He couldn’t anymore. Truth be told, it turned maybe one or two degrees before the lock stopped it from going anywhere else. “You guys need to fire that saint and replace him with someone who knows his job better,” he whispered, pulling his lock-pick set from his back pocket.
“Okay,” he said, giving the handle another quick once-over. “Common Schlage back door lock with bolt pin.” As far as door locks went, it was pretty skookum. Top of the line, really. But still, it would be the same on the inside as near on every other bolted door lock he’d opened: same pin and tumbler hardware with five pin stacks. He wondered why whoever installed it had opted out of putting in a dead bolt, too? Oh well, this just made everything that much faster. He hoped Tommy Stork’s bathroom visit or wherever he went would take at least a bit of time.
Sweat had collected on his forehead again and was running down the sides of his face. Under his arms, he was soaked. Fumbling in the shed’s shadow, he managed to find his gray T-shirt where he’d tossed it on the grass and used it again to dry himself off. Easier to work the lock without wet fingers.
How much time did he have until Stork returned? He did some rough calculations in his head. One minute for the lock, maybe two since he was working under pressure. Actually he scratched that and said three, since that was by far the worst case. If he couldn’t be in after three minutes, he’d hang up his lock-picking hat for good.
Then what? Seconds to reach Carry. Freeing her was another thing entirely. If that was an ax he’d made out at the end of the garage, it might be sharp enough to cut her ropes, but it wouldn’t be his first choice, that was for sure. He hadn’t been able to see the workbench really well, but usually benches like that came with tools. Maybe a small handsaw or, wonders of all wonders, some aviator shears. Stork had a nice place. Kept his gardens well. Shears wouldn’t be entirely out of the question.
Anyway, worst case would be around seven minutes to get Carry free and on her feet. So, totaled, that all gave him a worst case of ten minutes. Did he have that kind of time? He seriously doubted it. But what else could he do?
Besides, he just realized he’d wasted an entire minute at least thinking about all of it when he should have just been doing and not thinking.
Opening the small case in his hand, he plucked out the tension wrench just as he became aware of something else. The wrench in his right hand and the case sitting open on his left palm were moving. No, not moving, trembling. Despite his thoughts staying out of the game, the rest of his body was scared shitless. “No,” he whispered. “You can’t possibly do this if you’re jittery. You have to stop shaking.” He breathed in deeply and slowly let it out, hoping to whatever God was watching that his body would calm down.
But the more he tried, the more he thought about it, the more he felt the uncontrollable panic rise inside him, and the more he shook. He had to do this, though. Somehow. In the next minute, his hands were vibrating so badly he wouldn’t have been able to pick even the simplest of locks.
Frustrated and angry at himself, he stood there, the sweat once again returning worse than ever, even as the night had cooled. He stood there helpless before the door, as important seconds ticked away beneath a garish-white half moon.
He felt alone.
There wasn’t even time to go back to the bear.
CHAPTER 64
Leah raced her Bonneville up and across acres of forest toward Blue Jay Maples, where all the streets had names like birds and they wound and wended their way through dense woods with gaping ditches dug out on either side, because on one of those windy roads squatted a baby blue house with white shutters belonging to Noah Stork. And Leah distinctly remembered the detached garage recently painted huddling in the trees a ways back and alongside the home. She felt her teeth grind together as she considered how much of a bet she would offer that it was in that very garage that Noah Stork had executed all them victims.
All this time, for fifteen years, that garage had just crouched there, lonely and empty, full of the memories of screams and bloodshed, with absolutely nobody giving it a second’s thought. It was right out there, and nobody had a clue. Even she had walked right past it four times on her way in and out during her visits to Noah Stork, and never once had she even regarded the garage with any interest.
Her gut feelings no longer worked. And that scared the hell out of her.
The primary crime scene. Noah Stork’s bloody blue garage.
But Leah knew sometimes the best hiding places were right out in the open, in plain sight. All it took was a bit of gumption and luck. Or, in this case, she suspected, something closer to narcissism and arrogance. The profile she’d been putting together in her head for Noah Stork during the drive had led her to believe that megalomania could probably be added to the list of the man’s other obvious attributes.
Well, today, whatever had kept Noah Stork’s “hobbies” secret for so long, just got its card punched. Leah knew he had her little girl in that garage. Now that they were getting closer, as she slid around snaky turns and rumbled over rocky roads, she began to actually feel her daughter. There was no doubt this time. Leah knew, once they got to Stork’s house, she’d find Caroline. The only worry now was what state her daughter would be in when that happened.
“Was it possibly about slowing down a mite? Because I think if it was, you might want to pay that voice some attention.”
Leah glanced over and shook her head. Now he was telling her that she drove recklessly? As usual, he was ridiculous.
One way or another, though, tonight Leah would avenge her pa’s legacy and make right a travesty that had occurred fifteen years ago. That part felt right, and for once parts of this case settled well in her stomach. The only real questions still unanswered for Leah, other than a few small ones, were: Who had set up Harry Stork? Noah? Could he really have done that? Of the two twins, Leah got the sense that Harry was by far the favored child. And once that question was answered, the next best one—if the answer to the first one didn’t turn out to be Noah—was why? And of course, a third one fell after those two: How, exactly, was he set up, anyway?
Leah had the beginnings of a hunch on how to go about finding the answers, and she liked where it was coming from: either her spleen or her gut. Either one was close enough.
Tommy Stork was handcuffed in the back of Chris’s squad car. They figured bringing him with them was the only way to guarantee he wouldn’t run off and call his pa, tipping him off about the cops coming his way. Besides, he wasn’t innocent. He might not have killed anyone, but he’d trained a gun on an officer of the law, refused to relinquish his weapon when commanded to do so, and hell, he even lied about having the gun in the first place. No, things weren’t going to come out all roses and carnations for Tommy Stork, either.
Or he’ll cop an insanity plea and get off easy.
Leah didn’t care. She didn’t hate Tommy. Not the way she hated Noah right now. It was a boiling and spitting and greasy hate that filled her right to the top. Probably not the sort of hate she’d want to hang on to for much longer than it took to take Noah Stork down, but for now she just rolled with it.
“Susan B. Anthony for your thoughts,” Dan asked, obviously seeing the thoughts rattling behind her eyes. The siren sound wasn’t turned on, but she had the red and blue on her dash. It spun around, washing the interior of the car and the trees flying by in a dazzling array of colors.
“Nothin’,” she responded. “Just keepin’ the wheels between the culverts. You know what? I’d like to have two minutes in one of them interrogation booths with whoever designed these roads along with a lead pipe or somethin’ to that effect.”
Dan forced a laugh, but nothing about it was genuine. He was worried, too. And hopefully not, Leah thought, about finally getting his hands on the Cahaba River Strangler. Right now the semantics of what Noah Stork did no longer mattered. All that Leah cared about was saving a life so precious to her.
Dan’s grip on her Bonneville’s handhold had been white-knuckled
ever since they’d entered Blue Jay Maples, but now, as Leah tore around these Byzantine roads with thickly knotted woods streaming by outside, she actually felt how unsettled he was.
She came to a now-familiar turn and slowed enough to take one hand off the wheel and pull the siren off the dash.
“What’re you doin’?” Dan asked. “Now you won’t be able to see anythin’.”
“Noah Stork lives on this road. I don’t want him havin’ any hints that he might be gettin’ a few more for company tonight.”
Dan didn’t answer, but he did shift uncomfortably on the seat.
The road took a hard left and then a hard right. Leah accelerated into both turns, her back tires spitting up rocks like Cronos regurgitating his children. She took the right way too hard and lost control as the back end swung her around like a weather vane, the car coming to a stop pointing almost entirely in the wrong direction.
Maybe I really should have let Dan drive.
She felt Dan about to say probably more or less her exact thought, when she held up her index finger and said, “Not a word.”
Slowly and gingerly, she pulled the car back around, being very careful of the black shadows swallowing up the night on the edge of the road, and got the car going the right way again.
Her car continued to sputter rocks and squeal out patches as Leah went through each turn, growing closer and closer to that little blue clapboard house where so much death had lingered for far too long.
CHAPTER 65
Jonathon’s shaking hadn’t gone away. And he didn’t know what to do.
He just stood there behind Tommy Stork’s detached garage, the T-wrench in one hand, the rest of his picks in the case resting on the other, and waited. He had no idea what he was waiting for, though. A sign from God maybe? Jonathon wasn’t a regular attender of church, so he wondered how much attention God even paid to someone who’d maybe set foot in a nave half a dozen times in his entire life, not counting the times he broke into Jewel City Baptist up in Mississippi. Besides, he bet even with church, the good Lord looked past people with lock-pick sets in their back pockets.
Jonathon’s head was a mess. Every time he tried to think rationally, his brain just went nuts and figured any second he’d hear the door to Stork’s house open and out the man would come, destroying what was probably Jonathon’s only chance to save Carry.
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. Setting the T-wrench on the grass with the rest of his set, he picked up his shirt and dried himself off again. Then, hoping he wasn’t being too loud, he did six jumping jacks, trying to loosen himself up. While he jumped, he fully extended his hands and fingers, shaking them out. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Everything’s okay. This is just another lock.”
He did this three times before he finally felt it start to work. He’d calmed himself down enough that the trembling had lessened substantially. Now, if he could just stay this calm, he’d probably be okay. Unfortunately, it took wasting more precious time to arrive at this state.
Thinking of time brought back thoughts of Stork coming out of his house again. “Don’t!” Jonathon snapped, louder than he’d intended. He dropped to a whisper and continued the demand of his subconscious. “Don’t even consider thinkin’ about it,” he whispered again.
Picking up his tools, he grabbed another one from the box and left the rest of them on the ground inside their open case.
Lock-picking really wasn’t a hard skill to master. Even to call it a skill rendered it almost funny. No, it was more like a knack. Once you got it, you just always knew how to do it. People always thought Jonathon had to have practiced a lot to be that good, but the truth was, it all boiled down to two things: your sense of hearing and your sense of touch.
Because you couldn’t see inside the cylinder, those two senses were really all anyone had to work with and, like anything, the more locks you picked, the better you got at it. Your ability to “feel” what was going on inside that tiny vault grew faster than your ability to hear it, but being good involved honing both of those senses.
Sliding the torque wrench into the bottom of the keyhole, he turned the knob again until it stopped. Then he jammed in the wrench and kept pressure on it with the ball of his left hand.
While he did this, he continued thinking about how he’d learned his technique many years ago, when he was still a tween. Thinking about that kept the panicked shaky thoughts at bay.
Jonathon had spent maybe six months practicing a half hour or so a day before he felt good enough at it to call himself a lock picker. He practiced using various old locks people gave him, and when he couldn’t find anything else to try with, there were always working locks on his doors. His own and his neighbors.
He quickly learned many people’s work schedules.
Not that he opened anyone’s houses with less-than-noble intentions. He just opened them for the sake of seeing if he could. Then he’d lock them again. He only messed up once, and he still blamed it on the lock being his first pin and tumbler with seven pins. He’d managed to get it open, but when Terry-Lee Grant drove in her driveway after a long day of working behind the concession stand at Wheelie’s Roller Derby, he was still standing on her porch trying to get the damn thing locked again.
Of course she thought he was trying to break in. So Jonathon had to explain to some very dubious policemen that he only did it for fun and wasn’t really trying to get into Miss Terry-Lee’s house. The only thing sitting in his favor was the fact that he had managed to unlock the dead bolt and nobody could find any evidence of him coming inside.
He figured the cops just chalked him up to being crazy. That was fine by him. Better than probation, that was for sure.
With the torque wrench in and everything steady, he gently turned the knob, first counterclockwise then clockwise. He had to know which way the knob turned to open the door; otherwise, if he turned it wrong after setting all the pins, the tension would give and all the driver pins would simply push back into the plug. And that would mean starting all over. From scratch.
The secret to understanding which way the knob turned was by feeling the subtle difference in each direction. He turned it counterclockwise and the lock stopped him almost immediately. It felt “hard.” Jonathon tried the other way and, to most people, it would probably feel the same, but it didn’t. To Jonathon there was a distinguishable difference. Turning clockwise made the knob “give a little.” It felt “soft.”
Now Jonathon knew. For this knob, you turned clockwise to open it.
This was really the only talent it took, being able to feel slight changes in tension. Otherwise, it was just an exercise in patience and tenacity. Again, he was reminded it was more of a knack than anything else.
As he did, he considered that not everyone who learned about his “knack” immediately filled with the fright of him stealing everything they owned one night while they went to the movies. No, there was a whole other group that, as soon as they saw what Jonathon could do. This was especially true when it came to the No. 15 Master Lock.
Master brought this particular lock on the TV show Fight Back in 1983, claiming it was unbreakable. On the show, each lock survived two rounds shot at it dead-center with a high-caliber rifle without opening. Somehow, this impressed everyone and proved Master was right. Nothing could break through their new product.
Well, Jonathon showed how he could pick a No. 15 fresh out of the package in thirty-seven seconds, counting the time it took to tear open the package. Some people watching this had a sort of evil “epiphany moment,” when a kind of darkness enveloped them and their minds immediately began concocting complex schemes for Jonathon. In the past few years, he’d been asked to rob banks, break into liquor stores, open safety deposit boxes, you name it.
But Jonathon’s interest was only in lock-picking, not owning a lot of useless junk he’d have to try to pawn in shops that would know damn well by the second or third time he came in that he wasn’t just “cleaning out his baseme
nt.”
He believed his obsession with lock-picking stemmed from an early fascination he’d developed for solving things early in his life. His grandfather used to carve and construct wooden puzzles, usually involving a polished wooden ball on a string, that had to be solved by shifting a series of odd geometric obstacles, each appearing way too small for anything to go anywhere. They always started out feeling impossible, but as long as he never gave up, eventually Jonathon solved them.
That was when his enchantment for his grandpa set in, too. As Jonathon often thought, solving the puzzles was tough. How hard must it be to come up with them?
If he could only see me now, Jonathon thought. Then he seriously considered it. What would he say to do if he were here?
“Get to goddamn work,” Jonathon answered quietly. He’d tell Jonathon he had no choice. Nobody else was here. At the end of the day, the cavalry wasn’t coming.
The thinking helped. Jonathon’s hands had been steady while he first counted the pins, verifying there were five, and then started methodically working each one, from back to front, pushing up the key pins to release the driver pins. This, of course, pushed back on their springs, always increasing the pressure.
And he always kept tightening everything with the torque wrench.
So far, two driver pins had cleared the shear line—the point where the plug and upper compartment of the cylinder meet—and as each one had, he adjusted the tension and listened carefully. All he needed to hear was that quiet little ting! as the driver pin fell down onto the casing. If there was any real skill in all of this, it was in the tension adjustment. For each pin, you had to work it and get a feel for whether it was too tight or too loose. You couldn’t really tell until you got the key pin all the way up.
Jonathon figured he was about fifty seconds in, when the third of the five pins fell into place. This wouldn’t be breaking any of his records, but better safe than sorry, he figured. He readjusted the T-wrench and worked on the fourth pin, pushing it up and gauging the pressure of the spring, figuring how much tension he needed for it to clear.
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