Split Second (35 page)

W
ITH EVERYTHING ELSE GOING ON
, King had somehow found the time to set up an appointment with a security company based in Lynchburg. He watched from the front window as the van emblazoned with “A-1 Security” pulled up.

He met the sales representative at the front door and told him what he wanted. The man looked around the house, then eyed King. “You look familiar. Aren’t you the guy who found a dead body?”

“That’s right. I think you’d agree I need a security system more than most.”

“Okay, but just so we’re straight, our warranty doesn’t cover stuff like that. I mean, if another dead body turns up, you don’t get a refund or anything like that. That’s like an act of God, okay?”

“Fine.”

They agreed on what was to be done.

“When can you get to it?” King asked.

“Well, we’re kind of backed up. If somebody cancels on us, we can pop you up higher on the list. I’ll give you a call.”

King signed the paperwork, they shook on it and the man left.

As night came, King thought about calling Michelle and having her come over. He’d kept her in the dark pretty long, and she’d been a trouper about it. Yet that was just his way. He always
played things close to the vest, particularly when he was uncertain of the correct answer. Well, he felt more certain.

He called Kate Ramsey’s apartment in Richmond. Sharon, the roommate, answered; Kate still hadn’t turned up.

He told her, “Sit tight, and I’ll let you know if she turns up. You do the same.”

He hung up and stared out the big window at the lake. Normally when in a funk, he’d go out on the boat and think, but it was too chilly and windy for that. He turned on the gas fireplace, sat down in front of it and ate a simple meal. By the time he’d convinced himself to call Michelle he figured the hour was too late.

He thought about John Bruno’s kidnapping. It was clear to King now that the man had been abducted because he had
supposedly
destroyed Arnold Ramsey’s life with falsified homicide charges. Those charges had been dropped only after the intervention of a lawyer whose identity King now knew. He wanted very much to share this information with Michelle, and even glanced at the phone, thinking he might call her despite the lateness of the hour. It could wait, he decided. Next King thought about what Kate told them she had overheard. Or thought she had overheard. The name Thornton Jorst, supposedly uttered by the mystery man to her father. But King was convinced that what the man had actually said was not Thornton Jorst, but “Trojan horse.”

And something else Kate said was troubling him. According to her, Regina Ramsey said a police officer was killed during a war protest, and implied that the incident damaged Arnold Ramsey’s academic career. But Kate also told them the University of California at Berkeley let her father receive his Ph.D. because he’d
already
earned it. Kate had to know they could easily discern that 1974 was when Ramsey received his Ph.D. and easily conclude that the protest wasn’t about the war. Why had she done that? No answer to that question came to mind.

He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was after midnight. After making sure all the doors and windows were
secured he carried the gun Michelle had given him upstairs. He locked his bedroom door, then slid a bureau across it for added security. He checked to make sure the gun was fully loaded and that a round was in the chamber. He undressed and crawled into bed. The gun on the nightstand beside him, he soon fell asleep.

I
T WAS 2:00 A.M.
, and the person at the window raised a gun, took aim at the bulky figure lying in the bed and shot through the window, the glass tinkling as it broke. The slugs tore into the bed, blowing feathers into the air from the down comforter.

Roused from sleep by the shots, Michelle fell off the couch and onto the floor. She’d dozed off while going through Joan’s notes, yet was now instantly alert. Realizing someone had just tried to kill her, she pulled her gun and fired back at the window. She heard footsteps racing away and crawled toward the window, listening intently as she did so. She reached the wall and cautiously peered over the windowsill. She could still hear the strides of the person running away, and he also seemed to be wheezing. To her expert ears, his strides were curious, as though the runner was wounded or injured in some way. Whatever the cause, they weren’t normal. They were more like disjointed lunges, and her mind played with the idea that either she’d hit the would-be assassin or he’d already been wounded when he came to kill her tonight. Could it be the man she’d shot in her truck, the one who’d done his best to wring her neck? Perhaps the man who called himself Simmons?

She heard a vehicle start up and didn’t even try to race to her truck and follow it. She had no idea if anyone else was out there waiting. She and King had run into one ambush that way. She had no desire to repeat the mistake.

She went over to the bed and looked down at the mess. She’d
taken a nap there earlier, and the covers and thick pillows had gotten balled together. To the shooter it must have looked like her sleeping there.

Yet why try to kill her now? Were they getting too close? She hadn’t done all that much. Sean certainly had found out more than—

She froze. King! She grabbed her phone and dialed his number. It rang and rang but there was no answer. Should she call the police? Parks? It could be that King was just sleeping hard. No, her gut told her otherwise. She ran for her truck.

The alarm woke King. Groggy for a moment, he quickly became alert and sat straight up. There was smoke everywhere. He jumped up, then fell to the floor trying to breathe. He made it to the bathroom, soaked a washcloth and draped it over his face. He crawled back out, braced his back against the wall and, using his legs, levered the bureau away from the door. He touched the door to make sure it wasn’t hot and then cautiously opened it.

The outside hallway was full of smoke, and the smoke alarm continued to shriek. Unfortunately it wasn’t connected to a central monitoring station, and the single volunteer fire department station that serviced the area was many miles away. And his house was so remotely situated no one may have noticed it was on fire. He crawled back inside his bedroom with the idea of getting to the phone, but the room was so smoky he lost his bearings and was afraid to venture farther in. He slithered back out into the hallway and along the catwalk. He could see sparks and red flames down below, and he prayed the stairs were passable. Otherwise, he’d have to jump, possibly into an inferno, and that wasn’t a very appealing idea.

He heard sounds coming from down below. He was coughing from smoke inhalation and desperately wanted to get out of the house, but he was still aware this could be a trap. He clenched the gun and shouted out, “Who’s down there? I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”

There was no answer, which fueled his suspicions even more until he looked out the big front window as he lay on the catwalk. He saw the flashing red lights in his front yard, and he could hear the sirens of other fire trucks coming. Okay, help was here, after all. He reached the stairs and looked down. Through the smoke he could make out firefighters in bulky overcoats and helmets, with tanks strapped to their backs and masks covering their faces.

“I’m up here,” he shouted. “Up here!”

“Can you make your way down?” called out one fireman.

“I don’t think so, it’s a wall of smoke up here.”

“Okay, just stay there. We’ll come for you. Just stay there and stay down! We’re bringing the hoses in now. This whole place is on fire.”

He heard the whoosh of spray from fire extinguishers as the men charged up the stairs. King was sick to his stomach and nearly blind from the smoke in his eyes. He felt himself being picked up and hauled swiftly down the stairs. In another minute he was outside and sensed people hovering over him.

“Are you okay?” one of them said.

“Get him some damn oxygen,” said another. “He’s breathed in a ton of carbon monoxide.”

King felt the oxygen mask being placed over his face, and then he had the sensation of being lifted into the ambulance. For a moment he thought he could hear Michelle calling out to him. And then everything went black.

The sirens, flashing lights, radio staccato and other “sound effects” immediately stopped as the fireman hit the master switch on the control box with one hand and took the gun from King with the other. Everything became quiet once more. The fireman turned away and went back to the house, where the smoke was already starting to peter out. It had been a very carefully controlled “fire,” with all the elements of the inferno artificially created. He went inside the basement, set the ignition switch on the small device next to the gas lines and left the house. He climbed into the back of the van, and it immediately drove away. The van
reached the main road and accelerated, heading south. Two minutes later the small explosive device went off in King’s basement, setting off the gas lines, and the resulting explosion ripped Sean King’s beautiful home apart for real.

The fireman pulled off his helmet and mask and wiped his face.

Buick Man looked down at the unconscious King. The “oxygen” he’d been given included a sedative.

“It’s good finally to see you, Agent King. I’ve waited a long time for this.”

The van sped on into the darkness.

M
ICHELLE HAD JUST
turned off onto King’s long drive when the explosion rocked the night. She floored the truck and kicked gravel and dirt all the way up. She slid the truck to a stop as boards, glass and other parts of the destroyed house blocked her way. She jumped out, dialing 911 on her phone as she did so and screaming to the dispatcher what had happened, telling the woman to send everything she could.

Michelle raced through the wreckage, dodging flames and smoke and screaming out his name. “Sean!
Sean!”

She went back to her truck, grabbed a blanket, covered herself with it and hurtled through the front door, or where the front door had been. The wall of smoke that met her was overwhelming, and she staggered back out, gagging and dropping to her knees. She sucked in some fresh air and this time entered through a gaping hole in what was left of the structure. Inside she crawled forward, calling out every few seconds for him. She started for the stairs, thinking he might be in his bedroom, only the stairs weren’t there anymore. Her lungs heaving, she had to go back out to get some untainted air.

Another explosion rocked the structure, and she jumped off the front porch a few seconds before it came tumbling down. The concussive force of a second explosion knocked her through the air, and she landed hard, all the breath squeezed from her. She felt all sorts of heavy things hitting all around her, like mortar fire. She lay there in the dirt, her head cut, her lungs drowning in lethal fumes, her legs and arms bruised and battered. The next thing she
knew sirens were everywhere and the sounds of heavy equipment surrounded her. A man in bulky clothing knelt down next to her, gave her oxygen, asked if she was okay.

She couldn’t say anything as more trucks and cars lumbered up the drive and teams of volunteer firefighters attacked the inferno. As she lay there, the remaining parts of Sean King’s house collapsed and fell in. Only the stone chimney remained standing. With that searing image in her mind Michelle blacked out.

When Michelle awoke, it took her a few minutes to realize she was lying in a hospital bed. A man appeared next to her, holding a cup of coffee and wearing a relieved expression.

Jefferson Parks said, “Damn, we almost lost you. The firemen said a thousand-pound steel beam that got blown off the house was lying six inches from your head.”

She tried to sit up, but he put a hand on her shoulder and held her down.

“Will you just take it easy? You got the shit kicked out of you. You can’t just get up and waltz away after something like that.”

She looked around frantically. “Sean, where’s Sean?” Parks didn’t answer right away, and Michelle felt tears rushing to her eyes. “Please, Jefferson, please don’t tell me…” Her voice broke.

“I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know. Nobody does. They haven’t found any bodies, Michelle. No indication Sean was even there. But they haven’t finished searching. It’s, well, it was a bad fire and there were gas explosions. I guess what I’m trying to say is there might not be much to find.”

“I called his house last night, there was no answer. So maybe he wasn’t home.”

“Or maybe it had already blown.”

“No, I heard the explosion when I was driving up to his house.”

Parks pulled the chair up next to the bed and sat down. “Okay, tell me exactly what happened.”

She did, with as much detail as she could remember. And then
she recalled what else had happened, an event that had gotten pushed to the back of her thoughts by what had occurred at King’s house.

“Someone tried to kill me at the inn last night, right before I went to Sean’s. They fired through my window and into my bed. Luckily I’d fallen asleep on the couch.”

Parks’s face turned red. “Why the hell didn’t you call me last night? No, instead you go running into a building that’s exploding. Do you have a death wish?”

She sat back and pulled at the corners of her sheet. Her head was hurting, and she noticed for the first time that there were bandages on her arms.

“Did I get burned?” she asked wearily.

“No, just cuts and bruises, nothing that won’t heal. I don’t know about your head. You’ll probably just keep doing stupid things until your luck runs out and you lose that.”

“I just wanted to make sure Sean was okay. I thought if they went after me, they’d go after him too. And I was right. That explosion was no accident, was it?”

“No. They found the device that was used. Said it was pretty sophisticated stuff. It was set right next to the gas piping in the basement. Blew the place sky-high.”

“But why? Especially if Sean wasn’t even there?”

“I wish I could answer that, but I can’t.”

“You have people looking for him?”

“Everybody and everywhere we can think of. The FBI’s in the loop, the Marshals Service, Secret Service, Virginia State Police, locals; nothing’s turned up yet, though.”

“Anything else? Any leads on Joan? Isn’t there anything?”

“No,” Parks said in a discouraged tone. “Nothing.”

“Well, I’m going to get out of here and get to work.” She started to rise again.

“What you’re going to do is lie there and get some rest.”

“You’re asking the impossible!” she exclaimed angrily.

“I’m asking the reasonable. You fly out of here all banged up and disoriented and maybe black out in your truck and kill
yourself and someone else, well, I don’t see how that can be a positive thing. And remember, this is your second stint in the hospital within a few days. The third time might be the morgue.”

Michelle looked ready to erupt again, but then she just lay back. “Okay, you win for now. But the minute something happens you call me. If you don’t, I’ll track you down and it won’t be pretty.”

Parks held up his hands in mock protest. “Okay, okay, I’m not looking to make any more enemies, I got enough already.” He went to the door, then turned back. “I’m not going to give you any false hopes. The chances we’re going to see Sean King again are pretty remote. But while there’s still a chance, I won’t sleep.”

She managed a smile. “Okay. Thank you.”

Five minutes after he left, she hurriedly threw on her clothes, dodged the nurses on duty and escaped the hospital by a rear exit.