Lucy cracked the driver’s-side window before she settled down to snooze. That was when she heard the sounds on the windshield. Snow was silent. This was hard-driving sleet slamming against the windshield. Sleet meant the roads would freeze up. Suddenly she felt frightened and didn’t know why.
What were they doing out there? Just seconds ago she was thinking about taking a nap. Suddenly she was too angry and frightened to sleep. Her adrenaline pumping, Lucy hopped out of the truck, her head down to avoid the stinging sleet as she slogged her way over to the men by the gate. “Why don’t we just climb over the damn thing?” she shouted to be heard over the wind and sleet.
“That’s exactly what we’re getting ready to do, Miss Lucy,” Mitch shouted back. “We’re betting the guts of this security gate are on the other side, inside that stone gatehouse, and the owner has a special encrypted card that he just flashes when he wants to go in and out of this gate. It’s obvious we don’t have one of those particular cards, so we’re going to blow the system. Wylie is going over first and will blow it. I want you to stand back.”
Card. Lucy’s memory stirred. “Wait a minute. What kind of card are you talking about?”
“You know the kind you swipe through a lock or show it faceup to a small screen. Sometimes they go by eyes or thumbprints for ID. It’s okay, we know what we’re doing, Miss Lucy.”
“Wait. Please wait. I think I might have the card. Jonathan gave me a card several months ago. Early in the summer. He said it was for international shopping, you know, for when we went to Europe. Okay, okay, so I was stupid. To me it was just a weird-looking credit card,” she said defensively at the skeptical looks on the men’s faces. “I put it in my wallet and forgot about it till just now. You can make whatever you want out of that. If you give me a minute, I’ll get it for you.”
Minutes later, when Lucy handed over the card, Mitch looked at it, then at her. His gaze was so intense, Lucy felt like he had nailed her to the ground. He handed it to Drew Warner, who walked up to the gate and simply waved the card in front of the monitor. The gates slid open with barely a sound. Lucy felt queasy and light-headed as she followed the men through the gate.
Wylie reached for her hand. He bent over, and shouted into her ear, “Smile, it adds to your face value. Look, we’re inside, and that’s all that matters.”
Lucy nodded as she watched Drew and Mitch roam the property inside the gate. Even through the stinging sleet, she could see small dots of green, yellow, and red on the equipment they carried. Wylie led her to an overhang by a small round-arched back door. The narrow eave deflected some of the sleet. Jake joined them a few minutes later.
There, close to the house, Lucy found she didn’t have to shout at the top of her lungs to be heard. “I swear, I forgot about the card, I actually believed it was what Jonathan said it was, an international credit card. Since I never had one, how could I know if it was real or not? I was taking everything Jonathan said back then at face value. The card did say GLOBAL on the front of it. It looked like a damn credit card, Wylie.” If she hadn’t been so cold, she would have burst into tears of frustration. Why is this happening to me?
“If he tried to keep this house secret, why would he have given the card to you?” Jake asked. “How were you supposed to get into the house? All it does is open the gate.”
“I don’t know, Jake,” Lucy wailed at the outright suspicion in his voice. “I don’t know anything about how or what Jonathan did. You have to believe me.”
Jake took off his gloves and blew on his fingers. “No offense, Lucy, but your fiancé must have thought you were really stupid.”
“Yes, I guess he really did,” Lucy snapped. “And, I just proved to everyone how really stupid I am. He bamboozled me, okay. I take full responsibility for my own stupidity, but I am not involved in anything he did or said.”
Wylie put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “We’re going to figure this all out, Lucy. Don’t go off the deep end now.”
The trio remained under the narrow overhang shivering, their teeth rattling with cold for another forty minutes—at which point Mitch and Drew returned their gear to the truck and brought back different equipment. Another forty minutes passed as they explored for trip wires, then deactivated the alarm system and locks.
At last they were all inside the garage. Mitch fumbled for a light switch. All of them reared back at the huge black Chevy Suburban sitting squarely in the middle of the six-car garage. For some reason it looked obscene to Lucy. Obscene and frightening. Lucy wondered about the other six cars the FBI agents had mentioned. Nothing had been said about anything as prosaic as a Chevy Suburban.
Another twenty-five minutes passed while Drew checked out the Suburban and Mitch worked the keypad outside a door that led into the main body of the house. Eventually they were inside the house, all of them standing in the kitchen. Jake pressed a wall switch, and the gray room sprang to light. Outside, sleet hammered against the windows, sounding like nails being shot from a nail gun. Wylie looked around for a thermostat and turned it up to ninety degrees. Immediately a warm rush of air spewed from the baseboard grates.
Lucy looked around the huge kitchen. This was not a kitchen Martha Stewart would love. While state-of-the-art, there was nothing warm and cozy about the room. The word institutional came to mind. Every appliance was Sub-Zero, and stainless steel. Even the sink. The floor was dove gray granite. The hanging pot rack over the center island was loaded down with shiny stainless-steel pots and pans. Never used, Lucy thought as she looked up at the contraption. She could see the glue marks on the pots where the price stickers had once been. Out of curiosity, she opened the refrigerator. It was empty. She opened the freezer, and it was full. She reached for a package of frozen ground coffee and a container of half-and-half. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said curtly. “We all need to warm up.”
Mitch nodded as he walked away, Drew Warner on his heels. Jake and Wylie stayed with Lucy in the kitchen. Her voice was a whisper when she said, “I don’t think anyone lives here or has ever lived here.” Lucy pointed to the glue marks on the pots hanging overhead. The tears she’d been holding in check escaped and rolled down her cheeks. “What is this place?”
Wylie grimaced. Jake looked at the pots. “I don’t know, Lucy. Mitch said he thought it was a safe house. What that means exactly, I don’t know. It’s getting warmer; let’s check out the rest of the place. C’mon, it’s going to be all right. We have professionals helping us now. Right, Jake?”
“Absolutely,” Jake said as he removed his topcoat and muffler. “Actually, it’s getting downright toasty in here.”
A short hallway led them to an immense room that seemed to be, aside from the kitchen, the entire first floor. Lucy blinked. It was a round room. Lucy was reminded of a soccer ball. How could a square house have a round room? And it was white, so white it was dazzling.
Around white brick fireplace sat squarely in the middle of the room, the venting hood going all the way up to the ceiling and probably through the roof. Lucy couldn’t remember if she’d seen a chimney when she was outside or not. She tried to calculate the size of the pit and finally likened it to two circular hot tubs. Six huge cherry logs with strips of kindling laid between them were ready to be ignited. A circle of deep, white, velvet couches surrounded the strange-looking fireplace. No matter where you sat, you would have a view of the fire. There were no tables, no plants, no pictures on the wall—no knickknacks of any kind. The floor was hardwood, probably oak, and strangely enough it wasn’t the least bit dusty. She wondered if the house was hermetically sealed. The thought sent chills up and down her arms.
The wraparound windows were cloaked in heavy white brocade shot through with silver thread, the only concession to color. Was silver a color? Is there a silver color in a Crayola box? she thought inanely. She decided silver wasn’t a color. And the world would go on with the knowledge Lucy Baker deemed silver not to be a color. She must be losing her mind.
>
Lucy peered down into the pit and frowned. For some reason she didn’t expect to see ashes. But there they were. Someone had been there, and that someone, at some point, had built a fire. A few of the bricks on the bottom were scorched and black. Little piles of ash rested under the neat pile of wood.
“It smells like…wallpaper paste,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s a paint smell. Maybe just a new house smell. What do you think, Mitch?”
“I think it’s a paint smell combined with the fact the house has been closed up. This is definitely either a safe house or a stopping-off place for people on the run. I’m going to check out the rest of the house. Don’t open those drapes,” he cautioned.
“Check this out, Mitch!” Drew called from the front foyer, which was out of sight of the round room. They all ran through the arched doorway to a small foyer littered with mail. “The guy has one of those chutes like banks use at their drive-throughs. When the mail gets to here, the cylinder just opens, dumps the mail, and returns to the mailbox, probably someplace at the bottom of the driveway. I must have missed it on our way in. There’s nothing here but catalogs and junk mail. Everything is addressed to ‘Lucille Baker’ or ‘Resident.’ ”
If Wylie hadn’t been holding on to Lucy’s arm, she would have fallen. To prove what Drew was saying, Lucy stooped down and picked up a Crate and Barrel catalog. Sure enough, her name was on the label. She started to feel sick all over again.
“It’s just a catalog, Lucy. It doesn’t mean anything,” Wylie said.
“Like hell it doesn’t mean anything. This junk says I live here. Me—Lucy Baker—I get mail at this address. No wonder the feds are on my back. God, how I hate that man for doing this to me!”
Wylie shrugged. “Have it your way, Lucy. To me, it means nothing. There’s not one piece of personal mail, not one bill of any kind. That says a lot in my book.”
Her eyes hard, her voice grim, Lucy said, “Try telling that to the feds the next time they show up. Hell, they’re probably watching and spying on us right now.”
“Now what?” Jake asked.
Mitch fixed his gaze on Jake. “Drew and I are going to investigate the upstairs and the attic while you guys pour us that coffee. It should be ready by now.”
Five minutes later, just as Lucy was starting to pour coffee into the cups, Mitch called them upstairs. They ran, jostling one another in their haste to see what Mitch had found.
“What?” they said in unison at the doorway to a small room, no more than eight-by-ten in size.
Drew looked at them with a strange expression on his face. “I saw a room like this in Somalia that belonged to some badassed dudes.”
“Yeah, and what’s that supposed to mean?” Wylie asked, his voice on the shaky side.
His eyes hard as flints, Drew looked from one to the other.
“It’s called a dead room.”
10
“And a dead room would be…what?” Wylie growled. “We’re just ordinary people here in case you haven’t noticed. There doesn’t appear to be anyone dead in this room, so I have to assume it means something else entirely.”
Lucy’s jaw dropped as she gazed around the small room. Something lumpy with the look of Styrofoam had been sprayed onto the walls and ceiling. The door was padded with strange-looking quilted material that resembled shiny plastic. The floor was intertwined wire-and-rubber matting. A scary-looking room in her opinion. As she tried to absorb what she was seeing, she could hear Mitch and Drew explaining to Jake and Wylie what they were analyzing on the computer table. Since she didn’t understand the high-tech talk, she only heard snatches that left her even more clueless than before. Underwater parabolic eavesdroppers, fish-eye camera, microphones, a video console for the fish-eye camera, hard laser microphones. What she finally deduced from their conversation was that the room enabled whoever was in it to have conversations that were truly secure.
“What’s that?” Lucy asked, pointing to the center of the table.
“I’m glad you asked,” Mitch grimaced. “They’re the latest in technology. The mikes and headphones enable people to talk on the phones face-to-face, have conference calls secure in the knowledge that whatever they say stays safe in this room. That’s why it’s called a dead room.”
“Why would someone need something like that?” Jake asked.
“I don’t have any answers, Jake. You could try asking the feds or the guy himself. There isn’t anything more we can do here. So, let’s check out the basement, drink our coffee, and head for home. The big question is, do you want all this stuff we dismantled activated or what?”
“No!”
“Okay, Miss Lucy, you’re the boss. We will lock the door and reset the house alarm, though. You don’t want strange people crawling around in here. You have the card to the gate so if you want to come back, you can just swipe it. I’ll write down the code to the alarm system. You can come and go as you please. A word of warning, Miss Lucy. Somewhere, someplace, the person who installed all this hardware is going to know it’s been compromised. They probably knew the minute we started dismantling the system. And before you can ask, the people who did this are experts. Your guy probably brought them in from other countries. It’s not the kind of security you want your neighbors or your local security people to know about.”
Drew fixed his gaze on Lucy and Wylie. “You might want to give some serious thought to relocating or else have the feds give you some kind of protection. From the looks of things, there’s been some serious stuff happening here. It’s anyone’s guess if it is still going on. The federal agents were right when they told you it was dangerous, and you could get killed. Think about it.”
Like I can think about anything else. Lucy nodded.
Mitch shrugged, his eyes worried. “Let’s have that coffee before we head back to your house.”
“I’ll take mine to go. I’ve got some pretty steep roads to travel. I’ll be lucky to make it home by midnight,” Drew said.
In the kitchen, Lucy poured a mug of coffee for Drew. “Thanks.”
“Be careful,” Drew said, as he shook hands all around before heading out the door with his coffee. He called over his shoulder. “Call me if you need me.”
Mitch gulped at his black coffee. “Drew is right, Miss Lucy. You stumbled onto something that could get you killed. My suggestion to you is get in touch with the feebs, lay it out, bring them back here if necessary, and clean your skirts. Do that as soon as you can. Then relocate.”
As Lucy sipped at the scalding coffee, she strained to hear the men’s thoughts. Under the circumstances, she expected to hear a jumble, but nothing was coming through. Her shoulders slumped.
Wylie turned the thermostat to sixty-five before he placed his empty coffee cup in the sink.
Mitch set the alarm in the garage, and then they exited. The garage door closed with a loud bang. The little group, their heads down, ran as fast as they could through the deep snow and stinging sleet to the car outside the gates. Breathless, they piled into the vehicle. Wiley turned the key in the ignition and pushed the heater as high as it would go. Then he hopped out and scraped the ice from the front and back windshields. From his pocket he withdrew an aerosol can of deicer and sprayed both windshields. The wipers slid smoothly across the windshield as he slipped the SUV into reverse. They literally slid down the driveway and out to the main road.
What would normally have been a thirty-five-minute ride took them almost three hours before they pulled into Wylie’s driveway. Wylie’s head slumped down on the steering wheel the moment he turned off the ignition. “I need a drink!” he mumbled. “Hell, I need two drinks! I don’t ever remember driving in road conditions like this in my whole life.”
“Relax, you got us home safe and sound,” Jake said cheerfully. “I’ll personally make your drink.”
“Good, because I have to make a meat loaf for Coop. Lucy, are you coming in or are you going home?” Wylie asked.
Meat loaf. The dogs. A dri
nk. She was back in the world of normalcy. Safe and sane. There were no dead rooms in Wylie’s house or in hers either. There were no security gates or things that would blow up if you stepped on them, no trip wires, no mail chutes here in this quiet neighborhood. “I’ll go home and bring the dogs over. My larder is bare, so we’ll have to raid yours. Have my drink ready when I get there,” Lucy said, as she hopped out of the SUV.
The dogs knew she was home. She could hear them barking all the way in Wylie’s yard. When she reached her own driveway she was surprised to see footprints in the snow. Someone must have been by earlier. Who? One of the kids from one of the side streets wanting to shovel her driveway? She shrugged as she fitted the key into the three locks on her front door, glad that she’d added the mega lock at the top of the door that went into the molding. As she swung the door open, she was greeted by three clamoring dogs.
Inside, she raced through the house, her gaze going every which way as she looked for accidents or a sign that someone was or had been in the house. She didn’t see anything, so that meant the dogs were just barking because they really needed to go out. She turned on the floodlights on the deck as her hand went to the lock on the sliding glass door. There were footprints in the snow all over the deck. She started to shake as she bent down to take the dowel out of the sliding track. Even if someone had a key to the slider, the dowel wouldn’t allow them to open the door. Whoever had been in her yard must have climbed over the fence or else was tall enough to reach up, over, then down to the latch on the other side of the fence. Who?
The door swished open. The dogs barreled outside, even Lulu, who immediately piddled on the deck. The moment she was finished, the Yorkie started to sniff at the indentations just the way the others were doing. Who? Who had been in the backyard? Not some youngster wanting to shovel the driveway. Who?
The Nosy Neighbor Page 15