At nine o’clock there began to be a minor risk of a Realtor escorting clients on a tour of the empty house. But on a weekday like this, most working buyers would schedule an appointment after five o’clock.
Anyway, if an agent showed up with clients, Jane wouldn’t need to pull a gun on them. There was an attic access in the ceiling of the walk-in closet next to the master bedroom, a segmented ladder, which she pulled down now in preparation, just in case. At the first sound of voices downstairs, she would retreat to the upper realm of spiders and silverfish, and pull the folding ladder up behind her.
In the bedroom once more, she took a compact FM receiver from the tote bag and plugged it into an outlet under the window from which she had earlier conducted surveillance of the Hannafin place. This special receiver, which incorporated an amplifier and recorder, operated below the commercial band where radio stations plied their trade, and it was pre-tuned to an unused spot on the dial that matched the carrier wave issued by the transmitters that she had secreted in Hannafin’s four phones.
She would need this receiver only if the journalist used one of the landline phones to call someone. If he needed to talk to anyone before she spoke to him at noon, he would most likely resort to his smartphone. Most people thought that cellphone calls were far more difficult to tap. In fact, they were difficult, though not in all circumstances and not when the person conducting the surveillance made the proper preparations.
From the tote, Jane extracted a disposable cellphone, one of three that she currently owned, each of which she had purchased weeks earlier at different big-box stores. A programmed electronic whistle, approximately the size of a rifle cartridge and capable of reproducing any sound code, was taped beside the cell’s microphone.
After parting the draperies six inches, giving her a view of the Hannafin residence, she entered the journalist’s landline number in her disposable cell. She pressed SEND and an instant later triggered the electronic whistle.
The chip she had wired into Hannafin’s four phones offered two functions: first, as a standard line tap to listen in to calls; second, as an infinity transmitter. The sound code produced by the electronic whistle triggered the infinity transmitter, which stopped the journalist’s phones from ringing. Simultaneously, it turned on their microphones and broadcast sounds in the house over the phone line—to Jane.
The phones in Hannafin’s kitchen, living room, and study had nothing but silence to transmit, which meant she could hear clearly what was happening in the master bedroom. The tap-tap-tap of hammer against screwdriver handle and the thin shriek of a pivot pin being driven out of the barrel of a hinge confirmed that he had found the tools that she had hidden among his clothes.
Not long after the hammering had stopped and the pins had been removed from the three hinges, she heard the door rattling in its frame as he struggled with it. A sudden quiet followed by muffled cursing meant he realized a hard truth: Although the knuckles that formed the barrel hinges—three on the door leaf, two on the frame leaf—would part now that the pins no longer held them together, the door would not open more than an inch because it remained secured by the blind deadbolt.
That was why she had provided him with a sturdy screwdriver and a twenty-ounce steel claw hammer rather than lighter tools. To open the solid-core door, he would now need to split and gouge the wood either to pry loose the door-mounted hinge leafs or to dig his way even deeper to expose the guts of the blind deadbolt, which would be an exhausting job.
She had told him he would be able to free himself in fifteen or twenty minutes, but that had been a lie. He would need perhaps an hour to break out of the closet. She wanted him to have plenty of time to think about her proposal before he could get to a phone. And she hoped that, in his exhaustion, he would realize that in every moment of their brief relationship, she had been several steps ahead of him—and always would be.