Turbo Twenty-Three (Stephanie Plum 23)

“Yes. Always.”

“Isn’t that odd for a guy who makes ice cream and dresses his minions in yellow so everything looks happy?”

“Looking isn’t being. Bogart was a businessman. And he wasn’t happy. His business was going south.”

A Rangeman SUV was parked in front of Bogart’s house. Ranger pulled into the driveway.

“Lookout?” I asked him.

“Yes. And if someone stops to ask he can say we’re running routine checks on the house for Bogart.”

We got out of the Porsche, and Ranger strapped on a sidearm. He unlocked the front door, we stepped inside, and he switched a penlight on.

“I want to do a quick walk through the entire house,” he said, “but I’m really only interested in his home office.”

“What are you looking for on the walk-through?”

“Bodies. And evidence that someone has been in the house in the last couple days.”

We covered the downstairs first and didn’t find any bodies. The milk in the fridge was expired. The loaf of bread on the kitchen counter had some mold. The upstairs bedrooms were also body free. Closets and dressers were full of clothes. Medicine cabinets were filled with the usual. The Bogarts obviously expected to return to their house.

Bogart’s home office was on the first floor. Ranger drew the drapes, turned the light on, and looked around.

“No computer,” he said. “He worked on a laptop, and it wasn’t in his office.”

“The cameras should have been working when Bogart left the factory on Monday. Did he have his laptop?”

Ranger called his control room and told them to have Tank run the Monday video and get back to him. He went through the desk drawers and file cabinet, briefly looking through one file before returning it.

“I was hoping to find some financial information,” Ranger said. “Everything is digital now, but most people still keep paper copies of loan agreements and tax forms. Bogart didn’t have any in his office at the plant, and he doesn’t have any here.”

“Safety-deposit box? Home safe?”

“His home safe is small. Just enough for some cash and a little jewelry. I’d proposed a larger safe installation. If he has a safety-deposit box it’s not available to me.”

“Can’t do your magical lock-opening thing on a safety-deposit box?”

“I could, but I’d have to have a better reason than this.”

“Are you able to talk to his wife or daughter?”

“We had some initial contact, but they’re no longer picking up calls. They’ll sometimes answer a text message.”

“Are they really at Disney?”

“Yes. We can trace the location.”

“And Harry Bogart?”

“He used his cellphone to call the office to report the break-in, and an hour later the phone didn’t exist.”

Tank called and told Ranger they had Bogart on video, leaving his office. He had a computer case hung from his shoulder and he was carrying a paper grocery bag. No way to tell what was in the bag.

“We’ve been around the outside of this house,” Ranger said to me. “There’s no sign of forced entry. So Bogart either had his computer case in his car when he went to the office in the middle of the night, or else someone drove him back here to get it.”

“He was wearing his pajama top when he got to the plant. Hard to believe he would have taken the time or had the presence of mind to take his computer,” I said.

Ranger flipped the light off and opened the drapes, and we left the office and the house. He stopped briefly to talk to his man in the Rangeman SUV before getting behind the wheel of the Porsche.