…”Wednesday afternoon while you’re at work, for the last five weeks.”
My whole body went cold. Five weeks. Every Wednesday I’d come home and something had felt slightly off: a drawer not closed all the way, my mail in a different order, a coffee mug in the sink I didn’t remember using. I had told myself I was tired.
The volunteer, a retired engineer named Walter, didn’t let me panic for long. “Don’t go home,” he said. “We’re calling the police from here.”
The detective assigned to my case moved fast because of the protective order. She discovered that my ex-husband, Scott, had rented a studio apartment two floors below mine under his cousin’s name four months earlier. She also learned how he’d gotten into the lock system. The new property management company had hired a small installation contractor. One of its technicians was an old friend of Scott’s. For two hundred dollars, he’d added a microphone module to my lock and created a hidden administrator account.
The “door access fees” were the landlord’s idea, completely separate. But the extra charges were what made me look closely at the device in the first place. If the landlord hadn’t been greedy, I might never have found out.
Police arrested Scott the following Wednesday as he walked out of my apartment. He had my spare key in his pocket and a notebook listing my schedule. He was charged with violating the protective order, stalking and illegal surveillance. The technician lost his license and was charged as well.
Walter and the tenant organization took the fee issue to the city. It turned out charging tenants per entry to their own homes was illegal under our local housing laws. Every tenant in my building got a refund, and the city fined the management company.
I moved out within the month. My new apartment has an old-fashioned key and a deadbolt, and I installed both myself. My brother came over and changed the locks again anyway, just to be sure.
Scott was sentenced to three years. I sleep well now. Every Wednesday, I have coffee with Walter at the diner near my office, and he still checks my phone’s privacy settings out of habit.
