Blonder crossed the highway and walked up to a Maple Hills policeman standing by the gate. Another Maple Hills officer sidled up to join them, his right hand resting lightly on the pistol holstered by his side. Blonder said something to the first policeman; the officer touched the tunic radio clipped to his epaulet and spoke into it. A minute later, the officer motioned for Blonder to go in.
Just then, a sudden gust of fire shot up, and for an instant, the very top of the dark gray roofline of Amanda’s house stood bright in silhouette against the orange sky, a few hundred feet from the center of the fire. I took a breath, relieved. The air coming in from Agent Other’s open window in front was acrid and stank of a chemical fire.
I leaned forward on the backseat and tried to sound calm. “Can’t you tell me any thing?” I asked Other.
Other didn’t take his eyes off the fire across the highway. “Agent Till called for us to pick you up and bring you here.”
“How about we get out and stand by the car?”
He grunted a no. I gave up and watched the flames poke at the sky. For thirty minutes, they raged higher and higher, showing no signs of diminishing. Then Agent Blonder came out of the entrance, crossed the street, and opened my car door.
“Agent Till would like to speak with you now, sir.”
I went with Blonder across the closed highway to the gate. The Maple Hills officer stood aside, and we went in.
To the right, both sides of Chanticleer Circle were lined, bumper to bumper, with fire trucks, ambulances, Maple Hills police cars, and two dark Crown Victorias. We moved down the center of the street, past the lot where the Farraday house had been, to the curve.
To the left, a dozen firemen in yellow slickers wrestled big tan hoses like giant pythons, aiming streams of water into the flaming pile. The roof and the walls were gone, but I remembered the house. It had been one of the largest in Gateville, a redbrick, gray-roofed Victorian, with at least five bedrooms, a four-car garage, and a solarium off to one side. Now it was a mound of burning wood and smoking bricks.
People from the surrounding houses stood on their lawns, watching the firemen and the police. One pointed at me.
Farther around the curve, Amanda’s house loomed in the glare of the fire, pulsing red from the flashing lights sweeping across its arched windows and massive walnut front doors.
Agent Till, wearing khakis and a beige button-down shirt, stood with Stanley Novak on Amanda’s driveway. They were talking to a dark-haired young man in a Crystal Waters security uniform. Though the August night was hot, superheated by the fire, Stanley wore a flannel shirt. He looked cold.
Till spotted Blonder and me and motioned for us to come up. Stanley’s eyes never left the face of the young security guard. Till turned back to the guard. “Tell me again,” he said.
The young guard rocked on his feet, side to side. “There was no warning. One minute everything’s quiet as a graveyard, the next second there’s a fireball in the sky, followed by a huge boom.”
“You’re certain nobody ran out just before the explosion?” Till asked.
“Not through the main gate,” the guard said. “And we’ve got four men on perimeter, watching the walls. They didn’t see anybody, either.”
Till turned to look at the fire across the street. “Damn it.”
“At least no one was hurt,” Stanley said.
The guard turned to look at him, his eyes wide. “The family was home, Mr. Novak.”
Till spun around. “You said the house was dark.”
“I meant they were asleep,” the guard said.
Stanley’s pale face froze in the flash of the red lights. “No. Check the sheet. They went to Door County for the week, left us a phone number for their place up there.”
The young guard shook his head. “They came back, Mr. Novak. The father, the mother, and the two little girls.”
“Impossible,” Stanley said. “I made my last round at eight. They weren’t home.”
“They got back a couple hours after you left. One of the girls had the flu, so they came home early.” The young man’s mouth trembled, and he looked away.
Stanley stared at the guard and then made a horrible churdling noise from deep in his throat. He pushed past me to run to two paramedics standing next to an idling ambulance.
“Did you get them out?” he screamed, grabbing one E.M.T. by the shoulders. “Did you get them out?”
The medical technician jerked his arms up and grabbed Stanley’s wrists, yelling back that there was no chance of survivors. Stanley struggled, unhearing, trying to wrest himself free of the man’s grip. Suddenly, he sagged and fell to his knees. “Shit, shit, shit,” he sobbed. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I ran over to him and put my hand under his elbow. “Come on, Stanley.” I tried to pull him up. He was dead weight.
Till and Blonder came over and, together, we half-carried, halfdragged Stanley away, down Chanticleer toward the guardhouse. He fought us, incoherent, alternately mumbling, then yelling for someone to go into the rubble. At the guardhouse, the guard at the console helped us get Stanley to his desk chair in the back office. Till and I sat down in the metal side chairs across from the desk. Blonder stood in the doorway, right behind me.
Stanley slumped in his chair and looked, unseeing, across the desk.
“Stanley? What did you mean about the family being not supposed to be home?” Till asked.
Stanley’s face tightened. He turned and reached for a clipboard hanging on the cinder-block wall behind him, moving his arm like it weighed a hundred pounds. “We have this sheet,” he said in a slow, dull voice. He took the clipboard down and dropped it onto the black plastic desktop. “The Members tell us when they’ll be gone, so we can keep extra watch …” His voice faltered.
“They were dead at the first blast, Stanley,” I said. “The paramedics couldn’t have done a thing.”
Stanley looked out the window, towards the inferno at the west end of Chanticleer Circle. His face was slack, devoid of expression. “Bastards,” he said.
I looked at Till, wondering if they had somehow learned that more than one person was involved. Till’s face was a blank.
“Let’s give him some time, Elstrom,” Till said, standing up. I followed him out of Stanley’s office. He led me to a quiet space by one of the pillars. Blonder came along, five feet back.
Till turned around. In the glare of the entry lights, I wondered how old he really was. Whatever his age, by the depth of the lines etched in his face, the years had been hard. I didn’t want to imagine what it must be like, trying to sleep with a head full of crazies carrying bombs and guns. It took far less than that to send me up to the roof of the turret in the middle of the night.
“Where were you last night, Elstrom?”
“Asleep. Ask your boys.”
Till looked past me at Blonder. “You think he was asleep?”
“Come on, Till.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Blonder responded. “Mr. Elstrom spends a lot of time on his roof in the middle of the night, and we can’t really see him up there. He could have been awake.”
“Watching the sky, waiting, Elstrom?”
“Jesus, Till.”
“But he’d been inside all night?” Till asked, still looking at Blonder.
“There’s only the front door. We had that covered,” Blonder said.
I stepped in front of Blonder so Till would have to look at me. “What are you saying?”
Till looked at me. “Like I told you before, motive and means. You’ve got both. You’re broke. You have a real attitude about this place. And you were left alone in your ex-wife’s house for almost a month before getting tossed out. You had plenty of time to plant a few bombs.”
“We’ve done this before, Till. It’s just as weak the second time around.”
He shrugged.
“That’s why you brought me here?”
“It’s not just my gut that likes you, Elstrom. My head does, too.”
Blonder’s breath tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. He’d moved closer, ready to snap handcuffs on me. I moved a step to the side.
“You’re grasping, Till. You can’t find Jaynes, you can’t make a case against Chernek, you won’t look for anybody else, so you’re aiming at me.”
“You really like Jaynes for this, Elstrom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Chernek?”
“You’re blowing smoke on him, trying to force a motive.”
“So who fits better than you, Elstrom?”
Behind me, Blonder exhaled softly.
“Maybe the missing man,” I said. “The one we don’t know about. The one who got in here tonight.”
Till watched my eyes. “There was another note, came day before yesterday. Two million.”
“They’ll never pay two—” I stopped. “It arrived the day before yesterday?”
He nodded slowly, his eyes still locked on mine.
“When was the payment supposed to be made?”
“Four days from now, Sunday night.”
“The note arrived day before yesterday, and the bomb goes off tonight? He didn’t give the Board time to pay.”
Till nodded. “Bingo, Elstrom. Ballsard called me two days ago, screaming, said they’d just received another note, this one demanding that two million be left next Sunday, same place. Ballsard said he couldn’t pay, not two million.”
“So what was the plan?”
“We were going to surround the drop site, try to grab him.”
“There was no way for the bomber to know you weren’t going to pay.”
“Bingo again.” Till’s eyes were hot on mine. “The bomber couldn’t know he wasn’t going to get more money—”
I finished it for him: “—unless he was connected to the investigation.”
“Bingo for the third time, Elstrom. You’ve got all the answers, and that brings us right back to you.”
“I didn’t know about the new note, Till.”
“Unless you sent it.”
“Even if I had, I couldn’t have known Ballsard wasn’t going to pay.”
“You could have had ways.”
“Why did you pull me out here, Till?”
“I wanted to watch you watch the fire.” Till turned to look up Chanticleer. There were only flashing red and blue lights now. The yellow glow from the flames was gone.
“Bingo your ass, Till.”
Till smiled.
Twenty-four
The Bohemian called at seven fifteen, his voice quivering like he was a hundred years old. “Four have died. Turn on your T.V.”
“Till hauled me out there. I just got back.” I held the cell phone next to my ear as I went down the stairs to the first floor. I’d left my television on the table saw.
“What the hell’s happening?”
“Hold on.” I switched on the little T.V., fiddling one-handed with the wire antenna until the snow went away. Agent Till was on Channel 7, standing at a plywood lectern in front of the green cinder-block wall at the Maple Hills police station. Black microphones with local T.V. logos were clustered in front of him. The crawler at the bottom of the screen said it was a live broadcast. “I’ll call you back,” I said, and clicked off. I turned up the volume.
Till was nodding at a perky young thing in a thin sweater. “Of course, we have to assume this explosion is related to the one in June. We’re not ruling anything out.”
The live shot on the screen switched to the composite renderings of Michael Jaynes. “What you are seeing now is computer-aged pictures of a man we are seeking for questioning,” Till’s voice said over the image on the screen. “His name is Michael Jaynes, he is sixty years old, and we believe he may have information about the explosions at Crystal Waters. We don’t have a current picture, only an old Army photo, which we have used to prepare several views of what he might look like now. We are asking anyone with any information to call us or the Maple Hills Police Department.”
“Any other suspects?” one of the reporters shouted.
The screen flashed back to the lectern. Till was looking right into the camera, like he was looking right into my eyes.
I squeezed the little television with both hands, as if I could keep the screen from showing the photo the Tribune had taken of me during the Evangeline Wilts trial. “Don’t do this, Till,” I heard myself say.
Till paused and then said, “None at this time.” He shifted his eyes from the camera lens—and from me. I breathed and relaxed my grip on the television.
“What else can you tell us about Michael Jaynes?” the early morning man from the local Fox affiliate asked.
The cameraman widened the view to include the area to the side of the lectern. Chief Morris, wearing a tight uniform, was standing a full step back and off to the side from Till.
“Unfortunately, very little,” Till said. “He was an electrician who worked on the construction of Crystal Waters. We believe he may have gained information back then that pertains to the current situation.”
“You’re going back to 1970 with this?” a reporter called out from the back row.
“We’re being thorough.”
“There is speculation that this is actually the third bombing at Crystal Waters this summer, the second being a lamppost outside the walls. What have you been doing since the house explosion in June?”
The room went silent. Behind Till, Chief Morris took another step back. Till gripped the sides of the lectern.
“We’re asking residents of Crystal Waters to vacate their homes temporarily—”
Pandemonium broke out as all the reporters began screaming questions at once.
“Are there more bombs?” someone shouted above the din.
“We’re going to conduct a house-to-house search for evidence,” Till yelled, holding up his hand for quiet.
He waited until the shouting stopped. “We have no reason to believe there are any more bombs. As a precaution, the road outside Crystal Waters is being closed to all public traffic, effective immediately. We need to keep spectators away while we conduct our investigation.”
“Are you cutting the electric to Crystal Waters?” a reporter at the front of the throng asked.
To the side and back from the lectern, Chief Morris shut his eyes.
“We might have to shut off the current to check the security of the electrical lines. Again, we’re just being thorough.”
A female voice: “You mean the bombs might be hardwired into—”
“What about Anton Chernek?” the Channel 5 field man said loudly from the front row, cutting her off. I turned up the volume on the T.V. The Channel 5 man had good sources, maybe good enough to have learned that I was a suspect as well.
“What about Anton Chernek?” Till repeated, looking almost gratefully at the Channel 5 reporter. The other reporters hadn’t picked up on the trampled question about hardwiring, the one question that, if answered, would have caused all the television stations to abandon local programming in favor of a vigil outside Crystal Waters, their cameras aimed for the big blow.
“You also have Chernek,” the Channel 5 reporter prompted.
Till stared at the reporter, feigning confusion. “We don’t ‘have’ Anton Chernek. We’re A.T.F. Mr. Chernek was arrested on an unrelated financial matter by the F.B.I., and he’s free on bond. Thank you,” Till said abruptly, as he stepped away from the lectern. Chief Morris scrambled after him.
The sweet young thing in the thin sweater filled my four-inch screen. “That’s the situation from Maple Hills,” she said, signing off, as the screen went to a live helicopter shot of Crystal Waters. From up high, the fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances parked crazily along Chanticleer Circle looked like toys discarded by a monster child.
I stared at the helicopter shot of the charred ruins of the house that had exploded just hours before, the newly landscaped Farraday lot around the bend toward the guardhouse, and, across the wall, the lam
ppost next to where the school bus shelter had once stood. All were in the same northwest quadrant of Gateville. I kept looking at the screen, still seeing the helicopter shot, long after the picture had cut away to a commercial.
I went outside. This morning’s Crown Victoria was black. The two young men inside were pretending to read yesterday’s newspaper.
I tapped on the windshield pillar. The agent in the passenger’s seat put down the newspaper and looked up at me, acting surprised.
“Tell Till I’m going to see Anton Chernek.” I walked away.
Five minutes later, as I finished changing clothes, my cell phone rang.
“Why do you need Chernek?”
“Nice job on T.V., Till. You lied about everything.”
“I kept you out of it, Elstrom. Now answer me, or I’ll have you brought downtown. Why do you need Chernek?”
“He’s got old blueprints of Crystal Waters. I want to look at them.”
“For what?”
“For divine inspiration, Till. And for proximity. Have you noticed that all the bomb sites have been clustered together in one section of Crystal Waters?”
“I’ll send an agent to get the prints.”
“No. Let me talk to Chernek; he’s not going to work with you. Besides, you know damned well it isn’t him. Or me.”
He paused. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
I called the Bohemian.
Till must have told the agents tailing me to give me some space. I was already out of the Jeep and going into the Bohemian’s building when they pulled into the parking lot.
Griselda Buffy sat at the desk in the empty reception area.
“He’s expecting me,” I said.
She gestured toward the door to the general office. “Entrez,” she said in what might have been flawless French.
The office was a crypt. No one was in the cubicles. I walked to the back.
The Bohemian’s door was open. I tapped on the jamb, and he looked up.
“Vlodek,” he said, trying to roll the first syllable on his tongue like always. But there was no enthusiasm in it now. He sat small behind his desk, a paled man going through the motions. On a table in the corner, a small color television flickered, its sound turned off. He motioned to a chair.
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