The Homecoming (6 page)

“Nice work, Mark. We’ll need a statement from Quan too. Has the maid done their rooms yet?”

“No. Once we realized that there had been a crash and that you’d be coming over, I had all of their rooms locked and sealed.”

“When was the last time their rooms were cleaned?”

“They’d have had a turn-down service at ten last night. But the rooms are all cleaned before noon, depending on when the guests are out.”

“So almost twenty-four hours, then?”

“Yes.”

Nick looked at Beau.

“Call the LT, will you? Tell him we’ll need Forensics out here to go over the rooms. Mark, we’ll try to be subtle, but this crash, these guys are Chinese nationals, so the State Department and maybe the FBI will be getting involved. And this connection with Byron Deitz … something’s not right here.”

“I been turning it over,” said Luckinbaugh. “I got a notion, you want to hear it.”

“We do,” said Nick.

“Well, Mr. Deitz’s company was security for Quantum Park,” said Luckinbaugh. “Lot of high-tech stuff there. Secret stuff. Maybe that’s
why they were here. The Chinese guys. Maybe ‘the item’ was something they took from Quantum Park?”

Everybody stared at Luckinbaugh. It was as if a stuffed and mounted bluefin had begun to recite Catullus. He was a bigot but apparently he was also a pretty good cop.

“Oh Jesus,” said Nick. “That’s damn good, Edgar. Makes sense. And I sincerely hope you’re wrong.”

Luckinbaugh shrugged, but looked pleased.

Another silence.

“Edgar, did any of these guys send anything off by FedEx or drop anything in the mail?”

Luckinbaugh shook his head.

“No sir. Mr. Hopewell took the liberty of checking the mail drop box. Nothing there. And no FedEx or UPS pickups on a Sunday. Their drop boxes are empty too. And the shuttle took these guys right to Mauldar Field, no stops to drop anything off. If they had it when they left here, then they had it with them on the plane when they took off.”

They all contemplated that.

“Well, I guess we know where it is now,” said Beau after a moment. “Whatever it was.”

“In a crater on the fourteenth green,” said Nick.

“Yes sir.”

Nick stood up.

“Okay, Mark, Edgar, thanks a lot.”

“What’s going to happen now?” Hopewell wanted to know.

“Beau and I are going to go on up to Gracie, get a sit-down with Byron, see what he has to say about all of this. We’ll get our CID people in here, get your statements, bag the rooms, check out their contacts. In the meantime, we’d be grateful if you said absolutely nothing about this to anybody. There were media trucks at the crash site. Sooner or later they’ll figure out where the victims were staying. They’ll be all over you.”

“They won’t get a thing from us,” said Hopewell.

“Damn right,” said Luckinbaugh, with a final defiant glare at Beau. Nick and Beau headed for the car, with Luckinbaugh following behind. He opened Nick’s door for him, and he was still frowning at the back of Beau’s head as they pulled away.

“Made a friend there,” said Nick.

“Probably not,” said Beau, grinning. “His type just gets on my nerves.”

“I inferred that,” said Nick.

A pause, while Beau accelerated onto the main road and turned north. Gracie was about seventy miles away, on the east slope of the Belfair Range.

After a while, Nick said, “Cullud spit?”

“Yeah,” said Beau, looking grim.

“Shit’s still out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But not as much as you’d think. Times have changed. You run into it, this part of the state, it’s mainly with the older guys, especially the county deps.”

“Well, it’s not in here, Beau.”

Beau shot him a sideways smile.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then why you making me drive?”

Marty Coors was standing in the cement-block basement of the State Police HQ holding cells a few miles out of Gracie. The holding cells were twenty feet underground, protected by walls a foot thick, with closed-circuit cameras everywhere you looked and every kind of sensor and trip-wire device and mantrap you could order up from
The Great Big Book of Totally Sneaky Stuff
.

Coors was staring at a sheet of bulletproof mirrored glass. The glass made up one whole wall of a SuperMax containment cell. Inside the cell, sitting on a steel chair bolted to the concrete floor of a barren blank box, shackled in just about every way it is possible to shackle a guy without entirely covering him in chains, was the Man of the Hour himself, the one and only Byron Deitz.

But since the lights inside the SuperMax cell were not turned on, all that Marty Coors could see was his own reflection, a six-foot-three-inch muscled-out ex-marine in his early fifties with a face made for radio and
steel gray hair cut so short his scalp glowed pink in the sun. His eyes were in shadow as he stood in a pool of light from an overhead fixture.

Marty Coors was the CO of this sector of the State Police and right now it was his personal duty to see that the piece of human waste currently being held inside the SuperMax containment cell lived to see the next morning.

This he was doing by being the only living human being on level four of the cellblock. Level four had only one cell, known to the troopers based here as the Bull Pit, and Marty Coors was looking at it right now.

Coors was convinced to a moral certainty that every one of the twenty or thirty state troopers and county cops and even the three FBI types crowding the main floor concourse of the HQ center would cheerfully pop six rounds of hollow-point into Byron Deitz’s skull if he gave them a sliver of an angle on him. Or, if pushed, beat him to death with their bare hands.

This was because Byron Deitz had just been caught with pretty clear and convincing evidence that he had been involved in an armed robbery during which four police officers had been literally executed, two state, one county, and one of their own pursuit drivers, a fine young man named Darcy Beaumont, which had left Coors with only one pursuit driver for his entire sector, Darcy’s best friend, Reed Walker.

Two media mutts had also been killed when their news chopper had been shot down, but, to be honest, nobody gave a flying fruitcup about them, because, really, did
anyone
give a flying fruitcup when a couple of vultures circling a fresh kill got themselves all shot to shit?

No, they did not.

The memorial service for these four young men was scheduled for the following week, at Holy Name Cathedral down in Cap City. So far, law enforcement people from all over America, from Canada and the UK and Europe, were slated to walk behind the hearses. Three police pipe bands were due to attend, including the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, the U.S. Corps of Cadets Pipes and Drums from West Point, and the Virginia Military Institute Pipes and Drums.

It was shaping up to be the largest memorial service for fallen police officers ever held in the South, with expected attendance being estimated at somewhere around ten thousand people.

And this was all happening because of two hundred and twenty-odd pounds of meat and gristle chained to a chair on the other side of this
sheet of glass. The main reason Coors was unarmed was because he really didn’t trust himself all that much either.

He reached out and hit a wall switch beside the glass and a bank of fluorescent lights flared up inside the SuperMax cell. Deitz was slumped over in the chair, asleep, so when the lights went on his head came up with a jerk.

Appearance-wise, Byron Deitz had never been a figure one could contemplate with a joyful heart. He did not walk in beauty like the night. In fact, he slouched in warthog ugly like a Hangover Monday in Barstow, with a big bald head stuck like a cannonball on a neckless torso that might have been a shaved grizzly carcass. The fact that he had been well and truly tuned up by the arresting officers was written—let’s say tattooed—all over his face. He straightened up, glared through the glass, knowing somebody was out there. His grating snarl came through the loudspeaker in the wall over the window.

“Where’s Warren Smoles? I want my lawyer. I’m not saying a fucking thing without Warren Smoles in the room.”

Coors pushed the
TALK
button.

“This is Captain Coors—”

“Marty, you prick.”

“We’ve called Smoles. He was down in Cap City. He’s flying up right now. In a police air unit. He’ll be here in an hour. Anything you need right now?”

“You could take these fucking chains off me, Marty. I’m in your SuperMax cell. My company designed and built it. My contractors put it in. Whaddya figure, I built in a secret door in case I ever ended up here? Besides, I gotta hit the can.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Coors, killing the speaker. He left the lights on. From what he could see, Deitz was still talking. From how red his face was getting, it was probably something unpleasant. His radio beeped. He picked it up.

“Coors.”

“Captain, Nick Kavanaugh’s here. He’s asking to see Deitz. What do you want me to say?”

“Tell him I’ll be right up. And send a team down here to get Deitz to the can. It’s okay to take the girdle off him. Just ankle chains and the belt shackles. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Will do, Captain.”

“No sidearms, remember. Just the muscle and the Taser if you need it. Reliable guys only, got it?”

“Hey, Cap, they’re all reliable.”

“You know what I mean, Luke.”

“Roger that. They’re on their way.”

When Coors got out of the elevator in the main lobby, the entire space was jammed full of uniforms, big blocky men and solid, capable-looking women, young and old and right in the middle, the black and tan of the Sheriff’s Department, the charcoal gray of the State Police, even a few navy blue uniforms from the Niceville PD.

He saw Mickey Hancock and Jimmy Candles, the shift supervisors for the Belfair and Cullen County units, standing talking to Coker and his buddy Charlie Danziger. Danziger was a tall, cowboy-looking older man with a white handlebar mustache, and Coker was a top kick with the county. Coker was the unofficial go-to police sniper for pretty much every agency in this part of the state. He was wiry, silver-haired, and had something of a gunfighter air about him, with pale eyes and a tanned leathery look. He and Charlie Danziger were in civilian clothes, Coker in a charcoal suit and Danziger in a white shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Danziger’s connection to the case was that one of his Wells Fargo trucks had delivered the cash only an hour before the robbery.

When the elevator doors binged open, everybody in the lobby, including Coker and Hancock and Candles and Charlie Danziger, turned to look at Coors. It was like being gunned by a room full of wolves, all set faces and ferocious attention. The talk, whatever it had been, fell silent. Coors moved through the crowd, making eye contact, letting everybody know who was running this room. They all gave way as he passed. There was no muttering, but there were a few unfriendly looks.

He reached his office, a glassed-in square with a view of the rest of the operating area and the front doors. Nick Kavanaugh was there, along with his new sidekick, the kid named Norlett.

Boonie Hackendorff, the Special Agent in Charge of the Cap City FBI office, was leaning on the wall opposite Coors’ desk, a large big-bellied man with a round red face and a neatly trimmed beard. He had his suit jacket open and Coors could see he was carrying today, a gray Sig in a Bianchi holster.

Everybody looked up as Coors came in.

“Gentlemen.”

“Jeez, Marty,” said Boonie Hackendorff, “can you feel what’s going on out there?”

Coors came around, sat in the chair behind his desk, laid his hands on the table.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “Reminds me of Tombstone just before the Earps took their walk. Nick, how are you? Any word on Kate’s dad?”

Nick shook his head.

“Got a DT named Linus Calder up at VMI, he’s on it. So far, no sign of him.”

“He’s what, in his eighties? Could he have just wandered off?”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” said Nick.

Coors nodded.

“I hear Mrs. Deitz is with Kate?”

“Yes. She walked out on Byron last night. Took the kids. I think she’ll be with us for a while. Boonie, you’re gonna want to talk to her, I guess.”

“Yes. But not today. She’s been through enough. Okay, we’re all hanging here, Nick. What the hell went down at Mauldar Field?”

Nick laid it out for them, from takeoff to wipeout, and what they had learned from Hopewell and Luckinbaugh.

Boonie Hackendorff was not pleased.

“Are we saying that those five guys who augured in were Chinese fricking spies? And that Deitz was working with them?”

Nick shook his head.

“Only solid thing we can say is that Deitz is connected to them. He might even have been trying to stop them from doing something.”

Boonie was clearly thinking Homeland Security, a Bigfoot agency that nobody ever wanted to deal with.

“And Deitz used the word ‘item’?”

Nick nodded.

“No idea what he meant?”

“Not yet. Like I said, might have been something Deitz was trying to recover, something the Chinese guys had taken—stolen—somehow.”

Boonie shook his head.

“That doesn’t square with Holliman saying ‘they were always going to take it with them.’ ”

“No. It doesn’t,” said Nick. “That sounds more like Deitz was expecting to get the item back.”

“Which sure sounds like he gave it to them in the first place,” said Marty Coors.

“We can’t assume it. All we can do is follow up. Boonie, you might want to get on to the people at Quantum Park, get them to start an inventory check, see if anything’s missing.”

“We’re going to have to bypass all the Securicom people, go direct to the companies themselves. Jeez. I gotta make a few calls.”

Boonie went toward the door, saw all the uniforms out there, all staring back at him through the glass, and hesitated.

“Use my gun room,” said Coors. “Nobody there. Close the door.”

When Boonie was gone, Coors leaned back in his chair.