"What the hell?" he muttered.
He dropped to his knees to check the tires. They were also dry. Not only that, but the tread was not the tread he had followed. The limo tread had been serpentine.
"Musta got confused," he muttered. "Damn."
He left the garage and slipped around to the front.
There Remo was further surprised to find the same garage door he had earlier seen and the identical limousine tread vanishing under the door.
Remo went back into the garage.
The white convertible sat there, dry and slightly grimy. Remo went around to the back of the car.
On the stone-tiled floor were the faint wet tracks of the limo's distinctive snakeskin tread. They stopped three feet short of the convertible's rear tires, as if the limo had driven into the fifth dimension. The only other line of demarcation was the edge of one of the stone flags.
"This is ridiculous," Remo muttered in the dim light. He walked around the convertible. There was enough room to pass on all four sides if he turned sideways when he passed a tool-festooned workbench, but definitely no room for a second car.
Frowning, Remo stood in the dimness of the garage and said, "I've heard of locked-room mysteries, but this is a freaking garage and it isn't even locked!"
He made another circuit of the convertible, and finding nothing, hopped into the passenger seat.
There was no black limousine in the glove compartment, not that he expected to find it. But he wasn't about to let any possibility get by him. There wasn't even a registration.
The trunk was empty of everything but a spare tire bolted into a recess. There wasn't even a loose jack or tire iron.
Remo popped the hood and examined the ordinary sixcylinder engine. The radiator was cold to the touch. Gently closing the hood, Remo ran a Sinanju-sharp fingernail on the paint job. He got a flat gray line under the white enamel. He had hoped for black. But the convertible was not the black limo with a seven-second paint job and a new front end.
Remo Williams left the garage scratching his head. He went around to the front and looked at the tire tracks again. They were the same rattlesnake tracks, all right.
"None of this makes sense," Remo said half-aloud. He reached down and grabbed the garage door handle. It turned. He lifted the door carefully and once again beheld the white convertible's rear deck.
The rattlesnake treads continued as wet smears on the garage floor, stopping short of the white car.
Slowly Remo closed the car door and thought about what he should do.
Knocking at the white house was a tempting possibility, but what was he going to say? Excuse me, sir, but have you seen a black limousine drive into your garage and vanish into thin air?
Tearing down the garage walls also tempted him.
Remo decided he wasn't going to do that. Maybe later. It was possible he had gotten confused and followed the trail of the wrong tires. Not that that would explain the vanishing car, but if it wasn't the limo, it wasn't his problem.
Dropping to one knee, Remo scooped up a section of snow-captured tire tread. He carried it back to his car with both hands, trying not to crush it.
He drove back to the safe house with the section of snow melting on the seat beside him, following the rattlesnake tread all the way back to the semicircle of tire tracks that had been laid when the limousine had first spun into a reverse spin after ejecting a cloud of greenish vapor.
The gas cloud had dissipated. The sleeping man was still at his wheel. Evidently it wasn't a very curious neighborhood. Either that or everyone had been knocked out by the gas.
Remo set the captured section of snow next to the tracks. The diamond-shaped scales were a perfect match.
Remo stomped on the tracks in frustration. When that didn't solve the mystery, he decided to further investigate the safe house.
Halfway up the walk, he noticed something strange.
The driving snow had nearly obliterated a set of footprints along the walk, but they were still visible as rounded outlines.
Remo noticed that there where two sets of fresh footprints on the walk. Both were going away from the front door. Remo looked back. They stopped exactly short of the spot where the limousine had been parked.
He bent down. One set of prints was large, the other small. Remo fixed the smaller set in his mind and went back to where he had battled the diminutive chauffeur. The prints were the same. That meant the other prints would have been made by the tall man in the Russian fur hat.
The problem with that, Remo realized after he returned to study those prints, was that the toes pointed toward the house. Not away from it.
Yet clearly the man had left the house. Remo had seen him do exactly that. At least, he had seen him enter the car after hearing the sound of the opening safe-house door.
There were no other tracks on the walk, but the snow was falling so fast that earlier tracks--say, those made an hour or so before-would have been long covered up.
Remo looked back toward the closed front door, his expression falling into its natural frown lines.
Two sets of tracks. One going, one coming, but not the same man. That should mean that someone had entered the house in the last few minutes. However, the collection of snow in the chauffeur's departing tracks meant they had been made before Remo arrived on the scene. There had been no time for the man to enter or leave the house after that. He had been in Remo's sight all along.
"Unless they doubled back while I was chasing phantom tire tracks," Remo muttered aloud.
That didn't fit either, Remo decided. Because the snow hadn't yet obliterated the footprints made during his fight with the chauffeur. These were from about the same time, judging from the filling snow. And there wouldn't have been time for the snow to bury the passenger's tracks.
Yet the only tracks that could have been that man's were pointing toward the house, not away from it.
It made no sense.
But sense or not, Remo knew better than to stand here exposed any longer. He slipped around the side to the back door.
There were no tracks of any kind at the back door, so Remo made some of his own.
Breaking the FBI barrier tape, he eased open the storm door and carefully tried the inner doorknob.
It turned and caught. Locked.
Remo put his ear to the panel. There was no sound at first. Then he heard the sound of a furnace kick in, the dull roar of an oil burner firing up, and a desultorily dripping sink.
No heartbeats, no lungs in respiration cycle, no voices.
No nothing.
Remo popped the knob. It shot out of its socket, driven inward by the hard heel of his hand.
Remo stepped in, every sense alert. He drifted from room to room, finding nothing at first.
In the kitchen, a man sat at the kitchen table. His eyes were open, but his head lolled to one side. His arms were arranged so that his hands dangled between his akimbo knees.
He looked dead. He was the gum-chewing FBI agent Remo had talked to earlier.
Remo touched the agent's carotid artery with a forefinger. Definitely dead.
Noticing a faint discoloration over the man's windpipe, Remo touched it. The trachea felt mushy, as if it had been jellied.
"Sinanju?" Remo whispered in the stillness of the kitchen. His voice shook with disbelief.
He finished checking the rest of the house.
Drawers lay open. Here and there things were noticeably out of place or upended. The house had been searched. Not wildly and carelessly, but methodically and with patience.
Remo went out the front door, snapping the FBI barrier tape with a careless flick of one hand. He wore an unhappy expression as he walked down the walkway.
He was puzzling over the inexplicable footprints, trying to figure them out.
"Let's see," Remo muttered to himself. "The chauffeur came out before I got here. Okay, he's accounted for. But his passenger came out after him. So where are his tracks? And whose are these?" Remo snapped his fingers. "The FBI agent's!"