Blood Orchid

She heard some odd noises, then the line went dead-no dial tone, nothing. She put the receiver down and picked it up again. This time, she got a dial tone. She put down the receiver and pressed the button that brought up the caller ID log. The word “unavailable” presented itself for the last caller. The one before that was her office, the one before that was Ham. Maybe somebody had called from a cellphone and the call hadn’t quite gone through. Maybe he’d call back. She waited, but the phone didn’t ring again.

She finished her di

She walked across the beach and let the little waves wash over her feet. It was a beautiful evening, and she wished she had someone to share it with. She and Jackson had liked this time of day on the beach, had taken long walks, returning to the cottage only after dark. Daisy bounded across the beach and joined her, frolicking in the shallow water. Down the beach, toward Orchid, lights were coming on, families were sitting down to di

Holly was alone, and that hurt, but she still felt she’d rather be alone than with someone other than Jackson. There wouldn’t be another Jackson in her life, she knew that, but she hoped there’d be somebody down the line. When he turned up, she hoped she’d want him.

She turned and, with Daisy at her heels, trudged back to the house. It waited for her, warm, inviting, and empty.

8

The following morning Holly phoned the station and asked for Hurd Wallace.

“Deputy Chief Wallace,” he said.

“Hurd, Holly. Do you know a really good locksmith?”

“Yeah, sure; Phil Sweat; he does locks, alarms, electronics, the works. I’ll give you the number.”

Holly wrote it down, then hung up and called the man.

Two hours later, Phil Sweat arrived in a van emblazoned with the nameNO SWEAT LOCKSMITHS,Your Security Is Our Only Business. Sweat was short, ski

“Morning, Chief,” Sweat said. “What can I do you for?”

“I want new locks on all the exterior doors; excellent locks.”

“You had some kind of problem?”

“Somebody came into my house yesterday while I was at work. Nothing was stolen, but I could tell somebody had been here.”

“Rearranged things, did he?”

“In tiny ways that only I would notice.”

“There are people like that,” Sweat said, raising his baseball cap and scratching his head. “They break into people’s houses just to experience their lives. Sometimes they steal, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they shit on the floor.”

“Nothing like that, but I don’t want it to happen again.”

“You got an alarm system?”

“Yes, but I haven’t been using it.”

“Why don’t I take a look at it?”

“The box is in the hall coat closet.”

Sweat walked into the house, checking the front door lock on the way in. “I could pick that in thirty seconds,” he said, “and if I could, so could somebody else.” He opened the closet door, pushed the clothing aside, and opened the alarm central box. The key was in the lock. “You made it easy for somebody to get in here and yank some wires.”

“That didn’t happen; anyway, the alarm wasn’t on.”

Sweat peered into the box. “It did happen. The front door is no longer wired into the system.” He pulled a screwdriver from a vest loaded with tools and worked for a moment. “There, that’ll do it, but if I were you, with a problem like this, I’d beef up the system. You’re only covering what looks like the exterior doors and the downstairs windows. You got any motion detectors?”

“No.”

“Let’s take a walk around the house,” Sweat said.

Holly followed the man as he checked every door, every window in the house, looked in closets, inspected her safes. Sweat led Holly outside to his van. “You don’t have a bad system here, it’s just inadequate. What I propose is to replace all the exterior locks with Swedish units that work magnetically.” He opened the rear door, rummaged in some boxes on shelves inside, and came up with a hefty lock. “They’re very high quality, and hell to get past. Then I’d extend the alarm system to all the windows, and I’d put two motion detectors in-one at the top of the stairs by the kitchen, covering the living room.”

“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 perso

“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 ru

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.”

“Whatis 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.”

“Right now, the alarm system calls a security company.”

“Yeah, I know them. They don’t have any cars, they’d just call the police.”