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25
     
     
     
    Penny and I were brainstorming the case during a slow period at the shop. Of immediate concern was the fact that someone had been able to break into my shop, plant a package of cocaine in my toilet, install a covert video camera disguised as a motion detector, and during all of this activity my burglar alarm didn’t utter a peep. They had done it once and if we couldn’t find out how and plug the hole, there was nothing to stop them from doing it again.
    The way we saw it, there were three possibilities. One, someone was skilled enough to bypass my system altogether. Second, my alarm monitoring company was in on it—the alarm actually sent its silent signal and the person at the monitoring station ignored it. Third, the alarm and the monitoring personnel performed as designed, and the police ignored the report.
    “Open your alarm control panel,” Penny said.
    I found the key, and unlocked and opened the door on the metal cabinet. She booted up her laptop and used a tangle of wires to jack into the main circuit board. I’m good with computers, but this was over my head.
    “Good, this is a pretty sophisticated panel. I can check its history.”
    Within a minute she had a list of what looked like gibberish scrolling by on her screen. “Here we go...and right in here, and...voila! Your alarm did catch the intrusion. Two-fourteen A.M., night before last. Now let’s see what it did with the information.” Her fingers blurred on the keyboard. “It dialed out just like it was supposed to...and...uh-oh.”
    “Uh-oh?”
    “Yeah, uh-oh. We missed a possibility.”
    “What?”
    “Hang on, I’m getting there.”
    She rattled the keys. “Okay, here’s the telephone number your panel is programmed to dial.” She pointed at her screen. “That look right to you?”
    “That’s an eight-hundred number. My monitoring station is right here in town, a local number.”
    “Bingo. Someone dialed into your alarm panel, hacked into just like I’ve done here, and reprogrammed it to send its alarm signals to another number.”
    I grabbed a phone and dialed the number from her screen. Got a squealing noise like I hear when my modem is connecting to the internet.
    “How can we find out who has that number?” I said.
    “Anybody sharp enough to go this route won’t be stupid enough to have that number in their name. It’ll be hidden behind a trail of aliases.”
    “Damn.”
    “Yeah.”

 
    Chapter 26
     
     
     
    I called my alarm company and got the correct number, after which Penny reprogrammed my panel to undo the changes wrought by the enemy. She also installed a firewall to prevent any future attacks.
    We locked up the shop at five, and I called home and told Abby I’d be late. She pitched a hissy fit, since she had planned on me being there to baby-sit so she could go to some sort of shopping party with her girlfriends. Right.
    I suspected she had something other than a shopping party planned, but Homestead took precedence and I didn’t have time to argue. I hung up with her in mid-rant, and for the millionth time in the past few days wondered if I had been this naïve about her true nature for the past eleven years, or if she had radically changed.
    Penny crinkled her eyebrows. “You okay?” she said. Try as I did to ignore the situation with Abby and Knight, my face and ears were burning and I knew the fire was showing.
    “Ready to go?” I said.
    “Let’s do it.”
    We took Penny’s ride, a slick little Lexus SUV, and headed out. After enough turns and loops to be confident we weren’t being followed, we hit County Road 1125 and headed north, out of town.
    “This is beautiful country,” she said after a few minutes as we worked our way through the curves, up and down the rolling hills, pasture land on either side of the road stretching to the horizon. The days of August are long and the sun was still tall enough to bathe the landscape in light that was just starting to turn from white to