Maggie pulled her rental car, a light blue Kia Rio, up to the curb in front of the address that Stan had given her. The GPS unit resting on the dark gray dashboard had found Schofield’s home easily, but she still checked the address in the device to be sure. The house wasn’t at all what she had expected. It was a massive and gorgeous red-brick structure. Professionally landscaped plants and shrubbery, still visible beneath a layer of snow, bordered the house. A stamped concrete walkway that matched the home’s brick led up to the front door and then around the side. The sidewalk and the driveway had been recently shoveled.
She parked two houses down and backtracked to Schofield’s front door. It was made of heavy oak and was the color of maple syrup. There was no answer when she knocked, and so she made her way around the side of the house to the back. She discovered a large backyard housing an in-ground pool, a covered patio with a built-in grill, and a balcony leading off what she assumed to be the master bathroom. A large building housing another garage and a workshop or pool house rested along the back half of the property. It was covered with the same intricately patterned brick as the house.
Schofield worked for a security company, and it seemed highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have top-of-the-line protection for his home. Luckily, Maggie had Stan on her side. He had already broken into SSA’s database and extracted the disarm code along with Schofield’s personnel file.
After picking the lock, she entered the house and punched the code into a number pad hanging on the wall a few feet from the entryway. The kitchen was all chrome and granite and dark, ornate wood. Elaborate decorative patterns lined the hardwood floors. The house had a new and clean smell mixed with the aroma of French vanilla.
Maggie called out to make sure that no one was home, and then she walked through the ground floor. All the rooms had been beautifully decorated by someone with elegant and expensive tastes, but the house still had a strange feeling of homeyness. There was no doubt that a family lived there, evidenced by little things like colored pictures hanging on the refrigerator and baseball gloves lying discarded on the granite countertop.
There was a large staircase that curled up to the second story from an inviting foyer, but she decided to check for a basement first. If Schofield was hiding something from his wife, that was where Maggie would find it. She doubted that a man living with a wife and children would be able to hide anything right under their noses, but she also knew that people often saw only what they wanted to see.
She had just left the foyer and was walking down a long hallway whose walls were covered with family photos when the doorbell rang. From instinct, she pressed her body against the wall. Hugging the side of the hall but careful not to knock down the photos, she crept back toward the foyer and peeked around the corner. There was a shadowy figure barely visible through the glazed glass of the front door. She could see little else other than that the man was dressed in dark blue or black.
The doorbell rang out again. It was loud and resonated down the hall from all angles. She waited, refused to move. Then the figure knocked, paused again, and called out. “Mrs. Schofield? It’s an urgent matter about your husband.”
She stood there like a statue and waited for him to leave. The police in Indiana must have asked the local PD to send someone out to collect Schofield’s wife. But they wouldn’t be able to come into the house, even if they suspected that someone was inside. They would need a warrant for that. In one way, this new development hindered Maggie and in another it was a help. It would make leaving the house a challenge, but she figured that she could still sneak out through the back and make her way to her car through the neighbor’s backyard. But this also meant that she had someone out front watching her back. If the Prophet or Schofield’s family showed up, the officer would intervene.
After the cop had gone, Maggie walked back down the hall. At the end, she found a set of carpeted stairs just off the kitchen that led down into the home’s basement.