Silken Prey

neighbor’s.
    •   •   •
    T HE GROUNDS WERE PROTECTED by both radar and infrared installations, but Kidd had switched off the alarms on the rear approach, and had fixed the software so that they couldn’t be turned back on without his permission. Lauren had one major worry: that the dogs would be turned loose. If that happened, she was in trouble. She had a can of bear spray, which should shut them down, but she had no idea how effective that would be.
    For the time being, the dogs were in the house—one of them in the living room, where it could see the front hallway and the hall coming in from the garage; and the other outside the bedroom door.
    Inside the tree line, she pulled a pair of starlight goggles over her head. They were military issue, and she’d had to pay nine thousand dollars for them six years before. With the goggles over her eyes, the world turned green and speckled: but she could see.
    She began moving forward, like a still-hunter, placing each foot carefully, feeling for branches and twigs before she put weight down. Long pauses to listen. Fifty yards in, she crossed a nearly useless wrought iron fence. Any reasonably athletic human could slip right over it; Grant’s dogs could jump it with three feet to spare, and a deer would hardly notice it. Once over the fence, she took nearly fifteen minutes to cross the hundred yards to the edge of Grant’s back lawn. By that time, she knew she was alone. She took out her phone, a throwaway, and messaged Kidd, one word: “There.”
    One word came back. “Go.”
    Kidd was back on top of the hill, back on the manor’s Wi-Fi. Nothing inside the house had changed. Grant’s lawn was dotted with oak trees and shrubs, and Lauren stuck close to them as she closed in on the bedroom. There were motion and sonic alarms outside the bedroom windows, but Kidd had them handled. When she was below the windows, she took out a taped flashlight with a pinprick opening in the tape. She turned it on, and with the tiny speck of light, looked at the windows. Triple glazed, wired, with lever latches. Fully open, there’d be a space three feet long and a foot high that she’d have to get her body through. She could do that. . . .
    She pulled back, listened, crept down the side of the house. A light came on in the living room and she froze. Nothing more happened and she felt her phone buzz. She risked a look:
Grant moving.
She listened, then began to back away from the house, heard a crunch when she stepped in some gravel, froze. Moved again ten seconds later, backing toward the woods.
    From her new position, she could see the lighted living room, and Taryn Grant looking out the window. She was wearing a robe and had what looked like a drink in her hand. A dog moved by her hip, and Lauren thought,
Bigger than a wolf.
    The phone vibrated. She was into the tree line, and stopped to looked again: “Dogs may know . . . dogs may be coming.”
    She thought,
Damnit,
and texted, “Come now,” and began moving more quickly. She crossed the fence, which should give her some protection from the dogs, and made the hundred yards out quickly, but not entirely silently. At the street-side tree line, she knelt, stripped the goggles and mask off, stuffed them in her pockets, and then Kidd was there in the car.
    She was inside and pulled the door closed and they were rolling and Lauren looked out the window, toward Grant’s house, but saw no dogs. “She let them out?”
    “I think so—into the backyard, anyway. Didn’t seem like there was any big rush. Maybe she was letting them out to pee.”
    “That’s probably it,” Lauren said. “I never saw them. They didn’t bark.”
    “They don’t bark, not those dogs,” Kidd said.
    “I know.” She took a breath, squeezed Kidd’s thigh. “I haven’t felt like this in years. Six years.”
    They came out of the darkened neighborhood to a bigger street, and Kidd went left. They could see a traffic light at the end of the street, where the bigger street intersected with an even bigger avenue.
    Kidd asked, “What do you think?”
    “Piece of cake,” Lauren said.

CHAPTER 20
    T he next step was not obvious. Lucas had Quintana’s belief that he’d spoken to Dannon on the phone, but that was not proof. Nor would it convince a jury to believe that a crime had been committed, not beyond a reasonable doubt. He needed a scrap of serious evidence, something that he could use as a crowbar to pry Grant, Dannon, and