Part 3 — Junior At Three Ten
The account that paired the second remote was registered to Dale Mabry, thirty-nine, a volunteer driver for the church van. Mrs. Pruett knew him only as Junior. He had given her a different name on every errand, and a different phone number on every receipt.
My brother-in-law, Deputy Ray Calhoun, arrived at the end of the street in an unmarked car an hour later. He did not want me to change the codes, and now I understood why. He wanted Junior to keep believing the door was his.
We told Mrs. Pruett the truth, gently, over tea at her kitchen table. She put her hand on her chest and said, I fed that boy pound cake. Then she squared her shoulders, because she is a Georgia woman, and she asked what she could do to help.
The nighttime pills were the first thing Deputy Calhoun took. A pharmacist at the Richmond County lab opened the weekly box and found plain over-the-counter sleep tablets, the kind sold at any drugstore. They would never have harmed her, only kept her sleeping like a stone while the garage opened at 3:10.
That night Mrs. Pruett slept at her sisters house. Two deputies waited in her dark kitchen, and I sat in my truck at the end of the block with my tablet. At 3:09 the opener woke up. At 3:10 the door rose a foot, then all the way, and a man in size twelve boots ducked inside.
He went straight for the deadbolt on the garage side of the kitchen door. That deadbolt was why Mrs. Pruett never wandered out at night and never found him. He unlocked it, stepped inside, and found two deputies sitting at her table with a flashlight and a thermos.
Junior did not run. He put his hands up and said, in a small voice, that he was only looking for the file box. The file box was in Arthurs old desk, with the pension papers and bank statements he had been photographing, a few pages every night, for eleven nights.
He had been copying her late husbands account numbers and her signature, one page at a time, and trying out small transfers. The bank had flagged two of them, and they were returned to the penny. A garage door opener does not sleep, and it kept a perfect record of everything that was done in the dark.
Dale Mabry was charged with burglary, identity theft, exploitation of an elderly person, and administering a substance without consent. A judge denied bail. The church board hired an outside investigator and found that he had used the same approach on two other women in the van program.
The church paid to replace Mrs. Pruetts locks and to install cameras on all four sides of her house. It also began checking the background of every volunteer driver, and it apologized to each family in a letter, signed by the pastor.
I changed the codes myself the next morning and put in a new opener with a log she could read from her phone. She named it Arthur, and I did not argue.
Last week she called me again, but only to say the azaleas were in bloom and she had made a pound cake. I drank her coffee, ate two slices, and checked the log on my way out. Not a single entry in the middle of the night.