things to hide—so I felt pretty confident walking around the perimeter of the yard to Scott’s study.
I smiled as I approached the house. I’d only glanced at them the last time I’d been there, but my recollection was right—Scott’s windows were flimsy things. Aside from being energy-inefficient, it would be the work of a moment to jimmy one open.
I pulled on my own pair of gloves. Eleanor should have been pulling up to the front of the house any minute now. I breathed deep, and waited.
When I was a teenager, I’d broken into houses out of a desire to feel—well, anything. The fear of getting caught was the first thing I’d actually felt in the months after my parents died. And as that numbness slowly lifted, the thrill of those nighttime excursions had helped to drown out the crushing grief that howled inside me, even though I knew it was wrong.
Breaking into Scott’s house now wasn’t strictly right, as Julian had reminded me last night. But there was a good reason for it. If we were lucky, this would be the break we needed.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but after a moment, I thought I heard the chime of a doorbell coming from inside the house. I pulled out my cell phone. Were those footsteps, echoing from somewhere inside? Sure enough, a text from Eleanor appeared on my screen.
ELEANOR: Call your brother.
An innocuous text, we’d decided. Something that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, if for any reason someone looked at the screen of Eleanor’s phone. She’d typed it out ahead of time, of course, so that it was ready to send as soon as someone opened Scott’s front door.
It was my signal to get to work.
I slid a butter knife out of my pocket. With windows as cheap as Scott’s, you didn’t need anything more complicated. The windows were a little higher off the ground than I’d anticipated, which made the angle a bit awkward, but my fingers hadn’t forgotten the trick of it. In thirty seconds, I was pushing up the screen, and in another thirty, I was inside.
No sound of a security alarm. Whether that was because there truly wasn’t one, or because Eleanor was standing in the doorway, forcing the front door to stay open and the system turned off, I couldn’t say. And at this point, it didn’t matter.
I crossed the thick Aubusson rug to reach Scott’s desk, pushing back a chair that was so ergonomically designed it looked like it belonged in a spaceship. I jiggled the mouse at his computer to wake it up, and when prompted for a password, typed in Philippians4:19, barely daring to breathe.
It worked.
A smile spread across my face and I had the strongest urge to turn and grin at Julian, as though he were in the room with me. Shaking my head, I scrutinized the computer screen instead.
I couldn’t hear voices coming from the rest of the house, which was both comforting and not. It suggested that Scott and Eleanor, now hopefully ensconced in his living room, couldn’t hear me in here either. But it also meant I might not have any warning if that conversation ended sooner than I expected.
Trust Eleanor to do her job, I reminded myself, and you do yours.
I clicked through a number of folders on his desktop before I finally found one labeled with a seemingly random string of letters and numbers. My eyes widened at the contents—subfolders, dated by month, with PDFs inside each one of banking transactions. Deposits from Lyles & Blackstone. There was another subfolder with what appeared to be personal information for the developers.
So Joey had been right. Scott really did have receipts on everyone. The contents of this folder implicated him, but it just as clearly put Lyles & Blackstone on the hook for bribery. Mutually assured destruction.
I pulled a USB key out of my pocket and plugged it in. As I started copying folders onto it, I noticed an excel sheet on his desktop I hadn’t seen before. I clicked it open on a whim, scanning to see if it contained anything interesting, when my eyes caught on a Gmail address with the same string of letters and numbers as the folder I was copying.
I paused. This wasn’t part of the plan. I was just supposed to copy whatever documents I could find and leave.
But what if that email account had more information? Sure, I could check once I’d left, but that might send Scott a notification of a