by Mason Cross
“You’ll call when you get there?” she asked again.
“Soon as I get there,” I agreed. “Long-distance team.”
She held her hand out again and I shook it. “Thanks again. For coming, I mean.” She hesitated for a second, then said it. “Rebecca must have meant something to you, huh?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said as I turned and walked out to the car.
“Blake,” she called after me. “What’s her name? Her real name.”
I hesitated, then answered without turning around. “Her name is Carol.”
14
Gage was a cautious type. That was why he had parked around the corner from Freel’s house. He locked the Jeep and walked briskly around the corner, not hurrying or skulking in the shadows, just looking like somebody out for an evening stroll. His eyes were constantly surveying the street, taking in the lighted windows in the other houses, checking the parked cars for anyone sitting in the darkness.
There were two cars outside the neighboring house to 32: one in the driveway, one at the curb, suggesting someone was visiting. Not a close friend, though, because there was more than enough room for two cars in the driveway. Perhaps the driver had not wanted to encroach on this personal space. He glanced at the blue Ford as he passed it to confirm there was no one inside and then looked at the house. The lights were on at the ground floor, but he saw no sign of anybody through the windows.
He slowed as he approached the six-foot wooden fence that marked the boundary with Freel’s house, and calmly checked the surrounding street again before turning and walking up the path, headed for the side passage to the backyard. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the folding leather wallet that contained his pick set, and then stopped as he rounded the corner and saw the back door. It took him a few seconds to work out what was wrong. The yard was low-maintenance, and neatly kept. Just a rock garden and a paved section at the back door. Flanking the door were two rows of pot plants. On the right-hand side of the door, the second-farthest pot from the door had been moved, judging by the semicircle of dust protruding from underneath it. He looked closer and saw a small hollow in the soil, as though somebody had recently dug something out of there. Like a spare key.
Gage scanned the ground floor windows, and then the second floor. No signs of life, or light. He listened carefully, and then moved toward the door. There was a small catflap set into the door, just a few inches wide. He crouched down and nudged it open a crack, moving his ear to the gap. He listened for a few seconds, hearing at first only the sound of his own heartbeat. And then he heard something else, from within the house. The soft creak of floorboards, as though someone was ascending the stairs, and trying to be quiet about it. Somebody who didn’t want anybody to know they were in the house.
Interesting.
Gage stood up and surveyed the yard. It was sheltered from the street by the bulk of the house, and the overhanging leaves of the thick trees at the far end blocked out a lot of the light from the sky. There was a small wooden storage shed at the far end of the yard. Casting another glance up at the windows, he moved quickly to the side of the shed and crouched down, watching the house. He saw nothing for long enough that he began to wonder if the creaking floorboards had been a trick of his imagination, or maybe a pet had been left in the house. No, Freel and his wife had left weeks ago. Any dog or cat unfortunate enough to have been left behind would be an ex-pet by now.
After five minutes, his patience was rewarded. He saw a brief glow of illumination in one of the second floor rooms. Someone had used a flashlight, but had been very careful not to shine it near the windows. Had he not been watching the windows so intently, it would not have been noticeable. The cautiousness went along with the creeping up the stairs. Somebody was searching the place. Somebody who had just as little right to be there as he did.
Five more minutes. The back door opened quietly and a man stepped out. He was mid-thirties, six feet tall, in good shape. He wore black pants and a shirt. He glanced from side to side, and then at the bottom of the yard. Gage resisted the urge to flinch as he looked directly at his position.
The man looked back at the door, and a woman came out. Shorter than the man, dark shoulder-length hair. They whispered something to each other, and the man glanced around the side passage to check the street.
Gage watched as the two of them headed back out to the street, and then listened as their footsteps faded ... and then got louder again. At first he thought they were coming back, and then he realized they were going into the house next door. The house with the blue Ford outside, where somebody was visiting. Again: interesting. Gage counted to a hundred after he heard the door open and close. Number 32 could wait until later. He was more interested in why the neighbor and a friend had been searching the house.
Gage examined the fence that separated the last known dwelling of the man he was looking for from that of the person he was now interested in. He satisfied himself that his next action was within the realm of acceptable risk before lifting himself up and over.
He dropped into the yard, immediately drawing back into the shadows at the fence as one of the rooms in the house was lit up.
He crouched motionless, watching as the man and the woman entered what looked like a kitchen and began talking.
He didn’t need to risk getting closer to know what they were talking about. What else would they be discussing? He was satisfied that the man was the visitor. Their polite, slightly guarded body language confirmed that these two people had only just met. From the way she moved around the kitchen, he knew the woman was on home turf. This wasn’t a romantic assignation though; this looked like business.
So she was talking to a stranger in her kitchen, right after the two of them had searched her neighbor’s house under cover of darkness. Who was the man? Did he have a connection with Freel?
Gage watched for another few minutes. It didn’t look like either of them were going anywhere.
He made his way back out onto the street and walked around to where his car was parked. He wound the windows down and let the cool night breeze drift across his face. He turned on the radio at a low volume and found a local talk radio station. He had no interest in what was being discussed, but it passed the time.
He waited ten minutes. Twenty. Almost half an hour. He was starting to wonder if the visitor was going to stay over after all when he heard the sounds he had been waiting for: the soft clunk of a car door closing, and then an engine starting up. Gage killed the radio, buzzed the windows up and hunched back in his seat.
He watched the blue Ford pass by. The man from the house was behind the wheel. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead. He didn’t look in the direction of Gage’s car.
Gage watched the taillights as the driver reached the intersection with the main through road. The Ford turned right, headed for the Summerlin Parkway. Gage buzzed the window down again and listened as the sound of the engine faded away into the susurrations of the night. That was one good thing about the suburbs, he had to admit. In the relative quiet, it was possible to isolate and keep track of a single engine noise or set of footsteps for quite a while.
He waited another couple of minutes. He opened the glove box and took out his Glock G43 pistol.
He walked back around the corner. Not hurrying, not skulking in the shadows.
The ground floor windows at Freel’s neighbor’s house were all now in darkness. The rooms at the front of the upper floor were too, though Gage could see slight illumination in one of them, telling him that a door was partially open and one of the interior rooms had a light still burning.
He continued past the house, his eyes reading the street, and he turned into 32 for the second time. He walked down the side passage into the backyard. Sure enough, there was one lit window in the house next door—on the upper floor, at the side. He stayed close to the fence, out of the line of sight from the window, and moved to the point where he had scaled the fence earlier. He glanced arou
nd again. Up and over once more. All of the rooms this side were in darkness. This time, he didn’t wait by the fence.
The back door was locked. He reached for the leather case that held his picks. It wouldn’t be locked for long.
15
Sarah was way too buzzed to sleep. After Blake left, she poured the remainder of her coffee into the sink and made herself a chamomile tea. After checking all the doors were locked, she turned the lights out and headed upstairs. She passed the bedroom and went into the study. She sat down at her desk and sipped the tea, looking at the big, dark house across the way.
Carter Blake seemed like he knew what he was doing. If anyone could find out where Rebecca ... where Carol had gone, maybe he was the guy. Blake’s parting confirmation that the woman she thought she knew hadn’t even used her real name should have come as a shock, but somehow Sarah had been expecting it.
What he had said made sense. If she accepted that she was right to be worried about what could have made her neighbors leave so abruptly, then it followed that tracking them down could be dangerous. But then again, she had never let a little risk get in her way in her old line of work. She turned on the computer. It made sense to look at the problem from a different angle. Up until now, she had focused more on where they could have gone. What Blake had said had her thinking about what could have motivated them to go.
A team, he had said. She didn’t know Blake well enough yet to tell if that had just been a line, a way to placate her while he did things his own way. Her instinct was the offer had been genuine. But either way, a team was what he was going to get.
They were sure the woman she now knew was named Carol had been to this Corinth place, but since it was uninhabited, there was a limit to what Sarah could find out about it from a distance.
She looked at the computer again and referred to the map to remind herself of the name of the nearest inhabited town, noting it down on the pad she kept beside her keyboard. Despite the name, Iron City wasn’t much of a city, with a population of only fifteen hundred or so. If Carol and Dominic had a reason to be in the vicinity of Corinth, whatever that reason might be, perhaps they had stayed the night in Iron City. Maybe that was where they were now.
She widened the zoom to see where else the couple might have gone. She scrolled north first, let her eye follow the highway through a series of small towns curving up and across until the road reached Flagstaff. And then she went the other way. Seen at this scale, the road seemed to meander aimlessly down toward the border, passing through Tucson and then a series of smaller towns with one-word names. She caught her breath when she saw the name of one of the last of these towns.
Quarter.
She stared at the dot on the map for a few seconds, hardly able to believe it. But it couldn’t be a coincidence. She Googled the town of Quarter. Compared to Iron City, it was a bustling metropolis, with a population of several thousand. She wrote the name next to Iron City on the pad. All of a sudden, it felt like she was getting somewhere.
Sarah didn’t have any direct contacts in that neck of the woods, but she thought she had something just as good: professional courtesy. A couple of minutes on Google told her that both towns still had some form of local media. Iron City’s was all online: a blog and Facebook page, run by one or two people by the looks of things. She was heartened to see that Quarter actually still had a real-live newspaper: the Quarter Observer. Both organs were easily contactable by email. She sent off two quickly composed messages giving her credentials and asking with help tracking down an old friend. After consideration, she left her cell number at the bottom. She was sure Carter Blake would have his own ways of tracking people down, but it wouldn’t hurt to put some feelers out.
She thought back to the barbecue. April 14th. A Friday.
What had happened then? She pulled up the websites of the Tribune, the Las Vegas Review Journal, a couple of the smaller local newspapers. Nothing much on the 14th, so far as she could see. One of the hidden disadvantages of online news: because newspaper websites are so fluid, they do not provide the time capsule of a printed newspaper. She could view all of the big news stories of that day easily enough, but she was missing the big picture. There was an online archive of front pages for the Tribune and she could try going through that in the morning, but that would only show the most newsworthy events. Besides, maybe nothing happened on the 14th. Maybe something happened before that, or something was about to happen.
She browsed for news stories in the weeks before and after, but she had no idea of what to look for, and nothing jumped out. She had tried looking for a trace of her neighbor online before, of course. She hadn’t been surprised when she couldn’t find one: no Facebook, Instagram, nothing. Rebecca Smith was far too common a name to be of any use by itself, and none of the pictures related to that name were of the Rebecca she knew. She would ask Blake for Carol’s last name when he called tomorrow. She delivered herself a mental kick for missing the opportunity to do so earlier. Maybe she would have more luck finding a trace of Carol in her previous life.
That made her think of all the names in the notebook. She clicked into her cloud storage, where the photographs of the notebook had been backed up. She looked at the page with all the signatures. All the different names.
Previous life ... which previous life would that be?
Suddenly, she heard the low creak of the kitchen door from downstairs, as if it was being opened as slowly as possible.
Somebody was inside her house.
She took a sharp breath and felt a chill travel the length of her spine. She reached for her phone and realized she had left it in the kitchen. She didn’t have a landline upstairs: the only wired-in phone in the house was downstairs in the hall, and she almost never used it.
She got up quietly and tiptoed across to the door and out onto the landing, taking care to maneuver around the floorboard that squeaked. The light was on in the living room, sure enough.
“Blake?” she called, putting a hand on the banister to steady herself.
She knew it would make no sense for it to be him. If he had forgotten something, he would simply have rung the doorbell. Whoever was down there, it wasn’t Blake.
There was no response. Dammit, why had she left her phone downstairs? And then she realized that maybe she didn’t need one. She stepped back into the study. She could email the police—that was a thing now, right? Emailing the police? Hell, she could tweet them if it ... her hand was inches from the keyboard when the screen and the lamp winked out. She turned around and saw that the light from downstairs had gone out. Whoever was down there had tripped the switch in the fuse box.
A paralyzing dread swamped her. She thought she had been terrified before, when the lights were on, but now ... she suppressed a whimper and hurried back to the bedroom door. She started to swing it shut, thinking she could drag the desk in front of it. And then what? Climb out of the window, she guessed. She paused and yelled out.
“Whoever you are, get the fuck out of my house. I already called the police and they have a car on the—”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
The voice came from right outside the door.
Sarah gasped and slammed the door the rest of the way shut. How could he have gotten up the stairs so quietly? The door stalled and she felt pressure pushing her back. She leaned her full body weight on the door, but it was no good. There was a grunt and the door smashed back into her face, knocking her on her back on the carpet.
Her eyes, still adjusting to the dark, made out a man in the doorway, silhouetted in the streetlight illumination shining up through the glass in the front door. The man didn’t move, just stood there, filling the space. He was big, wide as well as tall, and his head was completely shaved. He was holding something in his left hand.
“I have two questions,” he said, his tone calm and reasonable. “One: where is Dominic Freel?”
Freel? Was that their real name? It was clear who he was talking about. “
I don’t know,” she said quickly. “Please get out. I won’t tell anyone you—”
“I thought the police were on the way,” he said, his tone mocking. He held a hand up and she saw that what he was holding was her cell phone. He knew she had been lying. There was nobody coming for her.
“We’ll come back to question one. Question two: who is the man you were searching the house with?”
“Blake? I don’t know him. I never met him before tonight.”
“Why were you searching the house? What do you know about Freel?”
“Nothing!” she shouted. “If you’re talking about the guy next door, I don’t know him. His wife asked me to water their plants.”
She started to get up off the floor, but the big man held out a hand to stop her. She noticed he was wearing leather gloves. He had come prepared to break in and leave no trace. He stepped forward and crouched in front of her. Her eyes, adjusted to the dark better, saw a face that looked as if it was carved out of granite, a terrifying blankness in his eyes. On the right side of his face was an old, white scar in the shape of a crescent.
“I’m disappointed in the quality of your answers so far.”
16
I almost didn’t go back.
By the time I left Sarah’s house, I had forgotten all about the vehicle that had slowed as it passed by the house earlier on. There was nothing particularly suspicious about one particular car driving past on a suburban street, after all. But as I rounded the corner and saw the black Jeep parked at the curb a hundred yards away, I remembered that the car that had passed by earlier in the evening had been a Jeep too.