“She was on my tail this morning,” the man said, holding his rib cage. He gave the colonel a quick and factual account of the chase and how he’d doubled the chase back on her, climbing high and watching Dinah from the parking garage.
The fourth man looked at the picture, too. “Same one who shot you the other night.”
The colonel scowled. “What’s your level of confidence that she didn’t follow you here?” he said in a whispery voice, as if he might be heard outside the house.
“I was careful,” the man said. “I don’t think we need to worry.”
“Well, we’re going to worry anyway,” the colonel said. He pointed to the tech. “Keep your eye on that monitor.” Then, to the fourth man, he said, “We’ll keep an eye out and see if they show up again. We’re close to deadline.” He pulled the picture of Mattie off the printer. “And what about this other woman?”
The man told the colonel about Dinah getting a phone call and ducking into the vegetarian restaurant. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe coincidence.” The colonel gave him a skeptical look. Coincidence was bullshit.
“The hippy-chick does look familiar,” the tech said.
“She’s a street singer. You’ve probably seen her when you were walking around town,” the man said, sliding his grip across his aching ribs.
“No, there’s something else,” the colonel said. “I’ve seen her someplace before. Not just singing on the street.” He held the picture to his face. Then he snapped his fingers. “Can we pull up the video we took at the roller derby match?”
The tech clicked some keys and called out a file name and number. The colonel went to his laptop, brought up the file, and watched the jumpy video. The colonel hit fast-forward. When he got to the place where Emily Elah entered, he slowed down to normal speed, and when she walked to the railing and started talking to the tall girl with the long legs, he reduced it to slow motion. When the girl turned her face to the camera, he froze the frame and zoomed in.
“That’s her,” the man said. “Good eye, sir.”
“It doesn’t tell us who she is. She shouldn’t be hard to find if she’s a street musician,” the colonel said. “It does tell us she’s involved with the Elahs, especially after this morning. We definitely need to find her and see what she knows about Francis and everything else.”
“That could change things,” the man conceded.
“Speaking of changing things,” the colonel said, “I haven’t given you the headline news yet.” With that, he went to the right-hand side of the whiteboard, crossed out the last date on the countdown and looped an arrow up to the preceding one.
The tech sat up straight, interrupted. “Hey, check this out.”
The man came around and looked at the monitor in time to see an old Volvo pass by. The Colonel grunted. The picture was not good enough to see anyone or anything inside. The car was moving very slowly.
The man realized they were watching a crappy picture of something he could easily see with his own eyes. He bounded up the stairs to get to a window in one of the front bedrooms. He spied his mark and returned downstairs and paused in the doorway.
“You saw the car?” the colonel asked.
“It was them. The female cop and her boss,” he said.
“There they are again,” the technician offered, “coming down the alley.”
The man dashed to the kitchen in the back of the house, moving the curtain slightly to peek out. He held his breath as the car glided past, and in the silence, he heard the call of a crow.
The colonel exhaled loudly. “Okay. Maybe we do something about these two. Just remember, we can’t get carried away. And right now, we have more urgent business.”
CHAPTER 33
We’re Going In
When Segal met with the captain to talk about raiding the house, the captain didn’t want to hear about the crow or the training platform. In fact, he seemed more than a little distracted and more than a little worried. Segal went through the part about Dinah following the guy based on a tip. He left out the part about asking the street people for help. He also left out the part about Dinah not having a badge or a gun. When he got to the part about the crow in the tree outside the house and the platform, his boss raised a hand.
“Just stop,” his boss said.
“Look, I know how it sounds,” Segal said. His boss wasn’t buying it.
“No, I don’t think you do. I think you’ve been working on crows and raccoons and mule deer so much in the past few days, you don’t know how far you’ve departed from reality. Or how this stuff sounds to halfway normal people. Not that I know that much about halfway normal people anymore,” he added by way of stepping off the soapbox.
Segal opened his mouth.
His boss held up his hand again. “What I want you to say is that you think you have probable cause to go into that house. If you tell me you think you have probable cause, then I will meet with the judge myself and get a warrant.”
This was not how Segal had expected the meeting to go. “I thought you would tell me I didn’t have enough evidence for a warrant. Then I would have to convince you to give me more manpower to watch the house to get something more definite. We’d stake out the house.”
“Well, Segal, I don’t think you appreciate the time factor, brought on by events you have no clue about. I’m not telling you to sit on the house. I’m asking you to tell me you feel like you’ve got probable cause.”
Segal knit his eyebrows together. The roles were reversed here. His boss was usually the meticulous one, telling him to take his time and document everything, one careful step after another. “Are we getting pressure from ONI?” he asked.
“We’re getting pressure, all right. I’m not at liberty to talk about it other than to tell you we need to close this one with all dispatch.”
The boss said it with an intensity Segal had seldom seen him reach. And when he was through, he continued to look Segal in the eye with the same intensity.
Segal absorbed this for a beat and then said with certainty, “Boss, I feel we have probable cause to go into that house for the purpose of apprehending suspects in the recent murders and also for collecting evidence concerning those crimes.”
“Good,” his boss said. “Start making your plans for later today.”
Segal got up to leave.
“And Segal,” his boss said, “you’re taking ONI in with you.”
Jerome Guilford was wearing a white shirt and blue tie and suit pants and over that a lightweight navy-blue windbreaker. On his feet were the perfect brown shoes.
“At least he looks good,” Dinah said under her breath. “Kind of like a game show host dressed up to play FBI.”
Segal winced. He sat in the passenger seat of his Volvo in the alley behind the house. A minute ago, they had cruised by, noting that the white van was gone. Earlier, it had been photographed sitting in a little gravel pull-off underneath a black walnut tree, and Segal had wondered how many vans these guys had. He also thought what a bad idea it was to have a walnut tree beside a parking place. Now, they were positioned where a small garage shielded them from prying eyes in the house. They were waiting for the signal from Jerome Guilford.
Between houses, they could see to the street. They saw Guilford and a couple of his men pull up in an unmarked car. At the same time, one of their own vans arrived across the street. This, Segal knew, contained several tactical people for backup.
The radio crackled. Guilford’s hushed voice. “We’re going in.”
“I’ll bet he’s been waiting his whole life to say that,” Dinah said.
Segal smiled. “The next sound you hear will be Jerome telling us the house is empty.”
“Yeah, I feel it, too,” Dinah said.
It was a thing they had discussed in the past, how a house had a certain look and feel to it when no one was there. He was reluctant to voice the words because he did not want them to be true.
He knew it was true.<
br />
The radio crackled: “The house is empty.”
They got out and walked over, and Jerome Guilford opened the back door for them. Segal noticed the security camera as he came up the steps.
“Looks like they left in a hurry,” Jerome said.
Segal could see why he said that. The place was a mess: empty boxes, cans, furniture askew. They walked through the kitchen and into the dining room.
Guilford pointed. “Looks like this might have been their command center.” He stroked his gloved fingertips over the empty tables and the few chairs scattered around. At one of the tables near the wall was the junction box where the cables from the various security cameras came together. The monitor was in place, blank. The computer gone.
Dinah’s main attention was on the whiteboard mounted on the other wall. It had been wiped clean, but the job had been hastily and not quite completely done. Here and there small black marks were visible. Segal joined her. Dinah put her nose close to the surface and gave a sideways glance toward Segal.
“Looks like they taped some things on the board, along with the writing,” she said.
He made out the little rectangular places where the tape had been.
One of the ONI guys walked in with a small toolbox. He set the toolbox down and removed what looked like a work light from it. He closed the blinds in the room and switched on the special light and held it close to the whiteboard. The purple glow brought forth the recently erased letters. “Better get some pictures and notes,” the guy said. “The traces of ink don’t last forever.”
Another ONI guy brought up a camera and took photos. Dinah secured one with her phone while Segal studied the scene, trying to reconstruct what the room and its occupants must have been like a couple of hours ago.
The special light confirmed what Dinah had said about tape on the board. They could see the little rectangles immediately above an open space where a picture must have been. Below, they saw names written in a precise and geometric hand: Francis Elah, Emily Elah, Suzanne Elah. In another column were the names Ira Segal and Dinah Rudisill. The column was entitled “Local Complications.”
“Something I can add to my résumé,” Dinah said.
“Looks like they had more pictures of you than me,” Segal said, pointing to the numerous spaces and arrows.
“I’ll try to take that as a compliment,” she said.
Segal read the headings across the top of the board. “Seems they were doing at least some of the same things we’ve been doing. Tracking people, trying to figure out how they relate to each other.” He pointed to the dotted lines and arrows connecting the picture spaces. He also saw that the names Gloria and Chickey had been roughly crossed out.
Dinah pointed to Lucile Devroe’s semi-erased name.
Segal nodded. “Yeah, I saw it.” He’d been trying to convince himself Lucile might not be in peril. Unfortunately, the board took away any illusion about that. Segal wondered what picture of her had been taped up there.
They moved on to the right side of the board and the column of dates. Each date was crossed out up to the current day. Three more were on the list. The last one had been crossed out and an arrow drawn looping up to the penultimate date, which had been circled.
“Looks like a countdown,” Dinah said.
“Countdown to what?” Segal asked. “That’s the question.”
“Whatever it is, odds are it takes place the day after tomorrow,” Jerome Guilford said behind them.
“It was moved up one day,” Dinah said.
Segal thought hard as he studied the dates. “Is something of significance scheduled in town for the day after tomorrow?”
“Or better yet, was something that was scheduled for three days from now moved up a day?” Jerome Guilford said.
“I’ll call Shirley Dawn at the paper,” Dinah said, pulling out her phone. “I’ll have her check with whoever puts together the community calendar section.”
“Hey, we’ve got garbage here,” a voice called. It was the same ONI guy with the special light.
Segal followed Dinah and Guilford and joined the other ONI man in the kitchen, where he was checking the cabinets. He held a small plastic garbage can in his hand. “I found it there,” he said, nodding to the open door of the cabinet under the sink.
Segal took the can from him and carefully poured the contents onto the kitchen table. The cuisine at Chez Bad Guy seemed to have centered on coffee, Slim Jims, and takeout food in nondescript containers. Not much to go on. Segal poked around in the other cabinets, which the ONI guy had left open. He saw nothing there except some unused plates.
Jerome Guilford bent and stuck his head in the cabinet under the sink. Segal could see in there too. There was a twenty-five-pound bag of cat food that was about half full.
“Looks like they’re cat lovers,” Guilford said.
Dinah came over. “I don’t think a cat has been here recently,” she said. “I’m really allergic to cats. I’m getting nothing.”
Segal examined the floor. “You’re right,” he said. “No bowls for water or food. No visible litter box or traces of litter or sand.” He took the bag and unfurled the rolled-up part. “I know where I’ve seen this before. It’s the same stuff Lucile feeds her crows out at Biltmore.”
The ONI guy had been diligently opening the Styrofoam food containers from the pile of garage. Along with the remains of Kung Pao chicken, he’d found a miraculously clean paper napkin folded into the shape of a bird. He interrupted them, held the bird napkin in the air. “Someone was into origami.”
Segal took it from him and slipped it into a plastic evidence bag. He held it up toward the ceiling light and showed it to Dinah.
“Looks like a swan,” Jerome said.
Segal said it at the same time as Dinah did: “Cormorant.”
Segal’s phone sounded, and he saw it was the captain calling. It was unusual to get a direct call from him, rather than one routed through dispatch. He stepped out to take the call.
When he returned, he motioned toward Dinah and said, “We have to go.”
“But Segal…”
He raised a hand to stop her. “The evidence-guys can process whatever else might be here.” Then he looked at the ONI men and said, “You guys, too, of course.”
Jerome Guilford held up his phone. “I need to go, too. How do I find the Grove Park Inn?”
Segal felt his lungs deflate. “You might as well ride with us.”
CHAPTER 34
Grove Park Inn
Segal took the wheel. The drive to the Grove Park Inn brought them through the heart of the city, then through the old residential district to the northeast and almost past the building that housed Creatures 2.0. They rode in silence, Segal mentally processing. Dinah was in the shotgun seat, flipping through her notebook. Jerome Guilford reclined in the backseat of the old Volvo beside a pile of paperback books, about which he showed no interest. He looked out the window, and Segal watched him take in the sights of the city, its buildings, its people.
“What do you think this is about?” Jerome asked as they left the commercial district. “What’s so important they call us out of a crime scene?”
Segal glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“Not sure. But for the last few days, something’s been going on.” Segal believed it must be something classified for his boss to pull him out of the raid.
“I heard the Grove Park Inn is an upscale place,” Jerome said.
“Hotel of the rich and famous,” Dinah said. “Always has been since it was built. You’ll see for yourself in a minute.”
After Segal wound the car up through a neighborhood of large old homes, past an elegant building of condos, and around a bend, the hotel came into view against the mountains. He noticed Jerome straining to see the enormous structure of gray stone. Impossible to take in. Too huge this close up.
Segal swung into the driveway and showed his badge to a bellman. “They’re expecting you,” the bellman
said, and waved him to a small parking area straight ahead, already partly occupied by several black SUVs. Segal wondered who exactly was expecting them.
When they got out, Guilford let out a low “Wow!”
Segal watched him gawk at the rear expanse of the inn. The walls were made of enormous blocks of gray, roughhewn granite. The roof, which curved down slightly over the top of the walls, was red tile. Rows of multi-paned windows marked each story. The effect was weight, strength, luxury. Even Segal felt the atmosphere washing over him; this was the kind of place you didn’t want to walk into looking like a slob. He straightened his tie as Dinah checked her hair in the mirror.
Segal entered the lobby with Guilford and Dinah following. He showed his badge to the girl at the main desk and asked for security. While she made a phone call, he took in the vast room. One of Segal’s favorite places in Asheville, the Grove Park Inn had changed little since the inn’s construction in the early 1900s. To his right was a huge sitting area with vintage Mission-style easy chairs and couches with wide armrests and generous, solid proportions. Segal thought about bringing a book there some rainy afternoon and sitting and reading for hours. Something by Fitzgerald or Hemingway—or better yet, Thomas Wolfe—would be excellent. Of course, this was one of those perfectly feasible plans that never seemed to materialize.
On either side of the room were two enormous stone fireplaces. There was no fire this time of year. Later there would be. As soon as the weather changed, guests could count on nice, warming blazes in both. On the other side of the fireplace to the left was a bar where, in his reading-day fantasy, Segal would have a drink after finishing his book. He could imagine Lucile Devroe joining him there, wearing a chic dress and that movie star hair of hers.
“Are you Segal?” A voice surprised him out of his trance. The man had a Grove Park security badge. He indicated they should follow him down a hallway to their left. As he walked, he saw photographs, mostly black-and-white, of various famous people who had stayed at the inn over the years. Movie stars, authors, Nobel laureates by the dozen. Politicians, too, were represented, including almost every president since the inn was built. It was photographic evidence that sooner or later, everyone comes to Asheville. Guilford grunted here and there. Dinah kept her notepad in front of her.
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