Silken Prey

of sterile surgical gloves in the SUV, before getting out, and Kidd had helped her get into them as a surgeon would, with no contact on the outer surface that would spread germs . . . or DNA.
    Once back in the trees, she pulled on her starlights and moved slowly toward Grant’s place. There was a lot of light from that direction, and none from the house to the other side. The light threw India-ink shadows behind each tree. Ten feet from Grant’s property line, she found a particularly deep shadow and lay down in it for five minutes, without moving; watching and listening.
    She saw a guard moving across the yard, away from her; he apparently had been assigned to the backyard. She decided she needed to time him. She took out the cold phone and called Kidd. She said, “I’m at Target. I’ll be a while. Call you when I’m ready to go.”
    “Okay. Everything’s fine, here.”
    Target was the edge of the yard, where she lay. Cell phones are radios, and hobbyists listen to the calls. . . .
    She hung up and lay back in the weeds. Three minutes, four minutes. The backyard guard had disappeared around the corner of the house, where the dog kennel was, and now reappeared, having walked all the way around the house. He was an older guy, hands in his pockets, peering here and there, but not obviously ready to act.
    When he’d gone halfway around the house again, Lauren took a breath, punched in Kidd’s number, said, “I’m gone.” She crossed the four-foot-high wrought iron fence that marked the property line, and, keeping a tree trunk between herself and the house, crossed halfway to the house. At the tree, she paused again, watching and listening, and saw nothing.
    Ten seconds, and she moved again, paused at another tree, then ran lightly across the yard to the house and lay down in a spreading arborvitae shrub at the house’s foundation. She pushed the starlights up and off, and stowed them in her pack. She smiled at a thought: the thought that the guard would hear her heart pounding in the bush.
    A minute passed, then another, and she lay completely covered and unmoving, on her stomach, so she could make a fast dash for the side tree line if she had to, like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. The target window was straight above her head.
    She hadn’t felt like this in six years, and she nearly giggled.
    A minute later, the guard ambled by, his head turned away from the house. When he was out of sight, she started counting seconds under her breath. At the same time, moving automatically, she stood up, looked through the window into a darkened bathroom. Kidd was watching the security cameras, and hadn’t seen anything, so she stuck a couple of suction cups to the window, pulled a glass cutter from her leg pocket, and putting a lot of weight behind it, scored the first layer of glass. At “forty” she hit the glass with the back end of the cutter, and heard it crack along the score line. She pulled on the suction cups, but the glass was stubborn, and she hit it again. This time, it came free, and she lowered it to the ground. She was at sixty.
    At one hundred twenty, she hit the second layer of glass twice, and pulled it free. The noise—a series of sharp but not particularly loud cracks—was unavoidable. The last sheet of the triple-pane glass would have to be done more carefully, because it had a foil alarm strip around the perimeter. Kidd thought all the alarms were off, but it would be best not to break it. She wasn’t sure she had time, so she lay back in the bush, and at the count of two-twenty, the guard came past the house again.
    When he was gone, she stood up again, and carefully cutting inside the foil strips, she yanked the last pane of glass off, and lay down again. She dialed Kidd and said, “Let’s get coffee.” He said, “I’ll see you there.”
    He knew she was ready to enter; and she knew that there’d been no alarm yet.
    Yet. Big word.
    •   •   •
    S HE PULLED A SHORT strip of thick, soft plastic tarp out of her pack, and waited again for the guard to pass. When he did, she put the tarp over the edges of the cut window glass and carefully boosted herself through the window. She stepped on a toilet seat, moved quickly to the water-closet door, into the main bathroom and to the bathroom door. She opened it, just a crack.
    The bedroom was dark. She could hear the distant vibration of voices and the deeper thump of rock music, but nothing from the bedroom. She dialed