Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

asked your questions already, you’ll get a shot.
It was getting easier all the time to talk to him this way. Out loud she said, “You
     told Friar what happened, but you didn’t go get the prototype and give it to him.”
    “No.” He looked up. “Once I do that, he doesn’t need Adam anymore, does he? He…we
     were supposed to make the exchange that night, but I didn’t trust him. I told him
     so. I said he’d need to prove they weren’t his men. Helaughed at me. He didn’t have to prove anything, but if I wanted to hang on to the
     device for a few days, why, he had plenty for me to do. That’s when he told me to
     call Rule and what to say when he got here.”
    “He expected Rule to bring Cullen?”
    Jasper nodded. “And you. And he wanted Rule to bring the Finder, but I couldn’t talk
     him into that.” Bitterly he added, “
I
wanted him to bring the Finder, too. If he had, I would have taken a chance. I could
     have passed one of you a note. Friar has my house most thoroughly bugged, so I had
     to follow his script when you were there, but I could have passed a note. If your
     Finder could have found Adam…but you didn’t bring her.”
    “If your house is bugged, he must know you left it tonight.”
    The twist of his mouth was meant to be a smile. “Now you’re impugning my professional
     abilities. I left recordings, of course. Several of them, because there are bugs in
     almost every room. No visual, but audio is damn near as tricky if it’s done well,
     and his people did a good job. But I’m better.”
    “How long before your recordings end?”
    He glanced at his watch. “I can stay another three hours, tops. The recordings will
     run out in four hours and seven minutes. Right about now,” he added, “I’m in the kitchen
     getting some nibbles from the refrigerator.”
    “If he has someone watching—”
    “The lights are on timers.”
    A high-end thief would need to be good at fooling surveillance, she supposed.
    “I don’t think there are watchers 24/7,” Rule said. “Chris and Allan haven’t spotted
     any. How did you leave your house without my men seeing you?”
    “There’s a way to go from my basement to my neighbor’s. I go to the third floor in
     his house, out a window, and into that huge oak in his backyard. From that tree I
     connect with another one in the yard behind him, then down, out the gate, and away.”
    “Your neighbor doesn’t mind you wandering through his house to get to his tree?”
    “My goal is for him to remain unaware of it. Mr. Peterson is eighty-two, deaf, and
     goes to bed at nine every night, so this isn’t challenging. His dog has excellent
     hearing, but we’re buds, so he doesn’t object to me visiting.”
    Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “Surely this is not the Mr. Peterson with the Great Dane.”
    Jasper smiled faintly. “In fact, it is. Mr. Peterson is a remarkably fit eighty-two,
     and while Ajax has a bad habit of hopping over the fence when he’s bored, he behaves
     well on their daily walks.”
    Drummond spoke from his spot near the wall. “Machek doesn’t sound all that retired
     to me.”
    He didn’t to Lily, either. Jasper still had all the gadgets he needed to fool surveillance.
     He’d worked out a route to leave his house unseen and had apparently used it before
     tonight. “How long did it take you to make the recordings you’re using tonight?”
    Jasper’s lips thinned. “I’ve had plenty of time. Nine days. When he first took Adam
     I suspected he’d bugged the house. Never mind why for now—I suppose you’ll want to
     hear all about that, but later. I didn’t know about him being a listener, not then,
     so I looked for less arcane ways of eavesdropping. Once I was sure I’d found all the
     bugs, I started making the recordings. It seemed likely I’d want to leave without
     him knowing at some point.”
    “Okay. How do you know the prototype is missing?”
    “Because it isn’t where I left it.”
    “But you weren’t going to make the exchange for the next few days. Why would you check
     on or move it? Isn’t there a chance you’d lead Friar to it?”
    “Oh. Right. I see why you wondered.” He grimaced. “It’s hard to overcome the habit
     of secrecy. I’d followed my usual procedure, you see, so I needed to move it to a
     better hiding place.”
    “Your usual procedure being—?”
    “FedEx, in this case.”
    “If you FedEx’ed it to yourself last night, it wouldn’t arrive until