Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [133]
We came to the smaller building first, two dark stories with a small loading dock on one side, a shipping and receiving facility.
The next building was the size of a small college campus administration building. All the lower windows were wired for security. Stephanie tried one of the back doors while I tromped through the flower bed along the wall of the building and searched for an unsecured window.
I couldn’t shake the feeling the Redmond police were about to come barreling around the corner and arrest us.
If there was one thing I knew, it was breaking into buildings. Except for burglars and locksmiths, firefighters broke into buildings more often than anybody. An ordinary residence had a door most firefighters could kick in with their boot or, at the least, one they could jimmy with a Halligan tool. You could also take an ax and knock off the lock, remove the guts, and kick in the door. We didn’t have a Halligan tool or an ax, and the doors on this building were built to withstand an atomic blast. Even if they weren’t, there would be a security system in place that would trigger an alarm if we broke in.
I sat on a small cookie-cutter concrete curb that ran around a flower bed to think things out. After a while, I heard some clicking. I turned around and found Stephanie fumbling with the door. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a number pad here. If we could only figure it out.”
Just below the knob was a numerical code pad with ten buttons lined up vertically. “Try seven, five, four, zero.”
She punched the numbers, pushed the door open, and gave me an astonished look. “How did you know that?”
“Isn’t that your aunt’s birthday?”
“Oh, you’re a genius.” I stepped inside in front of her. “Wait a minute. She wasn’t born in July. She wasn’t even born in 1940.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No.”
“You have your cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“We get separated, go straight to the car and get out of Dodge. I’ll call you later, and you can pick me up.”
“I’m going to stick with you.”
“No dice. We’ve already been over this. First sign of trouble: run.”
“Why don’t we just both go to the car?”
“I’m telling you the way it’s going to be.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing. When I’m gone—” She touched her fingers to my lips in an attempt to stop me. “However it happens with me, I want you to open yourself up to the world. Marry if you find someone who you can love and who’ll be a good father to the girls. I want you happy. I want the girls to have a family. They deserve it. You deserve it.”
“Oh, Jim.”
“Maybe after a couple of years you could shoot some air into my veins. You don’t have to promise or anything, but it would be nice if I knew I wasn’t going to spend four decades staring at a lightbulb thinking it was God.”
On that cheerful note, we tugged on our latex gloves and commenced burgling.
57. A STACK OF LETTERS FROM A DEAD MAN
In the atrium by the reception desk a smattering of red, yellow, and violet floor lights shone from the bottom of the shallow fish pool, but most of the light in the building came from street lamps outside in the parking area.
We checked Margery DiMaggio’s offices upstairs, her old office, which was unlocked and filled with cardboard boxes, and then her new office, which was locked but which had glass in the door, an unlikely amenity for such a security-conscious company.
Knocking out the glass with the pry bar, I reached inside, unlocked and opened the door to the smell of fresh paint. The spacious office suite had oak furniture and a tall oak cabinet at one end of the room.
The cabinet turned out to be a bar. Cognac seemed to be the drink of choice here. I took a sip of soda water and looked around while Stephanie riffled through the papers in her aunt’s desk. The file cabinets were unlocked. Switching on a