Blood Silence (21 page)

“C’mon, you’re going to love it. You know, it might be just right for a spring wedding.”

“It’s funny you should say that,” Sally replied, and Mac thought,
Here it comes.
“They just so happen to have two weekends open, one in late April, and another couple just cancelled in mid-May.”

“Then I think you should go look at it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re not here.”

“Like that matters,” Mac replied. This was always going to be her call.

“Come on, you know that’s not true.”

It was true, but he wasn’t going to argue. Mac knew that if this was what she really wanted, this would be the place, and as a smart, evolved male, he would agree to it. “Look, trust me, I wish I were there, but don’t worry about that. I trust you, and when it comes to stuff like this, we’re usually of like mind.”

“That’s true.”

“So if you really like the place and you like those dates, then don’t hesitate—grab it.”

He could hear her excitement. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good, because I already tentatively reserved the weekend of May 15.”

“Wow!” Mac laughed. Sally could be wonderfully impulsive. When she liked something, she did not hesitate—she pulled the trigger. “So we’re going to do this?”

“Yes. May 15. I’m going to want this place, and you know what—I think you’re going to love it, too.”

Of course he would. Only an idiot would disagree with his fiancée on this decision. “That’s good enough for me.”

They talked for another minute, and she promised to call back later in the day after she’d had a chance to go check the place out. He walked back into the kitchen, and his mood was lightened. It must have been noticeable.

“That call must have gone well,” Ann Hilary said.

“Yeah, it did.” He wanted to tell someone the date, but he didn’t think his ex-wife or his former in-laws should be the first to hear.

Hacker stepped into the kitchen. “The safe is open.”

They all rushed up to the office. Mac opened his backpack and took out his camera and slipped on rubber gloves.

“Is that necessary?” Meredith asked.

“Old habits die hard,” Mac answered as he opened the safe door. Inside were four red-rope files, which he pulled out. One thin file was labeled Life Insurance/Will, and he handed that file to Meredith. Another file was labeled Yellow Fields and Borman Industries. Meredith explained that those were cases from years ago that were sensitive for one reason or another. The fourth red-rope simply had Gentry written on the label. “Let’s see what’s in here,” Mac muttered as he placed it on the desk.

Inside were documents, but not many: simply a small stack of papers binder clipped with a yellow legal pad sheet of paper with scribbled notes clipped on top.

Meredith winced. “That doesn’t look like much.”

“So what is there?” Teddy asked.

“Notes,” Mac answered and held up the page. “Meredith, is that your husband’s chicken scratch?” he asked, handing her the yellow, lined sheet of paper.

She scanned the notepads. “Yes. He’s a lefty, and his writing is distinctive—lots of harsh, straight, left to right, vertical strokes.”

Mac scanned the notes, which were a long series of one or two word notations. Not a complete sentence on the pages. “Pretty … cryptic.”

“Frederick was dyslexic,” Meredith answered.

“Seriously?” Mac asked, surprised.

She nodded. “So, the problem with Frederick was that his notes never meant anything to anyone, except him. He had a system in his mind, so if he jotted down a name, a place, an object, a time, an event, whatever, there was always more to it.” She was scanning the page of random notations. “Unfortunately, three words could equate to a hundred with Frederick. It’s the way his mind operated, which was by memory. He’d hear or see something once, and he could just recall it. It always frustrated the lawyers he worked with, because they couldn’t understand his shorthand. They constantly begged him to dictate.”

The notations were many, with arrows and lines drawn to and between words, but as he scanned them, Mac understood what Meredith meant. They were almost in code, like the crumpled-up note in the garbage can from the night before. Williston, Ray, Buller family, County Road 4, Watford City, Telford, Deep Core, Murphy, PHI, and on and on with various dates listed but nothing tied to them. It was like one of his own mind-mapping exercises, where the notations meant something to him but others would have a hard time understanding what it all meant. He might have to call Dorothy to see if she could interpret Sterling’s hieroglyphics.

“What’s in the clipped papers?” Meredith asked.

“I have a death certificate. In fact, death certificates for a family of four and an investigative report from the Williams County sheriff—it looks like they were all murdered. They lived near Ray, North Dakota. There are the records for two thousand acres of property they lived on, which must be the record missing from the file at the firm.” He placed them on the desk, and then there were some other tax, land, and payroll records that he flipped through. It was not the bonanza he was hoping for.

Then he got to the last record.

“What is it?” Meredith saw his eyes widen ever so slightly.

“Uh … nothing,” Mac answered and then shook his head, yawned, and wiped his hand over his face to cover. “I’m just trying to keep my eyes open at this point. It was a long night.”

“Yes, it was,” Edmund replied, patting him on the shoulder. “Maybe you should get some rest, son.”

“Yeah, we can help you with all of this,” Uncle Teddy offered.

“No, that’s okay,” Mac replied, standing up and waving them off. “There’s not much here, but what is here I’ll run down to the law firm, discuss it with Lyman, and get copies made and take them home. I’ll get some sleep and then start going through all of this and see if I can make heads or tails of it.”

Mac gathered all the documents and placed them in the red-rope file, and the four of them descended the steps into the kitchen. Mac stopped and turned to his ex-wife. “Meredith, you go home with your parents, and don’t go anywhere by yourself. Take the security. I’m not kidding. Do you understand?”

She nodded. After last night, she wasn’t going to argue with him.

Mac showed himself out of the house and jumped into the Yukon. He drove south on Lake of the Isles Parkway, turned left onto Lake Street, drove east four blocks, and pulled over to the side of the street and parked. He dug out his phone and scrolled to the letter C and found the name.

The voice picked up on the third ring. “Coolidge.”

“Linc, it’s McRyan.”

“Mac, my boy. What’s up?”

“My conspiracy meter, and it’s on high alert. In my hand I have a copy of a cancelled check from Soutex Solutions to Shane Weatherly.” Mac knew Coolidge had a copy of the cancelled check as part of his investigation.

“How did you get a hold of that?”

“It’s a long story, but the very short version is that it relates to that case I stayed back here in Minnesota to investigate.”

“It involves your ex-wife, right? She’s accused of killing her husband. You’re doing the
Spenser: For Hire
bit on it.”

“Yeah, and you’re Hawk.”

“I like that,” Coolidge answered, a dapper dresser in his own right.

“Anyway, Meredith is accused of killing her husband
and
a woman he was found in bed with. I didn’t mention that when I saw you over the weekend. Here’s the kicker—the woman he was found murdered with is named … Callie Gentry.” Mac said her name slowly and waited for it to register with Coolidge.

It did, because after a few seconds of silence he could hear the DC detective rummaging about his desk. “Shit, Mac. Callie Gentry is the name signing the checks to Shane Weatherly.”

“Correct.”

“I’m listening.”

“Linc, I don’t know what I have here yet. I need a copy of your investigative file. Forensics reports, pictures, anything you got,” Mac stated as he thumbed through the documents from the safe again. “I think somehow your murder in DC and the ones I’m looking at here in the Twin Cities are connected, and it may all have something to do with land up in North Dakota.”

T
he sun was dropping quickly to the west, and a bitter northwest wind was rolling into northwest North Dakota as Speedy rolled up to the long driveway to the isolated farmhouse ten miles south of Williston. The house, set back in a small grove of trees, was almost invisible from the winding road, and it would be in the summer, with the foliage in full bloom. The little house was a comfortable yet extremely out-of-the-way resting place for Clint and Royce, whom he wanted and needed to keep a low profile.

Clint and Royce were his aces in the hole.

They were whom he and the company called when problems truly needed to be eliminated. He’d known them since childhood, all of them growing up in the same neighborhood in Midland, Texas. Speedy, the running back, Clint and Royce, the linebackers, all played under the Friday-night lights. After high school, Speedy went off to college at the University of Texas-El Paso, blowing out his knee as a sophomore. Clint and Royce stayed around Midland for a while, moving from ranch job to ranch job, and then they both disappeared. Speedy didn’t hear from or see them for years, until a chance meeting at a cowboy bar outside of Lubbock, when all three were well into their thirties. Late at night, with all of them having a few too many beers, his two long-lost friends revealed where they’d been, what they’d done, and the kind of work they were looking for.

Speedy kept that in mind.

A year later, their talents came in handy. First, he used them on a project in Texas to discourage some protesting locals from causing trouble.

In that case, the locals took the hint.

Two years later, there was trouble in Wyoming, and they were called again.

There, some people didn’t take the hint this time, and they were dealt with, and all that were left were their tombstones.

He was using them to do the same thing again, except on an exponentially more lethal scale.

Speedy still thought of both of them as friends, albeit friends who now made him uncomfortable. These days, he found himself always on guard when around them. Back when they were growing up, they were both decent guys who liked to race around in their pickup trucks, fracture an occasional law, and get in a fight and then go drinking with the combatant. They just liked stirring shit up. They were good old boys seemingly bound for life on a ranch or as roughnecks out in the oil fields.

However, when he ran into them again those many years later, they’d both developed cold, lifeless, sociopathic eyes—especially Royce, always the smarter of the two. A glare from him, and the person it was directed at would turn and walk the other way for fear of what would happen if they stayed.

The boys were good at what they did and were well paid for their talents—well paid enough that they were talking retirement. Both had expressed their desire to put the guns away for good and retire down to their spreads in west Texas. You could do this kind of “work” for only so long before your past would catch up to you somehow or you ran into someone who was your equal.

If things worked out in North Dakota as he’d planned, Speedy had every intention of joining them. He was ready to leave his transient life of a year or two here then another year or two there out in the wilderness of places like Colorado, Wyoming, and now North Dakota.

He pulled to a stop in the driveway of the farmhouse, noticing the pickup truck parked in the small, slightly listing red-and-white barn set behind the farmhouse. As he walked up, Clint opened the door, bleary eyed and yawning, and let him in.

Speedy took a seat at the table in the small and tidy kitchen.

“Coffee?” Clint asked.

“Yes,” he answered as he tossed his leather gloves on the table. Royce came shuffling into the kitchen in sweats, his hair unkempt and heavy circles under his eyes. He sat down at the table, and Clint soon joined them.

“So you weren’t followed?” Speedy asked to get the conversation going.

They both shook their heads. “Dumped the Suburban, and we were on the road back here within a couple hours of that,” Royce explained as he drank his coffee. “We kept a good eye in the rearview on the way back up here, and there was nothing. Very quiet.”

Speedy nodded. “I’ve been doing a little discreet checking. The police down there have no leads, at least so far. McRyan told the police he thought it was a professional who broke into Hilary’s house, but he had no description beyond a male who jumped into a black SUV. The police continue to investigate the break-in and search for your vehicle. I imagine they’ll be scrubbing traffic cameras and whatnot, so hopefully you dumped the SUV in a place that was not monitored.”

Clint and Royce gave him a look.

“Okay,” Speedy answered nervously. “So you properly disposed of the vehicle in a place where it won’t be found. Then, I’d say you got away clean.”

“For now,” Royce suggested. “I don’t get a sense that this McRyan dude goes away real easily. I can’t help but feel as if we’ll be hearing from him again.”

“Which begs the question, why was McRyan at Hilary’s to begin with? Last we knew, he was in DC,” Clint asked. “Then all of a sudden he shows up at her house right when we’re there? How does that happen?”

“Maybe luck?” Speedy offered.

Royce shook his head. “Come on, Speedy. He was going there for a reason. I suggest you find out what that reason was. That may tell you whether we’ll be running into the man again.”

Speedy nodded. “We will. We’re not done paying attention to him. We have someone on that.”

“Who?” Clint asked quietly, his eyes dark.

“Don’t worry about it,” Speedy answered, waving him off. “I don’t even know. Someone higher up the food chain took care of it.”

“No, who?” Royce challenged. In this line of business, the minute they replace you is the minute when you have to start looking over your shoulder. You go from asset to liability.