Glass House (36 page)

The backyard was exactly where Megan had
said and looked exactly as she described. Despite the fact that he
shouldn’t have been there, Finn got into the yard in a way that
people sometimes never considered in a supposedly cautious and
commonsensical world: he opened a fence gate and walked in.

That was a peculiar truth. No matter the day
and age, someone typically could stroll into a backyard and amble
around without having to face so much as a lock, and no one else
would raise the slightest concern as long as the person looked like
he should be there. Which Finn did.

That was made easier by the privacy of
Waldoch’s house and yard. Also as Megan had said, any neighbor’s
view of the house, and the backyard in particular, was cut off by
fences and trees. That meant Finn moved fairly freely as he set
about his tasks.

There was no dog to worry about, as Finn
feared there might be. Megan had been certain of that – the
meticulous and perfect landscaping and the absence of life in and
around the house convinced her, she had passed that word on to
Finn, and she’d been right.

He gave a final check of the sightlines from
his position, then turned to the window leading into the office. He
studied it, taking his time. Megan had told him she saw a strip
that ran the length and height of the window on the inside, along
both sides and across the top and bottom, and Finn saw that. It was
a tape alarm, with a single wire that ran out from a corner and
into the house’s electrical system. Any breaking of the glass, any
vibration too great for that matter, would trigger the alarm signal
and bring the police. Or, Finn supposed, whomever else Waldoch
might be using for protection.

But he was looking for other things beyond
that. There were no motion detectors that he could see, and Waldoch
almost certainly wouldn’t have thermal or pressure sensors in the
house, but Finn did find a plate alarm. Eyeing the window casements
just inside, he picked it out at the upper left corner – the
small, flat mark of an embedded contact plate. A match would be
found in the adjacent wall, lined up so they would be near-flush
when the window was closed.

The setup was a simple break trigger. Open
the window, the contact breaks, and the signal goes out. Jeremy
Waldoch had an office with a window that couldn’t be opened as long
as the house’s overall system was alarmed. And the window couldn’t
be broken because of the tape alarm.

Which was what made Finn’s situation
parallel to the unrealized similarities that Hanley faced in
entering the morgue to recover Anthony Dikembé’s body. The glass
was thicker and the window better, Finn’s moves even more careful
and cautious because of the alarms, but his goal was the same as
Hanley’s had been. He needed to get through the window, collect
what he was here for, and get back out.

Finn dug through the bag’s contents. The
window was double-hung, wood frame with white vinyl cladding on the
outside. Maybe a little pricier than most, but basically a standard
job. He retrieved a small drill, the butt of which fit neatly in
the palm of his hand. The bit was precise and fine, three
millimeters across, formed from carbonized steel, and sharp enough
to cut a finger with a glancing touch.

He lined up with the window’s twisting thumb
lock on the frame inside, centering the drill below it. He squeezed
on the trigger, waited for the soft hiss as the bit spun to full
velocity, and leaned toward the window frame.

In the process of Megan Davis putting him in
prison, Finn had lost most of the equipment he’d collected for what
he artfully called his “work.” They hadn’t seized those things in
the first searches of his house, and they never got the chance
later on before the trial – he destroyed or threw away most of
what he’d had, each piece a heartbreak as he got rid of it. A thief
doesn’t just go down to the hardware store to find what he needs
after all. He gathers it over time, coming across what he likes and
perhaps fashioning it to suit him more particularly. It’s all
handpicked, and all of it was gone.

With the exception of the drill. Apart from
its size, the drill appeared normal. Just a compact tool with a
changeable bit and a trigger – put some holes in the walls,
hang a picture, reset a door – so no one claimed it for
introduction into evidence at the trial, and he’d kept it in the
end. Which was good for Megan, as it turned out.

The drill was small and fast and, most
important, quiet. At a dozen feet away, it sounded like the push of
air from a leaking tire. Any farther than that, and the sound was
lost altogether.

Finn drilled to the frame’s core, stopping
when the resistance changed enough to tell him he’d reached the
metal lock piece, embedded into the wood. He put the drill aside
and took a polyethylene vial from the bag, a pair of neoprene
gloves wrapped around it.

Gloves on, he unscrewed the cap from the
vial and slipped a thin pipette into the bottle neck. The pipette
was also polyethylene, because the liquid inside the vial was
hydrochloric acid. It was a 37% solution, a concentration that was
sold in thousands of places as muriatic acid, and it was an
excellent corroder of metal.

Finn sucked some of the liquid into the
pipette and re-capped the vial, tucking it back into the bag. Then
he slid the pipette’s tip into the hole that was bored in the
window frame. He squeezed the bulb in his hand, saw the acid empty
from the tube, and swapped the pipette and gloves for a thin
awl.

He waited for three minutes before doing
anything, alternating glances at his watch with checks and rechecks
of the tree and fence lines. When the time had passed, Finn pushed
the awl carefully into the hole until it stopped. He rested the
ball of his thumb against a flat end at the awl’s tail, and he
pressed twice, gently, testing the feel before pushing a third
time – this one harder – on the tool.

There was a soft but audible crack as the
base of the lock snapped inside the window frame. Finn watched the
lock’s top piece tumble from the frame and onto the office floor
inside the room. The easy part was done.

Finn retrieved the awl and wiped its tip on
the grass before replacing it in the bag. He bet he’d need a
Phillips head and found that screwdriver, a stripper, and a wire
gapper. He pinched each of the two alligator heads on the gapper
open and shut, testing them to see that they worked smoothly and
tightly. Then he shoved the window up.

He was inside the office in a second and to
the front door of the house in five. There was a beeping panel
beside the door, just like the one that would be found next to each
entrance and, if his experienced guess was correct, in a master
bedroom upstairs.

Finn unscrewed the panel’s cover plate and
dropped it to the floor. He studied the circuitry and counted the
wires, working them quickly back to terminals before finding the
two he needed.

He stripped quarter-inch sections of each of
them bare, revealing the copper wire under the blue and black,
plastic insulation sheaths. Pinched the gator heads of the gapper
open again. Clamped one head on the blue. One head on the black.
Stepped back. And listened.

To nothing.

The beeping had stopped. An
insistently-blinking red light, now nude without the alarm cover
plate but still visible, wasn’t blinking anymore.

It’s like riding a bike
, he thought,
his fingers flicking across wires to recheck them. You see these,
you learn them, and you don’t forget. Not ever.

He knew that should worry him at some level.
Concern should come with the realization that he could still pick
apart a home alarm within the standard thirty seconds they allowed
before a signal went out. But that concern wasn’t there. Not at
all. Because for every bit that he knew it was wrong, he felt just
as strongly that it was quite right.

Finn returned to the office. Megan had said
the safe was in the foot of the desk cabinet. If what they wanted
was anywhere in the house, that would be the place, she’d told
him.

He found the safe immediately. Bent and
examined it.

Finn was a lock picker by touch – he
could feel the tumblers in most safes, twisting and dropping into
place when they cleared – but he wasn’t going to use touch on
this one. There was a time when he would have done it that way and
would have been proud of the fact. But this wasn’t that time.
Finn’s touch was too far back and his immediate need far too
present. He leaned out the office window and collected the gym bag,
digging through it until he found the stethoscope inside.

Then Finn fitted the earpieces in. He closed
his eyes. He started to work.

Into
Day Three

The courtroom was beautiful. Spacious and
grand. Old-styled and well-accented, with intricate touches –
carved scales and legal scrolls – worked into the cream trims
and cornices and moldings. The windows were heavily glazed, the
panes separated by broad buttermilk slats, and the walls were
thick-looking plaster, applied by hand and painted a copper-patina
green that reached to a squat, cornered arch ceiling that was set
off by gilded cords intertwined with silver casts of busheled
wheat.

A mural filled the ceiling above them. The
geography of Kansas stretched across four panels there, from dry
ranchland in the west to the grasses and wooded hills in the east.
The painting was done in 1923 but refurbished five years ago, and,
staring at it while listening to McCallum question Jeremy on the
trial’s third day, Megan marveled at the detail it showed and
wondered if she’d noticed it the first time she represented Jeremy
Waldoch in this room. She couldn’t recall.

There were fourteen jurors in the jury box
at the courtroom’s left side. The parties picked them on the first
day, working from a pool supplied by the court and weeding through
those, starting with general questions to the group.

Do you know either of the parties? Do you
like your job? Ever been fired?

Then with specifics to anyone who stood out
for any reason.

When you say you lost a job because your
supervisor didn’t like you, what did you mean? How did you feel?
Did you take any action?

After two hours, the attorneys had cut the
pool down to twenty, striking some of the prospectives for cause
and cutting three more each with peremptory challenges that allowed
a side to remove anyone for whatever reason they chose, or for no
reason at all. After another hour and a half, they were down to the
twelve they needed, plus two alternates. All fourteen – Megan
had shaken her head at seeing nine women among them – sat in
the box, turning in unison to whomever was talking.

The jury was there to the left, the judge at
the head of the room, and the witness stand to the right of the
judge’s bench, away from the jury box but turned slightly to face
it. That was a curious twist in a courtroom. With their primary
role in providing evidence, witness stands are usually as close to
the jury as possible. Ideally, the people making the decision see
the witnesses nearby, so they can better weigh what’s said and
whether they should believe it.

At least in theory.

But Megan was more than happy with the
layout. The jurors could see Waldoch at his table just fine, but
they weren’t angled well enough to concentrate on Kathy Landry. And
they could see the witnesses, but they couldn’t see them
completely.

The parties opened quickly, each side
offering a snapshot view of its case, with McCallum, no surprise,
reciting how the evidence would tell the story of the reluctant
victim who’d stepped up to speak out against how poorly she was
treated. Megan kept it even simpler than that.

She was, she thought, in a position of
particularly delicate balance, where any word could tip the world
one way or another at a time when she decidedly wanted to push it
the direction of her choice. The remainder of the night before the
trial started, she’d laid out the key arguments and the pieces of
evidence fitting into them, then noted Waldoch’s position on each.
Reading down that list, she’d culled out the parts she could
tolerate and marked them for emphasis in the opening. She wrote
around those, angling the things she wanted to say, finding room to
slip past a few things and ignore others, with a specific
goal – her own trial examination of Waldoch – firmly in
mind. And then they’d started.

The jury was seated at the end of the
morning on that first day, and the attorneys opened right after
lunch. McCallum had pushed and delayed to try to bump his first
witness to the next day, clearly wanting to avoid the
mid-afternoon, post-food drag that jurors feel, but he lost the
battle, and Kathy Landry hit the stand at exactly one-fifteen in
the afternoon. She would stay there for the next day and a
half.

By that second day, they were deeply into
Landry’s testimony, which McCallum ultimately ensured took the
entire allotted time. He stretched the questioning, broke the
session with two delaying motions to argue to the court, and in the
end got the jury sent home for the day with their heads full of his
client’s grievances, injuries, and condemnations.

All of it, the entire period over those two
days, went as Megan expected. McCallum put Landry on the stand at
the top of his order, filling the trial’s opening testimony and the
following six hours of court time with her tales of a relationship
and sex and gifts and, in the end, termination from her job.

They adjourned after he finished with
Landry. The jury was dismissed, the courtroom emptying. And that
night – last night – Megan had spent four more hours
working with Waldoch, going over the questions she thought McCallum
would ask when he called Jeremy as his next witness.