by Harper Lin
They lived in a fine house with a white picket fence, in a little cul-de-sac in one of Cheerville’s better neighborhoods. I pulled up for dinner early that evening. I had to question my son about poor James Garfield without his knowing that I was questioning him.
I knocked on the door. They had given me a key and said I could come in at any time, but I still knocked in order to give them their space. An important part of parenting was recognizing when your children had become adults with their own priorities and their own lives, and that had happened quite a while ago.
My son opened the door. “Hey, Mom, come on in.”
Frederick went his own way not only careerwise but also physically. He had a few too many pounds, and his belly seemed to grow every year. That concerned me. I had gently nudged him in the direction of the gym, to no avail. Exercise was essential to health, although I had to admit I had gone too far in the other direction. All that combat training, somnambulant forced marches through jungle and desert, and hand-to-hand combat with thugs of a dozen nationalities had taken their toll. While at Frederick’s age I had been at the peak of physical fitness, all the old injuries had come back to haunt me. Sometimes my ankles hurt. Sometimes my knees hurt. Sometimes everything hurt. I had recently joined a gym and was slowly trying to get myself back in shape. I had to take it easy, though. If I pushed it, I could end up worse than before.
We went into the living room, where my grandson, Martin, had his feet up on the coffee table, his hands on a controller, and his eyes glued to his Xbox.
“Hello, Martin,” I said, tousling his hair before I forgot that he didn’t like to be tousled anymore.
“Shhh,” he said.
On the TV screen, Martin was transformed into a burly man in camouflage, crawling through the high grass of the African savanna. He had a sniper’s rifle in his hand, easily identifiable as an M24 SWS, standard US Army issue. The graphics were quite realistic on games these days.
This was the quietest video game I had ever seen him play. Insects buzzed, the sniper made a few soft sounds as he swished through the grass, and that was it.
Not quite. I heard the distant sound of conversation. Frederick had installed an excellent speaker system, and I could clearly hear the sounds were coming from the left. Martin moved in that direction.
“What’s this game called?” I asked.
“Shhh. One Shot, One Kill: Counterinsurgency Edition.”
Sniper Martin crested a low rise, and a wide, dry riverbed came into view. Some men in black, their faces covered with kaffiyehs, were loading rocket-propelled grenades into the back of a Land Rover. A pit lay open at their feet, obviously where they had hidden the weapons until they could fetch them.
Hiding the weapons in a riverbed? What if it rained? These were either stupid terrorists or stupid game designers.
Martin switched to sniperscope view and scanned the scene. Through the crosshairs, we could see a man at the wheel of the Land Rover, half obscured by the tinted window. Three men were loading the weapons into the back of the vehicle.
“Check for sentries,” I told him.
“Shhh.”
“There’s going to be someone—”
Bang! He took out one of the guys loading the weapons.
Bang! Bang! He got the other two.
The engine roared to life. Martin swiveled and fired, and the bullet pinged off the door, just an inch below the driver’s-side window.
“Must be bulletproof,” Frederick said.
Bang!
The screen went red then switched to an image of a terrorist rising out of the savanna grass to Martin’s right, with an AK-47 and standing over Martin’s dead body.
“Ugh! You guys distracted me!” Martin shouted.
“I told you to look for sentries,” I said.
Martin did a classic teenage eye roll. “Why do you always pretend you know how to fight?”
I smiled, tousled his hair again just because I felt like it, and followed Frederick into the kitchen.
My daughter-in-law, Alicia, was in there making lasagna. Yes, a leading scientist who was a good homemaker too. She did it all. Better than I could. Although I had been at the top of my own and very different career, I was useless at cooking. The pasta I had made for Octavian the night before was about as much as I could handle. Boil water, throw in spaghetti, wait until soft. Even that, I often messed up.
We chatted about nothing in particular for a time until my son gave me an in for what I really wanted to talk about.
“How was that charity dinner you went to with Octavian?” Frederick asked.
He still couldn’t bring himself to say “boyfriend.” He had lost his father only a few years before, so I didn’t judge him. He’d met Octavian only once, and it had been awkward for them both.
I glanced into the living room to make sure Martin was still killing people, and I said in a low voice, “I didn’t get to stay. There was a murder in the men’s room.”
“What?” Frederick and Alicia said in unison. Why did people always say that when they heard shocking news? They’d heard what I said, after all.
“A man named James Garfield.”
My son’s eyes grew wider. I was worried they might pop out and land on the floor. If one rolled under the refrigerator, we would never find it.
“James Garfield? I just met him a month ago. Tried to sell him a house.”
“Tried to?”
Frederick’s face grew hard. “Yeah, Chief Running Horse sold him a house instead. Stole my client.”
Chief Running Horse was Frederick’s main rival in the local real estate business. He ran Native Spirit Realty and made a killing. Chief Running Horse was no more Native American than I was Japanese. He was darker in skin tone, and he liked to pretend to be a Native American because it brought in business. Frederick couldn’t stand him. Said he was a fraud, which of course he was. Frederick had even dug into his past and found proof that his real name was John Smith and he came from New Jersey. I suspected that was an alias. No one was really named John Smith.
Frederick had wanted to expose him but was afraid of a lawsuit that would damage his business as much as Chief Running Horse’s.
“Did James Garfield buy an expensive house?” I asked.
“Yeah, that nineteenth-century brick place over on Blackberry Street. Sold for nine hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
I let out a low whistle. No wonder Frederick was upset about missing out on that commission.
Our conversation got cut short when Martin slouched into the room.
“Done killing people?” I asked.
“Yeah. Hey, I’m reading a new series.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Zombots. It’s about zombies who are robots.”
“How can a zombie be a robot?”
He gave me a mischievous, childlike grin. “You’ll just have to read it and find out. I’m already on book two, so you can borrow book one.”
“I’d be happy to.”
One of the most charming things about people his age was how they constantly switched from awkward adults into ebullient children. I felt grateful that I was present to see the last fading years of his childhood before the adult took over.
He ran off to his room. Something crashed in there. I could hear the sounds of objects being tossed aside as he burrowed through the travesty that was his bedroom floor before finding the book he sought. He returned a minute later, looking a bit flustered, and handed me a brightly colored paperback.
Zombots Book One: The Zomboroboticapocalypse.
“Bet you can’t figure out how they became zombie robots,” he said, jumping up and down.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to pronounce the title.”
I looked at the cover. Several stiff-limbed people, their skin a greenish hue, had some sort of electronic gizmo stuck on the backs of their heads. They were chasing a group of plucky teens. There was always a group of plucky teens in these books.
“Nope,” Martin said in triumph. “They are regular people captured by a mad scientist and fitted with electrodes to turn them into zombies.”
Young adult literature had changed a lot since the days of Nancy Drew and the Famous Five.
We ate our dinner in pleasant companionship. That was what I had moved to Cheerville for, to be with my son and my brilliant daughter-in-law and to watch my wonderful grandson grow up.
I had to admit, though, that this dinner was almost as unsettling as the one I had eaten with Octavian the previous night. My mind was still abuzz with questions about how poor James Garfield had been killed.
The first place to look for clues, of course, would be his new house. I felt sure Grimal had sent his lackeys to check it out, and I felt equally sure that they had found nothing.
That, of course, was no guarantee that there was nothing to find.
It would be up to me, and all it would involve would be a little breaking and entering.
Five
Finding the house that James Garfield had bought was easy enough. Property sales were a matter of public record, so all I had to do was go to the Cheerville Records Office, fill out a form, and within fifteen minutes, I had the address—23 Blackberry Street.
I could have simply asked Frederick for the address, but I had no valid reason to do so. One of the chief rules of being a secret agent was to reveal as little about your intentions as possible. That had become so instinctive with me that I hadn’t even considered asking my son.
I drove slowly down Blackberry Street, which, I supposed, at one time in the halcyon days when Cheerville was a sleepy little town and the city hadn’t gotten so expensive that so many workers moved out to places like this, had been a little dirt lane where the locals collected blackberries. No more. Now it was lined with manicured lawns and two-story brick houses. Porsches and Jaguars were parked out front. The houses had garages, but why spend so much on a car and hide it in the garage?
Some of the houses were quite old, dating back to the time of the blackberries. These had a stylish charm that their newer neighbors tried and failed to emulate.
I passed by number 23. The curtains were drawn, and I saw no one.
After a second, slower pass, I decided it was safe enough and parked at the end of the lane.
One of the worst parts about getting older was that you became invisible. People discounted you, assumed you were harmless. Oftentimes, they didn’t even see you. It was demoralizing to say the least.
At the moment, though, it was pretty darn handy.
I strolled up the street, admiring the fine houses, tidy lawns, and effusive flower beds. A woman walked past with her dog and said hello, her eyes unfocused. She would forget me within five minutes.
Once I got to number 23, I glanced around. A few doors down, a man washed his Mercedes with a soapy sponge. He faced me but was concentrating on his task. The dog walker was receding, her back to me. Now was a good time.
I walked up to the front door as if I belonged there, putting on my reading glasses as I did so. This would require some close-up work, and my eyes weren’t what they used to be. The covered porch with its thick columns provided me a bit of cover as I slipped my lockpicks out of my pocket and jimmied the lock.
It sprang open without much fuss. An alarm in the front hall started beeping. I had thirty seconds to disable it.
I hurried over, as much as I could hurry these days, and pulled a code sheet out of my pocket. This was courtesy of a friend in the CIA. It included the override codes for every make and manufacturer of house alarms in the country. I checked the brand on the alarm, ran my finger down the list, and found it.
I punched in the code with seconds to spare. The light went from a flashing red to a steady green.
Every alarm had an override code for the use of technicians and law enforcement. It was illegal for me to have that list, but I had been in the CIA, not the Girl Scouts.
I closed the front door and got to work.
The interior was lovely, and I could see why it had sold for so much money. It had a fresh coat of paint that still lent a faint smell to the house. The wooden floors had been restored and polished, and there was an attractive oak banister up the curved stairway. I suspected it was original to the house.
James Garfield hadn’t had much time to unpack. The living room, kitchen, upstairs bathroom, and master bedroom were the only rooms that had been fully fitted out. The second bedroom was filled with boxes, and the third bedroom was empty. The oak-paneled den, which I thought would make an excellent reading room, was half filled with boxes. Accessing the garage through a door in the laundry room, which had a brand-new washer and dryer still with their stickers on, I found the garage to be empty too. His car had been parked at the country club. No doubt it was in the impound lot by now. But I found no gardening equipment or anything else in there.
After making a quick initial pass, I started looking more carefully. The kitchen held nothing of interest, although I noticed there was no alcohol. I remembered his drinker’s nose and ruddy cheeks and wondered about that. The boxes in the den contained books, mostly history and some quite old and probably rare. Apparently, he agreed with me that the den would make a good reading room, although he hadn’t had time to buy bookshelves or even an armchair yet. The living room contained nothing but the furniture, all new.
I went upstairs. The master bedroom furniture was also all new. Had he kept his old house in Ohio? Was that why he hadn’t moved the furniture to Cheerville?
Now that I was thinking of it, there weren’t very many boxes. The boxes in the second bedroom contained clothes, some more books, a desktop computer, and various odds and ends. If he had unpacked everything, half of the house would have still been empty.
Yet according to the city records, he had purchased the house a month ago and taken possession a week ago, certainly enough time to get his things there from Cincinnati.
And he had certainly been slow about unpacking. He had a functioning router but hadn’t unpacked his computer. I supposed he checked his email on a smartphone. It seemed odd that he hadn’t unpacked his computer until I realized he didn’t have a desk to put it on. And the walls were completely bare. No prints, no paintings or family photos. Nothing.
I got the impression that James Garfield was more interested in getting to Cheerville than living here. And yet he had spent almost a million dollars on a house.
The bathroom revealed no medications other than a common prescription for managing high blood pressure, not unusual for a man his age. There was also a prescription for Doxazosin. I didn’t know what that was. With my phone, I took a photo of the bottle to look up later.
Now for the master bedroom, where people tended to keep their most personal possessions.
In a frame on the bedside table was the only photo in the whole house, and it was a curious one.
It showed a blond woman in her late twenties or early thirties, decked out in an expensive evening gown and wearing a diamond necklace and a sparkling ring. At least I thought they were diamonds. It was hard to tell because the photo had been taken from a distance and enlarged until it had become slightly pixelated. The woman was in profile and walking down a sidewalk. She did not appear to be aware that she was being photographed. At the edge of the shot was part of the person walking ahead of her, just the tail end of a dress, one foot, and part of a hand.
Had Garfield been spying on this girl? I took out my phone again and took a picture of it.
Just as I did, I heard the front door open.
Uh-oh.
What to do? There was almost no place to hide in this house!
A couple of footsteps sounded downstairs, so soft as to be all but inaudible. They stopped. Whoever
it was hadn’t passed much beyond the threshold. Was the newcomer wondering why the alarm hadn’t started beeping? I hadn’t reset it.
I tiptoed over to the closet, eased it open, and slipped inside amid a collection of expensive suits and dress shirts, closing the door except for a thin crack so I could see out.
The footsteps resumed, softly moving around downstairs. At times I couldn’t hear them at all, and only the occasional creak of a floorboard told me the person was still moving. I opened my purse, where my trusty 9mm automatic was hidden. Good thing I still had my reading glasses on. I couldn’t see the sights on my gun without them.
The footsteps stopped for a minute, replaced by the sound of boxes opening. Whoever it was had come here with a similar intention to my own.
The tread sounded heavy, as though it came from a man.
He began to ascend the steps.
Oh, great. If I got caught here by anyone with a legitimate reason to be in the house, I would get arrested for real this time.
The footsteps drew closer. He entered the bedroom.
Then he moved into view. Peeking through the narrow crack I had left in the closet door, I saw a tall man in buckskins, moccasins, and a feather headdress.
Chief Running Horse? What was he doing here? Real estate agents weren’t supposed to go into a house after they had sold it, and they certainly shouldn’t be rummaging through the boxes of the new resident.
He stood for a moment, looking around the room. Then he got on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. When he stood up again, I hoped he would walk out, but no, my luck just wasn’t with me this week.
Instead, he opened the closet door.