Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (20 page)

"Do the Lees know about all this?"

"Valeria knows something's up. She was there when Cubby took that collar off."

"That's Ms. Valeria," she reminded me.

"Oh, right," I said, although, based on Valeria's body language at the tea party, it might not be. Carol, ever the attentive female, gave me an inquiring look. "Careful, big guy," she said. "That's very deep still water."

"That or superbly medicated," I said and described the tea party.

Her cell phone went off just then. It was the Realtor calling, asking if she knew where I might be. Apparently the title attorney was available to take the job and asking if he should proceed. She handed me the phone, and I told him to go ahead with it. Oatley said this would delay closing, because Whatley Lee did not do anything quickly. He proposed the alternative of my buying title insurance, but by now I was more than a little curious.

"The survey bring-up and the title search have become important," I told him. "I'm willing to wait. With a cash buyer in the offing, I suspect the sellers are willing to wait, too, right?"

He agreed with that notion and said he'd take care of it. I switched off the phone and handed it back to Carol.

"Does anyone do reenactments around here?" I asked.

She shook her head. "There weren't any real battles here," she said. "The anniversary of the train robbery is coming up in a few days, but the people most associated with that sad business would rather just forget it."

"Got that right," I said and told her what Hester had thought about my cleaning up the graves on the hill, perhaps turning it into a historical site.

"Just remember," she said, "if you do that, you must grant perpetual access to any and all descendants of any of the men who died there. That could mean a lot of strangers tramping through your property."

I hadn't thought of that. For that matter, I hadn't thought of a lot of things when I made the decision to buy this piece of property. The history could cut both ways, apparently.

"I've got my guys working back through Manceford County Sheriff's Office records on the wife-shooting conundrum," I said. "My bad guy kept saying that it would come to me, but damned if I can remember anything like that."

"You've talked to him?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said and elaborated on the porch encounter.

"That's scary," she said. "Especially the Dobermans."

"Well, I guess I can't complain. I run around with German shepherds, don't I? The real problem is that, so far, he's holding the initiative. That's what's scary."

"Maybe it means that you locked him up, and his wife then killed herself out of despair. Something like that?"

I hadn't considered that. It would certainly widen the scope of possibilities.

We talked about other, less frightening things for a few minutes, and then she had to go. She said she'd be in touch and left.

I called Horace and asked him to expand his search to look for dog trainers who specialized in Dobermans, again statewide. I needed to find a guy who'd had two dogs trained in the past five years for attack work. He said he'd get right on it. Then I passed along Carol's idea. He groaned. That would make a really big search effort. I told him to forget it unless nothing else panned out.

Once Carol left I grabbed my SIG, the two operational shepherds, and a walking stick. We headed out into the forests and fields of Laurel Grove this time. I dropped by the shop behind the big house, but Cubby had already gone for the day. The sunset was bright yellow, and I wished I'd brought some sunglasses. I thought I saw movement behind the curtains in one of the upstairs rooms, but it was probably just my imagination.

"C'mon, you hairballs," I told the shepherds. "Let's go find that cat."

At the mention of the word "cat," they both gave me a look that said,
Let's not and say we did.

The Laurel Grove plantation was quite different from Glory's End. For one thing it was an active farm, so there were many more dirt roads, and the fields were all either in crops or being readied for planting. The terrain was rolling, but the ridges of Glory's End subsided into the ground on this side of the road. We walked for an hour into early nightfall and then returned to the cottage. I walked the dogs around the building to see if they alerted on anything, but they did not react. The moon was low in the sky, and the night was going to be clear. I checked the Suburban, locked it, and went inside. I put Frick on the front porch on her dog bed, and Kitty came in the house with me. She was not only bigger than Frick but seemed to have a more developed protective sense. Frick was getting a bit independent in her old age.

Once inside we went through the rooms and generally checked the place out. If someone else had been in the cottage since we'd left, Kitty would have been following scent trails, but she appeared to be mostly bored. I checked on Frick, who'd not been happy being left outside, especially when Kitty got to come in, but she was on her dog bed, watching the lawn. It had been much easier to train Kitty with Frick around, because dogs learn best from other dogs.

I turned off all the lights in the cottage except one in the bedroom and closed the curtains in that room. Then I found the bottle of single malt, sat on the couch in the living room, and called Pardee at home. His wife, Alicia, was a trial lawyer in Triboro and one tough lady. She asked if he could call me back as they were sitting down to dinner. Pardee was back to me in twenty minutes.

"Sorry to intrude," I said.

"She's a little pissed that I'm going camping again," he said, "but I'm not."

"Joys of married life," I said. "Get the stuff?"

"Pretty much. Tony's working on a couple things. Horace is tackling the dog trainer business."

I remembered then my own caution about the cottage possibly being bugged, but I didn't want to step outside. "How's the hive?" I asked.

"The hive" was a code word we'd decided on to indicate that we thought there was a bug or two within range of the conversation. Hive, as in many bugs. It took Pardee a second to get it, but then he did. "We're working on that, too," he said. "I talked to the young blond lady down at the ranch. She said she could get us something to deal with that."

"Great," I said. "She knows her stuff, actually. I'm staying here for the night, and then I'll contact one of you in the morning to see what's next, and where."

"Got it," he said. "Or you could come down here for the night, stay with us, and then catch your plane to the Seychelles."

Factor that
, I mentally told any listening devices. "Thanks for the invite, but I'll wager Alicia is giving you that serious trial lawyer frown, as we speak."

"Well . . ."

"Yeah, right. Hasta manana, Detective Sergeant."

From the couch I was able to see out onto the front lawns and down to the millpond. There was still enough moonlight to see pretty well outside, and I had a good view of the dam and the road that crossed it. Old Frack was a dark furry ball in the corner of the living room. Kitty waited by the bedroom door so she could assume her sentry post. I called her over to the couch and gestured for her to curl up next to me. It took her a good second or so to make a decision about
that. I had her on one side, my SIG on the other, and the world's supply of Scotch. I waited for something to happen, and within minutes fell sound asleep.

The next morning I awoke with a start and a stiff neck. Kitty wanted to go outside to piddle, so I let her and the elder statesman out with Frick. I made the dogs' morning chow, put the bowls out on the front porch, and then went into the bathroom to take a shower. I took the SIG with me, although I felt a little foolish with a loaded .45 parked on the towel rack. When I came out into the bedroom, showered, shaved, and partially awake, I opened the curtains. There were two windows in the bedroom, and when I opened the second curtain, there was the guy in the white mask staring back at me. I nearly jumped out of my skin and was bringing up the SIG when I realized what it was: Someone had taped a life-sized picture of that white rubber face to the glass from the outside, looking in.

I went to the kitchen and made some coffee, trying to think whether I'd actually looked out those windows last night before I closed the curtains. The bedside table light had been on, and I couldn't imagine that I would not have seen that bright white face staring at me. That meant that he'd come in the night, without alerting the German shepherd out on the front porch. My stalker must be an expert creep. There'd been a very slight breeze, and it had been coming across the pond, which was on the opposite side of the cottage, so he would have been coming up into the wind. Still--neither Frick nor Kitty had heard anything to cause them to alert, and their hearing was a damn sight better than mine.

So: Elvis was in the building, or at least in the neighborhood. Not great. Not great at all. It also meant he'd had time to rig anything he wanted to over in the deserted mansion at Glory's End. Hell, for all I
knew he was holed up there, using it as his base of operations. First order of business, then, would be to sweep the environs of that hill very thoroughly, but not until my partners arrived.

Pardee showed up an hour later, and Tony was right behind him with a minivan. I stepped outside to avoid listening devices and told them what had happened overnight and what we had to do. Pardee got out some sweep gear and went through the cottage, finding no bugs. He suggested we do the same thing to the old house at Glory's End, but I said no. I remembered what the young blond tech had said about how a listening device could work for two masters.

We took all three vehicles and both shepherds with us, leaving Frack to guard his dog bed in the living room. We started with the house itself, and I again put Frick on watch outside and took Kitty with us into the house. We went room by room, checking walls, floors, and windows on all three floors, then the attic, and then we tramped down into the basement. I showed the guys where I thought there might be a false wall, and Tony went outside to get some tear-down tools.

It turned out to be much harder than we'd anticipated. Tony's crowbar and claw hammer were no match for 160-year-old, two-inch-thick oak boards. We then searched for the secret latch, because by now we were convinced there was something behind this damned panel of shelves.

"Maybe it only opens from the other side," Pardee said. "No latch or key on this side."

"Then what's the point?" Tony said, trying once more to pry something loose. The wine rack next to this shelf moved easily.

"Ultimate bolt-hole?" Pardee said. "You keep the door wedged open in times of danger and then close it behind you if you have to run?"

"Let's go outside," I said. "We'll start with the smokehouse. It's the biggest outbuilding."

It was pretty ingenious once we finally found it, and it was in the smokehouse. The building was a tall brick structure, maybe fifteen feet square, with heavily blackened beams overhead and a dirt fire pit right in the middle of the earthen floor. There were two cradle-shaped wrought-iron andirons in the fire pit. A few dozen badly blackened bricks were stacked on one side of the smokehouse. Tony was the one who figured it out. He grabbed the andirons and pulled up. The bottom of the fire pit was actually a wooden hatch, balanced on two thick pins, so that it came up like a trapdoor. Once we had it open we could see that the top of the hatch was a sheet of hammered metal. A few inches of baked-on red clay concealed the metal surface. Underneath the hatch a crude wooden ladder emerged from the cloud of fireplace ashes. It went down about ten feet into a brick-lined tunnel. The direction of the tunnel pointed right back to the big house.

"Bingo," Pardee said. "Who's up for a tour?"

Tony shook his head. He was claustrophobic and said he would stand guard on this end while we explored.

Pardee went down first, and I followed. The tunnel was lined with the same handmade brick out of which everything seemed to be constructed. The mortar looked even more floury than the exterior bricks, and as we walked, our footfalls produced faint wisps of white powder out of the arched ceiling. The air was cold and dry, and the floor was hard-packed earth. Our flashlights lit the tunnel up pretty well, but it was narrow enough that we could not walk side by side. The floor seemed to slope down as we proceeded, and the tunnel bent around to the left before we finally came to an alcove, which required a step down. I noticed that the right-hand wall near the alcove was actually a huge outcrop of granite, which had probably been the reason for the bending in the tunnel.

"Bingo number two," Pardee said, hunched over now because the ceiling was much lower here. We were facing a dogleg turn in the tunnel, first to the right and then to the left, all within four feet. "Somebody thinking tactical," he said. "Nobody could stand in the
basement and shoot down the full length of the tunnel while folks were running."

There was a heavy wooden door in the alcove, latched by a solid bar of black wrought iron encased in two brackets on either side of the doorway. The door was hinged at three levels with more black iron. Pardee pulled out the bar, and the door swung quietly on obviously oiled hinges into the tunnel, revealing the darkness of the basement on the other side. Mystery solved: It was a one-way escape door, opening only in the direction of safety.