by Andy Straka
“I think we need to get closer,” I whispered back.
Our best approach appeared to be back up along the slope to our left, where a triangular section of pines jutted into the field and came within fifty yards or so of the back of the house. Five minutes later we reached that point in the woods and lay on our stomachs side by side beneath a thicket. Toronto produced a small pair of binoculars from somewhere, and we took turns sweeping the entire property for any signs of life. There were none. A few early-spring crickets had begun to chirp near the pond, but otherwise the place might as well have been locked up for the season. No cars in the driveway—we would check the garage before making our entrance, though. No dogs or cats or animals of any kind. No outdoor implements or other tools left standing.
Toronto looked at me and I nodded.
He produced a small handgun from somewhere else that was actually a pellet pistol with a customized silencer. There was a short zip like the sound of air releasing from a tire, followed quickly by the sound of glass and bulb breaking, and then another. The back of the house and the field we needed to cross went dark except for the moon.
We waited some more. No sound came from the buildings. No movement, no other lights being turned on in alarm. I looked at Toronto and shrugged. He lifted his eyebrows in a bemused expression.
We both turned and stared at the house a little longer. Still nothing.
Without looking, I tapped him on the shoulder, crawled from beneath the bushes, and entered the field. I focused solely on the house, but I could hear Toronto's breathing beside and just behind me. The approach from this side of the main structure was relatively unencumbered by shrubs or ornamental plantings. We had to negotiate a drainage ditch and a low, easily hurdled stone wall, but that was it.
We made a quick sweep of the driveway to check for vehicles. The garage doors were solid, but there was a large window on one side of the building. A quick beam from one of our flashlights revealed the same Chevy Suburban I'd seen Drummond's security goons driving, but whether that meant the two were still camped out on the property or had merely left the vehicle there was impossible to tell. Since they'd locked it up inside and it was clearly a working car and not a family one, I held out hope for the latter.
We moved across the patio to the French doors leading into the kitchen. The floodlights aimed toward the far side of the house bathed the patio in a faint reflective glow. We both switched to latex rubber gloves, and I stood lookout while Toronto checked out the security system. Then he pulled a jackknife and some other type of tool out of a pocket. He ran something along the edge of the door and leaned on the lock. There was a soft pop. He motioned me over and within five seconds we were in.
Silence. The kitchen was still as a tomb. From what I could tell, when my eyes adjusted to the near darkness, it was also spotless. Probably the result of a cleaning service. Toronto found the control panel for the security system next to the door. I moved over to the coffeemaker and used my penlight to check out the contents. It too was spotless—and empty. Jake swept his little beam across the stove, even looked into the garbage. We looked at one another and nodded. Nobody home.
I motioned for Jake to follow me toward the front of the house. Cassidy Drummond had indicated that her father's office was connected to a landing on the main staircase. We passed down a hall floored with inlaid bricks and cedar crossbeams, turned left and made our way across a sunken family room, up a couple of steps to a foyer next to the front door, and there found the stairs, an open flight of treads minus risers with a handrail and banisters to one side. The landing stood only a few steps above the main floor, and the double doors to Drummond's office were held shut by a simple tubular lock that took Toronto all of three or four seconds to open.
Congressman Drummond's home office was nowhere near as large as his office in town or probably, for that matter, the one in Washington, either. Still, the room was elegantly appointed, with built-in bookshelves coated in black lacquer, thick carpet, heavy drapes, an oversized computer monitor, laid out with keyboard on a workstation custom-built into a corner of the room facing one of the windows. We shut the door behind us, pulled the drapes closed, and flipped on our beams.
“Okay,” I said in a low voice, “I'll take the room while you go through the computer.”
“Ever-ready E-file snooper at your service.” Toronto smiled, made a show of flexing his shoulders and cracking his knuckles, sat down, and brought the big screen to life.
I started with the congressman's desk. It too was locked, but without even looking away from his screen Toronto produced for me a little tool that looked like a cross between a corkscrew and tweezers. After a minute or so of poking, twisting, prying, and prodding, I managed to open the desk.
“Tsk, tsk … “ Toronto scolded, typing on the keyboard and clicking the mouse, his eyes never leaving the computer. “You scratched the wood.”
I went through all the drawers. Drummond seemed to be obsessively tidy: paper, pens, other paraphernalia were all neatly organized. There were a few travel brochures touting luxury hotels on St. Croix—maybe the congressman was planning another trip—but all else seemed to be mundane stuff. The deepest desk drawer contained a metal frame from which hung several boldly labeled file folders. There was one for bills, one for insurance and investments. Drummond had recently spent more than ten thousand dollars for a painting and some vintage bottles of wine at a celebrity charity auction. His credit card bills showed several restaurant charges and purchases from catalog retailers. He also seemed to fuel his vehicles, or have them fueled, at one of the same stations I frequented. His bond and mutual fund portfolio was impressive, if only because the current total of the accounts listed stood at more than three million dollars. The last file in the drawer was marked CORRESPONDENCE-PERSONAL FILES.
“Find anything?” I asked.
“Nope. Dude doesn't seem to use his computer much. Doesn't even use word processing.”
“Probably old school, not like us progressives.”
He grunted.
“How about his personal E-mail? Can you get online and check his screen name?”
“Not without time. Got a new program that'll maybe sniff out the password, but with this clunker of a CPU, it might take four, five hours. I can write down the E-mail addresses he uses, and maybe Nicky and I can hack into them back at your office. What're you holding there?”
I had pulled the last file from the desk drawer. It was pretty thick.
“Apparently Drummond likes to handwrite his personal letters. How about you take one stack and I'll take another?”
I sat in Drummond's desk chair while Toronto spread his pile out on the floor. I read through two letters Drummond had received from his daughters while they were in Japan. The letters contained little news, were almost cryptic in fact. Either they communicated with their father only out of obligation or they gave the details of their lives overseas by E-mail or phone calls. The main excuse for even sending the letters at all appeared to be photos the girls had taken of some sites in Tokyo.
“Gotcha,” Toronto suddenly said.
I looked up from reading. “You have something?”
“Maybe. Didn't you say the woman who ran that foundation was named Roberta Joseph?”
“Yes.”
“Got a note here from her to Drummond, along with copies of some checks. The note and the dates on the checks are from last year.”
“Let's see them.”
He brought them over and we spread them out on the desk.
The note was hard to decipher.
Dear Tor,
Did you make an error on these checks? Shouldn't those for A and P be less than the
checks for the general fund? I assume you may have been in a hurry and just transposed the numbers. Unless you're changing the arrangement. I'm holding on to them until I hear. Just let me know what you want to do. I can deposit them in the accounts, if you want, transfer the money, and we can make the adjustments n
ext month.
Roberta
There were photocopies of seven different checks on two pages, four on one, three on the other. All were in Drummond's handwriting and from his personal account, all made out to Second Millennium Foundation. On five of the checks, the words GENERAL FUND appeared on the notation line. The other two had letters handwritten on the same line, a different one for each check: A and P. Most interesting of all, however, in the top corner of one of the sheets, the one with the three checks, including those bearing the letters, Drummond, or someone else, had printed a word in dark pencil on the copy: PAITLEY.
“What do you make of it?” Toronto said.
“Looks like our Ms. Joseph's managing several different accounts. And one or more of them have something to do with some dead people.”
He lined up the copies. “You think we should take them?”
“We'd be contaminating potential evidence.”
“Right, like we haven't already done that.”
I pointed toward the corner where Toronto had been working. “There's a fax machine over there. Looks like it's turned on. Let's see if it has a copy function.”
We had just finished copying the last of the checks when Toronto cocked his head. “Hold on a minute. Listen …”
I heard nothing.
“Did you hear that?”
“No, I—” But now the sound became much more distinct—the low murmur of an engine and the sound of tires on stone. A car was coming up the driveway.
We scrambled to put the letters back into the file the way we had found them. Should I take the letter I'd just been reading? I skimmed the rest of it to look for any other bombshells, but there didn't appear to be any. I stuffed it back into the file along with the rest of the correspondence.
Toronto had already shut down the computer and was busy restoring everything else in the office to the way it was when we arrived. I finished returning all the files, then closed and locked the desk. We clicked off our lights and went to the window. I drew the drape aside and looked out.
Unfortunately, the view from the office window failed to show me the approach to the front of the house. I could see out to the woods, the moon and stars overhead, and on the mowed field grass the bright swath of brilliance, now unmoving, from a pair of headlights. A vehicle was definitely there, but it appeared to have stopped only partway up the drive.
Toronto edged around my shoulder to have a look. “What do you think, mate?”
“Whoever this is belongs here. They came right in through the main gate.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“Maybe they picked up on the fact that the lights were out in back.”
He furrowed his brow. “We need to get out,” he said. “Now.”
No argument from me. “How about the side of the house closest to the trees? It's still dark there. The headlight beams don't reach up that far.”
Toronto nodded. We pulled open the drapes and made our way out of the office, locking the door behind us again. We descended the stairs but didn't head back toward the kitchen. Instead, we crossed a dining room and entered another short hallway that led down a short flight of steps into a recreation room with a wet bar, pool table, big-screen television. Through a door on the far side was an exercise room with a weight machine, exercise bike, and treadmill. There were also two large windows facing the woods.
You could still see the glow from the unmoving headlights further out on the grass. There were sensors on the windows, but Toronto took out a pair of clippers and a little magnet and quickly dispatched them. One thing we hadn't taken into account, though. The house was built into the hillside, split into multiple levels. The drop from these particular windows looked to be at least fifteen feet.
But it was too late to worry about that. Just as we raised the window on the cold night air, the moan of a garage door rising, followed by the ignition of the Suburban's engine, came from the far side of the house. The security boys had been home all along.
Toronto went first. He swung his legs out the window and hung from the sill for an instant before dropping with a grunt to the ground. I was right behind him. I thought I'd timed my drop well enough to minimize the height as much as possible, but my foot must have caught the edge of a rock when I hit the ground. A jolt of pain shot through my leg. I didn't think the ankle was broken, but I'd sprained it badly enough. Toronto grabbed my arm and began running for the woods with me hobbling along, partially supported by his bulk, as best I could.
“Remind me to get you to the gym more often, buck,” he whispered. “You gotta learn to let those knees flex a little more when you land.”
I wanted to tell him I knew that already; I thought I'd been doing just that. But there were bigger concerns at the moment. I tried to stay low with him as we entered the safety of the woods and began making our way uphill through the trees.
A few yards in, I pulled him to a halt. “Hold on just a minute,” I said. “I'd like to get a look at whoever is in that car.”
“What are you, nuts? If those guys in the ‘Burban know what they're doing, they'll be out here sweeping this hillside with their high beams in a couple of minutes.”
“It'll only take a second. Where are the binoculars?”
He shook his head, but plucked out the glasses and handed them over.
From our new vantage point almost the full length of the driveway was visible. A dark Corvette, its headlights still blazing, idled about three-quarters of the way down the incline. The team in the Suburban had driven out to meet it in the same way they'd driven out to meet me, but there seemed to be a much more extended conversation occurring, as if the participants knew one another. Mr. Turnip was standing in front of the bigger vehicle pointing at the house, while his partner leaned on the fender right behind him. I switched my focus to the driver of the Corvette, a woman in a leopard-skin jacket with a shapely profile, standing with her arms crossed in front of her.
It was none other than my good friend Diane Lemminger.
25
“Call for you, Señor Pavlicek,” Juanita Estavez said early the next morning. “Line one.”
It was a standing joke between us—Juanita didn't answer phones. She was, however, the therapeutic receptionist, listening ear, and all-around organizational spark that kept me and the other semimarginal businesses in the office co-op from sinking into anarchy.
“Somebody famous?” I asked.
She smiled, showing bright teeth. “No, but you have important visitors. From the FBI. I think they're searching your office.”
“Great. I've got a business to run, we're still towing the two turkeys in the minivan around with us, and now this.”
“Looks like the feds got us surrounded.” Toronto, who was standing next to me, smiled. He'd made sure to remove his laptop and any traces of his presence before we left the office the night before. Returning from Ivy, we'd trailed Diane Lemminger to the Holiday Inn out by the interstate on Fifth Street. Fortunately, the guy working the front desk was a friend of mine, a very dark-skinned paraplegic named Bebo Walter. I'd first met Bebo when I happened to catch one of his wheelchair basketball games over at the old MAACA gym on Park Street; since then, he'd become a good source for me. I gave him twenty bucks and he promised to let me know as soon as he detected any sign that Lemminger was about to check out or leave the hotel.
Afterward, Toronto and I had driven across town and hidden the Jeep in Marcia's garage again, then walked a few blocks to catch a bus to take us back downtown. A little after midnight, we snuck up on the minivan parked across the street from my office and rapped on the window with a box of Krispy Kremes for the two agents. Almost as good as Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop.
“They show you a warrant?” I asked.
“Sí, Señor. I wouldn't have let them in otherwise. … Oh, and someone else—he drop this off for you,” Juanita said. She reached in her drawer and pulled out a pale blue envelope. No return address. Inside was a crude drawing of a
n eagle, or maybe a hawk, and two words in capital letters: FLIGHT CANCELED.
I know a handful of antifalconry, supposedly animal-rights types in town.
“What is it?” Toronto asked.
“Someone with a sick sense of humor.”
“Thanks, Juanita.” I limped around her desk and tossed the envelope and its contents into the wastebasket behind her.
“What happened to you?” Juanita said.
I grimaced. “Stepped on a garden rake.”
“A garden rake?” She looked skeptical.
“Gardening,” Toronto said.
The two of us walked up the stairs out of earshot. “How you wanna handle this?” he said.
I shrugged. “Not like my office hasn't been searched before.”
“I only need to send a fax and spend a few hours on-line and I'll be able to tell you anything you want to know about those Second Millennium accounts.”
“You know I've been thinking about that. Why don't you let me talk to Bill Ferrier, get him to do it for us this time? That way, it'll be nice and legal if it comes down to pinning something on Tor Drummond.”
“Be still my hacking heart. All right, if you say so, boss.” He glanced up the stairs. “We've still got a problem though. What about the Gestapo upstairs?”
“I'm thinking divide and conquer.”
“Yeah?”
I checked my watch. ‘Terrier's usually having coffee about this time at a place across the mall. I might just pay him a visit. Meanwhile, you could go on up to my office and—without interfering or being in any way threatening, of course—do your best to intimidate the living bejeezus out of whoever's there.”
“Bejeezus,” he said. “I can do.”
“How's it feel to be on the sidelines?” I did my best to smile brightly for so early in the morning.
Bill Ferrier glared at me from behind his cup of coffee.
“Sit down,” he said.
The morning crowd at Chaps was light. My favorite hangout on the mall, Chaps offered coffee and doughnuts, but specialized in multiple flavors of homemade ice cream, shakes, and malts, not to mention the fifties memorabilia plastered everywhere in pleasant disorganization, cool metal-and-vinyl booths, even an authentic Rockola Princess jukebox.