Thick as Thieves Read Free Page A

blazer. The guards have never seen him before, but whatever curiosity they experience is overmatched by heat and apathy, and they barely raise their heads. Carr shifts the Styrofoam coffee cup to his left hand and searches more pockets. The performance settles him down and he nods at the guards and puts a eureka look on his face. He fishes the ID card from his pocket and slides it through the reader on the turnstile that stands between him and the elevator bank. The light on the reader blinks from amber to green and the barrier swings away and Carr walks through. He stops on the other side.
    “My guys haven’t been in yet, have they?” he asks.
    The guards look at each other and back at Carr. “What guys?” the bald one asks.
    “IT guys, coming with new computers.”
    “Nobody’s been in.”
    Carr looks at his watch. “Should be soon. You’ll send ’em up?”
    The bald guard nods, taps a finger on a keyboard, and squints at the text on the screen. “Yep. That’s Molloy, on six?”
    “That’s me,” Carr says, and steps into a waiting elevator. He keeps his head down, away from the camera in the corner, and presses the button for six.
    The sixth floor is warmer than the lobby, and quieter, and all Carr can hear after the doors close behind him is the elevator sliding down and the faint push of air from a ceiling vent. Once upon a time, Carr knows, the whole floor belonged to a law firm. It was where they kept their library and conference rooms and archived records, until the markets went south and everything else followed. Then the law firm shut down, the building changed hands, and the new landlords invested in new doors, new wiring, and lots of wallboard, and turned all that teak paneling and Berber carpet into five separate office suites.
    Carr looks at the nameplates. To his right, two lawyers and a forensic accountant; straight ahead, behind heavy glass doors and a roll-down metal gate, in the largest suite on the floor, a company called Portrait Capital; and to his left, in the smallest office, Jerry Molloy, tax attorney in semiretirement, currently concluding a one-week visit to his Hill Country home. Carr removes his sunglasses, pulls latex gloves from his briefcase, and turns left.
    Molloy’s lock is a joke—old and tired—and it surrenders after a few bumps with the power rake. The alarm is even worse—no motion detector, and just a single magnetic contact on the door frame. But Carr doesn’t have to fiddle it; he has the code, copied from the slip of paper Valerie discovered taped beneath Molloy’s desk blotter two weeks before. Molloy had gone out to lunch—without setting his alarm—and Valerie was ostensibly visiting a divorce lawyer one floor up. It had taken her all of six minutes to find it. A dispirited chirping comes from the smudged plastic box on the wall. Carr taps the keypad and the box goes silent. He locks the office door, wipes a sleeve across his forehead, and looks around.
    There isn’t much to see. The space is partitioned into two rooms: the one Carr is standing in, with a small window, a small filing cabinet, a small desk for Molloy’s part-time secretary, and carpeting the color of car exhaust; and Molloy’s office, which is a larger version of the same. Both smell vaguely of old cigar smoke, and neither holds anything of interest to Carr. He takes off his blazer, folds it on Molloy’s desk, and rolls up his sleeves. Then he crosses to the far wall and opens a door.
    Behind it is a small utility closet, where electrical and telecom lines branch out from the conduits that carry them between floors to provide local service. There are junction boxes on the wall: gray for telecom, beige for electrical, flimsy white plastic for the security system. They’re mounted next to the vertical PVC conduits, and bundles of cable snake into and out of them. Carr pulls a penlight and a much handled sheaf of papers from his briefcase and flips pages to the plan of Molloy’s