After her confident entrance, her path became more circumspect. She stepped off the crunchy gravel right away and moved silently across the grass to hide in the shadows created by a clump of bushes. She crouched and listened, closing her eyes to aid the process. Nothing moved in her immediate vicinity. After a moment, a car passed on the street, but it didn’t slow or turn in. Olivia’s lips turned up in a smile. Manfred had warned her there were surveillance cameras, but she had noticed this afternoon that the two in front were stationary, mounted on the front corners of the house. They were both aimed toward the front door. That left Olivia plenty of room to approach the house unseen. In her pool of shadow, she pulled on the dark cardigan and buttoned it to conceal her T-shirt. She slid the broad hair band across her forehead and neck to keep her braid from swinging. She tugged it down low over her brows. She tucked dark thin plastic gloves into her waistband. She’d need them soon, along with her lockpicks. She exhaled deeply and almost silently before she began her creepy-crawl up to the main house.

This was what Olivia lived for. Her heart beat faster, and though she didn’t realize it, she was smiling. Since she knew the cameras were pointed at the front door area, she kept to the hedge as she worked her way toward the left side of the house. One of those windows would be her first attempt at entry. She hoped the front room, the formal living room, would provide her access, because that room had no furniture drawn up to the windows, a glance had told her.

If everything was tight as a drum on both sides, she’d resort to the lockpicks on one of the doors. But Olivia felt optimistic; the evening had had a good beginning. She drew parallel to the living room windows and had to leave her cover to cross the driveway and reach the shelter of the foundation plantings. The camellia bushes (she thought that was what they were) had ample space between them for her to hug the wall below the window. With some excitement she reached up to feel out the situation.

Then everything went to hell.

11

Manfred was hungry, and he was tired of feeling trapped in his house. Toward evening, the reporters began to drift away, and he felt pleased with himself. After eleven o’clock, he got into his car and drove to Davy, picking a barbecue joint called Moo and Oink, which was about the only place open this late. He had the chopped beef and the beans and the onion rings, and he enjoyed every bite. Most of all, he enjoyed being in a place that wasn’t his house.