Son of the Morning Read online

  With what she had learned in the past eight months, Grace had to admit he was right. If you had something worth protecting, you protected it, and you didn’t compromise security by fretting about whether or not the maintenance crew had to wait a couple of minutes. Of course, a sophisticated system would use closed-circuit cameras to identify the crew, and the door would be opened by remote control—

  Cameras.

  She drew in her breath with a hiss. “We’re going about this all wrong.”

  “We are?” Kris asked blankly. “What do you mean?”

  “There may be security cameras at the maintenance entrance. How are we going to waltz up to the truck and search it for extra uniforms?”

  He rubbed his chin, his long, skinny fingers rasping over his beard stubble as he went into his thinking mode. “Let’s see… okay. First thing, you let me out a block away and I’ll check it out. If there are cameras, then we have to find out if they’re closed-circuit and are being monitored, or if they’re just the kind that tapes so someone can watch the tape after a crime has already been committed.”

  “Either way, if there are cameras, that means you need a disguise too,” Grace said firmly.

  He looked taken with that idea, and her heart ached at his youth.

  “You’ll have to take off your glasses,” she decided. “I’ll wear them instead. And we’ll beef you up by stuffing towels in your uniform.”

  He looked doubtful. “I won’t be able to see,” he objected. “And neither will you.”

  That made sense. One of them had to be able to navigate. She plucked her sunglasses out of her pocket and handed them to him. “Pop the lenses.” She had paid fifty cents for them at a yard sale, so she didn’t hesitate to ruin them.

  Kris obediently popped out the plastic lenses, and gave the frames back to her. Grace slid them on, and glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. At close range it was fairly obvious there was no glass in the frames, but a security camera wouldn’t detect it.

  “We really should have scouted this out and maybe taken the time to buy our own maintenance uniforms,” she said, shrugging. “But it might work anyway.”

  It worked.

  Kris came jogging back to the truck, his face red from both excitement and exposure to the cold. He climbed in, gasping, and his glasses immediately fogged up. He snatched them off and absently held them in front of the heat vent while he gave her a myopically triumphant smile. “There’s a camera,” he reported breathlessly. “But it isn’t closed-circuit.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I checked it out.”

  “Kris!”

  “No problem. It’s in a corner, aimed at the maintenance door. I slipped around the side of the building and stayed out of its range. I didn’t see any cable wires running from the camera into the building. And even better—” He paused, grinning at her.

  “What?” she demanded impatiently when he let the pause drag out, and he laughed delightedly.

  “The door is propped open!”

  It was obvious Parrish and the Foundation didn’t own the building, Grace thought.

  “It’s the kind of door that locks every time it closes,” Kris explained. “I guess the maintenance crew gets tired of having to unlock it every time, so they dragged one of those rubber-backed mats over the threshold, and it keeps the door from completely closing.”

  Oh, the simple, elegant ingenuity of people trying to get out of a little inconvenience. With that one act, they had negated the building’s security.

  “We still need uniforms.”

  He grinned triumphantly at her. “There’s a big van parked there. I checked it out. The front doors are locked, and there’s a steel screen separating the cab from the back of the van, I guess so they can leave the back doors open and not have to worry about the van being stolen. Anyway, there’s lots of stuff in the back, and some dirty coveralls.” He slid his glasses into place. “What more do we need?”

  What more, indeed?

  The camera outside the service door wasn’t closed-circuit. The one in the hallway was.

  Parrish watched as two more maintenance people entered the building. His eyebrows had lifted a fraction when the first crew had propped open the door. For now it suited his purposes to let it remain open, to give Grace an easy access should she take the bait, but as soon as he had her he would make certain the owners of the building found a new maintenance service. Of course, the Foundation’s offices had far more stringent security measures, but that didn’t excuse the sloppiness of the present crew.

  These two latest arrivals carried tool boxes, and wore tool belts strapped over their shapeless coveralls. One was a skinny woman, wearing an unattractive baseball cap over her unattractive frizzy hair. Oversized glasses dominated her face. The man was tall, pudgy, clumsy. He wore gloves and a weird fur hat with ear flaps, and he didn’t seem to know where he was going. The woman led the way as they trudged down the short hall to the service elevator.

  He wasn’t interested in them. He watched carefully for the little mouse he hoped would nibble at his bait. Perhaps she wouldn’t come; if she had seen him do the shooting, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him, unless of course she planned to shoot him in revenge, but he was certain Grace wasn’t a woman who could kill. He could recognize the killer instinct in certain people; Conrad, for instance. Grace didn’t have it.

  On the other hand, she had surprised him and everyone else by being able to elude both the cops and his best men for more than eight months. She had proven herself to be unusually resourceful. If she hadn’t called the Foundation, no one would have had any idea she was back in Minneapolis. Shocking mistake. But then, felons often tripped themselves up by returning to the scene of their crime, perhaps to gloat at their own cleverness.

  But Grace had called the Foundation, himself specifically, and since she hadn’t spoken, the only reason would have been to find out if he was in town. Now that she knew he was, what would she do? Show up at his house to talk to him? She could have talked on the phone, unless she suddenly panicked at the thought of giving away her whereabouts.

  So had she seen him or not? Did she want to talk or shoot? Perverse of him, but he rather hoped it was the latter. The thought of Grace with a gun in her hand was strangely exciting. She would never get to use it, of course, but he didn’t want her weepy and weak in his arms; he wanted her furious, fighting, so that his victory was all the sweeter when, as with Calla, his skill overrode her anger. His little interlude with Calla had been unusually satisfying; surely with Grace his pleasure would be even more intense.

  Would she come or not? The service door was conveniently propped open, but perhaps she would try to enter during the day, when she could more easily mix with the flow of people coming and going.

  He waited patiently.

  “Here we are,” Kris whispered excitedly as he opened the access panel in the ceiling of the Foundation’s main computer room. It was quiet, dim, with only the hum of electronics breaking the silence.

  It had taken them an hour to work their way into place. Nothing was ever as easy as it looked on paper. First they had had to dodge the real maintenance crew, finally climbing seventeen flights of stairs instead of using the service elevator. After locating the access panel to the overhead heating ducts, they climbed onto a high stool and managed to hoist themselves inside, putting the panel back in place so no one would know they were there. Then, using a flashlight taken from her glove box, they navigated the miles of ductwork only to find they had to go into the Foundation’s offices after all. They located the computer room and listened for a while, but the room seemed empty. Carefully they removed the ceiling access panel.

  Kris leaned his head and shoulders out of the opening and looked around. “There aren’t any cameras,” he whispered. “But there’s a window in the door, so we’ll need to sit where anyone passing by can’t see us.”

  “If we happen to be climbing in or out when someone walks by, we’re s