by Stuart Woods
“Yes, that was an impressive display.”
“I designed and manufactured them. I began twenty-five years ago, right out of Caltech, by designing an aircraft radio. It was smaller and cheaper and just as effective as anything else on the market, and it made me a small fortune in just a few years. Being a private pilot—I owned a little Cessna 182, at the time—I started dreaming up new ideas for the cockpit. I bought a couple of other companies that made other aircraft products, and I took in a couple of partners by trading stock for their companies. A few years later we had a whole suite of avionics for light aircraft, and then I heard about the global positioning system, which is a network of twenty-five satellites circling the earth and which, at that time, could be used only by the military. I saw the possibilities, and I got a license from the government, in my own name, to design a civilian receiver. Both my partners were older than I and wanted to retire, so I borrowed a lot of money and bought them out, giving them a handsome profit, and when the government finally opened GPS to civilian use, I was ready with the first receiver. That was the smartest move I ever made. The second smartest was to incorporate the screens used on laptop computers as cockpit displays and to design systems for corporate aircraft like mine, which sell at a lower price than the competition.”
“And you’re completely retired now?”
“Yep. I’m going to concentrate on you, now.”
“Well, I assume that, since you seem to spend money like a drunken sailor, you must be fairly well off.”
“Ellie, my darling,” he said, “you will never have to worry about money again.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. I’m afraid my late former husband died without a will, and a huge fight with his children over the estate ensued. I had no stomach for the courts, so I lost out.”
“I’ve already given my lawyer notes for a new will, and it will be signed in a day or two.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said, squeezing his hand. “You’ve no idea what a relief that is to me.”
“By the way, you’re free to do anything you want with this apartment. Throw everything away and start from scratch, if you like.”
“I like most of it very much,” she said. “Maybe a new paint color here and there; it’s mostly Wright as it is.”
“Spend like a drunken sailor, as you put it; I can afford it if you spend like a drunken navy.”
Barbara laughed and squeezed his hand again.
“By the way, I thought I’d take you on a little honeymoon tomorrow.”
“That’s fine with me,” she said. “I would like a little time to think about what to do with the apartment. Where do you want to go? Where will we jet off to this time?”
“It’s close enough to drive,” Walter said. “Let it be a surprise.”
“You may surprise me all you wish,” she said, pouring them another martini from the shaker.
EAGLE AND SUSANNAH were finishing dinner at his house when the phone rang. Eagle took it in the study; he didn’t want Susannah to worry about this.
“Hello?”
“Ed, it’s Vittorio.”
“Thanks for returning my call, Vittorio,” he said. “Are you available for some work?”
“Yes, but I’m still in Los Angeles. I finished another job yesterday, and I thought I’d take a day or two off.”
“It’s good you’re there. Call Cupie and go see him, will you?”
“Sure. I saw him briefly after we testified. What’s the job?”
“Cupie will brief you.”
“Come on, Ed, what are you not telling me?”
“It’s about Barbara,” Eagle said.
“Oh, shit,” Vittorio replied.
13
EAGLE WAS FINISHING a sandwich at his desk the following day when his secretary buzzed him. He picked up the phone. “Yes?”
“Mr. Eagle, there’s a gentleman on the phone who says he’s calling from Rome, Italy, and he says he needs to speak to you urgently. His name is Donald Wells.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You want me to get rid of him?”
Eagle sighed. “No, I’ll speak to him.” He pressed the flashing button. “This is Ed Eagle.”
“Mr. Eagle,” the man said, “my name is Don Wells.” His accent was American.
“Yes, Mr. Wells, how can I help you?” He tried to convey that he was very busy and that the man should hurry up and get to the point.
“I’m in Rome, at the Hassler Villa Medici Hotel, and I received a phone call a few minutes ago saying that my wife and son have been kidnapped.”
“Mr. Wells, I think you want the FBI, not an attorney.”
“Yes, of course, but I’m a rather well-known figure in the film industry, and I don’t want to be on record as having called the police, if this should turn out to be a hoax. These things have a way of finding their way into the press, and that would be embarrassing for my wife and me.”
“What would you like me to do, Mr. Wells?”
“I have homes in Santa Fe and in Malibu, but neither phone answers. Could you possibly go to my Santa Fe home and take a look around and call me if you find anything that might indicate that something untoward has occurred? And could you arrange to have someone in L.A. check the Malibu house?”
“Mr. Wells, it would be a lot cheaper just to call the police in Santa Fe and Malibu.”
“I’m not concerned about your fees, Mr. Eagle. I know your reputation, and I would very much appreciate it if you would handle this for me.”
Eagle took a deep breath and let it out. “All right, Mr. Wells. Please give me your Santa Fe address and tell me how to get into the house.”
“The address is 180 Tano Norte. Do you know the road?”
The place was out past Susannah’s house. “Yes, I know it. If no one answers the bell, how will I get in?”
“There’s a rack holding half a cord of firewood to the right of the front door. There’s a key under the left end of the rack.”
“How about Malibu?”
“The house is in the Malibu Colony. You know it?”
“Yes.”
“Your people should just ask for the Wells house at the gate and give the guard the password, which is Featherweight.”
“Featherweight, all right.”
“And the key is in a window box to the left of the front door.”
“And how do I reach you?”
“You can call me at the Hassler, or you can reach me on my international cell phone.” He recited the number.
“Mr. Wells, where would you expect your wife and son to be on this date?”
“I haven’t spoken to them for a couple of days, but my wife had planned to fly from L.A. to Santa Fe for a few days. She just wasn’t sure yet when she could get away.”
“And to which address should I send my bill?”
“Please send that to my business manager, whose office is in Century City.” He gave Eagle the address.
“One more thing, Mr. Wells: How would your wife and son be traveling from L.A. to Santa Fe?”
“I’m in a fractional jet program call NetJets, and we fly out of Santa Monica.”
“Have you called them?”
“Not yet; I’d like to hear your report first.”
“Can you give me a physical description of your wife and son?”
“My wife—her name is Donna—is forty-nine years old, five-seven, a hundred and forty pounds, blonde hair; my son is fourteen, about the same height as his mother, dark hair, a hundred and thirty pounds. His name is Eric. He’s autistic.”
“Is he in school somewhere?”
“No, his mother has home-tutored him, with the help of various teachers, since he was nine.”
“How functional is he?”
“He doesn’t talk much, but most people wouldn’t know he was autistic on meeting him in our home, but he becomes anxious, if he’s away from his mother or me, and then he can be difficult to deal with.”
“I’ll
call you back when I know more,” Eagle said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Eagle hung up and called Cupie Dalton’s cell number.
“This is Dalton.”
“Cupie, this is Ed Eagle. Are you still in L.A.?”
“Vittorio and I are on the way to the airport for a flight to San Francisco.”
“I’ve got a detour for you,” Eagle said, then explained what he wanted.
“Okay, we’ll get a later flight to San Francisco.” Cupie hung up.
Eagle looked at his watch, then got his coat and hat and walked out of his office. “I have to run an errand,” he said to his secretary. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
14
CUPIE CLOSED HIS cell phone and turned to Vittorio, who was driving. “U-turn, pal.”
“What’s going on?”
“That was Eagle on the phone. He got a call from Rome from some guy named Wells, who says his wife and son may have been kidnapped. We have to go and check out his Malibu house for any evidence of same.”
Vittorio shrugged. “Okay.” He whipped the car around and gunned it.
“And let’s not get arrested on the way.”
“Aren’t you carrying tin?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like to use it with a cop for something as light as a speeding ticket.”
Traffic was easy for L.A., and soon they were on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading north.
“You ever been out here?” Cupie asked, as they came to the long string of cheek-by-jowl beach houses that composed most of Malibu.
“No,” Vittorio said. “With these houses jammed together like this, how does anybody get to the beach?”
“That’s the idea,” Cupie replied. “Nobody does, unless he has the keys to a house. Keeps out the riffraff. It’s a long walk from the nearest public beach to out here.”
“I thought all the beaches in California were public.”
“There’s public, and there’s public.”
They passed the turnoff for the little shopping center that passed for Downtown Malibu and soon turned off the highway into a driveway blocked by a guard shack and a bar across the drive. A uniformed guard stepped out of the shack and waited for them to come to a halt. For a moment he eyed the odd pair: a cherubic man in a seersucker suit and an Indian dressed in black. “Can I help you?” he asked.
Cupie flashed his LAPD badge, the slightly smaller version that retired cops toted. “We’re here at Mr. Don Wells’s request to inspect his property. The password is Featherweight.”
The guard went back into the shack, checked something on a clipboard and pressed the button that raised the bar. He waved them on.
Vittorio followed Cupie’s directions. “You been out to this place before?”
“A few times. These are some of the most expensive houses in the United States. Over there,” he said, pointing at a large house that backed up onto the beach. “See the sign? Wells.”
Vittorio pulled into the driveway. Cupie’s car was a gray Ford Crown Victoria, chosen because it looked like an unmarked police car, just for occasions like this. Nobody was going to call the cops, if they thought the cops were already there.
Cupie found the key in the window box. He pulled a wad of latex gloves from a coat pocket and handed a pair to Vittorio. “Don’t touch anything, even with these, unless you have to. We don’t know what we’re going to find, and if it’s bad, we want to be investigators, not suspects.”
Vittorio nodded.
Cupie unlocked the door and tapped the alarm code into the keypad. “Alarm was armed; that’s a good sign.” He led the way down a long entrance hall, more of a gallery, really, hung with a collection of abstract paintings. “Let’s stick together,” Cupie said, “and be careful.”
“Come on, Cupie, you think I don’t know how to deal with a crime scene?”
“Four eyes are better than two.” Cupie produced a flashlight about four inches long. They walked into a large living room with glass sliding doors overlooking a porch and the beach at one end. The room was a good forty feet long, Cupie reckoned. “Great for entertaining a hundred and fifty of your closest friends, huh?”
“I could get my closest friends into a jail cell,” Vittorio remarked. “This place looks like a platoon of maids just left.”
Cupie used his flashlight to illuminate corners of the spotless room. He looked under sofas and chairs, too. Nothing in the living room. They moved into the next room, a library, with a spacious home office off one end. Nothing.
They retraced their footsteps and crossed the hall into a large dining room, then through a swinging door into a kitchen, appropriate for a large restaurant. The block holding all the kitchen knives was full—no empty spaces—and everything was perfectly neat.
“Upstairs,” Cupie said. “Stay close to the wall, behind me, and don’t touch the banister.” There was a huge master suite upstairs that included two dressing rooms and two baths. Vittorio looked in the closets. They crossed the hall and walked into another bedroom.
“The kid’s room,” Cupie said, “but weird. No rock posters, no sports-team pennants. I’ve never seen a kid’s room this neat.”
Vittorio checked the closets, too. “This place is untouched by human hands,” he said.
Cupie led him back downstairs and to the kitchen. “Guesthouse at the other end of the pool,” he said. He opened a sliding glass door and walked the length of the fifty-foot pool. The front-door key worked in the guesthouse door, too. They found two bedrooms and a sitting room, and the place smelled a little musty, as if unused for a while. “Let’s walk the perimeter of the property,” Cupie said.
They did so, finding no footprints outside ground-level windows, no sign of forced entry. They reentered the house through the kitchen sliding door. Cupie called Ed Eagle’s office.
“He’s out for an hour or so,” the secretary said.
Cupie thanked her, hung up and called Eagle’s cell phone.
“Eagle,” he said.
“We’re in Malibu,” Cupie said. “The house is clean as a whistle. Any criminals operating here had a lot of house-cleaning experience.”
“Lock up and wait in your car to hear from me,” Eagle said. “I’m almost to the Tano Norte house.”
EAGLE PULLED INTO the driveway and stopped in front of the house. It was a typical Santa Fe home for an affluent family, he thought. Looked to be seven or eight thousand square feet, richly landscaped with native plants, guesthouse fifty yards down a flagstone path. He walked around the house and found nothing more surprising than a four-car garage, then he went back to the front door and found the house key under the firewood rack.
He rang the bell a couple of times and, getting no response, tried the front door, which turned out to be unlocked. The alarm system was not armed, either. “Hello!” he shouted, but got no answer. He turned right and came to the kitchen, a big room, with all the usual top-end appliances: SubZero fridge, Viking range, two Miele dishwashers. Not very different from his own kitchen, he thought.
He checked the dining room next door, then walked into the living room, which seemed to be in perfect order. He walked across a hallway to a large study, with many books on the shelves, then left it through another door and came to what seemed to be a wing of bedrooms. Directly ahead of him was a set of large double doors. He opened one of the doors and stepped into the master suite. Immediately, he detected a familiar odor, but he couldn’t place it. He stopped and thought about it, then it came to him.
It smelled like a butcher shop.
15
EAGLE TRIED NOT to move his feet. He leaned over and looked into the bedroom. He could see the corner of the bed and a pair of feet, a woman’s, with one shoe missing. He took a deep breath and walked into the room, keeping near the wall.
He stared at the bed for a long moment, until he was sure he had seen enough, then he retraced his steps and stood in the hall, taking deep breaths. When he had calmed himself, he went to his cell
phone’s address book and called the district attorney’s direct office line.
“Bob Martínez.”
“Bob, it’s Ed Eagle. Write this down: I’m at 180 Tano Norte, that’s the old County Road 85, renamed a few years ago, runs off Tano Road.”
“I know it. What’s up?”
“I had a phone call an hour or so ago from a man named Donald Wells, calling from Rome. He said he had had a phone call saying that his wife and son had been kidnapped, and he asked me to check it out.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No, he didn’t want that, unless something was confirmed.”
“And … ?”
“And I’m at the house, and his wife and son are dead in the master suite. There’s a lot of blood.”
Martínez was not fazed. “Okay, call nine-one-one right now, and let’s get this on the record. I’ll be there soon.” He hung up.
Eagle called 911 and answered the operator’s list of questions, then he went outside and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch to wait for the police. His cell phone vibrated.
“Ed Eagle.”
“Mr. Eagle, it’s Don Wells. Your office gave me your cell phone number. I wanted you to know that I went downstairs and spoke with the manager, who spoke with the hotel telephone operator on duty. The call I got about the kidnapping came from my Santa Fe house.”
“Tell me about the call.”
“The phone rang, and I picked it up. There was a kind of click and I heard some sort of computer-generated voice, a recording, I guess. It said something like, ‘We have your wife and son. Start raising five million dollars, and we will contact you about arranging payment. If you tell anyone about this, your wife and son will be killed.’ Then there was another click, and the line went dead.”
“Mr. Wells, are you sitting down?”
“Yes, I’m at the desk in my sitting room.”
“I’m at your house now, and I’m sorry to tell you that your wife and son are dead.”
There was a long silence, and when Wells spoke again his voice was unsteady and his breathing audibly shallow. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sorry, I am sure. I’ve called the police and the district attorney, and I’m waiting for them to arrive.” Eagle heard the sound of a police whooper from somewhere up the road. “I can hear them coming.”