Martial Lawless (Calm Act Book 3)

by Ginger Booth

  Why would Beaufort have his office here with no communications? Emmett lived on his phone.

  I took my security sniffer out of my purse. My founding partners on Amenac, the Amen1 hacker team, were wizards in the cyber security arena. They developed these gizmos for surveillance protection during the heyday of HomeSec enforcing the Calm Act. Our lives depended on it. We’d made our peace with HomeSec now, but I still carried my comms sniffer wherever I went – handy for finding a better phone signal. And after repeated exposure to mortal threats, the paranoia is slow to wear off.

  The living room had only the familiar meshnet chatter. The desk in the office likewise. But yes, there was a WiFi signal by the office window. A bookcase stood beside the window, maybe 7 feet tall. I retrieved a three-step stool I’d seen in the kitchen to stand on. Yes, atop the bookcase was the usual accumulation of dust – who dusts above eye level? – with a scuffed blank spot. I held my sniffer there. Yeah. Right about there was a good enough WiFi signal to use a repeater.

  To test my theory, I replaced the sniffer with my phone. Yes, my voice-over-WiFi app would work there. But the WiFi was password-protected. On a lark, I tried ‘Marilou’, but that wasn’t it.

  “Dee, what are you doing?” Emmett asked, causing me to jump in surprise. He’d stepped into the office behind me to watch.

  “Investigating the house,” I said. “I think Beaufort had Internet and voice-over-IP. Someone took it, but I think he had a repeater right here to boost WiFi through the house. Probably a string of repeaters up the mountain from the hotel. Good system for giving a few people true Internet. Bit slow. You wouldn’t want many people sharing, though. Too little bandwidth. Say, Emmett, what were the kids’ names? Beaufort’s kids.”

  I tried Colin, Reba, and Beau as WiFi passwords to no avail. The name of their pet beagle. Then Beaufort’s 10-digit phone number in Pennsylvania, then from Leavenworth, which Emmett still had on his phone. That one did the trick.

  “Well, cool,” I said. “I don’t know what good it does us.”

  “Plenty,” Tibbs assured me. He rattled off the winning password from memory and wrote it down. “Dee, I’ll follow this up. See what else you can find.”

  Emmett didn’t even give me an atta-girl. He just walked back to the living room with his phone, still trying to make some sense out of his leads. I sighed and looked around the office, sitting perched atop my step stool. Where would he keep his backup drive? It’s possible the intruders hadn’t found it. Your average American, from before the Calm Act, might trustingly use backups to the cloud, or skip backups altogether. Beaufort wasn’t an average American. He was an Army Resco, like Emmett.

  Beaufort was also fairly tall, over 6 feet. Why keep a step stool in his kitchen? I relocated my step stool to mid-kitchen, then stood on its top step to gaze around. I wouldn’t put an electronic backup near anything electronic, the microwave, the fridge. My eyes fixed on the cabinets. They were just boxes affixed to the walls, with no crown molding. There was over a foot of gap between cabinet top and ceiling. I climbed down and moved the step stool to the cabinets farthest from the fridge, and climbed up. I was still shorter than Beaufort, and couldn’t see or reach the back of the cabinets, so I stepped up on the counter.

  “Got it!” I said, astonished it was that easy. I held up my prize to show Tibbs. “Backup drive.”

  Tibbs accepted my prize and gave me a slow smile. “Thank you. Do it again.”

  “Slave driver,” I muttered. I looked around, still standing on the counter. While I was up there, I might as well look at the top shelves of the cabinets. I found a corroded key, unlabeled. It was so old that I doubted it was Dane’s. He was a fastidious type of guy, like Emmett. But the key might open some part of the house. I climbed down from the counter and studied the kitchen drawers again more carefully.

  In the cutlery drawer organizer tray, I found a man’s gold wedding band, simple and heavy. The engraving said, ‘God For Me Provided Thee.’ I brought it to Emmett in the living room. “Could this be Dane’s?” I asked him, and told him where I found it.

  Emmett swallowed as he read the engraving. His voice had a catch in it. “Yeah. I heard Marilou say that to Dane. Joking around. Sounded nice.”

  I needed to keep in mind that Emmett knew these people. They’d fallen out over politics, but they cared for each other once. I lay my hand on his in sympathy, over the ring. He was still mad at me, so my touch was tentative. His wasn’t. He grasped my hand between his two, and squeezed.

  “We’ll get through this, Dee,” Emmett said huskily. No one else was in the room with us. “If you want to.”

  “Of course I want to,” I murmured. “I love you, Emmett.”

  He nodded brusquely. “Not here. Not now.” He gave my hand another squeeze and let me go. “Look upstairs?” he suggested.

  I wandered up and looked around. There were three bedrooms. Sadly, I was already fairly sure that no one named Marilou, Colin, Reba, or Beau had ever lived here, nor even their beagle. A man would stow his wedding band in the silverware drawer to keep it, not misplace it, but never use it again. Dane had lived and died here alone. The furnishings and belongings upstairs confirmed that.

  A framed photo of Dane and his family sat atop the dresser. Judging from his uniform, the Army plane, and a sea of milling military families, a friend probably took the picture before his last deployment. From what Emmett told us, he was on deployment in the Middle East when the U.S. unilaterally pulled the Army out of all of our foreign engagements in a rout. For a logistics officer, that must have been a betrayal and a nightmare.

  Dane and Marilou were both smiling blonds, as were the two younger kids. The third, eldest boy was biracial, but had his mother’s smile. Dane hugged him close. At the time of this picture, Colin looked to be about 14. Dane must have married his mother when Colin was a pre-schooler.

  Drat. I was starting to like one Dane Beaufort, deceased.

  His bedside table held a Bible, unsurprisingly. I picked up the heavy softcover to find a little memo pad stowed beneath. Dane apparently kept it to jot down thoughts while in bed. I didn’t read it. Emmett was better equipped to make sense of these things. He was a tidy man, Dane Beaufort. The Bible wasn’t betrayed by any sex toys or pornography in the room, just a bland officer’s wardrobe, neatly put away. Under the socks I found an old family album, photos from before digital took over.

  I brought my lean collection back to Emmett, and suggested he look over Dane’s uniforms for spares for himself. He shook his head. “How much longer are we here?” I asked. The four investigators seemed to be studying our found artifacts in the office, and Emmett wasn’t looking at the house at all.

  “If I said an hour, what would you do next?” Emmett asked.

  I frowned at him. “Check the lower level, I guess.”

  He frowned back. “Concrete slab.”

  “No, just a concrete front porch,” I returned. “The house is on a slope. The back yard is down one story.”

  Kalnietis overheard this, and traipsed along with me outdoors, down the side stairs and to the back yard. Yeah, no children had played here. The youngest Beaufort boy would be maybe 8 years old by now. There would be signs of that – bikes, balls, a basketball hoop. This compact urban back yard held a bit of grass and a vegetable garden, with a rusty old lonely lounge chair. With no other back yard at the same level, it could have felt intimate. But instead a giant brick apartment building, upslope, partly walled one side. Apartment windows overlooked the yard to the great downtown view.

  The house wasn’t just stilts in the back, to compensate for the slope. The lower level was walled in. It probably held the mechanicals, since I hadn’t found the furnace and hot water heater yet. I was too short, but Kalnietis peered in the single window and confirmed this. We found a door around the opposite side from the outdoor staircase. Kalnietis started to pick the lock, but I handed him the corroded key to try first. It worked.

  Stepping into the gloom, the half-f
loor looked like a typical basement to me. The laundry was in here, a trash can, lots of boxes. There was an old indoor staircase that once led up to the kitchen, but now dead-ended at the ceiling. Some decade or another, someone wanted a bigger kitchen more than they wanted indoor access to the laundry, an architectural choice I personally disagreed with. Especially in Pittsburgh, which received a lot of snow. The residual staircase now served as shelves, of a sort. There were a few spare WiFi routers, in their original boxes, of the sort one could use as a repeater. I nabbed one, then had to brush more dust off my only sober dress.

  Kalnietis poked in the boxes. “This is an armory!” he exclaimed. “Dee, could you get Emmett?”

  I shot Emmett and Tibbs a meshnet text, without comment. “Sorry,” Kalnietis mumbled. “I could have done that.”

  I didn’t feel drawn to poking around in the dust of an ‘armory.’ The undisturbed arrangement of munitions might mean something to Emmett. Not me. So I rolled the trash can out into the yard as a gift for Tibbs. Tibbs wore dirt-defying camouflage and latex gloves. I placed the WiFi router like a cherry on top. I wandered back to the garden, trying not to get my low pumps too muddy.

  The apartments blocked the southeast exposure, but the garden plot got some southwestern light. Judging from the vines, not quite enough sun for tomatoes, but plenty for everything else. He’d tended his garden well, Dane Beaufort. Most of the summer vegetables had been replaced by cool weather crops. Broccoli, cabbage, and lettuce were ready to pick, and some lingering tomatoes. I didn’t disturb the potatoes to check those.

  And yes, that handmade structure in the back corner was a chicken hutch. No chickens, however. Unless… I peered over the back fence, another half story down, into a neighbor’s sloping back yard. A boy, maybe 6 years old, was playing with a few chickens.

  “Well, hello!” I called with a smile. “My name’s Dee. What’s your name?”

  “Michael,” he admitted. “You shouldn’t be there. That’s Major Beaufort’s house.”

  “It’s OK,” I assured him. “We’re friends, trying to figure out what happened to Major Beaufort. Are those his chickens?” The boy nodded. “Did you know Major Beaufort, Michael?”

  “My parents work for him,” Michael said. “I’ll go get them.”

  I waited for him. My eyes fell on the chicken coop. This could have been Emmett. All of Dane Beaufort’s home, except for the missing family. Before I met him, Emmett’s life in New Haven probably looked a lot like this. I wondered if he’d been lonely. Easy enough to think that no one would have wanted to kill him. Except, the weather changes and impending end of the world made people awfully crazy.

  Chapter 6

  Interesting fact: Before the Calm Act, Pittsburgh was not especially devout for an American city. About 32% were Catholic, 25% Mainline Protestant, 15% Evangelical, 4% non-Christian, and 18% non-religious. However 85% believed in God, similar to Dallas Texas or St. Louis Missouri; 76% considered religion important in their lives, and 77% prayed regularly. Rural areas surrounding Pittsburgh were more religious, and more Protestant.

  Paddy Bollai, Michael’s cammie-clad father, stared at the bookcase in Beaufort’s office with open mouth and furrowed brow. He seemed an ordinary blue-collar guy, maybe 30 years old. “So you already took stuff?” he asked, puzzled.

  “No,” I said. “Someone went through the place. Wiped the computer, the phone. Stole the food. I think it was at night.”

  “The food? Hell!” said Paddy. “Just brought in a whole butchered hog and steer, too. Took most of it to the hotel. But still.” He ducked into the kitchen and scowled. “Whole freezer of meat. Gone.” So that’s what the washing machine shaped footprint was on the kitchen floor.

  Paddy turned back and pointed around the office. “That bookcase was a whole bank of electronic stuff. Big-screen TV over there. Couple monitors. Another computer. Missing filing cabinet.”

  “What makes you think it was at night, Dee?” Kalnietis asked.

  “Took the food, but didn’t touch the garden or the chickens,” I said. And they hadn’t rifled the armory. Just to be safe, Emmett had closed up downstairs before Paddy arrived. We weren’t mentioning the munitions unless he did. “I don’t think they were familiar with the place.”

  “Oh, it was last night, all right,” Paddy confirmed. “I came by around ten to drop off Dane’s phone for you, and everything was fine.”

  “Do you have the WiFi password?” Tibbs asked softly.

  Paddy provided one, different from the one we had. Tibbs made a note of it. “Oh, and there’s another password. But I don’t know that one. Password on the computer was Colin, capital C. Draw a Z for Zorro to unlock the phone. How’d you get in?”

  “Spare key under the doormat,” Emmett murmured.

  Paddy Bollai snorted and shook his head.

  “Say, Paddy, do you know where Marilou and the kids are?” Emmett asked. “Dane’s wife and children.” He led us all back into the living room to sit and talk.

  “Dane moved here alone,” Paddy replied. “Never mentioned a family. Didn’t say much about his past, really. He was Army Airborne, based in Kentucky. Served in the Middle East.”

  That seemed a pretty skimpy biography. During the introductions on our way upstairs from the back yard, Paddy told us he ran errands for Dane, as well as serving in the militia. His wife Alice was Dane’s housekeeper. Dane had lived in this house, with the Bollai family as personal helpers, for two years. It seemed strange that Paddy didn’t know about a missing wife and kids. But on second thought, I had a neighbor for several years with a teen-aged boy. I never learned where they came from, or who the boy’s father was, until after she died and Alex became my fosterling. If it’s painful, sometimes you don’t mention your past.

  Emmett moved on. “Alright. One of my top priorities is to contact Dane’s second in command. Where is he? Who is he?”

  “Davison?” Paddy asked, looking grim. “Yeah, you probably want Dwight Davison. We couldn’t reach him, so I dealt with the body.”

  Special Agent Kalnietis pounced. “You’ve seen the body? Where is it now?”

  “Took it to the coroner’s office,” Paddy replied. Good heavens, Pittsburgh had a coroner’s office? If we still had such things in Connecticut or New York, I hadn’t heard of them.

  Paddy showed Kalnietis how to get there on a local map. Pre-border maps weren’t very reliable, as tornado damage wasn’t reflected. And there weren’t any new maps. Paddy used the old maps with the streets overlaid on the satellite photo view, which showed tornado gashes fairly well. The old coroner’s office, police headquarters, and city hall were all tornado casualties, but the coroner herself survived. The new morgue was in a shopping district downtown.

  “Did you witness the murder?” Kalnietis followed up.

  “Murder?” Paddy asked. “Sorry. Dane was beat up real bad. I don’t know anything about murder.” As an afterthought, he answered the question. “No. I wasn’t there.”

  “But you saw the video? On the Internet?” Emmett prompted.

  Paddy shook his head. “Haven’t had video in a couple years. Except right here. With Dane.”

  “Dee, could you find us the video?” Emmett requested. “I never saw the original post.”

  We hadn’t set up the replacement WiFi repeater, so I went back to the office window to hunt for the oldest post on Amenac, and downloaded the video. Kalnietis continued grilling Paddy about details of his involvement. Apparently there was a rally that afternoon in a suburb, which Paddy didn’t attend. Someone called him over the WiFi voice network hunting for Davison, because Dane was seriously injured in an attack. When Davison couldn’t be found, the same person, a stranger named Paul, called back a couple hours later and asked Paddy where to deliver the body.

  Paddy hadn’t realized Dane was that badly hurt from the previous phone call. He was furious that the body had been moved before anyone investigated. But by then, Dane’s remains were in a flatbed truck heading into Pittsb
urgh. Paddy directed Paul to his house, and took over the body from there. He brought everything to the coroner.

  Hotel manager Wiehl called Paddy yesterday afternoon during the train attack. It was news to Paddy that we were coming to investigate the death. When he’d delivered the meat to the hotel the day before, Wiehl was expecting a delegation to talk about the industrial joint venture with Ohio. After Wiehl’s call yesterday, Paddy retrieved Dane’s cell phone from the coroner, and left it here in the house for us.

  I returned with the video to show Paddy, and texted a link to my co-investigators for later. I supplied Dane’s apparent last words, ‘We know what God demands of us.’

  Paddy looked alarmed at that. He shook his head while he watched the soundless clip, slightly puzzled at first, building to flat-out denial. “No… No, that’s not right…” he murmured.

  When the clip ended, Paddy asked if he could see it on a bigger screen. Tibbs started to ask what the issue was, but the IBIS agents discouraged questions at that point. So we re-played the video on Tibb’s portable, the largest display we had with us. Gianetti and Kalnietis flanked Paddy’s seat in the office, where they could watch the screen and him at the same time.

  Paddy didn’t shake his head and mutter denials this time. He was glued to the screen, looking for something in particular. He replayed the video a couple more times, then sloughed back in his seat. He didn’t look happy. “I’m not sure, but this guy,” Paddy advanced the video, then pointed at the screen with a pen. “That might be Paul. The guy who brought me Dane’s body.”

  Tibbs stepped in, zoomed in on the possible Paul, and ran the video through again. Paddy shrugged. The video wasn’t high enough resolution for the zoom to help much. Paul wore militia camouflage. Maybe a third of the crowd did.

  “Is anything else strange here?” Kalnietis asked neutrally.

  “Everything,” Paddy complained. “That’s a crazy thing to say in front of that crowd. This guy Paul told me Dane was attacked in Green Tree. But that’s Station Square, down by the river. Not a half a mile from here.”