Silken Prey

palette, and began mixing color. An hour later, he was still adjusting the color on the river’s surface when the laptop screen flickered to life and Taryn Grant walked into the bedroom.
    Kidd stepped over to the laptop as Grant kicked off her shoes, then unzipped the back of her dress, pulled it over her head, and tossed it on the bed. A slip followed, leaving her in her bra, underpants, and genuine nylon stockings held up with a genuine garter belt.
    She walked off screen to the left, and Kidd said, aloud, “Come back, come back . . .”
    Thirty seconds later, the screen went dead.
    She had to come back through the bedroom, though, and Kidd pulled a drawing stool over to the laptop bench, sat and waited. Seven or eight minutes later, naked as the day she was born, fresh out of the shower, Grant walked across the bedroom, wiping down her back with a long white terrycloth towel. She was, Kidd thought, a healthy lass.
    As Kidd watched, she tossed the towel on her bed and walked over to a side table, reached behind it, and must have pushed a button or moved a lever—a built-in bookcase on a sidewall smoothly rotated away from the wall. Grant stepped over to the safe and after punching in a string of numbers on the safe’s keypad, she pulled open the heavy steel door and started taking out jewelry cases.
    Kidd turned to the studio and shouted, “Hey, Lauren. C’mere. Quick.”
    Lauren popped into the doorway a minute later, said, “I’ve got to get Jackson . . .” Jackson was at school.
    “Look at this,” Kidd said, pointing at the monitor.
    She looked and a frown line appeared on her forehead and she said, “What is this? Is that Taryn Grant? Kidd, what the heck are you doing?”
    “Hey. Look what
she’s
doing.”
    Lauren peered at the monitor. “She’s . . . whoa, look at that.”
    Grant had opened one of a half-dozen jewelry cases she’d put on the bed, and tried on a heavy necklace of knotted gold. She looked at herself in the mirror, then took off the gold, dropped it back next to the case, and opened another case. This necklace was smaller, more demure . . . and sparkled with diamonds.
    Kidd tapped a corner of the screen: “She took it out of the safe.”
    “Can we get a look at it? The safe?”
    “I can rewind a bit, look at that corner . . .”
    He stepped back through the recording, to the point that the camera had stopped recording. “The camera triggers on movement, and runs for another thirty seconds.”
    There was a jump, and then the unclothed Grant walked into the screen again, from the left side, and Kidd said, “Yow,” and Lauren said, “Yeah, yow. You are in no way qualified to handle something like that.”
    “
That
, my little pumpkin flower, holds not a candle to your own self,” Kidd said.
    “Thanks, but to be honest, you’re not qualified to handle
me
. I have to tone down my whole . . . Okay, here goes.”
    Lauren watched as Grant opened the bookcase, and then the safe.
    “That’s a Robinson Steel-Block,” Lauren said, peering at the safe door. “Can we rerun and get closer on the keypad?”
    Kidd rattled some keys and the corner of the screen that showed the safe shifted to occupy the entire screen; a few more keystrokes and the recording stepped back and showed the bookcase opening. Grant’s hand appeared and she hit the key sequence.
    Kidd said, “Jesus, an eight-number code.”
    “You won’t get into a Robinson with a jackknife,” Lauren said. “Run that again.”
    Kidd ran it again and Lauren said, “I think it was 62649628. Or it could have been 95970960. I’ll need to look at it some more. Is there an alarm when the safe opens?”
    “I’d have to do a little more exploring to figure that out . . . but I doubt it,” Kidd said.
    “Okay. I want to look at the way she pushed that button again.”
    They ran the file a dozen times, and Lauren watched Grant’s arm and fingers as she pushed the button, or moved the lever, that shifted the bookcase. Eventually, she decided that it was a simple button-push, probably wireless, and that the button was mounted on the back of the side table. “You can see that she feels for it, for a second, and then her middle finger pushes it . . . not a slide motion. It’s a button, and she pushes it once: it’s not a coded sequence.”
    Kidd started the live video again, and Grant, now back in her underpants, garter belt straps hanging loose down her legs, hooked her bra and started trying on