“Interesting,” he commented, his tone suggesting it was anything but. “Your brother has been a neo-Nazi for most of his life, and he was able to hide it from you and your father. That would require terrific self-control.”
Fiona’s mind went to all the times she’d turned to Whitley with one problem or another and all the times he’d appeared attentive and understanding. “More like terrific trust on our parts. We both trusted him, never imagining what he was really thinking. Like you said, it’s easier to trust than it is to be suspicious, especially when the recipient of that trust is a family member or a loved one. We should leave here. Despite all this sun, it’s a depressing room.” She took two steps toward the door and stopped. “You closed the door behind you.”
“I did. It seemed prudent, in light of us being housebreakers and all. Why?” She watched his gaze travel to the door and his eyebrows rise.
From the height of four to six feet, the heavy door was scarred with what looked like claw marks.
Chapter 19
Much as the turret room had provided answers to Whitley’s past, the basement room behind the tarp-sized flag provided answers to his present, answers Fiona would have cheerfully foregone.
A small room, perhaps 12’ x 6’, the mirrored walls on each end made it seem longer and narrower and doubly horrifying. Bemused, Fiona stared down at the sloppy double layer of opaque plastic carpeting the floor, rippling like foaming waves rolling onto a beach, but the foam on these waves was rust-colored, not white. At first, she thought the rust splotches were paint splatters, but when she looked at the walls, she could see the once white walls were also speckled with rust.
And what was that awful odor? It smelled like something had died in here.
She focused on the wall directly in front of her, on the crude peg board holding an assortment of what appeared to be short handled whips with multiple lashes, some rope, some braided leather, all ending in knots. Awareness rose, and she widened her eyes. That wasn’t paint beneath her feet. Neither were the rust speckles on the wall. Blood, dried blood—that’s what they were.
Covering her mouth to stifle the gag rising at the foul odor and at the thought of what might have been done in here, she backed from the room, bouncing off Grant before first fumbling and then savaging her way past the flag barrier until she erupted into the basement, sucking in gulps of clean air. When Grant joined her, she noted the wary cast to his eyes, an odd look in a man for whom frivolous appeared to rise to the top like cream on fresh milk. “Did he kill someone in there?”
“No.” He paused, as though choosing his next words with care. “Remember what I told you about the authoritarian personality having an excessive morality and no ego to mediate between it and carnal desire?”
“Yes.” She waited. For the first time, the man seemed at a loss for words.
“I can’t be certain, never having seen one, but I believe that’s a room for self-mortification. Self-punishment. I’m going on a limb here, but I think whenever your brother finds himself having impure thoughts, he visits this room, and he whips himself. I bet he’s using it to train himself away from carnal desires.”
“Sex?”
“Maybe. Remember that his mother tried to drown him for having evil thoughts. It could be he now thinks sex is evil. Either that, or he considers the type of sex he desires to be a form of deviance. Maybe he’s a latent homosexual. The neo-Nazis have a rigid definition of sex, maintaining it’s only for the purposes of reproduction of the master race and subjugation of inferior races. If Whitley was having inappropriate thoughts about another man, he might come down here and punish himself.”
Fiona didn’t think she could handle anymore, not tonight. Whitley had taken a house their father had made a loving home and turned it into a house of evil. “It worries me you know some of the things you know.”
He grinned, a shadow of a grin suggesting he was as moved as she by what they’d seen in the room, but a grin nevertheless. “Research. Sometimes you follow trails leading nowhere, clicking on one link leading to another leading to another, and you learn enough trivia to pronounce Whitley Delaney a very sick man, a lunatic who appears to be unraveling with age. The young boy saluting in those photos in the turret room looked fresh and clean and healthy, the last adjectives you’d apply to the man responsible for whatever happens in the room behind the flag.”
“The friend,” Fiona began, a thought gradually coalescing. “An adult male friend. Could he have molested Whitley, way back then? This would answer the question of how he progressed from the healthy young boy to the sick man he is today.”
“Maybe, but you might be oversimplifying it by trying to excuse your brother’s behavior. If you want answers to why he contracted your and your father’s murders three years ago, I think you have them in what we’ve seen here and in the turret room. If you want understanding of the man Whitley is today, you’ll never have that. He’s completely unhinged.”
Fiona considered her brother’s mental state. “We might be able to use that to our advantage.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how, not yet, but it raises possibilities. Dealing with a madman might be easier than dealing with a greedy man.”
“And more dangerous,” he countered.
As one entity, they whirled toward the stairs at the sound of the basement door opening above. Fiona didn’t need to see Grant’s gesture to know they had no choice in hiding places: it was Whitley’s room or discovery. Grant beat her to the door, holding it open while she raced in, grateful he’d left it unlocked. While he closed it softly behind them, she flicked off the light, as much to eliminate any trace of illumination from beneath the door as to shut down her view of Whitley’s self-punishment.
The stench of dried blood rose thickly around them, and it was all she could do to prevent herself from gagging.
The voices, at first a murmur, clarified while they drew nearer. “. . . keep that door locked.”
“I’ll speak to him about it again.” Fiona stiffened. She knew that voice, but from where? It had to have been a friend of Daddy’s. It wasn’t one of hers, and she’d never met any of Whitley’s friends. In fact, she didn’t recall Whitley having had any friends at all. Her father, a gregarious man who enjoyed socializing, had possessed a large circle of friends: entrepreneurs, politicians, and philanthropists. Which one would be a neo-Nazi? When the voices spoke again, the two men had drifted away, and she had to strain to hear.
“All of this has to go,” said the unfamiliar voice.
“We’ll have a short window in which to work. He’ll leave here at 8 AM, and the bomb goes off at 8:30. In the interests of time, we should leave the stadium chairs. It would be easier to move in a large screen television or a movie screen, placing it on the podium, than it would be to pull out all those chairs.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea. Turn it into a personal movie theater. Bring in a projector and films espousing Islamic dogma, ‘Death to the Infidels,’ something like that. Not you, though. You need to be in place to act horrified and field questions.”
“Three of the men are coming by with a U-Haul as soon as he leaves. I’ve told them they need to be in and out in fifteen minutes.”
“How’s our boy doing?”
“He’s alive.”
“What does that mean?” The strange voice was sharp.
One of the stadium chairs squealed and sighed. The familiar voice was sitting down. “Honestly, he’s barely holding it together these days. About six months ago, during a visit to the Sioux Falls fulfillment center, he imagined he saw his sister drive past. He knocked me down in his race for the car, and by the time we pulled into traffic, the car he’d seen was long gone, so there was no way I could prove to him he’d erred. Since then, he’s become nervy, seeing her face in every Indian or Pakistani woman he sees. I’ve had to chase him down several times to prevent him from making a public scene, and he’s become increasingly difficult to control.”
Another stadium chair made a soft-voiced protest. “But you can keep him in check for two more days, right?”
“He won’t be back in town until tomorrow evening. If I can dope him on the drive back from the airport, he should sleep the night through.”
“The wife won’t notice?”
“She won’t be flying with him. Whitley says they had some problems in Munich, and he doesn’t want her on the plane with him, anywhere near him, for that matter, so she’ll be taking a commercial flight back and going straight to a hotel.”
“What problems? He’s a newlywed, for god’s sake!”
Although Fiona strained to hear, she heard no response.
The strange voice spoke again, the tone one of astonishment. “A thirty-two-year-old virgin?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. He called her a slut.”
The strange voice bit off a low-voiced, barely discernible oath. “When’s his flight due?”
“Seven.”
“Have you heard from Farley?” the strange voice asked.
“No, and that’s worrying me. It’s been over forty-eight hours since he let me know he’d found McDermott and was on his way.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“My opinion? He failed. There can’t be any other reason for him not communicating with us. I think either he’s dead or the cops have him. I never understood why the woman ran like that. Even if she knew we were after her, she should have run to her people, not away from them. The last thing we needed was those cops sniffing around, asking questions about her, and now we have a missing contract killer.”
“You have only their word she’s missing, and that could have been, probably was, a ruse to get in Whitley’s face. We’re supposed to believe she’s been underground for three years? She’s not about to show up now, because she never went missing. The call placing her in South Dakota was their latest ploy to force us into doing something stupid, and Farley walked into it with his eyes wide open. I told you how it would be. We don’t need to worry about the McDermott woman. Our time will be better invested worrying about Delaney.”
“I can handle him.”
“You’re sure he didn’t write a new will, leaving everything to the new wife?”
“Nothing that’s been filed. I mentioned it to him, insisting he see to it before he left on his honeymoon, and he reacted as always when he thinks he’s being managed, refusing to do it. The old will stands.”
“And there’s no stray relative to question the will?”
“Relax. They’re all dead. We saw to that three years ago.”
“We should have seen to this three years ago.” The strange voice was curt, perhaps a man who didn’t like being told to relax.
“And immediately come under suspicion for the plane explosion? If it weren’t for his marriage, I’d still argue in favor of the status quo. He’s useful if you let him think whatever scheme in play was his idea in the first place, and we’ve never had to worry about being connected with any of his actions.”
“And the manifesto’s in the safe?”
“Done. A rambling account of how Jews are ruining America, how he can’t sit by and let it happen, and how he feels bad about the pain his actions will cause his new wife. Would you like to read it before you go?” Fiona felt her heart begin to pound. The manifesto was most likely the envelope she’d taken from the safe, the one saying it was to be opened in the event of his death.
“Not necessary. I’ll read it when it’s published in the newspaper. I’m leaving town as soon as we’re finished here. I need to be ready to begin the next step on this, and my presence here is no longer necessary. When do you meet with the new explosives expert?”
“Tomorrow. I’m not certain what I can add. You’ve given him his instructions, right?” A stadium chair sighed and squeaked. He was standing.
Another chair huffed and made a slapping sound. “He knows what to do. You need to make it happen, set up a meet here with him early Thursday morning so he can hand over the bomb. Remember: Whitley must think it’s going off at 9. You’ll tell him to be parked at the synagogue at 8 and Fortney will be by no later than 8:30 to pick it up and deliver it. All he needs to do is drive there, park, and wait for Fortney. All you need to do is go to work as usual.” The stranger’s voice faded. He was moving away.
When the familiar voice responded, she again had to strain to hear him. “I’ve got it, Reinhardt. Don’t micromanage.”
While the voices faded into unintelligible murmurs, Fiona listened to footsteps retreating into the distance and then mounting the stairs. If she stayed in this room for one more second, she knew she’d lose her lunch. Prawns settled poorly in Grant’s stomach; for her, it must be canned pheasant. She heard the faint click of a door closing. “Now.” She opened the door and walked into the flag, hating it, hating what it represented, and wishing she could rip it from the wall.
After closing the door behind him, Grant followed her into the relatively fresh air beyond the flag. “I need to get out of here.” He moved toward the stairs.
“We can’t, not yet. What if they’re standing in the kitchen right now, planning Whitley’s death some more?”
He gave her a searching look like the one he’d given her earlier in the office when he’d mentioned PTSD. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She glared at him. She did not have some mental illness, not like her brother. She was cautious, that’s all. And disgusted. Not crazy. “No, Grant, I’m not okay. I just sat in a stinky hell-hole while I listened to two men plan my brother’s murder. I found out my brother saw me in Sioux Falls, likely during a time when I was concentrating on avoiding you so wouldn’t have noticed him even if he’d been wearing a hockey mask and waving a knife. I learned my brother’s supposed to blow up a synagogue but will instead be blown up himself and in the process transfer Delaney.com to a bunch of sickos. And I’m whining, aren’t I?”
He held up his thumb and forefinger with the tips an inch apart. “A smidgeon. It’s in the tone, a certain pitch calling to mind fingernails on a blackboard. If you’re serious about discouraging me from future stalking, work on refining that tone. It’ll more than get the job done.”
She concentrated on not smiling, which should be the last thing she wanted to do. “I’ll keep that in mind. Oh. Here’s the icing on my cake of horrors: I discovered my father’s and Linda’s deaths were likely orchestrated by someone else, someone I know.”
At that, he started. “Who?”
“I don’t know. That’s what’s making me crazy. I knew that voice.”
“You might have heard him on the news. Reinhardt is the head of the National Socialist Organization, the NSO. Damon Reinhardt.”
“Not him, the other one, the one who said he’d be picking up Whitley at the airport. I recognized the voice, but I can’t put a name to it. It’s someone from way back when, long before the plane exploded, one of Daddy’s friends. Someone I either spoke with or overheard.”
“Here’s a thought: Reinhardt told the friend to be in place to act horrified and answer questions, right?”
She nodded.
“Later, he said the person needed to be at work. That suggests the familiar person works at Delaney.com. Why else would the police want to question him?”
She widened her eyes. “Yes. An employee. Someone I ran into often enough to hear his voice, but not someone I spoke to frequently enough to recognize. There would have been some serious promotions after the plane explosion. Whitley would have assumed Daddy’s position as president, and then he would have filled his position and those of the VPs who died. Good deducing, Watson.”
“Enough for that promotion from sidekick?”
“Don’t push your luck. Another interesting thought: The friend doesn’t know about the turret room. The plan would work until the police made their way upstairs. Now we need to figure out a way to thwart their nefarious plot.”
“Nefarious is a good word. Nice choice.”
“Tha
nks. I say we retire to our respective rooms and apply our minds to coming up with a plan to prevent Whitley from blowing himself up because I’m willing to bet there’s something going on at a synagogue in Saint Paul Thursday morning, something involving a large gathering of Jewish people. I’d cheerfully sit back and watch him blow himself up if I weren’t certain many more would die with him.”
“I say we both retire to your room, wherein I’ll do some reading, bringing us up to speed on this Zeitgeist, and you’ll get on your laptop and research Saint Paul Jewish events.”
She examined his face, which had assumed a look of boyish entreaty. “The world could be exploding around you, and you’d still be stalking me, wouldn’t you?”
Boyish entreaty morphed into annoyance. “One, I don’t consider what I’ve been doing stalking. I consider it interest. Two, I told you why I’m interested in you, and it ticked you off. I wasn’t being glib or making a come on or whatever you’ve decided I had in mind. It was an honest response to your question.”
Fiona expected anger to rise at his words. When it didn’t, she felt a flutter of panic. Heaven forbid she should actually become attached to her stalker. A comfortable acquaintance was one thing; a good friend was quite another, especially when the good friend had a more than passable face and body. “My room then. I’ll stop at the turret room and grab the journal in case I need light reading. I need to remember who that voice belonged to. Maybe Whitley mentioned him in his journal.”
Chapter 20
Having been banished from the bed—a simple error in judgment on his part having precipitated an unfortunate reaction—Grant sat in an uncomfortable chair at the opposite side of the room, pretending to read while he watched Fiona on the bed.
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