the house to find Sweat running wires up the stairs. “What’s up?”

Sweat dug into a vest pocket and came up with a small electronic-looking little thing.

“What’s that?”

“I thought I’d have a look at your phone system. I found this in the main box around the side of the house.”

“What is it, Phil?”

“It’s a pretty sophisticated bug. It was attached to the main phone line, so somebody could hear you on any extension, and run to a VHF transmitter under the eaves. VHF is line of sight, so with the transmitter up high like that, it would have a range of, oh, I don’t know, maybe six to ten miles.”

“Somebody tapped my phone?” Holly said, half to herself.

“Yep. Question is, what do you want to do about it?”

“Rip it out.”

“I can do that, but they might just come back and do it again, and better, so that it would be harder to find. On the other hand, if you leave the bug in, you can decide what they hear. I should point out that every phone in your house is a transmitter, whether it’s being used or not.”

Holly thought for a minute. “Rip it out.”

“Okay, but if I were you, I’d watch what I say; you’d never know when it’s back in. I mean, I could come over here a couple of times a week and sweep the place.”

Holly thought some more. “Okay, leave it in, but can you fix it so it doesn’t work very well?”

“I could probably arrange for it to work intermittently, so that a listener would only hear some of what’s said. That way, he’d think it was his fault.”

“Good idea. If he wanted to come back, would he be able to breach the system?”

“The way I’m rigging it, he would have to be really, really good, and he’d need a lot of time—several hours—to figure out how to get in. But it could be breached—any system can be breached, eventually.”