Part 3 — Phone In The Tank
The detective asked me to read him the second number on that phone, and I did. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, Travis, that number belongs to a teller at the credit union on Capital Avenue.
Her name was Megan, twenty six years old, and she had been at that branch for two years. Whenever Opal Hendricks came in to cash a check, Megan texted Corey the amount and the time. That was how he knew about the four thousand dollars and the Thursday visit.
Corey was the nice young man from church who brought Opals groceries. He had been quietly collecting her routines, her purse hook, her eye doctor Tuesdays and her phone passcode, all while helping her find the weather app he had installed.
The detective arrived at Opals bungalow in an unmarked car and put the bag back into the tank himself, exactly as I had found it. Then he waited in the spare room with two officers while I fixed the toilet the long way, whistling loud so the phone would not go quiet.
At two in the afternoon, the second text came in. Corey wrote, Is she home alone now? The detective typed one word back, yes, and twenty minutes later a man in a church windbreaker knocked politely on the front door with a bag of groceries.
Opal noticed a crooked lid, and that single sharp little thought turned out to be the best alarm system in Battle Creek.
Corey was arrested on the porch holding a bag of oranges. He was charged with conspiracy, attempted theft from a vulnerable adult and unlawful use of an electronic device. Megan was arrested at the credit union that evening.
Both cooperated. They had worked the same scheme on two other widows in the county, and every one of those families received a call from the detective that night. No one lost a cent, and the credit union changed its rules about sharing customer information.
Opal was not frightened for long. She said she had lived through two floods and a blizzard and that a polite thief was not going to spoil her afternoon tea. She did, however, ask me to check every other tank in her house.
I replaced the flapper, set the chain at the right length and charged her my flat eighty five dollars. She tipped me a slice of lemon cake and told me I was the first plumber who ever looked behind a lid.