Page 44 of Buried Too Deep

Now he knew exactly where to look.

As his grandfather closed the safe and spun the dial, Sage wondered exactly what else was in the damn safe, and how he was going to break into it. It appeared to be an old-fashioned model. No electronic components whatsoever.

That was both good and bad.

Good, in that he could try an unlimited number of combinations without setting off any alarms. His grandfather hadn’t pressed any buttons, hadn’t disabled any security systems. He hadn’t done anything more than lock his office door.

No electronics meant there were no wires to trip or sensors to set off.

But the bad news was that there were a lot of possible combinations. Hopefully, his grandfather had set his combination with numbers that had personal meaning, because the cameras Sage had planted weren’t at the right angle to see the numbers to which the dial had been spun.

He could plant another camera, one that would catch the combination. That was the best plan, because he could be trying random combinations until the end of time and not hit the right one.

Or he could do both. Install another camera if he couldn’t figure out the combination. He’d try numbers that represented meaningful events in his grandfather’s life. The old man’s birthday. The birthdays of his first and second wives. Of his three children.

Sage remembered his own father’s birthday, of course, but he didn’t know the birthdays for his father’s siblings. Uncle Walton was in the army and had been since Sage had been a baby. Sage could count on one hand the number of times the man had come home for any reason.

They weren’t close.

His aunt Jennifer was an even worse case. He had no recollection of ever meeting her. She was in a mental hospital somewhere and had been for years. He’d once overheard one of the kitchen staff saying that she’d had a psychotic break after a drug overdose and had to be committed. To his knowledge, no one in the family ever visited her. Not even his grandfather. Sage had no idea in which year she’d been born, much less the actual date.

Everyone had seemed to have forgotten her. There were no photographs of Aunt Jennifer in the house. Not a single one.

And, now that Sage was thinking about it, that was weird.

There were photos of his grandfather’s first wife in the study, but nowhere else in the house because it bothered Lexy, the second wife. But photos of his actual grandmother did exist.

None of his aunt, though.

Frowning, he put his phone away. He needed to compile all of the dates that might be important, and that included the birth date of the daughter no one discussed.

He wondered if his mother knew but ditched that thought right away. They’d had words the last time they’d talked, which had been on his eighteenth birthday. Seven years ago now. Their words had been angry, filled with the kinds of things that were hard to take back. On both their sides. She didn’t approve of Alan, and Sage knew she wouldn’t approve of him were she to know what Sage did for a living. His mother would have to be a last resort.

He’d try to find out about Aunt Jennifer on his own first. And if none of the other combos worked, he’d plant another camera.

Sage checked the clock. He’d need to wait until tomorrow. There were four guards that staffed the little guardhouse at the entrance to the gated community where Alan lived, and three of them normally kept regular shifts. The fourth was a backup or covered vacations.

Luckily for Sage, they were paid by the community and not by Alan, so they had no particular loyalty to his grandfather—at least no more so than to the rest of the neighbors. The guard who’d been on duty when Sage had gone by that afternoon disliked Alan because he was a televangelist and “bamboozled widows out of their money,” which was pretty much true. But the guy liked Sage and would turn the other way whenever Sage entered, allowing Sage to come and go as he pleased. It didn’t hurt that Sage tipped him frequently and well and had since he’d been a rebellious teenager with too much money, time, and anger.

Unfortunately, the shift change had already occurred. The next guard hated Sage and thought he was a spoiled rich-kid punk.

Which was also pretty much true.

The nasty guard would always make sure that Alan knew Sage had entered the gate at the community’s entrance. Sage couldn’t just sneak in.

Sage could claim to be visiting Lexy, but that wouldn’t be believed, either. He and his stepgrandmother tolerated each other at best.

So he’d bide his time and wait for a better moment to go back to his grandfather’s study. He’d attempt to open the safe and would definitely plant more cameras.

In the meantime, he’d continue to watch Cora Winslow’s house. She was in there, along with several members of Burke Broussard’s staff.

He could no longer track her, which sucked. Broussard’s people had found the bug and tracker he’d slipped into her purse on the first night he’d broken in, the day after her father’s body had been identified, his picture on the TV news. Sage hadn’t known that at the time, of course. Alan had simply instructed him to find out who she was and what she was doing. Sage had done the research and connected some dots.

And then he’d gotten curious, because there were a lot of dots he couldn’t connect. Not yet. He’d stayed in her house that first time only long enough to bug her handbag because he knew she had a dog. But the bug allowed him to discover her habits, chart her movements. The next three times he’d broken in had been when she’d been at work. The dog had never even noticed him, sleeping the entire time. It had made Sage too comfortable, which had gotten him into trouble the next time he’d broken in at night. The dog had started barking, waking Cora, who’d come down to investigate.

So he’d gone back to daytime incursions. But only once more. He couldn’t go back again. Now she knew someone had been there when she’d been at work.

Now she had PIs working for her, dammit. Sage had planted a dozen of the bugs and Broussard’s people had found every single one. One of the guys had replaced the locks on the doors, too. Sage had seen him on one of the upstairs balconies, fooling with the new lock until he’d gotten it right.

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