by Lis Wiehl
The silence seemed almost as loud as the alarm.
He took a deep, ragged breath. Should he turn on the light? But if he turned on the light and someone had broken in, they would not only know he was here, but they would be able to move around easily. With the lights off, he had an advantage. After all, this was his house.
Gabe stepped into the darkness.
CHAPTER 6
Charlie sat in his Crown Vic listening to his voice mail before he went back to the office. He had to listen to the third message twice before he was finally able to pick out the hesitant words from some kind of annoying background whine.
“I’m at my house and I can’t get hold of my mom. The house alarm’s going off and I’m not sure what to do. I think it’s been going off for a while. So if you get this message in the next twenty minutes or so, could you call me back?”
It was Gabe Quinn. Mia’s kid. Fourteen years old. Charlie had been married three times, but he didn’t have any kids. Which was probably a good thing. He didn’t even have a cat.
Sometimes, though, he saw a little of himself in Gabe. He’d seen the kid put on an I-don’t-care face when he clearly did. Seen him be brave when it might have been better to be cautious. But at fourteen boys were all hormones, impulses, and bravado.
And since his dad had died, Gabe had been forced to grow up. To square his skinny shoulders and be the man of the house.
The kid answered on the first ring. “Hello?” His voice was barely audible, but only because he was speaking softly. The sound of the alarm was gone. Charlie relaxed and pulled the keys from the ignition.
“It’s Charlie Carlson. It sounds like you got the alarm taken care of. So is everything okay?”
“No!”
Charlie hadn’t known that a voice could be both soft and frantic. He slid the keys back in the ignition. “What’s wrong?”
“I turned off the alarm and went inside to check things out. But I think someone else is here in the house too. I can hear them moving around downstairs.”
Charlie sucked in a breath, his heart speeding up. “Get back outside! Now!”
“I can’t. I think they’re right by the stairs.” And then the kid put the cherry on the sundae. “And I left Brooke outside.”
Charlie started his car again, swearing under his breath. “I’m gonna scramble a unit out your way. Until then, is there someplace you can hide? Under a bed? In a closet?” He couldn’t remember what the top floor of Mia’s house looked like.
Silence.
“Gabe?”
The only answer was a muffled thump. As if the phone had fallen from the boy’s hand and onto the carpet.
“Gabe?”
Charlie could hear something in the background. A man yelling. He couldn’t make out the words. But he could hear the emotions fueling them. Anger and fear and a little bit of panic.
Hitting the buttons to activate his sirens and lights, he just prayed that the man in Mia’s house didn’t have a weapon.
CHAPTER 7
To Mia, it seemed to take hours for the courthouse elevator to reach the ground. It stopped on every floor. People held the doors for friends or to finish a conversation. She wanted to scream, but that would only slow things down further.
Many of the people who got on wanted to talk to her, but she just held up her hand and shook her head as she scrolled back through the messages on her phone. Co-workers had reacted to the news of what had happened. Gabe had texted her about dinner. Eli Hall, a public defender who taught with her at the University of Washington Law School, wanted to know if she was okay.
And in the middle was a phone message from Gabe. He had left it just ten minutes earlier. Mia put her finger in her other ear so she could listen to it a second time, trying to tease out her son’s voice from the blare of the alarm in the background and from the voices now surrounding her. Finally the elevator doors opened and she pushed her way out, not caring when she stepped squarely on someone’s foot. What had Gabe done once he hung up the phone? As she ran to her car, she called him back, but it went straight to voice mail.
“Gabe, it’s Mom. Don’t go in the house. Go to the neighbor’s or something. And call me back as soon as you hear this.”
Once she was in her car, Mia raced out of the parking lot, the squeal of her tires echoing off the concrete walls. Her car bounced out onto the street, forcing other traffic to screech to a halt. Ignoring a volley of angry honks, she began to weave in and out of cars.
Her heart pounded in her chest and ears. Her fingertips felt numb. She forced herself to take a deep breath. She was probably overreacting. The term false alarm hadn’t become a staple of the lexicon for nothing.
But if it was nothing, why hadn’t Gabe answered his phone? Why hadn’t he called her back? Had her call gone to voice mail because he was on the phone with someone else? Or because he had turned the phone off? Or because someone else had?
As she merged onto the freeway, Mia’s hands were slick on the wheel. She drove the way she hated anyone else to, riding people’s bumpers until she forced them to move out of the way. The world had collapsed into a single thought, as if she were seeing it all through the sights of a gun. She had to get to her children. Now.
As she raced home, Mia murmured a prayer that was just a single word repeated over and over. “Please. Please, please, please.” The rain was coming in gusts, forcing her to constantly adjust the windshield wipers from high to medium to intermittent and then back to high again.
Why hadn’t they worked out a strategy for what Gabe should do in a situation like this? They had planned where to meet if they were separated in an earthquake, but wasn’t this more important? Of course, Scott was the one who had made the earthquake plan, and that was before they had gotten the security system. Before Scott had died. Accountants were good at making plans, making lists, making sure everything was orderly. Now Mia was trying to take up the slack, be mother and father both, and she feared she was doing a lousy job.
Even if false alarms were common, that didn’t mean this one wasn’t real. Someone still could have broken in, looking for electronic gadgets or prescription drugs. And since burglars were often users themselves, an encounter with one could be unpredictable, even violent.
And what if it was something worse, someone targeting her specifically? Mia thought of what had just happened in the courtroom. Could this be Young’s backup plan? Did he know that her kids were her life? Had he planned to take her life away just as she was taking his?
Being a prosecutor was not a low-risk occupation. No matter how hard you tried to keep your home address and personal details off the Internet, anyone with a little cash could find someone willing to divulge them for a fee. Mia thought of the Denver prosecutor gunned down outside his home, the Texas prosecutor shot by a masked man as he walked to his office. In California a man with a grudge had even killed the daughter of his own attorney in some kind of twisted payback. And then there was Mia’s co-worker Colleen, shot down in her basement because she was getting too close to the truth of a scandal.
When Gabe couldn’t reach her, what choice had he made? Had he done the smart thing and retreated? But fourteen-year-old boys didn’t really believe they might die. Not even when their own dads had.
She heard sirens behind her. Red and blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror. After pulling over to let an unmarked Crown Vic with lights in the grill pass, Mia watched as it took the next exit. The exit for her neighborhood.
Her heart contracted. No, no, no. Not her kids. She couldn’t take it if anything happened to them too. Scott’s death had nearly broken her. But her kids, her kids were her heart. Her life.
Even after she got off the freeway, Mia was still driving at close to freeway speeds. She turned onto her block. In front of her house stood two blue-and-white patrol cars, their light bars now dark, as well as the Crown Vic that had passed her. The door opened and Charlie Carlson got out.
She jerked the car to a stop across the s
treet, then ran toward him.
He turned toward the sound of her heels, then held up his hands. “Stay back, Mia. And don’t make any noise. There’s someone in the house with Gabe. We don’t want to spook the guy.”
“Oh my God.” It was half prayer, half disbelief. This couldn’t be real, could it? “What about Brooke?”
“I don’t know.” He said it plainly, but in the glow of the streetlight she saw the anguish in his face.
One patrol officer was at the side door and the other at the front. Both of them had their guns drawn. The side door was open, and the officer there was yelling, “Come on out with your hands up.”
CHAPTER 8
Anticipate the unexpected and assume the worst. That was what his first partner had told Charlie when he started working patrol. Now, years later, he had plenty of ways to fill in the blanks. All of them bad.
He assumed that the person who had broken into Mia’s house was still inside. That he—or they—was armed. That he was dangerous. And that he was panicked. Panicked was worst of all. Panic led to poor decisions. Panic led to people getting hurt, even killed. That was why he had asked the responding officers to shut down lights and sirens before they arrived, lower the volume on their radios, and silence their equipment.
“Go wait by your car,” he told Mia now.
“But what about—”
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t have time to argue.” He turned away so he could scan the house, looking for clues, for anything out of place. Had he seen movement in the glossy green leaves of the camellia bush next to the side porch?
He stepped onto the porch, keeping out of the line of sight of the open door. In the porch light the cop, with cheeks as red as apples, didn’t look much older than Gabe. “Who’s inside?” Charlie asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper.
“That’s not yet been determined. I found the door open, indicating that we had an active B&E-type situation. I entered, heard movement, and attempted verbal contact. When there was no response, I exited and waited for backup. They just arrived.”
“We don’t just have a burglar or burglars,” Charlie said. “We’ve also got a fourteen-year-old kid in there. Name of Gabe Quinn. Did you see him?”
The rookie shook his head. “I didn’t make visual contact with anyone.”
Charlie thought. If he called out to Gabe and the kid responded, would that simply provide the burglar with a ready hostage?
“We know you’re in there!” he called into the darkness. “Come on out with your hands up!”
A long silence. Long enough that Charlie had time to wonder just how bad things were going to get. Then a voice came from overhead.
“Charlie? Is that you?”
The tightness in his chest loosened. “It is. Stay where you are, Gabe. Are you alone? Are you safe?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” His voice was shaky. “Are there other cops here? Besides you?”
“Yeah. Two.”
“I think they think I’m the bad guy.”
“What?” Charlie wasn’t sure he was following.
“When I was talking to you on the phone, this guy started yelling at me from downstairs to get my hands up or he’d shoot me. But instead I hid.”
He looked at the cop next to him. Now the rookie’s whole face was red.
“Did you tell him you were a cop?” Charlie asked.
A pause. “I’m not certain I identified myself as an officer.”
He exhaled sharply, then called upstairs to Gabe, “Just to be safe, we’re gonna clear the house. Stay put until we say otherwise, okay?”
When it came to the search, the rookie redeemed himself. They worked in speed and in silence, using hand signals, taking quick peeks—alternating high and low—slicing the pie when they went around corners, leapfrogging down hallways, never forgetting about the fatal funnel of a doorway and never turning their backs to an uncleared room.
When they reached the top of the stairs, Charlie called out for Gabe, asking where he was.
“In my room.”
“Okay. Just give us a sec.”
Brooke’s room was clear, as was the bathroom. In Mia’s room the bed was unmade, but only on one side, as though she still expected Scott to show up and reclaim his half.
Finally Charlie opened the door to Gabe’s room. It appeared empty. The closet door stood open.
“All right, Gabe, you can come out.”
The chair in the front of the desk slowly began to inch out into the room, then Gabe unwound himself onto the carpet. Charlie holstered his weapon and reached down to pull him to his feet, marveling that the kid had managed to contort his body into a space not much larger than a milk crate.
“Your mom’s outside. She wants to know where Brooke is.”
The boy’s face paled. “You mean Brooke’s not outside? I told her to wait on the side porch. I told her.”
There was no point in telling a fourteen-year-old that he had made the wrong decision. Judging by the horrified expression on his face, he had already figured that out for himself.
CHAPTER 9
Mia paced next to her car, her arms wrapped around herself. She couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t take her eyes off the open door Charlie and the cop had disappeared into. Couldn’t stop straining her ears to hear the familiar voices of her children. Couldn’t stop fearing that she would instead hear something worse. A scream. A cry. A gunshot.
After what seemed like hours but was just a few minutes, Charlie, the young cop, and Gabe came out of the house. Mia flew across the lawn to her son, wrapping his wiry frame in her arms. When had he gotten to be so tall? He submitted for just a second before he stiffened and broke away.
“Where’s your sister?” Mia looked behind him for a small figure, maybe hanging back in confusion, but saw nothing. Panic sharpened her voice when he didn’t answer. “Where’s Brooke?”
“I told her to stay right here.” His eyes were huge. He turned in a circle. “Right here on the porch.”
“Brooke?” Mia called out into the darkness. “Brooke? Honey?”
Silence. It stretched out, long enough to reach in deep, to hollow her out, and then—“Mommy?” A little voice, and close. Thank you, God.
“Brooke? Where are you, honey?”
“Is the bad man still there?” Her voice was coming from deep inside the camellia bush.
Mia tensed again. “What bad man?”
“The one with the gun. He was yelling.”
She relaxed as she realized who Brooke meant. “Oh, honey, they’re police officers. You’re okay. It’s safe to come out.”
Her yellow rain jacket flashed among the dark leaves, and then she pushed her way out. Mia snatched up Brooke and held her close. Her face was scratched from the branches, but otherwise she looked okay.
“Why didn’t you stay on the porch?” Gabe demanded, voice cracking.
“Because,” Brooke said, and then stopped.
“Because why?” Mia prompted.
She leaned forward. Her whisper tickled Mia’s ear. “Because I had to go pee!”
“Oh, Brooke!” Mia had to smile. Ten minutes earlier she had been sure she would never smile again.
While they had been talking, the patrol officer had been notifying his dispatcher as well as the officer on the other side of the house. Now he cleared his throat. “Um, ma’am, even though there’s currently no one in your house, it looked like they must have been interrupted while they were still going through it.”
“What?” Her free hand went to her throat, to the place where Bernard Young’s fingernail had dug into her an hour before. Charlie cocked his head.
Suddenly her arms felt too weak to hold her daughter, and she set her down. It was all too much. Gabe. Brooke. Coming way too close to having her throat cut.
The young cop gestured for Mia to follow, and they all, including the second patrol officer, trailed after him.
As she staggered forward on hollow-feeling legs,
Mia wondered what had been taken. Material things might not matter, but some things were still irreplaceable.
“See.” The cop waved his hand at the family room like a game show host extolling the features of a new car. “Someone started to toss it.” The room was a mess, as if it had been gone through in a hurry. Half the doors to the built-in cupboards stood open. Brooke’s pillow lay next to a wall. Scattered throughout the room were clothes, dishes, sections of newspaper, a single sneaker, a half-filled laundry basket, books, a game of Connect Four, and a random menagerie of stuffed animals.
“They must have been interrupted,” the cop repeated. “Do you want to look to see what’s missing?”
Mia’s cheeks got hot. This kid was too young to know what it was like when you had two kids and worked sixty hours a week. “Actually, um, this is normal. It’s how the house was when we left. We’ve just had a busy week.” She hoped no one pointed out that it was Monday.
“Oh.” The bright color was back in his face. “So I guess the whole thing was a false alarm. No burglar.”
“No burglar,” Mia echoed.
“Okay, so when it comes to false alarms, you should know that you’re allowed one freebie. But for any additional alarms, you’ll be charged a hundred-and-fifteen-dollar fee. Each.”
“We should figure out what caused it,” Charlie said. “Do you have motion sensors in the house? I’ve seen cats, balloons, even spiders trigger them. Anything that breaks the beam.”
“No. We just have alarms on the doors and the downstairs windows.”
“It was pretty stormy out there earlier. And this is an older home.” He walked back into the hall, grabbed the front doorknob, and shook it. Even though it was still locked, it rattled in the frame. “That’s more than likely your problem right there. With the wind blowing, there’s enough play in it that it could have separated the contact from its reed switch for a second. You need to get some weather stripping.”
