Moonlight Mile (Kenzie & Gennaro 6)

I stepped over the ice patch as we reached the crosswalk. “You don’t want to know.”

Chapter Fourteen

Helene McCready’s current abode was, on the surface, a hell of a step up from the Dorchester three-decker apartment where, until recently, she’d seen fit to poorly raise her daughter. She and Kenny Hendricks lived at 133 Sherwood Forest Drive in Nottingham Hill, a gated community two miles off Route 1, in Foxboro. All I knew about Foxboro was that the Patriots played there eight times a year and it wasn’t too far from the outlet mall in Wrentham. After I accessed those two factoids, I was out. End of list.

It turned out Foxboro was also home to half a dozen adorably named gated condo communities. En route to Nottingham Hill, I also passed Bedford Falls, Juniper Springs, Wuthering Heights, and Fragrant Meadows. All, as mentioned, gated. I couldn’t understand what the gates were for, though; Foxboro had an extremely low crime rate. Other than a parking space on game day, I had no idea what they’d want to steal out here, unless there was a sudden shortage of barbecue utensils or power mowers.

The gate at Nottingham Hill wasn’t hard to circumvent, since there was no gatekeeper. A sign on the kiosk read DURING DAYLIGHT HOURS, PRESS *958 FOR SECURITY. A couple of car lengths past the kiosk, the main road, Robin Hood Boulevard, forked. Four arrow signs at the left fork directed me to Loxley Lane, Tuck Terrace, Scarlett Street, and Sherwood Forest Drive. The road was straight, and what lay ahead appeared to be the kind of middle-class cookie-cutter subdivision I’d expected.

To the right, however, the arrows promised to lead me to Archer Avenue, Little John Lane, Yorkshire Road, and Maid Marian’s Meeting House, but the road led only to a collection of sand mounds with a lone yellow backhoe sitting atop one. Somewhere during the Nottingham Hill development boom, the boom had lowered.

I took the left fork and found 133 Sherwood Forest Drive at the end of a cul-de-sac. The backyards around here were the same tan sand as the mounds where Maid Marian’s Meeting House was supposed to stand, and both 131 and 129 were vacant, the building permits still hanging in windows speckled with sawdust. The front lawns were green, however, even in front of the vacant houses, so someone at the holding company still believed in proper upkeep. I circled the cul-de-sac, slowly enough to note that the curtains were drawn across Helene and Kenny’s windows, those facing north, south, and west. The east windows faced the tan mounds of sand in the rear, so I couldn’t see them. But I was willing to bet their curtains were drawn, too. On my way back up the street, I counted two more FOR SALE signs, one with a smaller sign dangling underneath that read SHORT SALE. MAKE AN OFFER. PLEASE.

I cut over to Tuck Terrace and parked by a half-finished ranch at the end of another cul-de-sac. Houses to the right and the left had been completed. They stood empty, though, the lawns and shrubs recently planted and green as shamrocks, even in December, but the driveways awaiting a paving crew. I went through the skeleton of the half-finished ranch at 133 Tuck Terrace and crossed an acre of tan sand with wooden stakes and blue yarn carving out the backyards-to-be. Soon enough I stood behind Helene and Kenny’s house. It was the two-story Italianate model, a McMansion-wannabe so predictable I could smell the granite kitchen countertops and the hot tub in the master bath from the almost-backyard.

There were about forty different ways I hadn’t cased the place properly. I’d driven around the front so slowly a three-legged basset hound with hip dysplasia could have lapped me. I’d parked my car in the vicinity—a block over, but still. I’d approached across open ground. I hadn’t come at night. Short of standing out front with a sandwich board that read BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A FRONT DOOR KEY? I couldn’t have made myself more conspicuous.

So the smart move would have been to walk straight past the house, hope anyone inside took me for a land surveyor or a finish carpenter, and hightail it back home. Instead, I decided the odds had been working in my favor so far—it was two in the afternoon and I hadn’t seen a soul since I’d pulled into the development. It’s stupid to believe in luck, but we do it every time we cross a busy street.

And mine kept holding. The sliding glass doors around back couldn’t keep out Gabby. Or even me with my rusty B&E skills. I picked the lock with a keychain bottle-opener and a credit card. I entered the kitchen and waited by the door in case an alarm sounded. When none did, I jogged up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. I passed through all the bedrooms only long enough to confirm no one was in them and then worked my way back downstairs.

I counted nine computers in the living room. The closest one had a pink stickie attached that read BCBS, HPIL. The next one had a yellow stickie: BOA, CIT. I tapped the keyboard of the first computer and the screen pulsed softly. For a moment, I saw a screen saver of the Pacific, and then the screen turned lime green and a quartet of animated figures with the heads of the cast of Diff’rent Strokes danced across the screen. A speech bubble appeared by Willis’s head and a cursor blinked. Arnold said, “Whachoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” Kimberly was sparking a blunt when she rolled her eyes and said, “Password, dickhead.” A stopwatch appeared in the thought bubble above Mr. Drummond’s head. It ticked down from ten as Kimberly did a striptease and Arnold changed into a security guard’s uniform and Willis hopped into a convertible and immediately crashed it. As it burst into flames, the clock above Mr. Drummond’s head exploded and the screen went black.

I called Angie.

“The entire cast of Diff’rent Strokes?”

“Now that you mention it, Mrs. Garrett wasn’t there.”

“Must have been the Facts of Life years,” she said. “Whatta you got?”

“Computers with password protections. Nine of them.”

“Nine passwords?”

“Nine computers.”

“That’s a lot of computers for a living room with no furniture. Did you find Amanda’s room yet?”

“No.”

“See if there’s a computer there. Kids are less likely to password-protect.”

“Okay.”

“If you can get on, just get me an IP address, and the incoming and outgoing servers. Most people, no matter how many computers they’ve got, use just one server. If I can’t hack it, I know someone who can.”

“Who do you meet online?”

We hung up and I went upstairs to the bedrooms. Helene and Kenny’s was as expected—Bob’s Furniture dresser and chest covered in wrinkled clothes, box spring on the floor, no nightstands, several empty beer cans on one side of the bed, several empty glasses sporting some sort of sticky residue on the other side. Ashtrays on the floor, wall-to-wall carpeting already soiled.