WE SHOULD LEAVE. I HOVER NEAR THE FRONT DOOR and listen for the response team. I don’t detect voices or doors opening and shutting, not so much as a floorboard creaking. Just the wind and the rain and the clocks. I glance at my watch. SWAT has been clearing the house for exactly six minutes. It’s as if the men have vanished.

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK …

All Marino and I have to do is walk back outside into the storm. It’s safer than being in here or at least that’s the way I feel as I look at him, at his wide back turned to me. He has one of his contacts on the line, another female I can tell, and I realize he’s talking to Chanel Gilbert’s alarm company.

“I’m going to repeat this,” Marino says, “and we’re going to write it down.”

He means I’m going to, and I get a notepad and pen out of my shoulder bag, reminded of my gun again. I slip it out and place it on top of a scene case.

“It was reset at ten-twenty-eight this morning,” he’s saying to a contact he calls sweetheart, “and there was no activity until twenty-five minutes past one P.M., which is when I disarmed the system.”

I listen for another moment, and then he ends the call and says to me, “How are we supposed to explain something like that? I set the alarm when we left the first time at ten-twenty-eight, then unset it now. In other words no one’s touched the alarm system in the past three hours except me. So how the hell did someone come in here and wind the clocks? It’s a damn good thing you were with me the entire time or they’d say I did it.”

“You couldn’t have and that’s ridiculous,” I reply.

“You positive there’s no other explanation for why we’re hearing the clocks now but we didn’t earlier?”

“What other explanation could there be?”

“But the alarm system had to be armed and disarmed. And it wasn’t. So how were the clocks wound?”

“I can only tell you that they have been since we were here last.”

“Maybe there’s another way to get in that bypasses the alarm system.” Marino is restless, looking and listening as I think of the locked bulkhead doors outside in the flower bed.

I’m reminded of the rusting hulk of the Mercedes on the bottom of the sea. It seems the broken-up shipwreck and the bulkhead are somehow the same. Portals to an evil place. Portals to destruction and death. Portals to our ultimate destiny, and I wonder if the bulkhead doors have alarm contacts and are wired to the system. If not, one could access the house that way. No code would be needed and there would be no record of someone coming in and out.