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“Okay.”
Cooper turned on the lights and they looked around. They were inside a small living room with a couch, an easy chair, a television, a weight bench with a dozen dumbbells, and a small desk with an iMac desktop computer.
They could see the kitchen down a short hall to the right of the front door. A door to the back left led to a small bedroom; another door opened to a set of steps that went up to a tiny bedroom/attic.
“I’ll take the bedroom and bathroom,” Cooper said. “You take the living room and kitchen.”
Melton tried the laptop first, pushing the power button: it asked for a password, and she shut it down again. She had no idea how she could bypass it. She looked behind the TV, and then felt along the back edge, and found nothing. The room had an old wall-to-wall carpet, and she crawled along the edges looking for a place where it might pull up.... She rattled all the power outlets to make sure they were solid and identical. She moved to the kitchen, opened a storage cabinet and found a plastic box full of keys.
“I got a bunch of keys,” she called. “Should we keep one in case we want to come back?”
“Try the side door.”
Melton took the most likely keys, opened the side door, and tried them. One group of three identical keys on a key ring worked, and she took one and put it in her pocket and returned the rest of the keys to the cabinet.
“Got one,” she called.
Cooper opened the bedroom closet and searched all the pockets in the shirts, coats, and pants. She looked behind the clothes for anykind of box or container. She shook out shoes. She looked under the bed, under the mattress. They’d been searching for twenty minutes when Cooper worked through a small chest of drawers, feeling through the socks and underwear and sweatshirts.
A silk orchid, in full bloom, sat in a plastic pot on top of the bureau, and it occurred to her that she’d seen nothing else that looked like plant life in the house. She picked up the pot. It was too light for its size, and looking at the fake orchid, she picked it up at the base of its stem and lifted. The plant came cleanly out of the pot, and beneath it she found three tiny silver SanDisk USB flash drives, none more than an inch long and a half-inch wide.
“Got something,” she called to Melton.
Melton hurried in to look, frowned and said, “Shit. We didn’t bring a laptop. We should have brought a laptop.”
“Can’t get in his?”
“No, it’s got a password, I don’t know how to get past it. What should we do?”
“I don’t know—he hid them, they must be important,” Cooper said. “Maybe I should put them back, for now. If the place gets searched, we can make sure they’re found.”
“God, I hate to. They’re something,” Melton said.
Cooper put them back in the pot and said, “We’ve got some time to think about it.”
They worked through the kitchen, then Melton climbed the stairs to the attic/guest bedroom. She’d been in the room only a minute when she called.
“Maggie! Maggie!”
Cooper, in the kitchen, hurried up the stairs. The room was nearly empty, with a flat, ancient mattress in the middle of the floor,on iron legs. There were four suitcases against one wall, one flopped open and empty, and a broken IKEA desk.
When Cooper stepped inside, bending under the low, slanting ceiling, Melton said, “Look.”
She lifted one side of the mattress, where three MacBook Pros sat on the woven bedsprings.
“Oh, Jesus,” Cooper wailed, a hand slapping over her heart. “Oh my God.”
She knelt on the floor and lifted one of the computers off the springs, opened the lid. Inside, there was a Banksy sticker showing a black-and-white chimp wearing a sign that said “Keep It Real.”
“Art’s,” she breathed. She pushed the power button, and when the computer asked for a password, she typed one in. “We made the kids give us passwords in case... we wanted to know what they were looking at,” she told Melton.
The computer accepted it.
“Now we have a working computer,” Melton said.
Cooper looked at her and nodded: “Yes, we do.”
They carried it down the stairs, took the USB drives from under the silk orchid, and plugged in one of the drives. The drive was full of MP4 video files. They clicked on the first one and as it began running, Cooper said, “Oh, no.”
