The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(79)

“Are you all right?” Doyle asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Quinn replied.

He walked to the living room—each cautious step born out of stubbornness and determination—and he noticed what was different: the semi-pro Meade telescope that stood mounted on a tripod next to the French doors to the garden. Quinn stared down to where the tips of the tripod legs met the parquet flooring. Years earlier he had found the perfect spot for the telescope, and it had remained in the same place ever since—three small indentations in the wood marked its usual position. It was quite clear that the tripod had been moved about five inches to the left.

“Carl?” Quinn said over his shoulder. “When where you last here?”

“Four days ago,” Doyle replied.

“Since I’ve been in the hospital, have you ever come anywhere near this telescope? Looked through it? Moved it perhaps?”

“No. Usually I just pick up the mail, put the flyers in the garbage, and that’s it. I don’t even walk to that part of the room.”

“Did you go into the study?”

“No, I didn’t need to.”

“I just have to check something.”

Bookcases covered every wall; a mahogany desk sat in a corner; a thin film of dust had built up over the green glass banker’s lamp that reminded him of his college library. Nathan Quinn remained by the threshold and examined the room: his eyes went over the small, significant objects of his past life: pens, papers, a framed photograph of his parents’ wedding day, an antique carriage clock.

On a bookshelf, the hourglass and the three nineteenth-century nautical compasses that had belonged to his father sat where he had placed them. Quinn’s eyes held them whole: almost where he had placed them. Our life and its minute parts are an indistinct landscape to others, but to us even the smallest detail has its own precise coordinates, and any change, however infinitesimal, is obvious.

“Someone was inside the house,” he said to Doyle, proceeding to the alarm box fixed on the inside wall next to the main door. He’d had it installed seven years ago, and at the time it was top of the line.

“I don’t understand,” Carl said. “The alarm was set; there was no . . .”

Quinn keyed in a number combination, and a list of dates and hours appeared on the box’s screen. All the times were during daylight or early evening.

“Are these the days and times you were here?” he asked Carl.

Doyle looked and shrugged. He tried to remember the precise times he had been in the house, but they had blended into a blur of repeated actions.

Quinn took out his cell from his coat pocket and dialed the telephone number on the alarm box. He gave his name, a password, and an eight-number code. “I need you to e-mail me the last twenty entries in the log. Thank you.”

“Nathan, did I mess up somehow?” Carl asked.

“There’s nothing you could have done, and there’s no way anyone but me would have noticed.”

“Did they take anything?”

Quinn looked around. It had been a nearly immaculate job, because they weren’t there to rob; they were there to examine and analyze the enemy.

“Come with me,” he said to Doyle.

The safe was fifteen by twelve inches of steel concealed behind a panel in the linen closet. Quinn ran the combination quickly on the electronic locking device and opened the thick metal door. The contents—various papers and some antique jewelry boxes—seemed intact. Quinn took them out, then reached inside and pressed a hidden switch that revealed a secret compartment within the safe. He looked inside.

“Nothing has been touched,” he said to Doyle.

“Do you know what happened?”

“I think so,” Quinn replied.

The alert pinged on his phone. Quinn opened the e-mail from the alarm company: the last entry in the log was his and Carl’s arrival at the house; the second from the last entry indicated that the previous night someone had disarmed the system at 3:10 a.m. and alarmed it again at 3:57 a.m. Quinn showed it to Doyle.

“Nathan . . .”

“They deleted the entry from the box here, but it had already been registered in the central database. They spent forty-seven minutes inside, and then they left.”

Suddenly the house seemed quite different.

“Nathan, I—”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Quinn repeated. He knew Doyle well enough to understand that he was as angry as he was mortified that this breach had happened on his watch.

Quinn thought quickly. “We must treat this as a crime scene,” he said as he dialed Tod Hollis’s number.

He needed to make sure that nothing had been taken, but he needed to make just as sure that nothing had been left.