"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Fala tried to reason with him, but he screamed at her. So she drove to the
nearest pay phone and called the police.
She returned to the house to discover that the police had already arrived.
****
The phone number Fala took off the sign belonged to a landline that rang in an
office several blocks away. The office, in a new complex near the MAX train line, fit
Preston’s M.O. perfectly: rent in a new space, buy old furniture, pack several boxes
with newspapers, seal them, and make it look like you’re still moving in. The smell of
new paint always convinced, as did all the empty office suites still for rent down the
hall.
 Once she found the landline, her job got easier. She decided to go
old-fashioned instead of high-tech, splicing into the line late one night. She could
record off-site, just like the feds used to do in all their investigations. No one looked
for low-tech anymore; they had firewalls and virus protection and spyware, but no
one expected a simple bug in the line, established at the routers in the basement,
routers that wouldn’t get checked in a building so new, not even if there was some
kind of outage.
She was amazed at the skills she’d learned in the last few years: how to enter
an empty office building without anyone getting suspicious, waiting in the dark in an
unrented office suite until everyone had gone home, working the basement lines with
a flashlight between her teeth.
Technically, she hadn’t done any breaking and entering. She hadn’t broken at
all, and she’d entered during normal business hours. She hadn’t stolen anything, nor
had she left any fingerprints down on the lines.
And if she played this right, no one would get hurt.
No one except Preston, of course.
****
The police arrested her for two hundred counts of fraud. Preston and Reggie
were long gone, leaving the office filled with her fingerprints only, and empty file
cabinets—except, of course, the one drawer that was unlocked, the drawer with four
hundred files, two hundred by client name, two hundred by address, all the
information in Fala’s handwriting, and all the forms touched only by Fala’s hand.
By Fala’s reckoning, Preston had skipped town with more than one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for three weeks’ work. For that same amount of time, Fala
had received $810 gross pay, three nights in jail, and a legal nightmare that would
extend for the next three years.
It had been a brilliant plan. Preston had scouted real-estate records, found
empty houses that had just sold, called the real-estate agents, identified himself as a
welcome-wagon volunteer, and asked for the closing dates. Most of the time, he got
them.
He only picked vacant houses whose closing dates were at least a month out.
In a college town, such places proliferated in the summer. He waited until the
lockboxes came off, then broke in and changed locks only on the doorknob itself.
The deadbolts remained the same. He carefully left the deadbolts unlocked and
locked only the doorknobs, giving himself—and Fala—access throughout the entire
month.
Once the place rented to some poor unsuspecting sap from out of town,
Preston returned to the house, unlocked the doorknob, and locked the deadbolt
from the inside, leaving by a side window.
 It was a variation on an old scam, renting the same apartment to a dozen