Free Hard Cold Winter by Glen Erik Hamilton

THE TRUCK, I tossed the messenger bag on the passenger seat and started the engine. I wanted a look at the guy asking the manager to unlock Kend’s apartment. A family member, maybe, or a cop. It might be useful to know if it was Peninsula deputies working remote, or if they’d passed the case off to SPD. I drove around the block to park where I could see the building entrance. It had started to rain, graduating rapidly from a drizzle to an insistent pelting shower.
    The large stack of Kend’s bank and credit statements took some reshuffling to put in order. I read through them as the precipitation streamed down the windows.
    They told a story. Kend’s finances were a holy mess. Every month he received one deposit into his bank account in the whopping sum of twenty grand, from something called GLV. The deposits stretched back as far as the statements went. I assumed it was Kend’s trust fund. That was the only bright note for him.
    Then the money went right back out again. In cash. During each of the past few months Kend had made withdrawals in large round numbers, until he’d completely wiped out his monthly allowance. The trust fund money was usually gone within four or five days after it arrived.
    The credit statements proved he was living on borrowed time, charging everything from groceries to the cable bill. At least it looked like the condo was paid for.
    He hadn’t bought another car, though. No gas receipts, either. The Panamera he’d sold seemed to have been Kend’s only ride. I checked the bank statements again. No deposit of extra cash from a few weeks before, when Kend had signed off on his hundred-K Porsche.
    What was burning through Kend’s money like this? Drugs? No sign of that in the apartment, and he’d have overdosed long ago at this rate. Was he dealing? That was possible. If he were buying in quantity and laundering the money somewhere else. But why max out his credit cards?
    The door to the building opened. A stout, middle-aged guy in a blue business suit and tie came out, walking so fast he verged on jogging. He held Kend’s Mac laptop under his arm, hunching to shield it from the rain.
    He had the look of a cop, from the stone scowl to the bristly mustache. But a cop wouldn’t grab just one piece of evidence and remove it with his bare hands. Ex-cop, I decided.
    I got a closer view through the river running down my windshield, as he crossed the street to a gray four-door Taurus two cars in front of me. His face was as chubby as his body, made rounder by a comb-over that swooped light brown hair over his tanned pate. Fat but strong looking, like a junior college lineman gone to seed. He hustled his gut behind the steering wheel and the Taurus zoomed away.
    I began putting Kend’s financial statements back into his monogrammed messenger bag. The bag had looked empty, which was why I had grabbed it. There was an interior pocket, half unzipped. Inside the pocket was a large piece of paper, folded in quarters. The paper was thick and a little waxy, like a blueprint. I unfolded it.
    It was a schematic. For an alarm system.
    With pencil notes around the sides, pointing out how and where to beat it.
    Kendrick Haymes, scion of old money, had suddenly become much more interesting.
    Of course, just because the schematic had been tucked away in Kend’s monogrammed bag didn’t mean it was his. Elana was more the type to be familiar with burglar alarms. Was it hers? Both of theirs?
    The alarm was complex. In a quick scan of the diagram I spotted redundant power sources, and both hardwired and wireless zones. Not the toughest system to beat, but not DIY crap from Radio Shack, either.
    Where was it installed? The design was intended for a commercial building, or a series of connected smaller buildings, I guessed. There was no company name or identification number. A blank white strip showed at the bottom, maybe where those details had been masked before printing it on this strange waxen paper.
    And had