Page 65 of Death on a Scottish Train

When we arrived at my place, we paused.

The door to my clinic was open.

“Uh. I know I locked it when I left. And Abigail and Tommy were already gone.”

He stuck his hand up. “Stay here,” he whispered.

I nodded, but then wondered if I might be safer closer to the guy with the gun. Even though it was dark outside, I’d left a few lights on in the interior part of my home.

But the office was draped in shadows. Still, it was easy to see that someone had been searching through the paper files. What an outsider wouldn’t know was those were old. Everything that was current with our patients was stored on the computers and protected with several layers of security needing authentication, to which only Abigail and I had the passwords.

“I wonder what they were looking for?” I whispered.

“Normally, I’d say drugs in a medical office, but they were searching through the files. So, information.”

My office was more of the same. I didn’t keep much paper in there, but it was obvious someone had gone through my documents and moved stuff around. Some of it was on the floor. Nothing was broken, it was just a lot of mess.

I followed him back to where we had all of our tech and machines for labs and such. The bookshelf that hid the secret door was still locked. There was a security code to get in now, which had been added when we’d been broken into the last time.

“Thank goodness,” I said.

While paper could be replaced, we had several thousand pounds-worth of equipment back there.

Then I followed him through my house.

The pharmacy door was locked tight. There were two deadbolts, and a key card was needed to get inside. While I couldn’t imagineanyone in Sea Isle breaking in for drugs, we had a lot of visitors in the summer.

Except for the extra locks, the door looked like some kind of pantry.

“OK, so not drugs,” Ewan grunted.

“Or they couldn’t find them,” I said. “But you’re right. It does look like they may have been searching for information. But why?”

“They want to know how much we’ve discovered so far,” he said. He shook his head. I think he might have been more upset than I was over the intrusion and that was saying something.

Even though this sort of thing had happened before, it still felt like the worst kind of violation of privacy. I had cameras and locks to keep the place secured. And Sea Isle was normally so much safer than anywhere else I’d lived.

This kind of thing only seemed to happen when there was a dead body involved.

We went through the kitchen and to the freezer I called the autopsy room.

The keypad had been smashed, but the door was locked.

“You don’t think they stole the body again.” That had happened on my first case here in town. The killer had stolen the body and dropped it at sea. More than likely hoping that it would never be found, but he had bad luck in that regard. The ocean currents had not been in his favor.

Ewan tried to shove the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Without the keypad it was impossible to get inside.

“Well, if it’s that difficult, then they probably didn’t make it through the door.”

“Most likely. I’m calling my team.”

It had been a long day of work and a full evening. I couldn’t help but yawn.

“Let me check your room upstairs and you can go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll take care of all this.”

“I’m tired but now I have a good case of the nerves. Who would break into my office and why did they want the body?”

“Well, let’s take a look at the camera video and see if we can find out.”