I had to walk a few blocks to reach a bus stop served by a bus that would take me the two plus miles to Constance’s neighborhood, but it didn’t really matter because the bus wouldn’t arrive for a good thirty minutes. Sometimes taking action took forever. It was moments like this that I missed my Ducati desperately.

According to the bus’s clock, it was almost nine o’clock when we came to a screeching halt at my stop in Madison Park. I hopped off the bus and wandered up the sidewalk in the wrong direction while I waited for the bus to trundle farther down the street and turn around a corner.

Once it was out of sight, I turned on my heel and marched straight toward Constance’s lakefront property. It was surrounded by a wall of trees and shrubs grown over a four-foot-high fence—totally scalable. I found a spot where the greenery was thinner and the light from the streetlamps was dim. For a few seconds, I loitered by a black pickup, pretending I was checking an imaginary phone. After I felt fairly certain I wasn’t being watched, I squatted down, then leapt at the fence, propelling myself over in one smooth motion. My landing could’ve been better, but it wasn’t too loud and didn’t disturb the plants too much. With any luck, nobody would ever know I’d been there.

I huddled in the bushes for a few minutes, making sure that even if the average person had spotted movement in the shrubs from the other side, they’d have lost interest. And then I waited a few more minutes. Only after it felt like I’d been waiting for an hour but it had really probably only been ten minutes or so—really, I’m temporally lost without my phone, I should probably consider getting a watch—did I start the slow process of skulking through the bushes. And can I just say that skulking is exhausting. All that squatting and breath-holding and slow shuffling forward. By the time I reached a break in the shrubs, my quads were quaking and my back ached.

Giving my legs a break while I surveyed the property, I lowered myself the rest of the way down until I was sitting on my heels. I’d come through behind what appeared to be a guesthouse, but I had a clear line of sight to part of the enormous main house. Just like in the photos from the fundraiser gala, the house appeared to be in the traditional Cape Cod style, only on crack. The place was huge.

Here’s the thing about breaking and entering into multi-multimillion-dollar properties like this—there’s never really a good time to do it, but nighttime is pretty much the worst time, what with all of the alarms and motion sensors and security personnel and guard dogs. Not that there isn’t always a way around the security measures, but it takes time to formulate a plan. So I had to give myself some time to study my surroundings. To locate all visible cameras and motion sensors and extrapolate the locations of others I couldn’t see based on what I could see. To figure out how to get into the house and interrogate Constance—and, let’s be honest, dispose of her—then get back out without getting caught. That last part was key.