Nolan clenched his teeth. Ari was involved as well? Was he the only person in this so-called team who didn’t pay lip service to the law? What next? Was André going to take up bank robbery?
“So?”
“That doesn’t strike you as odd?”
“Do you realise how much winemaking equipment costs? Even that second-hand destemmer was a few thousand bucks.”
“It’s also the only building with a camera.”
“There’s a camera?”
“Ari understands fields of motion. Just chill.”
“What if she missed one? What if they have a picture of her face?”
“Do you think this is Ari’s first rodeo? She has a detector and a jammer.” Alexa put a finger to her earpiece. “Okay, sure, yeah, give me a minute…”
“A minute for what?” Nolan asked because that last part hadn’t been aimed at him.
“We’re going to interrupt the signal, record a sample of footage, and play it back on a loop while Jez and Ari take a look in the barn.”
“No, no, no, no, no. Tell them to come back. Haven’t you taken enough risks already?”
“Aren’t you a tiny bit curious?”
“No,” he lied.
“It won’t take long.”
She wasn’t kidding about that part. Alexa worked her electronic magic, Jerry fiddled with the padlock, and not ten seconds later, it sprang open. Even if they didn’t go to jail, they were all going to hell.
Jerry took two steps inside, then halted, presumably to let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness after time in the moonlight outside. Nolan could feel the tension through the screen. Whatever was waiting in the gloom, he didn’t like it, and neither did Jerry.
She glanced across at Ari, her head tilted to the side, listening. What was it? An animal?
“Here we go again,” Alexa said. “Fuck.”
CHAPTER 38
ALEXA
This was the part of the job I hated the most. The part where I had to watch helplessly as drama unfolded on a screen. Not that I wanted to be the person breaking into a barn in the dark, you understand—I was Schrödinger’s hacker, wishing I were there but also relieved I wasn’t.
Anyhow, I held my breath as Storm’s drone showed vehicle headlights trundling down the driveway, a small cargo van, much like the one the Cleaners had arrived in on Monday. But instead of knocking on the Lelands’ door and going inside, the driver honked the horn. A minute later, Roy and Margaret emerged from the house and hopped into the van, and they all headed off along the track that led to the barn.
The barn that Jerry and Ari were currently nosing around inside.
Please stop at the winery. Please stop at the winery.
“Uh, guys? You might want to make a hasty exit.”
“Not yet. Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“I hear it,” Ari said. “The sobbing?”
Sobbing? What sobbing? I adjusted the feed from Jez’s microphone, and then I heard it too. The quiet sound of weeping, somewhere deep in the barn.
