Moving Target (18 page)

“What’s that?” LeAnne asked.

“My Taser,” Sister Anselm answered. “I generally don’t leave home without it, especially if I’m going to be traveling long stretches of lonely highway by myself. You should probably look into getting one. Now, if you’ll go see to Lance, I should make some calls.”

Puzzling over what kind of nun would advise her to carry a weapon, LeAnne returned to Lance’s room. Inside nothing had changed. The machines still hummed; the lights were still dimmed. As she slipped into the chair, however, Lance opened his eyes. “Mom?” he croaked. “What happened? Where am I? And why does it hurt so much?”

O
n the way back to San Leandro from Austin with her father in the passenger seat, Susannah Bissell had insisted on stopping off at Denny’s to have some dinner. Ever since her mother died, Susannah had nagged him constantly, worrying about his living alone and whether he was getting enough to eat.

“No warmed-up canned soup for you tonight,” she said as she turned in to the restaurant parking lot. “You’re having real food for a change.”

He did, ordering the senior-plate roast beef special from the pictured menu. It was dark when Lowell Dunn made his way into the small wood-frame bungalow he called home. The neighborhood, not far from San Leandro’s Old Town, was gradually being gentrified, but it had once been part of the barrio and the only part of town where a mixed-race couple—a black man married to a Hispanic woman—could buy a house back in the bad old days.

With both him and his wife working—Lowell as a janitor at the juvenile detention center and Juanita as a cook in the high school cafeteria—they had qualified to buy the place. It was the first and last house the couple purchased. It was the house where they welcomed and raised their two daughters, and it was where Juanita died after a long battle with diabetes.

Most of the other houses on the block dating from the same era were in a state of disrepair. This one was perfect. The paint was fresh. The roof had been recently replaced. Inside there were no squeaky floorboards or leaky faucets. Lowell had replaced or repaired them all. The neighboring lots might be weed-choked wastelands, but Lowell Dunn’s tiny yard, surrounded by a sturdy wire-mesh fence, was a smooth carpet of wintering-over yellow Bermuda grass where not so much as a single dead dandelion dared show its scrawny neck.

The yard and the house constituted Lowell’s private domain. He knew its every inch and every nuance. As soon as he stepped inside and switched on the lights, he felt that something was wrong, as though someone had been there in his absence. He went from room to room, checking, but nothing seemed to be missing or out of place. Neither the front nor the back door showed signs of having been jimmied or forced. The windows were properly closed and latched. The television sets in the living room and the bedroom were where they belonged. The microwave, two years old but unused, sat untouched on the kitchen counter. Two weeks earlier, Susannah had taken him to Costco and used her card for him to buy cigarettes. The half-used carton of Camels—expensive enough to merit being stolen—was still in the fridge. The thumbprint-operated gun safe in the bedside table was where it belonged and showed no evidence of tampering.

“You been livin’ by yourself so long, you’re turning into a girl,” Lowell chided himself sternly. Back in the living room, he settled into his recliner. First he lit a cigarette—Susannah didn’t allow smoking in her minivan—and reached for the television remote. He scrolled through the channels, looking for something he hadn’t seen before. Had Lowell Dunn been able to read, he would have been able to use the guide to see what was on as well as which programs were new and which were reruns, but that was his big secret: Lowell Dunn couldn’t read.

He could work with his hands. If something was broken, he could look at it and figure out how to fix it. That was how he had made his
way up through the janitorial ranks at the detention facility: by being the best handyman there was and by making himself indispensable, but reading was beyond him. That was why he had never used the microwave his daughters gave him for Christmas two years ago. He couldn’t read the instructions. That was why he liked Denny’s—because the menus had pictures instead of words.

After clicking through the channels, he realized that the episode of
Criminal Minds
looked to be new, but he didn’t stay with it. He knew too much about the bad things some people did to others. As uneasy as he felt right then, he didn’t need any further reminders. Instead, he switched off the TV and sat alone in his silent house, smoking three cigarettes in rapid succession and thinking about who on the staff might have been behind what happened to Lance Tucker.

All his life, Lowell Dunn had been early to bed and early to rise. Eventually, weariness got the better of him. When he felt himself starting to snooze a little after eleven, he dumped the long-extinguished contents of his ashtray into the trash can beside his chair. Then he got up, switched off the lights, and went into the bedroom.

Once undressed, he sat on the side of the bed and considered what it meant to be an old man alone in the house. He remembered all too well that after Juanita died, the girls had suggested that he get a dog to keep him company, and a telephone so he could call for help if the need arose, but Lowell Dunn had implacably resisted both. Now, still unsettled by the thought that some stranger might have gained entry to his house, he wished he hadn’t been so stubborn. He was tempted to try sleeping without removing his hearing aids, but as soon as he put his head down on the pillow, the ungodly screeching in his ear made him rethink. He sat back up and removed both hearing aids, putting them on his bedside table as a cloud of cottony silence descended around him.

He was restless. He tossed and turned for some time before he fell asleep. The last time he looked at the clock, it was after one. He knew
that, in a few hours, when the alarm went off at five, it would be tough to drag his weary body out of bed.

At last he drifted into a sleep so sound that he never heard the tiny click of the front door as someone used a key to gain entry to the living room. He didn’t notice the brief flare of a cigarette lighter as someone moved the tail of the living room curtain into the trash can by his chair and set it on fire. After that, there was another small click as someone went back out the front door and used the key again to lock the deadbolt.

Had the smoke alarm installed by his son-in-law two years earlier been operational, the din might have been enough to awaken Lowell Dunn. Oddly enough, the batteries had been removed. The silenced smoke alarm gave out no warning at all.

By the time a passing motorist saw the flames an hour or so later, the house was fully engulfed. Unable to go in through the front door, firefighters broke down the back one. They had hoped to find someone alive, but it was too late. The house was a total loss, and Lowell Dunn, evidently overcome by smoke, never managed to get out of bed.

The fire trucks were putting out hot spots when LaVonn Bissell came by on his bicycle on his way to school. The poor kid came running into the yard, screaming for his grandfather. So much for making a proper notification to the next of kin. As for the guys investigating the incident? Once the fire cooled off enough so they could work, the cause was readily apparent. The fire had obviously started in a trash can next to the remains of a leather recliner. When they pulled the crushed trash can out from under the collapsed roof and ceiling, they found the telltale remains of dozens of cigarette filters. One of the investigators held one up for his partner to see.

“Is that what I think it is,” the second one asked, “a cigarette butt?” The first guy nodded. “The trash can is full of them.”

“Figures.”

They examined the house for residue of accelerants and found only
the track where the blazing curtain had run up the wall, setting fire to first the ceiling and then the rafters. They found the melted remains of a smoke alarm from which the batteries had been removed.

As far as the investigators were concerned, the story was clear: The fire, although accidental, was neither unexpected nor inexplicable. Another careless smoker bites the dust. What else is new?

W
atching the news in her hotel room the next morning, Ali learned that the Internet was still being disrupted throughout Europe. It was provoking to realize that some kids in Shanghai with too much time on their hands could inconvenience people half the world away. Knowing that, she didn’t bother trying to log on to the hotel’s system. Instead, she stopped in the dining room for the breakfast buffet and then headed out. Without Leland along, she programmed Banshee Group’s address into the Land Rover’s GPS.

By the time she had negotiated her third roundabout in under a mile, she was grateful to have the chirpy female voice keeping her on the right path. The balmy weather was gone on this cold and frosty morning. The predicted storm, complete with another round of snow, was heading south, but it wasn’t due to hit Bournemouth until late in the afternoon. There were patches of fog here and there on the roadway as she headed north, but that was all. She wondered where B. was in his ten-hour flight from Tokyo to Helsinki. When the phone rang, Ali was surprised to hear Sister Anselm’s voice.

“I understand you’re in Texas,” Ali said. “Will you be home in time for the wedding? You’re not calling to back out on being matron of honor, are you?”

“Certainly not,” Sister Anselm replied. “I fully expect to be back home by then. I wouldn’t want to miss the wedding. I take it you know why I’m here?”

“I’m assuming you were dispatched by Bishop Gillespie at B.’s request, right?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“It must be late at night there.”

“Yes, it is,” Sister Anselm replied. “The witching hour. Someone needs to be with the patient around the clock, and I volunteered for the night shift. Since my charge’s mother hasn’t slept in a real bed for days, I gave her the key to my hotel room at the Omni and told her to get a good night’s sleep. In the meantime, I wanted to run something past you. Do you know anything at all about this case?”

“Some,” Ali admitted. More than I should, she thought.

“For some reason, Bishop Gillespie directed me not to contact B. about any of this directly, so I decided to work through you instead. If I’m not mistaken, people at High Noon are able to gain access to information that might be problematic for other people.”

“What do you need?” Ali asked.

“A couple of things happened today that I think B. needs to know about. For instance, you know about the tagging situation at the school, that landed my patient, Lance Tucker, in jail?”

“Yes.”

“B. should know that a representative from that company, United Tracking Incorporated, sent a smarmy guy named Crutcher to the hospital today. He offered Lance’s mother a check for fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand?” Ali repeated.

“That’s right. Crutcher said it was a good-faith gesture to show how sorry they were that Lance had been injured.”

“That’s a lot of money for an apology,” Ali said. “Why would they do something like that?”

“That’s what I wondered, too,” Sister Anselm said. “It sounded fishy
to me. I’m worried that the company is trying to worm its way into the family’s good graces for reasons we don’t understand. Lance’s mother could certainly use the money, but I advised her not to take it.”

“Probably a good call,” Ali said.

“In the course of the day I asked some pointed questions about the family’s financial situation. It sounds as though thirty-seven thousand dollars would be enough to keep them out of foreclosure. Having had her turn down the check, I’m looking into some other avenues to help her out.”

Ali had a pretty good idea where Sister Anselm would go looking for help.

“This evening,” Sister Anselm continued, “a kid named Andrew, a friend of Lance’s, came by to visit. He told us that Lance and his former computer science teacher, a guy named Mr. Jackson, were working on a computer application that would make it easier to access something called the ‘dark Web.’ Do you know anything about that?”