“A man, his wife, two daughters barely starting school.” His voice was dry, raspy. His eyes searched my face. “How can they think I did this?”
“They don’t. Remember, they’re watching me, too.”
“Agent Till mentioned Michael Jaynes on T.V. Are they getting close?”
“I doubt it. Till said that to give the illusion he had a lead.”
“Was there a note like the other times?”
“Two days before. Two million. But the bomber didn’t wait for the reply.”
The Bohemian put his elbows on his desk and leaned forward. “What is to be done?”
“I’m here to look at your blueprints again.”
He sank back in his chair. “Surely you don’t think I’m involved in the explosions.”
“No.”
“You don’t think I would kill a man, a woman, and two little girls.” His eyes looked like they were pleading.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You give people chances, not take them away. Like you did when you hired me.”
He gave me a tired smile. “I’d like to take credit, but it wasn’t me. Your friend Stanley said you would be ideal and could use the work. I liked the spirit of his suggestion and recommended it to the Board.” He pushed himself up. “Let’s get the blueprints.”
We went to a storage room. He unlocked a cabinet and took out the big paper roll. As he did, he dislodged a tan folder that fell to the floor. He leaned the roll against the cabinet, bent down to pick up the folder, and handed it to me. “I found this among the other papers. The sales brochure. Very selective, very private. We only printed three hundred and didn’t use half of them. As you know, the sites sold out immediately.” He picked up the roll of blueprints and locked the cabinet, and we walked down the hall. “Might as well use the big conference room. Keep the dust off the table.”
He switched on the lights in the large room we’d used only a few weeks earlier, when Till, Chief Morris, Stanley, the Bohemian, and I had met to strategize. Just a handful of weeks. Now a whole family was dead because the people in that room couldn’t put anything together.
The Bohemian set the drawings down on the table. “I will leave you to it, Vlodek,” he said, and went out.
I sat midway down one side of the table and started to unroll the blueprints, but then set them aside and picked up the manila folder the Bohemian had handed me. The sales brochure inside was printed on the kind of heavy tan parchment stock they use for menus at high-end restaurants. CRYSTAL WATERS, the cover proclaimed in two-inch dark brown script. Stacked below, one word per line, it read: BEAUTY. TRANQUILITY. SECURITY.
The first five of the six inside pages presented lavish half-tone drawings of the various stone and brick houses that were going to be constructed. Each residence was shown surrounded by mature trees and featured a view of the fountain in the middle of the pond. Superimposed on the renderings were short, pithy blurbs in tall script: “Secure in our world,” “Safe, because our children trust us,” and, across one idyllic scene of a family picnicking under an oak tree, “Chanticleer Circle, the safest street in America.” The bottom of every page was bordered, side to side, with a drawing of the brick wall that would enclose the development.
With serene drawings and soothing words, the marketing people had rendered the perfect world well. The only thing they’d missed was a sketch of the Stepford Wives, sauntering along in gingham, clutching bouquets of daisies.
The sixth page was the only one that gave details. As I started reading, I recognized the verbiage; they were the same words that had been used by the corn soufflé lady in the Maple Hills Assembler before Crystal Waters had been built.
I reread the closing paragraph several times. “From the impenetrable walls that enclose the community, to the fireproof construction, the security of the guardhouse, and the safety in the underground shelters, Crystal Waters will be the safest community in America.”
Underground shelters.
I unrolled the drawings, flipping quickly over the grading elevations, landscaping details, drainage specifications. I was looking for specifications for concrete, any kind of concrete. The road specifications were there, along with the foundations for the guardhouse, the fountain in the pond, even the base of the wall. But there was no information about underground shelters.
Without the torn-off index sheet, I couldn’t know for sure, but it was likely that at least some of the missing blueprint pages had to do with the underground shelters.
I rerolled the prints and took them to the Bohemian’s office. He was reading a computer printout on his desk, eating a small bowl of cottage cheese. “About the only thing my stomach can tolerate these days,” he said, gesturing with his spoon.
I leaned the roll of blueprints against the side of his desk. “Any chance the missing blueprints I told you about before had to do with bomb shelters?”
He set down the cottage cheese. “As I said, I keep the prints; I don’t use them.”
“It was you, though, wasn’t it, who drew light X’s on the Farraday house and on the old bus shelter?”
He nodded. “I was wondering about their closeness to each other.”
“And the house that just went up, that was close to the other explosion sites.”
“Yes.”
I set the brochure in front of him and opened it to the last page. “The last paragraph says there are underground shelters in Crystal Waters.”
He looked down at the brochure and read.
“They were never built,” he said, looking up when he was done.
“Why not?”
He pointed to the roll of blueprints I’d leaned against his desk. “Set those up here and I’ll show you.”
I put the roll on his desk, site plan on top. With a pencil, he drew five evenly spaced square hubs along Chanticleer Circle, centered within the edges of the street. “There were to be five bomb shelters, built under the road for additional protection,” he said.
Next, he connected each house to a shelter with double lines, in clusters of five or six houses for each shelter. “These were to be the tunnels, running from each basement to the shared shelter.” The tunnels fanned out from each shelter to a rough circle of individual houses. “I think some of the tunnels might have spurred off of one another, depending on the layouts of the houses, but this was the general idea.” He studied the clusters he’d drawn. They looked like five rimless wagon wheels running along Chanticleer Circle.
“That was the plan, anyway.” He picked up his cup of cottage cheese. “Narrow escape tunnels leading from the houses to central shared shelters under Chanticleer Circle, capable of withstanding a massive blast.”
“You say they were never built.”
“The first buyers weren’t comfortable with the idea of shared underground vaults. One who objected was your former father-in-law, Wendell Phelps.”
“Better to die than sweat together in fear?”
A tiny smile flitted across his face. “Perhaps, but by the time Crystal Waters was built, the big fear wasn’t nuclear war. It was the riots, the fires, the uprisings of the students and the poor, storming the citadels of the rich. Bomb shelters couldn’t protect against that. In fact, the shelters planned for Crystal Waters could be a threat. As Wendell, among others, pointed out, those tunnels were a way into the homes. Someone could break into one home, go through its tunnel to a shelter, and from there break into other homes. Wendell was right. The developers reconsidered and filled them in.”
“You just said they weren’t built. How could they be filled in?”
He tossed the cottage cheese cup in his wastebasket, picked up a pencil, and tapped the eraser on one of the hubs he had drawn along Chanticleer Circle. “The shelter vaults under Chanticleer Circle had to be built before the road was laid. I guess it would have been the tunnels that had to be filled in.”
“So the shelters are still there, under the road?”
He shrugged. �
��I would presume so.”
“And the tunnels going to them?”
“As I said, Vlodek, the idea was scrapped.”
“And the tunnels were filled in? Filled in, or never built?”
“Filled in—” He stopped when he saw the look on my face.
“For sure?”
He started to shake his head, then froze as the impact of what I was asking hit him.
“Where were the entrances to the tunnels?”
“Small openings, maybe three feet square, through the basement walls.”
“How about air shafts? Other ways in?”
“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know.”
I looked down at the rimless wagon wheel he’d drawn in the northwest quadrant of the development. I grabbed a fountain pen from a tray on his desk, unscrewed the cap, and started darkening the blueprint lines with black ink. From the hub under the road, one spoke went to the site of the Farraday house. A second led to the house that had just exploded. I darkened the lines of a third tunnel and looked at him.
His mouth worked for a minute before the words came out. “Amanda’s house,” he said. He looked up from what I had drawn. “Did you ever see an entrance in the basement?”
“There was none. But I only lived there a few months. I never had reason to examine the basement wall.”
“I don’t think the entrances to the tunnels were ever cut in.”
“You don’t think, or you don’t know?”
He started to say something, but I already had my cell phone out, punching in Till’s number. I got his machine. I clicked off, called Stanley, got his voice mail, too. All of Gateville could be blown to the moon with the flip of one switch, and nobody had time to answer the damned phone. I told Stanley’s machine to tell Till to comb the grounds looking for air shafts leading down to tunnels and to begin in the northwest quadrant, where the two exploded houses had been. I said to check every basement for ways into the tunnels, starting with Amanda’s house.
I said that was where the bombs were.
Twenty-five
I was leading my two-car parade home on the Eisenhower, the Crown Victoria tight behind, when Stanley called. “It’s a mess here, Mr. Elstrom,” he yelled into the phone, trying to be heard above what sounded like large truck engines. “The Members won’t leave without their furniture and clothes. Everybody has hired moving trucks, and now Chanticleer Circle looks like rush hour downtown. Gridlock. Agent Till is bringing in tow trucks to clear the street so he can get his own equipment in, but I don’t know how long that will take.”
I took the next exit off the expressway, swung into the corner of a gas station, and cut the engine so I could hear. The Crown Victoria screeched to a stop behind me.
“Stanley,” I shouted into the phone, “do you know anything about underground tunnels and bomb shelters at Crystal Waters?”
The sound of diesel motors at his end was deafening. I didn’t think he heard me. “I said, do you know anything—”
“Tunnels?” he shouted back. “I never heard that, except from your message. There are no tunnels here.”
“I think you’re wrong. Get Till to comb every lawn, every foundation, every basement, looking for ways into those tunnels. I think the D.X.12 is hidden there.”
The sound of truck engines got louder.
“Stanley?” I yelled into the mouthpiece.
“Got it, Mr. Elstrom. Tunnels. I’ll tell Agent Till.”
“Start with Amanda’s house.”
“You don’t think Miss Phelps—”
“Of course not,” I shouted. I took a breath, trying to slow down so I could be precise. “It’s because her house is so close to the two that have been blown up and because it’s been unoccupied. Tell Till to start there.”
“I’ll tell him, Mr. Elstrom. Wait at home until you hear from us.” He clicked off.
I drove to the turret. Before getting out of the Jeep, I picked up the cell phone, toying with the idea of calling Amanda. I could use the pretext that I was making sure she’d gotten her artwork out of Gateville, but it would be pointless. She knew about the bombs and knew about the link between them and me. It was why she hadn’t been taking any of my calls.
I put the phone in my pocket. I couldn’t repair anything over the phone.
I got out of the Jeep. I didn’t recognize the two young agents back in the Crown Victoria, trying to appear to be looking everywhere but at me, but they looked the same as the others: dark suits, white shirts, close haircuts. Till must have had dozens of them. I gave them a nod, which they ignored, and walked up to the turret, scanning the ground around the base for small packages, containers, anything big enough to hold an explosive. It was my habit now, since the shed had gone up. I did the circle, unlocked the heavy door, and went in.
It was only eleven thirty in the morning but I had a hundred pounds of fatigue clamped to the base of my neck. From too many nights on the roof, I supposed, watching the sky over Gateville. But things were ending. Till was up to his knees in Gateville now. He was taking things apart; he’d find the tunnels. Then he would find the D.X.12, or at least the wiring, and no one else would die.
I went upstairs to the third floor and lay on the cot and checked out.
A cold gust of wind blew in from the river, arcing the metal slats of the window blinds into a crazed kind of St. Vitus’ dance. It was dark, the only light in the room a gauzy, narrow beam from the moon outside the slit window. I pulled the blanket over my ears to shut out the clatter and tried to will myself back to sleep, but images of what must be going on at Gateville, of diesel searchlights and teams of men in bomb suits, probing the grounds, going into tunnels to rip things out, popped me all the way awake. I squinted at the clock. It was twelve thirty in the morning. I’d slept for thirteen hours.
I put on my jeans, Nikes, and the red sweatshirt, stenciled with I LOVE ARKANSAS in green below a Tweety Bird, that I’d gotten at the Discount Den during Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. I like to be stylish, even in the middle of the night. I went downstairs to make coffee.
I filled my travel mug, grabbed a two-pack of Twinkies, and went outside. A Crown Victoria, black in the white light of the moon, was in the usual spot, a hundred yards down. I recognized Agent Other behind the wheel, Agent Blonder riding shotgun. I smiled at them, held up my Twinkies in salute, and rejected the idea of asking them for an update about Gateville. They wouldn’t tell me; zipper-lips was the first commandment of being a junior G-man. No matter, things were under control.
I walked down to the bench by the river. Behind me, the Crown Victoria started up and eased quietly forward to keep me in sight. I sat on the bench, and the car’s engine stopped.
I sipped coffee and took small bites of a Twinkie, making it last. For the first time since Stanley Novak had come to see me in June, the greasy tingle of impending disaster was gone from my gut. I felt good, rested. Things were going to get better.
Trucks rumbled along the tollway. Somewhere closer a railroad signal clanged, and Rolling Stones music filtered out of one of the joints along Thompson Avenue. Mick was complaining about getting no satisfaction. Right, Mick. And from a car parked in the dark fringes of the city hall lot, a woman laughed, not in joy but in need. Too bad she couldn’t hook up with Mick, I thought; they could do each other some good.
Normal sounds; Rivertown sounds.
I slid the second Twinkie out of the package. It was cool for the end of August, and I was glad for the sweatshirt. I looked up. The sky was that startling black that comes when there is a full moon and the summer air has suddenly gone crisp. The lights along the river stood out bright in the night, temporarily freed from the humid haze that shrouds them in summer. It was a good night, a clear night.
I watched the river reflect lazy silver ripples in the moonlight, ate slowly at the Twinkie. By now, Till’s men were in the tunnels. I imagined dozens of them hand-digging, pulling out wires and packets of D.X.12. With luck, they’d also be pulling out
evidence that would lead them to the bastard that had set off the bombs. And that would finish it forever. There would be epic battles with insurance companies, and people like Bob Ballsard were going to lose a lot more than his inventory of boat shoes, and Amanda might lose her house. But she’d still have the art. And no one else would die.
I checked my watch. One thirty. I finished the last of the creamy white nutrient they inject for health reasons into Twinkies and went back up to the turret. I waved at Blonder and Other. They didn’t smile.
I climbed the stairs to the third floor, thinking Till might take my call. He’d still be at Gateville, far enough along to have made some real progress. He’d have to thank me for the tip on where to start digging; he might even drop his stony facade to congratulate me on the brilliant sleuthing that had yielded the presence of those long-abandoned tunnels. It was probably just oversight that he hadn’t contacted Blonder and Other to call off the surveillance on me.
The cell phone wasn’t on the wood table by my cot. I checked the floor and poked under the mound of clothes on the chair. Not there, either. I thought back. The last call I’d had was from Stanley, in the Jeep, when I’d told him where to hunt for the bombs. I went downstairs and outside. Blonder and Other watched me from the Crown Victoria. Blonder picked up his phone.
I looked through the plastic passenger window of the Jeep. The cell phone lay face up on the seat. I opened the door, turned on the phone, and sat on the passenger seat. The message indicator started flashing. I punched in the code.
“Hi, Dek.” Amanda’s voice was guarded. “I don’t know if I should be calling you. I have no one else to call. I don’t want to put you at risk, but I have to know what’s going on. Two weeks ago, Stanley Novak called me, saying there have been bomb threats at Crystal Waters. He also said that your storage shed blew up and that you are being falsely considered a suspect. He told me there was no danger of any bombs actually going off and that you would be cleared shortly. Then he said that you would be better off if I avoided contact with you. I asked him how long that would take. He said less than a month. I didn’t understand, but I said fine, I would wait one month for him to give me the go-ahead to call you. Now somebody from my father’s office just called and said there’s been an explosion at Crystal Waters. He said it’s all over the news, that the police are going to search my house, and that I should get my paintings out of there. What is going on, Dek? I’m over Ohio now. I’ll call you when I get to O’Hare.”
A Safe Place for Dying Page 23