The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Adult, Thriller, Adventure
ISBN: 1416549986
Publisher: Pocket Star
Published: 2008-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

Sipping strong, sweet coffee in the café across the street from the Gray Rock, thirty-nine-year-old Miguel Abrera was flipping through a brochure he’d received in the mail recently. It was yet another in a recent series of unusual occurrences in his life. Most were merely odd or irritating; this one was troubling.

He looked through it yet again. Then closed it and sat back, glancing at his watch. He still had ten minutes before he had to return to the job.

Miguel was a maintenance specialist, as SSD called it, but he told everybody he was a janitor. Whatever the title, the tasks he performed were a janitor’s tasks. He did a good job and he liked the work. Why should he be ashamed of what he was called?

He could have taken his break in the building but the free coffee that SSD provided was lousy and they didn’t even give you real milk or cream. Besides, he wasn’t one for chitchat and preferred enjoying a newspaper and coffee in solitude. (He missed smoking, though. He’d bargained away cigarettes in the emergency room and even though God hadn’t kept his side of the deal, Miguel had given up the habit anyway.)

He glanced up to see a fellow employee enter the café, Tony Petron, a senior janitor who worked executive row. The men exchanged nods and Miguel was worried that the man would join him. But Petron went to sit in the corner by himself to read e-mail or messages on his cell phone and once again Miguel looked over the flyer, which was addressed to him personally. Then, as he sipped the sweet coffee, he considered the other unusual things that had happened recently.

Like his time sheets. At SSD you simply walked through the turnstile and your ID card told the computer when you entered and when you left. But a couple of times in the past few months his sheets had been off. He always worked a forty-hour week and was always paid for forty hours. But occasionally he’d happened to look at his records and saw that they were wrong. They said he came in earlier than he had, then left earlier. Or he missed a weekday and worked a Saturday. But he never had. He’d talked to his supervisor about it. The man had shrugged. “Software bug maybe. As long as they don’t short you, no problemo.”

And then there was the issue of his checking-account statement. A month ago, he’d found to his shock that his balance was ten thousand dollars higher than it should be. By the time he’d gone to the branch to have them correct it, though, the balance was accurate. And that had happened three times now. One of the mistaken deposits was for $70,000.

And that wasn’t all. Recently he’d had a call from a company about his mortgage application. Only he hadn’t applied for a mortgage. He rented his house. He and his wife had hoped to buy something but after she and their young son died in the auto accident he hadn’t had the heart to consider a house.

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