Alex Ames - Calendar Moonstone 01 - A Brilliant Plan by Alex Ames Read Free Book Online

simply taken the tape to erase his own trail. I wondered if the other burglar had noticed the short circuit override.
    Ron continued, “What I assume is that the night watchman makes his next round, about an hour later. Again, he checks the backyard and plans to make his round to the front. The thief uses the opportunity to let himself out of the back-office. He opens the safe doors from the inside.”  
    “The watchman notices something or maybe has forgotten his cigarettes, and returns to the back-office and discovers the leaving thief,” I continued.
    “There is a small fight, leading into the safe room, the watchman dies.”
    It was actually quite different, but who was I to disagree. The night watchman had made his next round, right. I had crawled out from my hiding place and was doing my thing with the back-office safe, a difficult but solvable task within the time frame. The office safe had been classic, fifty-year old, brown steel, mostly heavy and impressive. Good old key and combination lock combined. All you needed to open it was good equipment, a little time and patience. I had been on it for about five minutes, listening for the sounds of the watchman’s steps on the steel staircase in the backyard. My plan, should the safe turn out to be more stubborn than expected, had been to work it for ten minutes and then play it safe and hide again until the night watchman’s next round. But the equipment, my fingers and my luck worked like a charm; eventually, I heard the dull click in my earphones, made three crosses and the door of the back-office safe opened.  
    To my horror, at exactly that moment, I heard some noises but not from the creaking steel staircase outside; they were from the super secure safe door to the showroom. ‘Impossible’ was my first non-four-letter thought and while the large safe door slowly rotated, I wrapped up my equipment in record time and hid under the next table, where no one could see me from either the back-office door or the door to the safe showroom. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see anyone from there, either.  
    I asked, “How did he die?”
    “Blow on the head with a heavy object. We found some sort of colored metal art piece, a mobile, on the floor with blood on it.”
    “Calder.”
    “Beg your pardon?” Ron gave me a raised eyebrow.
    “Alexander Calder. His mobiles are world famous.” And I had seen it lying right beside Mr. Eastman’s lifeless form, bloody art.
    “Well, one of his works is now hosted by our downtown crime scene investigation lab.” Ron gave a sly smile and turned serious again. “The murderer wraps things up, closes the door to the safe room and exits through the backdoor.”
    We stood near the taped outline of the night watchman; there was an abstract shape in the form of a Calder mobile nearby. This was the position in which I had found the dead night watchman and the Calder. I had hidden for a while under the desk in the back-office, the whole time praying feverishly that no one would decide to take a closer look at the back-office safe. All I could hear had been someone stepping out of the safe room into the back-office, shuffling some things around for a second and then unlocking the backdoor and leaving. Torn between the running sands of time and curiosity as to what the competition had achieved, I finally peeked from under the table, found myself alone in the back-office and tiptoed to the safe door. I glanced into the showroom and my blood froze. The night watchman wore a dark blue uniform; his cap was lying beside him. The Calder was lying where the killer dropped it and pools of blood had formed under and around his head. It took some courage to step up to the body and feel for a pulse. There was none; he was dead. A quick look around the showroom, fully lighted, revealed no obvious burglary or broken displays. Therefore, the sequence of events that Ron assumed could not be true. Nothing made sense right now.  
    I couldn’t do