Euphoria made her light-headed. She handed the paper back to Luke and managed to speak with only a slight tremor of excitement in her voice. “It’s not the same address as the one he gave the car dealer. It could mean that we’ve found him.”
Luke hesitated. “We’ve almost certainly found where he was living up until the night I saw him at Bruno’s.”
Kate’s euphoria deflated. “But he won’t be there anymore, will he? He took off for some new hidey-hole as soon as he realized you’d recognized him.”
“I wish I could believe that Ron is still at this address, Kate, but my guess is he bolted within hours of seeing me.” Luke grinned and gave her a high five. “But between your boobs and my bucks, we did pretty well in there, huh?’
She smiled back. “We sure did. We make a winning team.” They’d done better than a professional detective, in fact, since George Klein hadn’t managed to rustle up a mention of Consuela Mackenzie, and certainly hadn’t managed to find this more recent address for “Mr. Jones.” The driver’s license number was new, too, although probably irrelevant since her father was unlikely to use it now that his Stewart Jones identity was compromised.
She didn’t mention her thoughts about George Klein to Luke, though. It seemed disrespectful to celebrate a petty triumph over a man who’d been murdered only a few days earlier.
“What’s our next step? Should we try to call the phone numbers Sam just provided for us?” She shook her head, answering her own question. “No, that would only spook Dad if they still happen to be valid. We absolutely don’t want to let him know we’re getting close. I guess our next step is to pay a visit to 344 Maple View Drive.”
“I agree.” Luke glanced at his watch. “It’s already three-thirty. We only have a couple more hours of daylight. Let’s make the most of them.”
Maple View Drive was located in one of the older-established areas of Herndon. Its name had been acquired honestly, with mature maple trees planted along the entire length of a spacious median divide. This late in October some leaves had already fallen, but many of the trees were still a magnificent crimson, bright enough in the afternoon sun to cast a warm glow on the brick facades of the upscale villas and patio homes lining the street.
Luke drove at a sedate pace, slowing only a little more as they passed 344. Maple View Drive seemed to be a dormitory street, designed for professional couples, with none of the residents home at this hour.
“Great location if you want to hide,” he commented. “I’m guessing none of these people know one another. I’ll bet we could show pictures of Ron and Consuela to a dozen residents and nobody would recognize them as neighbors.”
It was depressing but true, Kate thought. “You were right about Washington being a great city for anyone who wants to disappear. The short-term rental apartment where he was living back in June struck me as the ideal situation for somebody who wanted to be anonymous, but this is even better. No doormen, no communal lobby, nothing at all to cause anyone to remember him.” Animosity seeped into her voice. “He’s really good at hiding, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but we only need him to have been careless once. Just once, and we’ve got him.”
“Not necessarily. We may only have Mr. Jones, who probably doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Think positive thoughts, kiddo.” Luke turned around at the crossroad and parked the car across the street from their target. Number 344 seemed to be a standard patio home, with its own front door, a pocketsize individual front yard and no other humans anywhere in sight.
They both spotted the For Rent sign in a corner window at the same moment. “There’s a phone number for the rental agent. Sunday’s a busy day in real estate. Let’s hope the office is open.” Luke squinted against the sun to read the numbers and then keyed them into his cell phone.
“Is it even worth calling?” The rental sign had confirmed Kate’s fears. “If the place is for rent, it means Dad has flown the coop already. There’s no way any legitimate rental agent is going to hand over information about a previous set of tenants. Not to us at least. And impersonating a police officer will get us arrested.”
“I’m not going to ask the rental agent about Ron, at least not directly. I’m going to get us inside the house where your father and Consuela were living and hope to God we find something to provide our next lead. We have slim pickings, Kate, and we have to pursue all of them. The first thing is to be very friendly on the phone so that we’ve established a level of rapport before the agent even unlocks the front door.”
The rental office responded to Luke’s call with a seemingly endless menu of choices. He worked his way through four irrelevant options and finally gave the thumbs-up sign: he’d reached a real, live human.
“My wife and I are looking for a furnished town-home in the Herndon area,” he informed the gushing Southern voice on the other end of the phone. “I’ve just been transferred here and we need a place to rent for six months while my wife finishes out the school year back in Chicago.”
He paused for a moment to listen to a question. “Oh, no,” he answered quickly. “We don’t have kids of our own. My wife is a schoolteacher and I’m a chef. In fact, we’re sitting outside one of your properties right now. It’s on Maple View Drive. The location’s ideal for me. How much is the monthly rental? I’d only want a six-month lease.”
He listened again. “Hmm…that’s right at the upper end of what we can afford, but it’s doable. Could somebody bring over the keys so that we can take a look inside?”
He listened some more, said yes several times, and then hung up. “Mary Ellen Robell is on her way over.” He grinned. “Hold on to my right hand at all times, Katie-love, or I just might find myself signing a rental agreement. Beneath her Southern charm, Mary Ellen sounds a tad on the aggressive side. Visualize a piranha that hasn’t eaten in a while.”
Luke’s comment about holding on to his hand had slipped out too easily, Kate reflected. She’d almost responded that it would be a pleasure. Worse, Luke didn’t even seem to notice that he’d used one of his old endearments. Katie-love. It didn’t mean anything, of course. Except that it would be disastrous if they allowed the camaraderie of today’s search to create the illusion they could safely become friends. There was nothing about her feelings for Luke that fell under the heading of friendly, much less safe.
“Let’s take a walk around the outside of the property while we’re waiting.” She needed to get out of the car; her awareness of Luke’s physical presence suddenly seemed suffocating. “What are we going to be looking for once we’re inside?”
“I wish I knew. Anything at all that might lead us to Ron. I’ll try to keep Mary Ellen occupied. Since I told her I’m a chef, I’ll say I do a lot of cooking at home and display an obsession with cupboard space for all my specialized equipment. That’ll give me an excuse to open every drawer in the kitchen area. Meanwhile, you can whiz through the house and see if you can find anything at all that Ron and Consuela might have left behind. If I get even a whiff of a chance, I’ll ask her about the previous tenants, of course.”
“Bet she tells us they’ve gone back to Australia.”
He gave a regretful nod. “I bet you’re right.”
Kate was willing to follow up every lead, especially one they’d worked so hard to acquire, but she was beginning to accept that finding her father might be a task beyond the capabilities of a couple of amateurs, however motivated. And, God knew, she had plenty of motivation. Still, she and Luke had already confirmed almost beyond the possibility of doubt that her father was alive—something that would have seemed inconceivable only a couple of weeks ago. Even if they found out nothing else, their trip had been worthwhile. Maybe they had even gathered sufficient circumstantial evidence to interest the police in reopening the case. It was a possibility at any rate.
Mary Ellen, lacquered and buffed to perfection, greeted them with a welcoming smile as artificial as her makeup. “You came at just the right moment,” she said.
“We sent in the crew to clean up after the last tenants only a couple of days ago. Our cleaners are the best in the business and you’ll find everything is spotless.”
If only Mary Ellen knew what bad news she was delivering, Kate reflected wryly. The last thing she and Luke wanted to hear was that the property had been cleaned to perfection. Her father would have taken care to leave nothing behind, and on the remote chance that he’d been in such a hurry that he’d slipped up, an efficient cleaning crew would have taken care of any odd scraps of paper he might conceivably have overlooked.
“Did the last tenants cause problems?” Luke asked. “Is that why you needed to send in the cleaning crew?”
“Oh, no, that’s standard practice. At McMasters Realty we pride ourselves on handing over our properties in pristine condition. But it’s true that the last tenants did leave unexpectedly. Mr. Jones was an Australian diplomat and he got transferred back to Sydney on such short notice that he had to mail the house keys back to us from the airport.”
“I thought Canberra was the capital of Australia,” Luke said. “I wonder why Mr. Jones was going back to Sydney? Diplomats usually work in their foreign ministry and that’s always located in the capital city.”
“Maybe he just stopped off in Sydney. Maybe he has a home there.” Mary Ellen clearly was a woman who focused on the deal ahead and she had zero interest in idle chatter about tenants who were no longer providing rent to her company. She’d probably only mentioned Mr. Jones because diplomat sounded like an impressively upper-class profession.
“Now, Mr. Savarini—”
“Call me Luke, please.”
“Then, Luke, you must come and look at the terrific kitchen. This particular model is one of our most popular rental homes and I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised with the features. We replaced all the appliances eight months ago and now they’re stainless steel, top of the line.” Mary Ellen siphoned him off from Kate and propelled him into the kitchen. A Marine Corps general couldn’t have executed the maneuver with more efficiency.
You could only admire her father’s efficiency as a deceiver, Kate thought, heading in the opposite direction. Not for him anything as clumsy as leaving his rental accommodations without notice, even if he was running away at top speed. He’d actually taken the time to invent a convincing lie and mail back the keys from the airport so that Mary Ellen and her colleagues would have no reason to remember him anything but kindly. Of course, he had almost thirty years of experience of inventing lies on the fly. No wonder he was so damn good at it.
Mary Ellen talked as though her company had learned very recently of Mr. Jones’s departure. Kate assumed her father had actually packed and left within twenty-four hours of seeing Luke at Bruno’s restaurant. Then, when he was safely out of reach and living under a new name, he tied up the loose end of this rental and returned the keys.
With hindsight, it was all too easy to see that they’d conducted their investigation at far too leisurely a pace, as if it didn’t matter whether they followed up Luke’s initial sighting the next day, or a month later. Still, there were few things more useless than regretting missed opportunities, and since Luke was valiantly chatting up Mary Ellen in the kitchen, Kate did her duty and quickly walked through the rest of the two-bedroom, two-bath villa.
She opened every closet door, checked the dressers in the master bedroom and even peeked under the king-size bed. The cleaning crew, as promised by Mary Ellen, had done an excellent job. There wasn’t a dust ball in sight, and the drawers had all been freshly lined with scented paper. The closets contained plastic hangers and nothing else.
The villa was designed to accommodate a childless couple—presumably the most desirable category of renters—and the second bedroom had been furnished as a combination guest bedroom and office, with a daybed against one wall, and a built-in desk against the opposite wall. Bookshelves, currently empty, framed the window, and a leather armchair completed the furnishings. It was a pleasant, usefully designed room, as was the rest of the villa, and Kate could imagine that her father and Consuela would have been quite comfortable there.
She sat at the desk and switched on the hotel-style lamp, which had electrical and phone outlets built into the base for easy Internet access. Apparently rental property owners had finally figured out that nobody enjoyed crawling under the desk to set up their laptops. There was also a leather folder on the desk, filled with printed instruction sheets from the property company. Kate searched through it with high hopes—it was the only thing she’d found so far worth searching—but there were no convenient scraps of paper tucked by Ron Raven between printed cards and forgotten.
Sighing, she pulled open the two file drawers, the very last thing left for her to check out. A few empty folders hung crookedly from the metal frame, but once again there wasn’t a single scrap of paper to be seen. Giving way to a moment of extreme frustration, Kate slammed the drawer shut. The drawer responded with a slight, intriguing rattle.
Kate damped down a flare of excitement. The sound had probably been nothing more than a file falling off its runner. Opening the drawer again, she pushed all the hanging folders toward the back. Resting on the dusty bottom of the drawer was a tiny flash drive, smaller than a stick of gum. She’d finally managed to find a place where the cleaning crew hadn’t been busy. Heart thumping, she reached into the drawer and palmed the flash drive.
She smelled Mary Ellen’s perfume even before she registered her voice or the sound of her footsteps coming up the stairs. Kate quickly pocketed the tiny device. She walked across to the window and was staring out, apparently transfixed by the view of the street, when Luke and Mary Ellen came into the room.
Mary Ellen noticed nothing amiss in her demeanor, but Luke realized at once that she was almost bursting with excitement. He got rid of the agent by the simple method of announcing that he didn’t think the villa would work for him, citing the lack of a separate dining room. Not one to go down to easy defeat, Mary Ellen assured them as she escorted them out into the street that her company had several other great rentals to show them.
“What have you got?” Luke asked Kate as soon as they were back in the car. “That place was cleaned so thoroughly, I thought we’d be totally out of luck.”
“Maybe we are out of luck. It might be nothing. What I found might not even be my father’s. Or we might have hit pay dirt.” Kate opened her hand and showed him the flash drive. “This was in the desk file drawer.”
“Holy shit!”
“Yeah, that, too.” She laughed, giddy with unexpected success. “If it is my father’s, it could have all his active files on it. It says right on the casing that it’s a two-gigabyte drive, so it’s got tons of storage space.” Reality returned, sharp enough to pierce the bubble of her enthusiasm. “Except if he’d lost something as important as his backup drive, he’d presumably have gone back to the house to reclaim it.”
“Not if he was afraid I was closing in on him. And he might not have known where he lost it. Something that small could have been dropped anywhere. In the rush of packing up, he could easily have lost track of when he last had it.” Luke leaned over the back of the car seat and grabbed his laptop from the backseat. “Anyway, there’s no need to guess what’s on it. We can take a look.”
Kate held his computer balanced on the arms between the front seats and waited impatiently for it to boot. Luke slotted the flash drive into a USB port and adjusted the screen so that they could both see the results.
The drive contained two files, RR21 and RR22. RR21 was almost three hundred kilobytes in size. RR22 was significantly smaller. “That’s several dozen pages of data in total, isn’t it?” Kate tried to visualize some of her recipe files and their size in kilobytes. “We have more than twenty pages of data in RR21, I think.”
“Yep, maybe as many as thirty.”
“And the file names suggest we’ve found something that definitely belonged to Ron Raven. RR21 and RR22. Those initials can’t be a c
oincidence, not on top of everything else we’ve discovered today.”
“It would be astonishing if they don’t belong to him. Hot damn, we could finally be closing in on your dad’s trail. Okay, here goes. Drum roll, please.” Luke sent her a cheerful grin before clicking on one of the files. Kate held her breath while the screen flickered. She exhaled in a disappointed gust when, instead of opening up to pages of text, the screen produced a dialogue box, informing them the file was password-protected and requesting the password.
“Damn.” Tight-lipped, Luke closed the box and clicked on the second file. Another box appeared with the same message as before.
“Any suggestions as to what your father’s password might be?” Luke asked. “Wait, there are seven stars, so we need something with seven letters.”
“Try Dad’s middle name,” Kate suggested. “It’s Howatch. That has seven letters.” She supposed there was a slim chance Ron had been careless enough to use something as obvious as his own name to protect his files. Although, the more she learned about her father, the less appropriate careless seemed to be as a word to describe his behavior.
Luke keyed in Howatch and was informed it was an invalid password. They tried Ron’s initials, combined with the year of his birth, and then the names of both his wives and all three of his children. They even tried various seven-letter combinations of Consuela Mackenzie and Julio Castellano. Nothing worked. The unpalatable fact was that she didn’t know enough about her father to have the remotest clue what he might choose as a locking code on his file system, Kate reflected grimly.
“Let’s leave it until we’ve had a chance to call Mom,” she suggested finally, when the frustration level inside the car was becoming palpable. “We should call Uncle Paul, too. He’s Dad’s business partner, so he might know more about the passwords Dad favored for business deals than Mom or me. Maybe it’s a strictly numerical combination.” In which case the possibilities were virtually infinite.
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