We passed through a stone doorway into a much larger area with a slightly higher ceiling. Like every other space in the basement it was packed with files and boxes, here interspersed with nests of furniture and, at regular intervals, huge stone pillars. I estimated the room was about forty feet wide by sixty feet long, but I wasn’t good at estimating under the best of circumstances, and I had no idea whether the clutter made the space look larger or smaller. The short wall to our right and both of the long walls were interrupted at intervals by doors, presumably leading to other corridors and rooms full of documents. I spotted a kitchenette along one wall, and a curtained alcove that was probably Mr. Throckmorton’s bedroom.
Near the short wall to our left, at the far end of the room, was the counter that, in happier times, had separated Mr. Throckmorton from the customers who came to apply for permits and licenses or access documents from the archives. He’d hung curtains across the width of the room just behind the counter, cutting off our view of the entrance door, now barricaded both inside and out. Although, come to think of it, the curtain was probably there less to shield the barricade from his view than to keep the Evil Lender’s forces from peering in at his lair when he opened the plywood doors.
Most of the horizontal surfaces in the basement were piled high with stacks of paper, all weighted down with bricks, large stones, and other heavy objects to keep them from blowing away in the breeze created by half a dozen revolving electric floor and table fans. The whirring of the fans and the constant rustling of the papers made a rather restful background noise.
In the middle of the space was a battered but sturdy oak table. One half of it was piled high with dice, a hand-drawn map, and stacks of game cards and all the other paraphernalia of one of Rob’s role-playing games. The other half was empty, and I suspected Sammy had cleared away a space for Horace to use.
“You’re right,” Horace said. “I should take off my suit.”
He set down his bag and began scrambling out of it. He, it, and the clothes underneath were soaked with sweat.
“There are towels over there,” Mr. Throckmorton said. He pointed with his elbow, as if that was the only way he could refrain from grabbing the towel himself and handing it to Horace. “And you’ll find hangers a little to the left.”
Sammy obliged by handing Horace the towel. While Horace toweled the sweat away, Sammy, under Mr. Throckmorton’s close supervision, arranged the gorilla suit neatly on a heavy wooden hanger and hung it where one of the fans would blow it dry.
Horace stood in front of another fan for a few moments with a blissful look on his face. Then he straightened up, folded the towel neatly, set it on the floor, and picked up his kit.
“Okay, let’s do your hands,” he said.
“You should probably swab Rob’s cell phone, too,” I said. “He’s been handling that recently. Before he got the orders not to touch anything,” I added, before Rob could protest.
As I watched the now familiar process, I realized I had two options. Now that I’d safely escorted Horace here, I could go back through the tunnel to the outside world—and maybe have to come back again to coax him out when he was finished. Or I could twiddle my thumbs here until he was finished.
“While you’re doing that, I’m going to call Michael and check on the boys,” I said. Perhaps I could invent a child-care crisis that would require me to leave.
“The telephone is over there.” Mr. Throckmorton pointed to a desk piled with one- to two-foot stacks of papers, one of which had a phone sitting atop it. “But we operate on the assumption that they’re bugging it.”
“That would be illegal!” Horace said.
“And you think that would bother them?” Rob asked.
“I can make the call, if you can figure out a coded way to say whatever you want to say,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “But it might be easier to e-mail.”
“I have my cell,” I said, holding it up.
“If you get a signal, let me know and I’ll switch to your carrier.” His smile wasn’t exactly smug, but you could tell he enjoyed knowing something I didn’t. “The walls are a foot thick. Ceiling, too. No signal here.”
“We got a signal outside the barricade,” I said.
“Stone’s not as thick up there,” he said. “I can sometimes get a signal up by the barricade, but not down here. You could try going up there.”
“Stay away from the area near the barricade until I’m finished with it,” Horace said. “Okay—now your clothes.”
“My clothes?” Mr. Throckmorton’s voice sounded anxious, and he glanced over at me.
“I’ll just step out for a moment,” I said. “I’ll come back and e-mail Michael when the coast is clear.”
I made my way back to the corridor and sat down on a box to wait. As I sat, I gazed around at the books and papers surrounding me. Normally, clutter drives me crazy, but the more I looked around, the less chaotic the basement looked. Everything was definitely organized. There were very few loose papers—everything was confined to boxes, file folders, or neat string-tied parcels. And everything bore a neat tag or label. I could spot at least a dozen different styles of printing or handwriting on the labels—probably representing at least that many county clerks over the years. All of them, from spidery copperplate to neat modern block printing, were uniformly precise and tiny.
“You can come back in now, Meg,” Horace called.
Mr. Throckmorton was dressed, as he had been before—gray slacks, white shirt, suspenders, and bow tie, though now the suspenders and the tie were royal blue. I suspected his wardrobe was well organized and didn’t contain a lot of variety. Rob was resplendent in black-and-green polka-dotted silk briefs.
“Have either of you been near the barricade lately?” Horace asked.
“Not since just before the incident,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “We heard someone knocking on the plywood door. I thought it might be Randall, but sometimes one or more of the security officers come with him.”
“So he pulled the curtains closed, and I hid just inside the corridor leading to the tunnel,” Rob said.
“Wasn’t that overkill?” I asked. “The curtains look solid enough.”
“The idea was that if they battered down the barrier, Rob could run down to the cell where the tunnel comes out and lock the door from the inside,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “There’s a spare key in the cabinet. And then he could retreat into the tunnel, pulling the cabinet behind him, and we might have a chance of keeping the secret of the tunnel.”
“So you weren’t with Mr. Throckmorton at the exact time of the murder?” Sammy asked.
Rob opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it grimly and shook his head. Mr. Throckmorton sighed softly.
“I went over to the plywood privacy door,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “And I was about to open it, but I heard raised voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell the tone was angry. I wasn’t sure what was going on. And given how strange everything has been lately, I decided maybe I shouldn’t open it until I knew precisely what was going on. I was backing away from it when I heard the shots.”
“Shots?” Sammy repeated. “Plural?”
“I think so,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “Two shots, very close together. Although I suppose it could have been one shot with some kind of echo. I’m afraid I don’t know much about guns.”
“He ran back here and told me what was happening,” Rob said. “And I was going to run up there and look, but Phinny pointed out that if there was something going on up there, the area just outside the barricade would be swarming with people, and we shouldn’t take the chance of anyone spotting me.”
“Or shooting at him,” Mr. Throckmorton added.
“So I didn’t open the plywood, just stood there inside the barricade. And I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so that was when I called you on my cell phone. That’s the only place you can get a signal, remember?”
“I stayed well away from the b
arricade after that,” Mr. Throckmorton added. “But I kept Rob in sight, in case he was hit by a stray bullet.”
Horace nodded and picked his way along a path through the file cabinets and boxes toward the far end of the room. The counter that ran all the way across that end had a break, where you could lift up a movable segment of the countertop to exit or enter Mr. Throckmorton’s part of the room. Rob and I followed. Mr. Throckmorton did, too, but at a greater distance, as if he more than half expected gunfire to break out again.
Horace drew the curtains to reveal the far end of the room. Some wide wooden steps led up six or seven feet to a raised area, eight feet deep, that ran the width of the basement. If I recalled correctly, the raised part was level with the part of the basement outside the barricade. The exit door was located in the middle of the wall on the raised area—though now the door was gone and a series of huge landscaping ties ran across the doorway. They appeared to be bolted into the stone, and on each end more huge timbers ran perpendicular to the barricade, braced at the other end by two of the immense stone pillars. Clearly, any would-be intruders who tried too hard to batter down Mr. Throckmorton’s barricade risked bringing a large part of the building down on themselves.
The middle of the barricade was covered with the plywood—two sheets, on hinges, so they could swing out like double doors.
“That’s to keep anyone from peeking in,” Mr. Throckmorton said, when he saw Horace eyeing the plywood. “There’s a latch at the top.”
“First things first,” Horace said. “When was the last time you opened the plywood doors?”
“Yesterday,” Mr. Throckmorton said.
Horace set his satchel down on the counter, pulled out his digital camera, and climbed up the wooden stairs. Rob, Mr. Throckmorton, and I followed, although we stayed several steps down from the top, so we could watch without being in his way. He took dozens of photos of the barricade, from the front and from both sides, and of the floor in front of it.
His face was impassive. More than impassive—grim. I didn’t expect him to leap up, grinning, to announce that he’d found some bit of evidence that would exonerate Mr. Throckmorton. But I was watching for some small expression of triumph or interest.
After the photography he began swabbing things, and apparently examining every speck of dirt through his magnifying glass.
And then he stood up and stared at the plywood for several minutes, frowning.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Put us out of our misery,” I said. “What have you found?”
Chapter 14
“Not much,” Horace said. “Which isn’t the worst possible outcome. I haven’t found anything good, but I haven’t found anything bad either. Just a big lot of nothing. No visible bloodstains on the floor—which isn’t surprising; since she was shot from the direction of the barricade, the heavy blood spatter went the other way. No sign that the barricade has been removed any time lately, but also nothing to prove or disprove that anyone opened the plywood.”
He went back to his satchel, removed a spray canister, and began spraying the floor just inside the barrier. Then he pulled out his digital camera and held it at the ready.
“Luminal,” he said. “Shows bloodstains. Can somebody get the lights?”
Mr. Throckmorton raced down the stairs and hurried to a bank of switches along one of the side walls. He flipped all the switches and the basement suddenly became profoundly dark. We all stared in silence for a few moments. Horace clicked away with his digital camera.
“On TV, the bloodstains give off this weird blue glow,” Rob said.
“In real life, too,” Horace said. “You can turn the lights back on, Phinny.”
“No glow,” Rob said.
“This is good?” Mr. Throckmorton asked.
“It’s not bad,” Horace said. “If there had been blood and you’d washed it off, there’d still be enough to fluoresce when it combined with the luminal. Unless you used bleach, in which case the whole area would glow blue. No signs of any blood spatter on this side of your barricade and no signs of a recent hasty cleanup. But as I said, I wasn’t really expecting any. The area just outside the barricade was clean, and so was the outside of the plywood, as far as I could tell through the barricade.”
Mr. Throckmorton sighed.
Horace reached up to unfasten the latch and pulled open the plywood doors.
“That you, Horace?” Aida Morris loomed up on the other side of the barricade.
“Yes,” Horace said. “I’m going to test outside of the plywood barrier for blood spatter.”
“Test it how?” Aida said. “You can see with your own eyes that there isn’t any.”
“Trace blood spatter,” Horace added.
“Hmph.” Clearly Aida didn’t share Horace’s enthusiasm for forensics. But she did watch with close attention as he repeated his luminal routine.
Rob and Mr. Throckmorton had been hanging back. But on hearing that there was no visible blood spatter on the door, they crowded forward. I stepped back so they could watch Horace’s luminal routine at close range.
“No blood on the outside of the plywood either.” His tone was glum.
“Of course not,” Aida said. “It all went the other way.”
She stood back and gestured at where Colleen Brown had fallen. I couldn’t help looking, and realized with surprise how very much blood there was on that part of the floor and even on the wall. Perhaps Brown’s scarlet-clad form had distracted me from realizing this before. And—
I heard a small thud. Mr. Throckmorton was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor to my left.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Mr. Throckmorton has fainted.”
“I’ll take care of it!” Rob said. “Hang in there, Phinny!”
He dashed down the steps and over to Mr. Throckmorton, threw the small, limp form over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and threaded his way through the file cabinets and boxes back to the other end of the room. I followed to make sure both of them were all right. Rob probably would be, now that Mr. Throckmorton had given him an excuse to flee the area near the blood spatters.
He shouldered aside a curtain hanging between two high sets of shelves to reveal what must be Mr. Throckmorton’s sleeping quarters. A twin-sized air mattress, neatly made up with clean white sheets, rested on some kind of platform—probably more boxes of files—while the shelves that surrounded it on three sides were filled to overflowing with books—mostly American history, at least from what I could see from my vantage point just outside the alcove.
“Here you go!” Rob exclaimed in a cheerful tone as he deposited Mr. Throckmorton on the air mattress. “Do you think I should throw some cold water over him?”
“No, I think you should fetch a glass of cold water and offer it to him when he comes to,” I said. “And keep him down at this end of the basement.”
“Will do!” Rob might be squeamish, but he was also resilient.
I wound my way back to the other end. Horace had moved on to taking pictures of the gun, which was still wedged inside the barrier.
“Mr. Throckmorton okay?” Aida asked.
I nodded.
“Aida, can you reach the gun from out there?” Horace asked.
Aida squatted down and tried. Several times.
“I could if I didn’t mind shredding my hand on that razor wire,” she said. “But not easily.”
“Whereas it’s very easy to reach from here,” Horace said. “The wire’s not as dense on this side.”
He stuck his gloved hand through a gap and snagged the gun on the first try.
“Is that important?” Aida asked.
“If you wanted to throw the gun through the barrier, and realized it had stuck there, why not pick it up and throw it again, if you could reach it?” Horace said. “That could help Phinny.”
“Of course, a really sneaky person might deliberately leave it there so we’d think just that,” I said. “I don’t think that pro
ves anything.”
“Assuming the killer’s devious enough to have thought that through,” Aida said. “And besides, from what I hear, he had to make tracks if he didn’t want to get caught red-handed.”
Horace nodded, and put the gun in an evidence bag.
“So,” Horace asked, in a nonchalant voice. “Are we opening up the barricade soon?”
“Not that I know of,” Aida said. “Chief told me to keep everyone the heck away from it for now. And out of this room, so no one would see you if you needed to open the plywood. You finished? We should shut it up if you are.”
“Oh.” Horace’s face fell. “Well, I’m going to be here for a while, looking for any more evidence. You just let me know if he changes his mind.”
“Chief wants to get the gun and some of that stuff off to Richmond ASAP,” Aida pointed out.
“We could pass it through the barricade,” Horace suggested.
“Not with all that razor wire in there,” Aida said. “Unless you want to shred it to bits and yourself with it. Maybe we should get a couple of the Shiffleys in here to see if they can take the razor wire out.”
“Not yet,” Horace said. “It’s evidence. Possibly exculpatory evidence. We need every bit of that we can get.”
“I’ll bring the evidence over,” I said. “About time I got back to take care of the twins.”
“I shouldn’t let you,” Horace said. “Chain of custody. Sammy could take it.”
“I have to stay here with Phinny and Rob until the chief says otherwise,” Sammy said from farther back in the room.
Aida and I both glanced at Horace’s anxious face and exchanged a look.
“Meg, I hereby deputize you and instruct you to deliver this evidence to the chief,” Aida said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Though I refrained from saluting the way the Flying Monkeys did.
Some Like It Hawk Page 10