“Could the partner be the one you saw last night?” Chapel asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But if one of them was fixing the camera Tuesday morning, then why’d he come back last night?”
“Well, could’ve had another short, maybe. Might’ve forgotten something, something that he thought would incriminate him.”
“Or maybe he wasn’t here to work on the cameras,” Chapel said.
Burchett frowned at him, then glanced at me. He looked embarrassed, and it took me a second longer to realize why, that he’d been thinking the same thing Chapel had, but hadn’t wanted to say it.
So I said it for them both. “You think last night he came here to rape me.”
“We don’t know that,” Burchett said, replacing the Leatherman in the pouch on his belt. “Got one more thing to show you.”
“I think I’ve seen enough.”
“We’re almost through.” He smiled reassurance at me, then opened my closet and stepped inside, sliding my clothes down along the rod and revealing the access door into the attic space. He shoved it open and crawled through, then called back for me to follow. I ducked and shimmied after him.
It was dusty and dim, the only illumination the sunlight slanting through the small vent at the front of the house, and it smelled of insulation and wood and stale air. Cobwebs hung off the rafters, and I swiped at them uselessly as I got to my feet. There was just enough room to stand, hunched, if you were short like myself or Burchett. Chapel, when he came through, stayed on his knees.
Burchett had moved forward and when I reached his side, he indicated the vent. Through the slats I could glimpse the street out front of the house, the tops of the apple and elm trees in my yard.
It took me another second before I could make out the antenna, short and stubby and rubber and black, attached to the underside of one of the slats. From outside, in the shadow of the house, it would have been invisible. Burchett had crouched and was fumbling beneath the crossbeams, and then he came up with what looked like a thin rectangular box, also black plastic. It had another antenna attached to it, even stubbier than the first, and a row of three lights, all of them off. A power cord ran away from it, disappearing in the insulation at our feet.
“The transmitter,” Burchett explained. “Broadband wireless; you can get one at just about any computer hardware store for a couple hundred bucks. All of the cameras in the house send to this little guy here, you see? Then this fella, he beams the signal to another unit somewhere, maybe only a couple blocks from here, maybe up to a mile away, and it downloads the signal onto tape or maybe even direct to a hard drive.”
“Tape?”
“The cameras, they’re video, Miss Bracca, not still-image. Those pictures of you, they’re not photographs, they’re video captures. This guy is taking videos of you, selecting the image he wants, pulling that, and cleaning it up. You see?”
I did see, and it alarmed me enough that I shot a glance back to Chapel, where he was wedged just inside the access way. From his expression, I knew that he’d seen it, too, was probably a lap ahead of me.
“There’s a fucking tape?”
“It’s possible.” Burchett looked at the unit in his hands, then back to me. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Is it off?”
“Yes, ma’am. We did a frequency trap before disconnecting it, so there’s no need for it to ever get switched back on.” He moved the box to his left hand, went into the coin pocket on his Levi’s with his right, coming out with a thin and short metal tube that he held between his thumb and index finger for me to see. “This is one of the cameras. Not much to look at.”
There was a bead of glass on one end of the tube, two tiny wires running from the other. In the light I wasn’t sure, but the wires looked white and black. The whole thing wasn’t much longer or thicker than a matchstick.
“Easy to place, easy to hide, gives a stable enough image,” Burchett continued. “You have the right software, you can clean up whatever it provides pretty nice. Not terribly expensive, either. The technology’s gotten to the point that this is bush-league stuff.”
“Hurrah for technology,” I said.
Chapel finally spoke up. “Rick? How long to get this stuff out of her house?”
“Take us maybe an hour to disconnect everything, get it all pulled and all the little holes spackled so that you can’t much tell they were ever here.”
“Then do it,” I said.
“Then what?” Chapel asked.
“Then what what?” I asked.
“There’s a question of the tape.”
“Potential tape,” Burchett said. “Miss Bracca got home four days ago, that’s nearly a hundred hours of video if the perv who did this kept it all. That’s not likely, Fred. Gets expensive.”
“Just one tape is a problem, Rick. None of us wants to see a ‘Bracca Uncovered’ video hitting the Web.”
“No, don’t suppose we do.”
“Then I want to know who did this. And I want to make sure they don’t have anything damaging to my client.”
“More damaging,” I said, but I said it softly, and neither of them heard me.
Burchett was nodding. “With the frequency, we can track back to the receiver. But we’ll have to move on that fast. Our perv here most likely already knows his system’s gone down. He might guess we’re on to him.”
“Then get on it.”
“We could call the police.”
“No,” I said. “No cops, no publicity. Bad enough the pictures are out there, I don’t want the whole world seeing me like that.”
“Rick, you’ll have to handle this yourself,” Chapel said.
Burchett smiled, nodded his head at me as if tipping the brim of a hat, and I realized what it was that made him so disarming, and that maybe made him as good as Chapel said he was. A man he might be, but in that gesture, you could see the kid who wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up.
As if to prove me right, he said, “We’ll get saddled up.”
Burchett left with the scary woman, leaving the other guy to remove all the pink flags and the cameras they marked, and Chapel told me that he needed to get back to the office, but that I should call him if I wanted anything.
“You going to call Graham?” I asked him.
“That was my intention.”
“You’re going to tell him about the other pictures?”
“I don’t see how I can’t.”
I nodded, not liking it. It was stupid, maybe, but I knew what would happen as soon as Graham got the news. He traveled with a laptop, and it wouldn’t take long before Click and Van saw the pictures. Click would be bad enough, but the thought of Van staring at those images was hard to take. She’d see it not so much as my humiliation, but proof that she’d been right about me all along.
Chapel left me with his home number, and the number for his mobile, as well as the number for Burchett. He told me he’d get in touch as soon as he heard anything, and that I shouldn’t worry, things were well in hand, now. I walked him to the door, and when he was gone I went to the kitchen and got myself a beer, not really giving a damn what the remaining member of Burchett Security might think of that behavior.
I was halfway through the bottle when I realized just how set up I had been, and that brought some dark thoughts running home. Whoever had done this, they’d done it with a lot of time to spare. They’d done it easily, and covered themselves well.