two glasses of wine from dinner combined with the stress of the past few days began to take a toll on her. She found herself nodding off as she stared at an unchanging screen. She had reached the point of dragging herself off her chair for a dozen jumping jacks every few minutes just to keep herself awake, when an image flashed on the courtyard camera that abruptly brought her to full wakefulness.
Swiftly, she backed through the video and played it again, this time at half speed so that she wouldn’t miss anything. The first indication anything was amiss was when a dark figure scaled the courtyard gate. He shifted something on his shoulder—a backpack!—and then swiftly moved to one side, as if he knew the camera would catch his movements should he walk straight ahead. But what the intruder didn’t know was that the cameras were no longer at the same angle they’d covered the previous night.
Which also meant that Robert had no idea he’d been caught on video unrolling his sleeping bag and heading toward a corner spot right outside the shop’s courtyard door.
Heart pounding, Darla hurriedly switched the courtyard camera back to live mode. She had finally replaced the burned-out lightbulb in the exterior fixture, which she routinely left on overnight, so that a dim glow illuminated much of the bricked patio within those walls. Now, the courtyard appeared empty. But she knew that even though she had repositioned the camera earlier that day, small blind spots still existed to either side of the door. And she’d seen Robert, sleeping bag in hand, heading toward one of those corners.
The question was, was he still there, hidden now from camera view?
She flipped the view to the playback and swiftly checked the date stamp. Sure enough, the digital time stamp on the video showed that Robert had climbed over the gate but a few minutes before she and Barry had parted company at her front stoop. With the store long since closed for the day, he had no legitimate reason to have returned . . . certainly, no legitimate reason to climb over a locked gate and prowl about her courtyard!
If she hurried downstairs, Darla thought in outrage, she might still catch the teen in the act of whatever it was that he was doing. She stuck her keys in her pocket and then grabbed her cell phone, ready for confrontation.
Abruptly, the image of Curt lying dead in the basement flashed through her mind. He had been unarmed when he had encountered someone—perhaps Robert?—on his property in the middle of the night. If Curt, who had been a good six inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than Darla, had not been able to defend himself, then what were the chances she could?
“So call Jake for backup,” she told herself and quickly dialed.
Once again, however, the call went directly to the ex-cop’s voice mail. “It’s me, Darla,” she said in a rush. “I think Robert is downstairs in the courtyard, maybe trying to find something he can sell for scrap. I’m going down there now.”
And if things go badly, she grimly told herself, at least Jake will have a record of my last minutes without having to rely on Hamlet for clues. Darla glanced around the living room and spied the clublike rain stick that Great-Aunt Dee had brought back from Chile still propped in the corner. Once before, she’d grabbed it up, prepared to defend herself when she thought an intruder had broken into her apartment. It might not be as effective a weapon as a crowbar, but it was better than nothing.
A few moments later she had let herself into the store via the hall entry door, quickly shutting off the alarm. As always, the shop was dark save for a single light she kept on over the register. Silently as possible—though surely no one in the courtyard could hear her footsteps—she made her way to the back door, debating as she did so the best way to handle the situation. She could shut off the alarm and stealthily crack open the door for a cautious look . . . or she could fling open the door and use the element of surprise to her advantage. So what would Jake do in that situation?
Element of surprise, she decided.
Setting down the rain stick next to the door, she turned on her phone and punched in three numbers. That accomplished, she picked up the stick again and tucked it under