Flight ik-8

by Jan Burke

  “Yes, but maybe not much of one. How likely was it that I would know whose child that was? He wanted me to walk away with a particular set of ideas about his boss.” Frank shook his head. “And I fell for it. I have to admit, the photo was the part of that whole scene that ultimately convinced me.”

  “You didn’t have time to ask a lot about it, right?”

  “I was in there late in the day,” Frank agreed.

  “It’s like what you said about Lefebvre,” Vince said. “Haycroft did the same thing to you — he put pressure on you. You can be damned sure he knew what was safe for him to do and what wasn’t. You’re married to a reporter who’s lived here most of her life, so he probably figured you’d ask her if she remembered the story. He knew what was in the newspaper about his boy. If it was your kid, you would have had that article memorized, too.”

  “The toxicologist almost blew it for him,” Reed said. “He had to be the one to tell you the story that went with that photo.”

  “But if I had asked you, Vince—”

  “He knew what the situation was in here — everybody in the department knows you’ve been getting the silent treatment.”

  “Haycroft only needed to throw you off his scent for a few hours,” Pete said grimly.

  “Right,” Reed said. “Just so he could have time to rig a couple of bombs and put them in your car. As of this morning, you weren’t supposed to be a problem.”

  They again fell silent, looking at Frank in a way that made him say, “Cremation. And don’t let Pete give the eulogy — nobody wants to sit in a pew that long.”

  “That’s not even funny,” Pete said. “You’ve come too damned close to being cremated already. That fire at Rosario’s place…” He shook his head.

  “Pete’s right,” Reed said. “Think of what Haycroft knows about crime and killing people.”

  “And here we were, being such fucking assholes—”

  “I’m not ready to walk through the exit door yet,” Frank said, but he wondered what Haycroft’s next plan of attack might be. Once Haycroft realized that Frank was still alive, would he give up — leave the area? Or would he make some other attempt?

  “So you think Randolph might have been on to something oddball going on in the lab?” Pete asked.

  “Yes. I think that’s why it was important that he not be allowed to hold that meeting with the chief and the other commissioners. Until I talked to Vince about Haycroft’s boy, I thought the problem had been with Larson. Now I think Trent Randolph was probably going to ask Larson to get rid of Haycroft.”

  “Or to charge him with a felony,” Vince said.

  “Let’s talk to Larson,” Pete said.

  Frank looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get over to Hale’s office. And I want to talk to Irene — since I don’t know what Haycroft might try next.”

  “I’ll call downstairs and see if we can get a unit out to watch your place,” Vince said. “Between the car bombs and that business with Dane last night, no one should question it.”

  “What are your plans for the day?” Frank asked, trying to keep his voice casual.

  “What’s wrong?” Irene said. “Has something else happened?”

  He briefly told her about Haycroft. “You remember what he looks like?”

  “I think so. Brown hair, medium build?”

  “Yes. Keep an eye out for him, but stay the hell away from him.”

  “Sure. Okay to tell Seth and Elena about this?”

  “Yes, absolutely — now tell me your plans.”

  “Seth is coming to work with me this morning — he’s excited about seeing the newspaper. Elena has an appointment with her attorney.”

  “She can afford one?”

  Irene hesitated, then said, “None of our business, is it?”

  “You talked Brennan into helping her out.” Brennan was one of Las Piernas’s top attorneys. Irene — who had needed his help more than once — was a personal favorite of his.

  “She’s going to do some investigative work for him to repay him.”

  He felt his anger toward Elena return, but decided that he had bigger worries for the moment. “So you’ll be in the office all day?”

  “No — later on we’ll be going over to the dedication of the new wing of the courthouse. Judge Kerr is going to give us front-row seats and a personal tour. But don’t worry — there won’t be more law enforcement types in any one place than the courthouse today.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But take the cell phone with you today — all right? I’d just feel better.”

  When he went back to the others, he found them huddled in intense discussion.

  “Mind if I take a casual stroll down to the lab to try to get some hint about where the bereaved Mr. Haycroft might be?” Pete asked him. “I’d feel better about riding in your car if we could keep an eye on him.”

  “Yeah,” Vince said. “I’ll go with you — I want to ask Mary Michaels about how Haycroft has been spending his time lately — see if he was out of the lab when those fires were started.”

  “I think I’ll have a long talk with Flynn down in the property room,” Reed said. “Maybe we can let that guy who works with Tom Cassidy—”

  “Hank Freeman,” Frank said.

  “The computer geek?” Pete said.

  “The computer expert,” Reed corrected, and Pete shrugged.

  “I’ve already got him looking at Seth Randolph’s computer,” Frank said.

  “I thought maybe he should take a look at Flynn’s machine, too — see if there’s any reason Haycroft knows who checks out the evidence from the Randolph case.”

  “If all that’s okay with you, Frank?” Vince asked uneasily. “It’s your case.”

  “I think I’ll talk to the chief about changing that,” Frank said.

  “You want off the case?” Pete asked.

  “No. I want to stop working solo.”

  45

  Friday, July 14, 9:25 A.M.

  Paul Haycroft ’s Residence

  The plan was in motion. Everyone knew their role, their place in the activity that centered on Paul Haycroft’s home. Convincing Chief Hale that a killer worked in his lab hadn’t been easy, but once convinced, Hale had the zeal of a convert. He offered personnel and resources — and made sure that the search warrant, faxed over while they were setting up the operation, was worded so that they were given plenty of latitude.

  The entire block was cordoned off and evacuated. There were patrol cars everywhere — as well as vehicles belonging to the bomb squad, the SWAT team, and a medical emergency team. The SWAT team, dressed in full tactical gear, carrying Heckler & Koch assault rifles, had taken up their initial positions. This was their part of the show — and as calm as most of them appeared, Frank knew their adrenaline was pumping.

  His own was, even as he stood next to Pete, studying the house while they waited for it to be cleared.

  “Big attic area,” he said to Pete.

  “I noticed that, too. It’s too big, don’t you think?”

  A group from the SWAT team cautiously approached the house carrying an “Arizona toothpick” — a four-foot-long metal device, about two inches in diameter, with a claw on one end and a narrow point at the other. Avoiding the doormat — which might have been a pressure-sensitive trigger for a booby-trapped door — they knocked and shouted their warning.

  They did not wait long for a reply. The toothpick made short work of the door and they were in, quickly sweeping through the house. The bomb squad was on their heels, dogs in harness. Within minutes, the leader of the SWAT unit came back out to talk to Frank.

  “There’s no one in there, but we’ve found an entrance into the attic that looks as suspicious as hell. It’s not your usual crawl-space access. It’s some kind of specially built door, and it’s got an alarm on it. I’m going to order a portable X-ray so that we can take a look through the roof before we go in that way.”

  “How about the vent?”

&
nbsp; “Sure,” he said with a smile. “Crude but effective.”

  They brought a ladder up to the side of the house, attached one end of a chain to the vent, and hooked the other end to the rear bumper of a patrol car. “Stand back!” a SWAT officer warned, removing the ladder and making sure no one was beneath the vent. He then signaled the driver of the car.

  “Wagons ho!” Pete said as the car moved forward and the vent came out of the wall with a bang, bringing stucco, the heavy chain, and a cloud of debris with it — and leaving a rough-edged observation port below the roofline.

  The ladder was repositioned. Another SWAT team member climbed it, took a cautious look through the hole, then radioed that the attic was a finished room — it appeared to be an office with a workbench of some kind. Someone brought a fire ax to him and he quickly enlarged the hole.

  “Our dogs aren’t hitting on anything on the first floor,” a member of the bomb squad said. “We’ll check out the attic next.”

  “Can your dogs climb a ladder?” Frank asked a member of the bomb squad.

  “Oh, yeah. Part of their training. Mine doesn’t like it much, but he can do it.”

  Frank’s cell phone rang. “I’ll get things started on the ground floor,” Pete said.

  Frank nodded to him as he answered the call.

  “Frank — it’s Reed. Thought I’d let you know what we have so far. Haycroft was seen at the airport this morning. Got there really early, then aborted a flight. Apparently he drove off after he decided not to fly. He’s got a little Cessna. The chief got a search warrant for it, and Vince is going over it now. Vince says it has some kind of special storage lockers on it.”

  “Any news on where Haycroft went after that?”

  “No, but we think we know which plates he has on the van this morning — he’s actually using the ones registered to the vehicle. The parking garage at the airport videotapes a vehicle’s license plates as they enter, and the tapes are date and time stamped — it’s a way of preventing people from parking for a week, then claiming they were there for a day and lost their ticket. Vince checked the ones from this morning — a late-model white Chevy van went in at about the time Haycroft was seen there, and sure enough, it was his.”

  “That’s a break, anyway. With luck, he won’t believe he needs to change them.”

  “There’s more — and, man, I’m glad you’re the one who will have to tell this to the chief, because it’s all going to hit the fan when you do.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Freeman says that there are over forty files monitored by the program.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “They go back twelve years.”

  “Twelve? How can that be? That computer isn’t that old.”

  “Haycroft was on the committee that chose the computer hardware and software for the property room. We think he must have kept track of the older cases some other way before the new computers were installed. Maybe he had a program on the old computer, too. However he did it, he had his list of cases, and the property room computer called his whenever anyone looked at the evidence for them.”

  “Wouldn’t the evidence control software indicate tampering with the files? Otherwise, we’re way too vulnerable.”

  “Apparently there are plenty of safeguards to keep anyone from getting into the evidence control program and making entries or changing anything. But Haycroft never changed any of that data, so no alarms went off. He just rigged a little extra ‘notification program’ that would get word to his computer.”

  “If he could get into the property room computer, why didn’t he zap the special program and list of files before he left?”

  “That’s the best part — and it’s gonna make you look good with Hale. Flynn said that he took that computer off-line after you were in here on Wednesday night. Guess you had a conversation about it that made him take precautions. By the way, he says to tell you to keep watching out for those ancient Egyptians, whatever that means.”

  “So Haycroft was forced to leave his watchdog program behind. What about these files — anything in common?”

  “We haven’t gotten very far yet, but after you call Hale, we’ll probably get lots of assistance. I’ve looked at two. That’s not enough to make a study.”

  “But you found something.”

  “Maybe. They were cases where an anonymous phone call led to discovery of evidence — and then to an arrest.”

  “Shit.”

  “I had the same reaction.”

  “Haycroft was the caller.”

  “In the two cases I looked at, the men who were arrested had each previously been in custody on other cases — suspected but ultimately released. This time, they proclaimed their innocence, but the evidence was against them.”

  “Lack of evidence on the previous?”

  “Sort of. Enough for us, enough for the D.A., but not enough for Judge Curse. Like I said, only two cases, so who knows what I’ll find with the others.”

  “Things are hopping here, but as soon as I get a minute, I’ll call Hale.”

  “Good luck. I also talked to the bomb squad administrative offices. They looked up the records. You were right — Haycroft was the liaison on the Wendell Leroy Wallace cases. I asked them to put me in touch with the guys who had been on those cases.”

  Frank walked along the sidewalk in front of the house as Reed told him about his conversations with four members of the squad who each remembered Haycroft for his avid interest in the cases he worked on.

  “He even asked them to let him photocopy Wallace’s notebooks,” Reed said.

  “Which I’m sure they took to be a healthy scientific interest,” Frank said, looking up at the high-pitched roof of the house. “Remind me about the other Wallace cases.”

  “He blew up three cars, but the bomb squad defused two others — everybody in this company he had a grudge against started taking taxis and riding buses. He also bombed a building — placed explosives in an empty office below the victim’s. He made studies of other kinds of explosives, too. I’ve got the details when you need them.”

  “Larson have any further ideas?”

  “The guy is useless. He’s seriously pissing me off — he just won’t face it. We still can’t get him to believe this is possible. Even with Chief Hale riding his ass, all he can say is that he trusted Haycroft completely.”

  “That may be the problem Randolph saw all those years ago. Or maybe he noticed the anonymous-tip pattern.”

  “I’ll bet Haycroft will know.”

  “I can’t wait to ask him,” Frank said.

  “We did get one other break — the toxicologist says that the Wheeze has been having breakfast with Haycroft at Greenleaf’s and slipping down to the lab for all kinds of other little meetings.”

  Frank was speechless.

  “No one thinks it’s romantic,” Reed said, “but maybe that’s just because no one other than Vince can think of the Wheeze in the nude.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “No, I’m on the outs with her. Since you’re her golden boy of the moment, why don’t you see what you can learn from her?”

  Frank sighed. “Okay, but it will have to wait. Gotta go, Reed. If you have trouble getting through to me, it’s this house of Haycroft’s. I’m looking at the roof and I’d swear he’s done something to try to make it tough for infrared. Who knows what it will do to phone signals?”

  The SWAT team leader approached him. “The bomb squad tells me we’re clear up in the attic — but they got an iffy sort of alert from the dogs — mild reaction from one of them around this one area near the workbench. They think material may have been stored up here at some time — probably the stuff he used to make the devices for your car. They want you to test the top of that table for residue.”

  “Okay, I’ll make sure it comes with us when we leave.”

  “You want to come up the ladder and take a look at the rest of what’s up there?”

&nbs
p; “Sure.”

  The phone rang again before he reached the ladder.

  “Frank! It’s Blake Halloran. I think we have your fire starter on videotape. From a gas station not far from the police department. Not a very good image — but it’s something. A gardener in a white van filling a can with gasoline — only he handles everything the way you do when you don’t want to leave prints.”

  “Great,” Frank said. “I think we’ve identified the arsonist.” He told him about Haycroft and made arrangements to have someone pick up a copy of the tape. “Do me a favor and ask your other arson investigators if any of them have ever worked with him, okay?”

  The evidence against Haycroft was falling into place. He felt certain they were going to be able to nail him. He started up the ladder.

  46

  Friday, July 14, 10:35 A.M.

  Courthouse Plaza

  Paul Haycroft placed a white kitchen garbage bag on the bench before he sat on it. He intensely disliked sitting on such benches, but this one was across from the county courthouse. There were big doings at the courthouse today. The temporary stage was in place, and chairs were already in rows across the plaza. This wasn’t a gathering that would draw much of a crowd from the general public, but there would be plenty of politicians, lawyers, judges, and law enforcement types. A few civic groups, of course. A local high school marching band. Lots of press. The courthouse was not far from the water, but even so, under the July sun, the spectators would be miserable on their plastic folding chairs.

  Not so the dignitaries on the stage. He watched as workers raised a white canvas cover over the stage itself. Those on the stage would enjoy its shade. They could drone on and on while their audience broiled.

  The sound system, bunting, a podium — gradually, the plaza was being converted into a theater. The audience would enter expecting a dull play. Haycroft smiled. He would prevent everyone from being bored.

  He studied the new wing from this safe distance. This was not the first day anyone would enter the building, after all. He had been there on a number of occasions, sometimes openly. He knew that Kerr had been inside the building almost every day for the past few weeks, making sure all would be in order for this day. Desks and bookcases had been moved in, phones were installed, lights were working, security systems were at the ready. So much could be done, though, before security systems were truly at the ready.