9

Whoever they were, they were efficient. There was nothing obvious that caught my attention. They hadn’t tossed underwear on the floor or washed the dirty dishes in the sink, but someone had broken into my apartment and conducted a pretty careful search. People like me, active people with a disability, share the everyday world with other people, but we live entirely different lives. For convenience, I’d made some adjustments in the apartment, but unless you are living with restrictions, you wouldn’t notice them. The glass that I always left near the edge of the kitchen counter so I could reach it easily had been moved back several inches. The bottom drawer of my desk, which I leave a tiny bit open because it tends to catch and it’s hard to get leverage to pull it out, had been closed. The chair next to my desk had been moved, probably because whoever had gone through my computer needed it to sit on, but when they put it back they failed to leave sufficient space between the side of the desk and the wall for Mighty Chair to slide past. The lids on my pain pill bottles, which I always leave partially opened, had been tightened. The search had been thorough, and unlike those agents who had visited Jenny, these people did not want me to know they had been there.

Jenny was the only other person who had a key, which she used when she got home before me, but she would have told me if she had stopped by. And she wouldn’t have tightened pill bottle lids.

I knew they were looking for anything that would lead them to the source of the video. In an odd way this was exciting. I’d never thought I would be involved in something so vital to national security that the government would break into my apartment. Not only was there no link to the video there, there was nothing that could compromise me or embarrass me. As boring as it makes me appear, I literally had nothing to hide—I mean, unless someone was really desperate to know what I’d bought my mother for her sixty-fifth birthday. The most interesting things on my desktop were what I laughingly referred to as “my business records” and my tax returns, courtesy of H&R Block.

I clicked through my computer, although I had no idea what I was looking for. It just seemed like a smart thing to do. It’s what every TV detective would have done. I assumed they copied my address book and maybe my emails. I smiled at that thought: Some poor schmuck was going to have to waste a day looking through several thousand emails I hadn’t gotten around to erasing. I suspected they had planted a listening device somewhere, but I didn’t bother looking for it. Unless it actually looked like a bug, I wouldn’t be able to spot it.

“Cher, call Howie,” I said.

My apartment had been “tossed,” I told him. I smiled as I said it. “They ‘tossed’ it, Howie!” I loved speaking noir. “You believe that? Do they really think I’m stupid enough to leave evidence like that on my computer?”