I looked around to see if I could spot where Flanagan might have hidden a key.
I doubted he’d leave one in such an obvious place as under the rubber doormat I was standing on, but I stepped off the mat and checked anyway. Nope.
That left the garden shed. Its double doors were closed and latched with a hasp, but it wasn’t locked. I stepped over to it and moved the snow shovel aside. I unlatched the hasp, opened the doors and peered into the gloomy interior.
The windowless shed held the usual assortment of garden tools—a spade, a leaf rake and a garden rake, a maul and a few other pieces—plus some resin lawn chairs. A coil of garden hose hung on the wall to my left, along with a pruning saw and a pair of long-handled branch loppers. A roll of four-foot fence wire stood in one back corner, and a stack of lumber scraps was piled in another.
Two shelves ran the length of the wall to my right. A sizable collection of hand tools was scattered along the lower shelf, and the higher shelf held stacked flowerpots, the old orange ones made of terra cotta. The flowerpots surprised me a bit; I wouldn’t have figured Charlie Flanagan for a green thumb. Then again, they might have belonged to his mother and he’d just never gotten around to disposing of them.
I glanced at my watch. More than a half hour had elapsed since I’d seen Flanagan kick Dusty. I had to move more quickly.
I started with the row of flowerpots. They were stacked in threes and fours. I tipped back each stack, brushed my fingers beneath them, found nothing. I also looked behind each stack hoping to find a key hanging on a nail. Again, nothing.
I finished the row and stood back, perplexed. A couple of coffee cans sat at the far end of the lower shelf, past the assortment of hand tools. I stepped further into the shed to check out the contents of the cans.
They contained miscellaneous bits of hardware—curtain brackets, nails, screws, washers, the usual collection of odds and ends. I thought about dumping them out to see if there might be a key lurking in the jumble somewhere but decided against it, figuring Flanagan probably wouldn’t want to bother rummaging through the stuff when he needed the key.
I turned back toward doors of the shed, momentarily at a loss.
The doors to the shed opened outward. I’d pushed them open and left them open to let as much light as possible into the shed. Looking back toward the doors, I let my gaze wander around their frame. I looked at the hinges—two on either side—then stepped closer for a better look.
Son of a bitch.
Charlie Flanagan had driven a single nail into the wooden wall of the shed just above the top hinge for the right-hand door. Hanging from that nail by a split key ring—and almost perfectly camouflaged because its brass color matched that of the hinge it hung against—was a single house key.
I grabbed the key and returned to the back door of the house.
The key slid in easily. I turned it and the door unlocked.
I was in.
Chapter 36
Now I really had to move quickly.
I glanced at my watch again and noted the time. I’d give myself 15 minutes to find out whatever I could, then leave, regardless. Staying any longer would be cutting it too close.
I was standing in an enclosed and heated back porch, what some folks call a mud room. A washer and dryer stood against the opposite wall nearest the kitchen, and there was also a good-sized deep freeze unit. A row of coat hooks, most of them filled, ran along the wall just inside the door. On the floor beneath the assortment of hanging jackets and insulated hoodies were several pairs of boots and shoes.
It was a mud room like thousands of others in other words, except that in the far corner beside the freezer unit stood an uncased Remington 870 shotgun. On a shelf above the freezer were several boxes of 12-gauge shells.
I wondered if the gun was loaded and guessed it probably was. Flanagan lived by himself in the country, where keeping a loaded firearm handy was by no means an uncommon practice. As a prison guard and a person with a reputation as some kind of badass, Flanagan probably figured he needed to be prepared for any late-night intruders who might come calling.
I’d do well to remember that when I paid him a return visit.
I didn’t take time to check the gun—I felt fairly confident of my assumption—but crossed the mud room and stepped up into the kitchen. It was a fairly large room as country kitchens are inclined to be, but sparsely furnished with an aged wooden table and matching chairs, a refrigerator and a gas stove. A small microwave sat on the counter next to a coffee maker.
A good-sized walk-in pantry was just to the right of the doorway, covered with a louvered door. I popped the door and looked inside. The shelves were stocked with a couple of boxes of cereal, a few basic spices and an assortment of canned goods—several varieties of Campbell’s soup predominating—and boxes of prepared food like Hamburger Helper and Kraft mac and cheese. Charlie Flanagan was not an epicure, obviously.
Next to the pantry was the refrigerator. A quick look revealed a half gallon of two percent milk, a container of orange juice, and several rows of longneck Budweiser. Condiments filled the shelves on the inside of the door, and Charlie Flanagan was one of those people who kept his bread in the fridge.
I checked my watch. I’d already spent five minutes of my allotted 15. I needed to pick up my pace and see the rest of the house. The real clues to a person’s character—his secrets, in other words—are usually found in the bedroom and bathroom.
I crossed the kitchen and stepped into the living room. The furniture was worn; the décor was man plain. A better-than-average whitetail head mount with a 12-point rack hung on one wall and a large HDTV hung on another. A few outdoor magazines and movie DVDs—Flanagan appeared to be a Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson fan—were scattered on a battered coffee table.
A wooden gun cabinet with a glass door stood in one corner. The glass was etched with a scene of ducks flying over a marsh. The cabinet had slots for six guns, all of which were full. I counted a lever-action Marlin, an AR-15, an old bolt action .22, and three shotguns. Two of the latter were 12-gauge semi-autos, one with a matte black finish and the other in camouflage, most likely used for turkey and/or duck hunting. The remaining gun was a 20-gauge over-under.
The cabinet was locked, but a thief could break the glass and grab everything inside with no trouble whatsoever. Charlie Flanagan obviously wasn’t worried about that happening or he would have opted for a heavy duty gun vault like the one I owned.
Nothing else in the living room struck me as out of the ordinary, so I moved on.
I passed the stairs leading to the second floor and continued down a small hallway. A half-bath opened off to the right, opposite a closet under the stairway. I pulled open the closet door and saw some odds and ends of clothing and a couple of file boxes on the floor.
I didn’t have time to examine the files and I doubted there would be much of interest there anyway. So far everything I’d seen indicated a single guy living alone, with nothing to suggest Flanagan was engaged in any kind of nefarious activity…aside from his habitual bullying, that is.
I turned to the half-bath. It boasted a stool and a sink with a medicine cabinet above the latter. I opened the cabinet; aside from a box of Band-Aids and a tube of Neosporin ointment it was empty. A half bar of soap lay on one corner of the sink and a hand towel with several smudges hung on a rack on one wall.
Again, nothing.
I moved on down the hallway to a corner room at the back of the house. This appeared to be a combination office and storage room, with a tall metal shelf unit along one wall. The shelves held stacks of old magazines, some medium-sized file boxes and a bunch of loose folders. A gray metal desk, the kind you might buy at a warehouse or office liquidation sale, stood against the opposite wall, with a black office chair pushed into the leg receptable. A black two-drawer file cabinet stood next to the desk.
An Apple computer sat on the desk next to a large, black, Soyo monitor. I clicked the mouse and the screen lit
up with a desktop image of a snow-covered mountain range. A dozen icons were arranged in a vertical row on the left side of the screen.
I resisted the urge to try to get into Flanagan’s computer files. Even if they weren’t password protected, I didn’t have the time to peruse the files, looking for God knows what. Sure, I might have discovered he was addicted to online porn, but that wasn’t going to give me anything useful in terms of how to plan his execution. Ditto any financial records I might find. I didn’t care where he did his banking or whether he paid his bills on time.
Instead, I started opening the drawers of his desk. The center drawer contained the usual assortment of office supplies—several ballpoint pens, pencils, paper clips, a pair of scissors, a roll of scotch tape, a brass letter opener with a handle in the shape of a duck’s head.
The top drawer to the right held several notepads and a box of business envelopes. I shut it and opened the second drawer.
It was empty except for a holstered handgun and a box of cartridges.
I looked at the gun for a long moment, then gave into temptation and pulled it out of the drawer.
It was a nine millimeter Glock in a polished, high gloss black leather holster. I didn’t know if prison guards carried sidearms—I guessed they probably didn’t, as the danger of a prisoner wresting one away would be too great—but Charlie Flanagan had definitely equipped himself with a man-stopper, nonetheless. When or where he carried it was a question worth considering. I’d seen no sign of it on his person when he’d given me the hard shoulder bump the night before, but then I hadn’t really been looking for a gun. My bad.
I unsnapped the retaining strap and pulled the Glock from the holster.
It slid out easily. I released the slide and pulled it back far enough to verify there was a shell in the chamber.
Charlie Flanagan obviously believed in being prepared.
I slid the Glock back into the holster, snapped the retaining strap and returned it to the drawer.
I closed the drawer and opened the one below it. This one was filled with old photo envelopes, the kind you used to get from the drugstore when you had film processed and prints made, in the days before digital photography. I picked up the top envelope and checked the date. The envelope was eight years old.
Again, I didn’t bother looking at the photos. They were most likely snapshots of family or friends and wouldn’t be any help. I tossed the envelope back onto the stack and closed the drawer.
I checked my watch. My 15 minutes were up but I still wanted to take a quick look upstairs. I returned to the living room and mounted the stairs two at a time, realizing that if Charlie Flanagan came home now I’d be well and truly caught. I needed to wrap it up and get the hell out and away from this place.
There were three bedrooms upstairs, plus a full bath. I ducked into the bathroom first. Tub and shower stall, sink with some Axe brand men’s toiletries scattered on the side. I popped open the medicine cabinet and saw some nail clippers, a Gillette Techmatic razor, a couple of bottles of Advil and Tylenol, but no prescription meds.
Interesting.
I closed the cabinet and moved on to the bedrooms.
I came to the master bedroom first. Flanagan’s bed was unmade and there were some clothes tossed on an easy chair in one corner. A tall dresser of dark wood stood against one wall. I pulled out the drawers and saw nothing but socks, underwear, t-shirts and sweatshirts. To Flanagan’s credit—not that I was inclined to give him any—these were all folded neatly.
I opened his bedroom closet and saw two guard uniforms hanging in plastic bags from a dry cleaners. Several flannel shirts, a few sport shirts and pairs of blue jeans hung beside the uniforms, and toward the back of the closet I could see a gray suit, probably seldom worn.
I closed the closet door and stepped out of the bedroom and back into the hallway.
That’s when I heard a dog bark.
Chapter 37
Fuck.
The dog barked again, and it sounded close…right outside the house, in fact. My first inclination was to move to a window and check to see if Flanagan had returned. I was guessing that the dog I heard was Dusty, the yellow Lab, barking from the back of Flanagan’s pickup.
But I resisted the urge to look out a window. I hadn’t turned on any lights inside the house—it was a sunny afternoon and there was enough ambient light inside for me to see well enough to conduct my cursory search—and that meant that anyone outside looking in would be unlikely to see me…that is, unless I appeared at a window. I didn’t want to make that mistake.
I needed to find out if Flanagan had returned. I hadn’t heard his truck pull into the driveway but the house was closed up and the dog’s bark was a sharper sound, more likely to penetrate.
I quickly descended the stairs. Looking across the living room through the open blinds but staying well back from the window, I could see my own vehicle in the driveway but nothing else. To see more of the driveway—and whether Flanagan had pulled in behind me—I needed a wider angle of vision, not possible from where I stood.
I turned and headed for the kitchen. As I did so, the dog barked again, sounding a little farther away. What the hell?
I crossed the kitchen to the back door. I hesitated a second, then opened the door and stepped outside.
The dog barked again. From where I stood just outside the back door, I could look directly across to Dusty’s kennel at the end of the equipment shed. The dog was standing next to the kennel, facing me.
It wasn’t Dusty the yellow Lab. This was a much larger animal, almost the size of a Great Dane. At first glance I thought it was a Great Dane—it had the Dane’s huge head and deep, square muzzle—but then I noticed several characteristics that told me otherwise. Its color and markings, for starters.
It was a deep, golden tan color, much darker than the light fawn that is one of the several acceptable colors recognized by the Great Dane standard. It also had a large white patch on its chest, a white muzzle and a blaze down its foreface, along with four white paws. Its ears were smaller than a Great Dane’s, either cropped or uncropped…they resembled those of a greyhound, folded lengthwise and canted back. It might have been, I guessed, a Great Dane-greyhound cross.
It stood next to the kennel staring directly at me. It appeared neither aggressive nor fearful, but simply alert and watchful. “Hey, fella,” I said, and its ears pricked up momentarily.
Then it turned away and trotted down alongside the kennel, its long tail swinging low. It trotted on around behind the equipment shed and was gone.
I let out a long breath and stepped forward to look around the corner of the house to the driveway. My vehicle was right where I’d left it and nothing else was in sight.
I crossed to the garden shed and hung the house key on the nail above the hinge. I closed and latched the shed doors, returned the snow shovel to where it had been leaning previously, and walked quickly out to the Equinox.
I started the engine and made a tight turn on the packed snow in front of the equipment shed. Once again I centered the SUV in Flanagan’s tracks—and mine—and drove down the driveway. I was reasonably confident Flanagan wouldn’t be able to tell that anyone had been here in his absence.
I got to the end of the lane and pulled out onto Highland Road. I’d gone no more than a mile when I saw a white pickup approaching from the direction of town.
It was Flanagan in his F150. As we passed each other he glanced my way but again gave no sign of recognizing me. He was still wearing a scowl and I wondered if that was his perpetual expression, a sort of “don’t fuck with me” look that he probably hoped people found intimidating.
As he barreled past me I glanced in the rearview mirror. Dusty the Labrador was standing in the bed of the pickup. I made a quick note of Flanagan’s license number, reversed in the mirror but still readable—GDX 189—and repeated it several times to commit it to memory. Something told me it might be useful.
I bypassed the town square and
drove back to Hidden Hollow. I was still somewhat unnerved by the close call I’d just had, and I knew most of it—hell, all of it—was my own fault.
The fury I’d felt after seeing Flanagan kick his dog had made me reckless, dangerously so. I realized now that driving out to his place in broad daylight and breaking in—even though technically there wasn’t any real breaking involved—was nothing short of foolhardy…idiotic, even. Not to mention illegal. Sure, I’d gotten away with it, but that was due entirely to the barking of a stray dog.
If the dog hadn’t happened along when it did and barked, presumably because it hadn’t recognized my vehicle in Flanagan’s driveway, I’d almost certainly have been caught by Flanagan when he returned home. That couldn’t have ended happily.
I had the dog to thank for my getaway. I wondered if it belonged to a neighbor and assumed it probably did. It wasn’t wearing a collar but a lot of country dogs didn’t, their owners believing that a collar increased the risk of a dog getting hung up in a fence or caught in some brush.
Regardless of where it had come from or to whom it belonged, its barking had warned me to get the hell out of Flanagan’s house and I’d done so in just enough time to avoid being caught.
I tried to shake off my unease, telling myself a miss was as good as a mile.
Right?
Chapter 38
It was a quarter to four when I got back to Hidden Hollow and neither of the other hunting parties had returned to the lodge from their afternoon hunt. That was fine with me because I needed a little time to decompress without feeling obligated to be social. I also wanted to jot down a few notes while the details of my quick toss of Flanagan’s house were fresh in my mind.
The Killer in the Woods Page 19