Part 3 — The Blue Light
My nephew Marcus read the name on the emergency contact card out loud, and Miss Inez put her hand over her mouth. The name was Devon Whitfield, her grand nephew in Gulfport, the boy she had sent birthday checks to for twenty years.
It was not a stranger at all. Devon had been the one watching the video. He had hired Kendra through a staffing agency, told her what to do and paid for the little cameras with a credit card in his own name. The blue light was his idea. He wanted to see her enter the safe code.
Kendra turned herself in two days after she fled the driveway. She said she had never meant to go that far. She had been told it was a security system for a lonely old lady, and she took the job for the money, until the withdrawals began and she got scared.
Her testimony helped the case. She gave the detectives her phone, her messages with Devon and the name of the gas station where she took the cash. Because she cooperated, the prosecutor accepted a lesser charge and a probation sentence.
Devon was arrested at his apartment in Gulfport on charges of fraud, unlawful surveillance and exploitation of a vulnerable adult. When Miss Inez looked at his photograph on the detectives table, she said, softly, He used to love my pecan pie.
The cruelest thing about that little blue light was how much it looked like care.
The court ordered Devon to repay the eleven withdrawals and the bank interest in full. The bank restored the funds even before the order, and the staffing agency paid a settlement for failing to check its own hires.
I rewired Miss Inezs smoke alarms myself, with real detectors, a new fire panel and a surge protector for her computer. I tested every one of them and showed her how to press the test button herself.
The little fireproof safe now sits at the back of her closet, with a new code that only Miss Inez and her lawyer know. She changed it to the day she and her husband opened the hardware store.
She baked me a pecan pie the following Sunday and made Marcus eat the first slice. He said it was the best evidence he ever collected.