The kitchen suddenly sprang with motion — fast and airborne. I swung my pistol toward a big white cat sliding across the countertop, surprised as I was, trying to reverse course on smooth tile and knocking over a phone that slid off the counter and clattered to the floor. I picked it up and set it back in its cradle. No messages on the recorder. The cat disappeared under the couch.
Standing in the hallway, gun down and still amped by the cat, I asked myself if four people could have possibly left while I was out there watching. Gone out the front when I’d staked out the back? But from the rear I’d still been able to see the Suburban, and it hadn’t moved. And out front I’d planted myself at a distance and angle that gave me a view of most of the desert behind the little building — good enough to see them picking their way through the cactus-mined desert, headed for… where? If they had managed any of those feats on my watch, it was time for me to consider a new career.
Which left two options: an attic or a basement.
I looked up to see an attic hatch neatly framed in the old plaster ceiling, exactly where you’d expect to find it in a building this size and shape. They could easily have climbed through and pulled the ladder up behind them. Which could partially account for the motion I saw through the curtains. Which meant they could be up there right now.
However, I also saw that the colorful kilim hall runner at my feet lay askew. As if recently disturbed.
Dragging it aside with my boot, I saw the dark cut lines through the pavers, neatly done but still visible. In the shape of a trapdoor, large enough for people. No handles or recessed pulls. No easy way in. So, likewise, they could be just feet below me in a basement or crawl space, waiting for me to pass. I toed the runner back into place.
Then retreated outside and through the desert darkness to my truck. Continued my watch. Puzzled and off-balance.
The darkness surrendered to gray, and the calls of desert songbirds joined the morning. Across the parking lot from bungalow nineteen the office light was on but none of the other units were stirring yet. There were only two cars besides Holland’s Suburban, Cassy Weisberg’s Beetle, and Broadman’s silver Chevy Tahoe.
A few minutes later, Brock Holland and Gretchen Deuzler came from the front door of bungalow nineteen, quickly got into the white Suburban and drove toward town. I didn’t even have to duck and hide.
I got my Vigilant 4000 up and running. Noted that Holland and Deuzler were headed west, toward San Diego.
I waited another hour, then drove into the Bighorn lot and parked up near the office, one space over from Broadman’s silver Tahoe and Cassy Weisberg’s sun-blanched blue Beetle.
Cassy buzzed me into the office, welcomed me with a distant smile.
“Hello, Cass, is Harris around today?”
“Who wants to know?”
“The PI, Roland Ford.”
“I was only kidding you, Mr. Ford.”
“You’re a good kidder, then.”
“Mr. Broadman is sleeping, no doubt. He doesn’t usually get up until after noon.”
“Would you tell him I’m here?”
“I’m not supposed to wake him.”
I tried to look disappointed and I was probably sleep deprived enough to be convincing.
She pressed something on the counter I couldn’t see. “Mr. Broadman, Roland Ford is here to see you. The PI.”
The soft buzz of static, like the sound of a phone being picked up but not answered.
“Probably sleeping, like I said.”
“May I see him?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Can I just go knock?”
“That’s rude, Mr. Ford. I can’t allow that.”
My first impulse was to embrace rudeness. Natalie Strait was alive and kicking, and last seen a couple of hundred feet from where I now stood. Maybe, if I was face-to-face with Broadman, I’d be face-to-face with Natalie, too. My second thought was that Cassy Weisberg, employed by a kidnapper, and undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, might suffer for my rudeness more than me.
“Roland, what do you want?” asked Harris Broadman through the speaker.
“I have a question about Natalie Strait,” I said.
“I know nothing about her.”
Did he know it was me watching them last night? If not, I could still be just a harmless pest to him. If so, he would try to derail me.
I stalled and threw out something that Dalton had told me just recently.
“Dalton said he used to brag about her when you were in Fallujah,” I said. “That you three talked on Skype once, and you told Dalton he’d better take good care of her when he got home or you would.”
“And what’s the matter with that?”
“I’m trying to figure out if Natalie might have looked you up recently,” I said. “As a friend of her husband.”
“She did not. She did not.”
“No communication from her at all?”
“I’ve told you. None. Be gone, Ford. You’re trespassing on my property and my patience.”
“It’s my job, but thank you, Sergeant. I apologize for getting you up so early with long-shot questions.”
“You know I will always help.”
I thanked Cassy and told her to have a great day.
Stopped in front of bungalow six. The blinds were open.
Broadman looked back at me from the far side of the living room. He was sitting on the same ’50s turquoise sofa as when we’d first talked here and he’d told me about the IED that Dalton Strait had not quite saved him from. Same molten face. Same white clothes, white ball cap, and aviator sunglasses. Same sprigs of downy white hair.
He pointed the remote at me and the blinds shut tight.
Thirty-Five
The Chaos Committee’s “gift” to California, promised days earlier, was opened by Gail Winfield, the police chief of tiny Hopedale, in the western Sierra Nevada, at 8:35 a.m. on Wednesday, May 27th.
I’d been home from the Bighorn less than an hour when Lark called.
“It killed her instantly,” he said. “They’re using better materials and less of them. The box that Chief Winfield opened could have been a coffee table book. It weighed about the same. It arrived UPS the day before, from an insecure drop box in Hemet. Another bogus sender and return address. Fires just set in Stockton and Grass Valley. And another officer wounded in Sacramento, shot with a rifle.”
Hemet is forty-three miles from Fallbrook, where the first Chaos Committee bomb was mailed. And seventy-seven miles from Ramona, where the second bomb originated. The third bomb’s origin, which killed Congressman Clark Nisson in Encinitas, was of course still unknown.
“Three of four bombs posted from my backyard,” I said to Special Agent Lark. “I hope you don’t come after me.”
“We might. Have you looked at all the surveillance video?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“I’m counting on you, Roland. This one’s for Joan. Remember? What’s new on Natalie Strait?”
“Nothing since the blouse and the letter from Justine,” I lied.
“The cops think Dalton wrote it and mailed himself the evidence as a smoke screen,” said Lark. “They think it’s possible that he had her bagged as cover for his campaign crimes.”
“Is that why you haven’t opened an official FBI investigation?”
“That’s part of it. Hazzard says Dalton wasn’t where he said he was the morning she vanished.”
“He’s got an embarrassing alibi for that morning,” I said.
“I didn’t think you could embarrass that guy,” said Lark. “Every time I see him he’s talking about his wife handling all the finances. How he never touched the money. I mean, you can stick up for him because of Fallujah, but…”
“But?”