Page 27 of Rebel

Getting up, I walked around my office looking to see if anything was missing. Dumbfounded, I turned to him. “Nothing that I can tell. I locked the files up in the filing cabinets. There doesn’t seem to be much effort made to breach them.” I gestured down at the safe.

Rebel squatted down and ran his fingers along a long, deep scar near the keypad. “See this deep trench in the metal. It looks like they used power tools to try and open it.”

“Why would someone break into an electrician’s office? It doesn’t make any sense. We don’t have any tools on the premises and it’s not like we even accept cash anymore.”

Rebel stood up and wrapped one arm around me. “Whoever did this might not have known anything at all about your business. There’s a great deal of damage to the building—pictures torn off the walls and destroyed, office supplies smashed and this,” he said pointing down at the safe.

“You mean like a former client who wasn’t happy with the work we did under Mark’s management?”

“That makes more sense than thinking a regular burglar did all this really aggressive damage.”

Harvey arrived right as the police were pulling up. “Oh my god, Lacey. What happened?”

I scrambled around in the mess of papers on the floor to find the schedule of clients for today while explaining, “I walked in and found the place a mess. It’s obviously a break-in. I hope the police can figure out who did this.”

Harvey took the paper I found, grumbling, “What in the hell is the world coming too?”

“I don’t know, Harvey. Try to put this out of your mind and deal with your customers. Once Benny’s finished talking with the police, he’ll head out and do his scheduled jobs for today.”

“Sure thing, boss. I’ll carry on, because the work still needs to get done.”

Patting him on the back encouragingly, I told him, “Yes it does, and I’ll get to the bottom of this if it’s the last thing I do.”

When I walked over to Rebel and the officer he was talking to, I realized they were having a disagreement.

The police officer was saying, “Like I said, there have been three break-ins in a five-block radius. This is likely the same group of people.”

Rebel shook his head vehemently. “Were all the other businesses totally trashed the way this office is?”

“Well, not quite this bad, but one of the buildings had graffiti sprayed on the walls. The MO isn’t always exactly the same. Sometimes there are slight deviations and escalations. The extremely aggressive way the perps destroyed almost everything they could get their hands on might represent an escalation. We need time to review the scene. I’m afraid you’re going to have to conduct business remotely for a while.”

Rebel took a step closer to the office, but I grabbed his arm and tugged him back. “We can do that. If I give you our security code can your officers be sure to lock up when they’re finished? We still have client records and a safe on site. We need that protected.”

“Absolutely,” he responded.

Glancing towards the front door, I stated, “I don’t know why the security alarm didn’t go off when the doors were breached.”

“That’s another thing our detective will look into,” the officer stated sternly.

“It’s because the security alarm is fucking ancient. When this is all over, we’re getting a modern, state of the art system,” Rebel insisted.

“You can do as you like after we process the crime scene. For right now, we need to take your written statements. Then you’re going to need to leave the premises until we give you the all-clear to return.”

Rebel and I settled down with a stack of blank paper and wrote out exactly what we saw when we entered the building. Since both Rebel and I had been keeping everything in electronic format, it meant he could get on with making service calls when we left the office.

Once we were outside and far from earshot of the officers, he asked, “So, what’s the plan? Are you gonna work from home?”

I nodded, feeling like the local law enforcement were barking up the wrong tree regarding our case. “Yeah, that’s the plan.”

Rebel told me, “We have a spare office at the clubhouse you can use if you like?”

I smiled up at him. “If I end up at your clubhouse, you and I are going to keep accidentally falling into bed together until neither of us can walk.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Maybe we could hook up on the weekends. I’ve been working a lot of extra hours over the weekend trying to figure out how to market the business and get things back on track.”

“That sounds like a lot of hard work. You’ll need me to relieve your stress on the weekends,” he said smugly. “Plus you lost our little bet, and you know what that means?”

---