I shoother back a thumbs-up icon, and slip my phone back in my pocket as I watch the detective approach.
“Ready to go in and have a look?”
I nod.“Yep.”
The walk-through is anti-climactic.I don’t see anything missing or even displaced and mention that to Althoff.
“No tools missing?Parts?”he prompts.
I take another glance around the garage, but nothing jumps out.
“Not that I can see.I mean, nothing of importance anyway.”
We already went through the apartment upstairs, and that looked exactly as I left it.Nothing was missing from my office either.Not that they’d have much time to go through anything considering the first deputies and Battaglia’s crew were here in minutes.
I don’t understand what anyone had hoped to gain.
“It makes no sense,” I point out.“Why go to the trouble of breaking in when you don’t plan to take anything?”
Rick Althoff stands in the middle of the shop and slowly turns a full circle.
“Unless they intended to leave something,” he thinks out loud, stopping suddenly and narrowing his eyes.
I turn to where he’s looking, Remi’s Chevy pickup.We move at the same time, but Rick gets there first.
“Don’t touch anything,” he orders, and makes me stand back while he checks the inside of the cab.
He finds it in the back of the truck, waving me over to take a peek into the bed.It takes me a second to recognize it as a cell phone smashed to bits.
“If I were a betting man, I’d say that’s Remi’s phone,” he states, pulling out his own cell to take a few pictures.
“Didn’t that get?—”
“Stolen.Yes, which means we should probably get out of here, lock this place down, and call the feds.This wasn’t about you or your business, this was for the boy.A warning,” he adds.
His last statement sends cold chills down my back and jolts me into action.
He catches me by the back door.
“Hold up.I’m coming with you.”
Outside he barks orders for his deputies to guard any entrances and not to let anyone inside until the FBI gets here.Then he pulls on my sleeve.
“You can ride with me.”
Good, because my truck has been blocked in by Roy’s SUV.
He’s already on his phone—it sounds like he’s talking to Special Agent Mancuso—when I get into the passenger side.While he reverses out of the back lot, I dial Tessa’s number to give her a heads-up.She needs to know what’s going on before we roll up to her house in a cruiser.
“Pretty sure that’s his phone,” she says ten minutes later, when Althoff shows her the pictures he took.“I can still see parts of the BMX decal he put on it.He used to be into that.”
She’d been all business when I called her.Short and to the point in her questions, even though I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to tell her.One of her FBI guards was already inside the house when we got here.
She’s still all business now, clearly in professional mode.I feel distinctly out of my depth, with nothing to contribute as I listen to the three law enforcement officers talk about fingerprints and video feeds.But I do find out the movement, alerting Battaglia Security on the security camera at the rear of the firehouse, had been the light from the motion detector installed over the back door coming on, and a brief glimpse of an arm, swinging what looked to be a crowbar or something like it.Unfortunately, whoever broke in seemed aware of the camera and made sure not to give their identity away.
“They’ve had eyes on the place,” Althoff suggests.“First of all, they didn’t seem worried about the motion detector light and steered clear of camera view.They also brought a crowbar, which means they knew the flimsy door and lock would be fairly easy to breach.”
The comment about the door stings a little, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right.I should’ve done something about that when I went through the trouble of having the security system installed.I’ll have to do it now.
