18

Cybershield Systems was housed in an office building downtown near a Whole Foods.

Lazarus parked in visitor parking while Piper finished her cup of coffee. Last night she had stayed up late and only gotten a few hours of sleep. As she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, she kept thinking of what Lazarus had said: When you can’t sleep, you know it’s bad .

They went into the atrium and toward the row of shiny silver elevators. Cybershield was on the eleventh floor.

The doors opened, and they stepped off with a group of people in suits or shirtsleeves with fancy ties. In front of them, they saw the Cybershield office area, which had a receptionist and desk made of glass.

“This isn’t some mom and pop, these guys are legit,” Lazarus said. “Emily Grace was shelling out almost five hundred bucks a month for her alarm.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask Sophie.”

They let the receptionist know they were there. A bit later a man in a suit came out, short-cropped blond hair and a look on his face that said he had far better things to do than talk to the police.

“Detective Holloway?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He held out his hand, and Lazarus shook. “Timothy. Good to meet you. You didn’t go into much detail on the phone.”

“I prefer talking in person.” He glanced around. “Quite a setup you got here.”

He nodded. “Top of the line. Even the government’s a client. We like to say Fort Knox relies on us.”

“Clever,” he said.

“Yeah, well, anyway, I did look up the name you gave me. Emily Grace. I’ll get you everything you asked for on a drive. But was there anything specifically you wanted to know?”

“I saw a bill. She had some expensive security.”

“It was our top-of-the-line home system.”

“Not top-of-the-line enough apparently.”

Timothy looked to both of them and then cleared his throat. “Yes, well, what can I do for you today exactly?”

“I’m trying to find out why a single mom who makes fifty grand a year is spending six of that on an alarm system.”

“That’s not our place to ask why somebody wants an alarm.”

Lazarus moved over to an old-time map of the Las Vegas tunnels underneath the city. “What about the person that installed it?”

“What about them?”

“I wanna talk to ’em.”

He looked to his receptionist and then checked his watch. “Lucy, please get them whatever they need.” He turned to Lazarus. “I have a meeting to get to, but if there’s anything else you need, please don’t hesitate to call.”

Timothy rushed away. Lazarus got the information for the installer. It was a man named Barry Watson. He was out on a call, but Lazarus got the home where he was currently at, and they left.

The address was in a section of the city that had almost no retail or restaurants. It was a series of homes pushed up against a cliff with only one road running past them. Lazarus took a phone call, and Piper listened as he told someone on the other end that the answer was no and they needed to find someone else. He hung up and didn’t say anything about it as they got out of the car.

A blue van with “CYBERSHIELD” written in white letters on its side sat in the driveway of the flat, tan house. A man wearing a Cybershield shirt and jeans was stowing away equipment in the van.

“You Barry Watson?”

The man turned to him, facing him squarely. He was much larger than Lazarus.

“Yeah.”

Lazarus flashed his badge. “I need to talk to you ’bout one of the customers you installed an alarm for. Emily Grace.”

Barry’s expression slackened as he regarded them both. “I saw it on the news. She was a really nice lady.”

“She was paying a lot more than she could afford for protection. I was hoping you could tell me why.”

“Tell you why she got an alarm? I don’t know if she said anything about it. If she did, I don’t remember. I do like ten of these a day.”

“Well she was scared a’ someone getting past it, and someone did.”

“I know. We talked about it back at work. There’s no way. This is next-generation stuff. We’re talking eight cameras, six motion detectors, an alarm on every entrance and exit, plus satellite monitoring of the street, which is new. It’d be like trying to break into a police station. No one could get past it if it’s working correctly.”

Lazarus said, “Assume I do want to get past it. What would I need?”

“I mean, a lot of technical knowledge. You’d have to know all the latest updates and all.”

“You know all that?”

Barry glanced between him and Piper, who simply stood and watched. “Yeah, and so do the twenty other installers we have, plus all the installers and former installers from every company in the state.”

“But you’re the only installer that’s been in her house, Barry.”

The two men locked eyes. Piper glanced past Barry and spotted a woman peering out of the house, watching the strangers interrogate her alarm installer on her front lawn. “Is there a device?” Piper said.

Barry looked at her. “A device?”

“Something that a person without technical knowledge could use to get past the alarm?”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, glancing at Lazarus. “Yeah, there is. It’s called a POD.”

“What is that?”

“It looks like a remote control, but it tricks the alarm into thinking it’s still on when it’s off. I don’t really know how it works. We don’t use them and they’re like five grand, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

Lazarus said, “Where would I get one?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can ask some of the IT guys back at the office. They might know something.”

Lazarus took out his card and slipped it into the man’s breast pocket. “You handle it and get in touch this afternoon, not tomorrow.”

As they walked back to the car, Piper asked, “What was that about?”

“Little dog psychology. Gotta shake things sometimes to see what falls out.”

“Have you ever heard of a POD?”

“No.”

Piper got into the car and googled it.

“Sounds high-tech. It interferes with ‘modulation of the system using an EMP pulse,’ whatever that means.”

He shifted the car into reverse and rolled back off the driveway, glancing at Barry, who maintained an unwavering stare.

“You want to dig deeper into him? He seemed fine to me,” Piper said.

“You weren’t looking for what I was.”