A Killing Sky (15 page)

We scrambled to put the letters back into the file the way we had found them. Should I take the letter I'd just been reading? I skimmed the rest of it to look for any other bombshells, but there didn't appear to be any. I stuffed it back into the file along with the rest of the correspondence.

Toronto had already shut down the computer and was busy restoring everything else in the office to the way it was when we arrived. I finished returning all the files, then closed and locked the desk. We clicked off our lights and went to the window. I drew the drape aside and looked out.

Unfortunately, the view from the office window failed to show me the approach to the front of the house. I could see out to the woods, the moon and stars overhead, and on the mowed field grass the bright swath of brilliance, now unmoving, from a pair of headlights. A vehicle was definitely there, but it appeared to have stopped only partway up the drive.

Toronto edged around my shoulder to have a look. “What do you think, mate?”

“Whoever this is belongs here. They came right in through the main gate.”

“What are they waiting for?”

“Maybe they picked up on the fact that the lights were out in back.”

He furrowed his brow. “We need to get out,” he said. “Now.”

No argument from me. “How about the side of the house closest to the trees? It's still dark there. The headlight beams don't reach up that far.”

Toronto nodded. We pulled open the drapes and made our way out of the office, locking the door behind us again. We descended the stairs but didn't head back toward the kitchen. Instead, we crossed a dining room and entered another short hallway that led down a short flight of steps into a recreation room with a wet bar, pool table, big-screen television. Through a door on the far side was an exercise room with a weight machine, exercise bike, and treadmill. There were also two large windows facing the woods.

You could still see the glow from the unmoving headlights further out on the grass. There were sensors on the windows, but Toronto took out a pair of clippers and a little magnet and quickly dispatched them. One thing we hadn't taken into account, though. The house was built into the hillside, split into multiple levels. The drop from these particular windows looked to be at least fifteen feet.

But it was too late to worry about that. Just as we raised the window on the cold night air, the moan of a garage door rising, followed by the ignition of the Suburban's engine, came from the far side of the house. The security boys had been home all along.

Toronto went first. He swung his legs out the window and hung from the sill for an instant before dropping with a grunt to the ground. I was right behind him. I thought I'd timed my drop well enough to minimize the height as much as possible, but my foot must have caught the edge of a rock when I hit the ground. A jolt of pain shot through my leg. I didn't think the ankle was broken, but I'd sprained it badly enough. Toronto grabbed my arm and began running for the woods with me hobbling along, partially supported by his bulk, as best I could.

“Remind me to get you to the gym more often, buck,” he whispered. “You gotta learn to let those knees flex a little more when you land.”

I wanted to tell him I knew that already; I thought I'd been doing just that. But there were bigger concerns at the moment. I tried to stay low with him as we entered the safety of the woods and began making our way uphill through the trees.

A few yards in, I pulled him to a halt. “Hold on just a minute,” I said. “I'd like to get a look at whoever is in that car.”

“What are you, nuts? If those guys in the ‘Burban know what they're doing, they'll be out here sweeping this hillside with their high beams in a couple of minutes.”

“It'll only take a second. Where are the binoculars?”

He shook his head, but plucked out the glasses and handed them over.

From our new vantage point almost the full length of the driveway was visible. A dark Corvette, its headlights still blazing, idled about three-quarters of the way down the incline. The team in the Suburban had driven out to meet it in the same way they'd driven out to meet me, but there seemed to be a much more extended conversation occurring, as if the participants knew one another. Mr. Turnip was standing in front of the bigger vehicle pointing at the house, while his partner leaned on the fender right behind him. I switched my focus to the driver of the Corvette, a woman in a leopard-skin jacket with a shapely profile, standing with her arms crossed in front of her.

It was none other than my good friend Diane Lemminger.

“Call for you, Señor Pavlicek,” Juanita Estavez said early the next morning. “Line one.”

It was a standing joke between us—Juanita didn't answer phones. She was, however, the therapeutic receptionist, listening ear, and all-around organizational spark that kept me and the other semimarginal businesses in the office co-op from sinking into anarchy.

“Somebody famous?” I asked.

She smiled, showing bright teeth. “No, but you have important visitors. From the FBI. I think they're searching your office.”

“Great. I've got a business to run, we're still towing the two turkeys in the minivan around with us, and now this.”

“Looks like the feds got us surrounded.” Toronto, who was standing next to me, smiled. He'd made sure to remove his laptop and any traces of his presence before we left the office the night before. Returning from Ivy, we'd trailed Diane Lemminger to the Holiday Inn out by the interstate on Fifth Street. Fortunately, the guy working the front desk was a friend of mine, a very dark-skinned paraplegic named Bebo Walter. I'd first met Bebo when I happened to catch one of his wheelchair basketball games over at the old MAACA gym on Park Street; since then, he'd become a good source for me. I gave him twenty bucks and he promised to let me know as soon as he detected any sign that Lemminger was about to check out or leave the hotel.

Afterward, Toronto and I had driven across town and hidden the Jeep in Marcia's garage again, then walked a few blocks to catch a bus to take us back downtown. A little after midnight, we snuck up on the minivan parked across the street from my office and rapped on the window with a box of Krispy Kremes for the two agents. Almost as good as Eddie Murphy in
Beverly Hills Cop.

“They show you a warrant?” I asked.

“Sí, Señor. I wouldn't have let them in otherwise. … Oh, and someone else—he drop this off for you,” Juanita said. She reached in her drawer and pulled out a pale blue envelope. No return address. Inside was a crude drawing of an eagle, or maybe a hawk, and two words in capital letters:
FLIGHT CANCELED.

I know a handful of antifalconry, supposedly animal-rights types in town.

“What is it?” Toronto asked.

“Someone with a sick sense of humor.”

“Thanks, Juanita.” I limped around her desk and tossed the envelope and its contents into the wastebasket behind her.

“What happened to you?” Juanita said.

I grimaced. “Stepped on a garden rake.”

“A garden rake?” She looked skeptical.

“Gardening,” Toronto said.

The two of us walked up the stairs out of earshot. “How you wanna handle this?” he said.

I shrugged. “Not like my office hasn't been searched before.”

“I only need to send a fax and spend a few hours on-line and I'll be able to tell you anything you want to know about those Second Millennium accounts.”

“You know I've been thinking about that. Why don't you let me talk to Bill Ferrier, get him to do it for us this time? That way, it'll be nice and legal if it comes down to pinning something on Tor Drummond.”

“Be still my hacking heart. All right, if you say so, boss.” He glanced up the stairs. “We've still got a problem though. What about the Gestapo upstairs?”

“I'm thinking divide and conquer.”

“Yeah?”

I checked my watch. ‘Terrier's usually having coffee about this time at a place across the mall. I might just pay him a visit. Meanwhile, you could go on up to my office and—without interfering or being in any way threatening, of course—do your best to intimidate the living bejeezus out of whoever's there.”

“Bejeezus,” he said. “I can do.”

“How's it feel to be on the sidelines?” I did my best to smile brightly for so early in the morning.

Bill Ferrier glared at me from behind his cup of coffee.

“Sit down,” he said.

The morning crowd at Chaps was light. My favorite hangout on the mall, Chaps offered coffee and doughnuts, but specialized in multiple flavors of homemade ice cream, shakes, and malts, not to mention the fifties memorabilia plastered everywhere in pleasant disorganization, cool metal-and-vinyl booths, even an authentic Rockola Princess jukebox.

“As you can see outside, I don't travel alone anymore.” The guy and the gal from the minivan had changed shifts again with the original crew. I guessed one or both of them would be somewhere in sight.

He checked over my shoulder. “Tall guy leaning against the storefront and reading the paper at ten o'clock.”

“Sounds like one of them.”

“What do you expect? You're fuckin’ with the feds and a congressman here, Frank. Why don't you just let it go? If Karen Drummond can put you in the clear, why not let the feds worry about her and her daughter?”

“Maybe later,” I said.

He shook his head. “Mother and daughter must really be worried someone's after them or something to want to hang around with you,” he said.

“Maybe they just needed a break from being the nightly feature at six, ten, and eleven.”

“Uh-huh. What, you their press secretary now, too?”

I said nothing.

“What happened to your leg?” he asked. Guess I hadn't done a good enough job of disguising the limp.

“Garden rake,” I said, trying to sound a little more convincing than I had with Juanita. “Stepped on it at first light when I was going out in the backyard to check on Armistead.”

“Right. I heard there was a break-in at Tor Drummond's estate in Ivy last night.”

“Really? Hate it when stuff like that happens. Bumps up the crime rate.”

“Someone slipped in and out right under all his security—a real professional job.”

“Must've made someone look bad. Hear any more about Haynes?” I knew Bill wouldn't let go of an investigation like this entirely without keeping tabs on it.

He shrugged.

“Bet he's not confessing, is he?”

“Nope. They had to let him go. No body, no other evidence, for now, and the video's inconclusive—can't prove he was driving the Jeep. I suppose they're hoping one of the two of you leads them to the girl.”

“They still seem pretty convinced that this is a kidnapping.”

His eyes searched the restaurant to make sure no one else was listening. “That's because there's been another note,” he said flatly.

I stared at him, trying to absorb what he'd said. “Not from Tor Drummond's office again, I hope.”

He shook his head. “They're keeping this under wraps, but it showed up at police headquarters. Came in the regular mail, Charlottesville postmark.”

“What did it say?”

He lowered his voice.
“I have Cartwright Drummond. She is alive and I will keep her until it is time.”

“Until it is time. Time for what?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Sounds like it might be a hoax.”

“Maybe, except that inside the envelope was a Polaroid of someone bound and gagged. Not a very good picture, but looks like it could be her.”

“She's still here in the area, then.”

“Quite possibly.”

“So why are they still dogging Toronto and me?”

His voice remained calm. “Could've been you sent the picture, Frank.”

“Right,” I said. “Either that or the tooth fairy.”

He looked down at the table. “I know. I know.”

“What about Haynes?”

“Still the prime suspect.”

“You've got to admit, the evidence so far doesn't look good for the kid.”

“I hope you don't plan to try to dog him yourself.”

“Who, me? Why do that when I've got the feds? Don't pay my federal taxes for nothing.”

“What's going on, Frank?”

“I told you. I think Drummond's dirty and there's a connection.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just for the sake of argument, let's say you're right and maybe this case is more complicated than what it first appears. Absent a dead body or any other physical evidence, we still gotta go with the facts we've got in front of us.”

“I've always been a believer in facts.”

“C'mon, Frank. When are you going to tell me what you're working?”

Two families noisily entered the ice cream parlor looking for doughnuts: a father and mother and another mother alone with six or seven children in tow. We were seated in the back booth nearest the bathrooms, and I faced away from the group and the door, but I still kept my voice down.

“Drummond's dirty,” I said. “He may or may not be good for his daughter's sudden invisibility, but the guy's hiding something. Might even be seeing it on TV soon.”

“Well, hallelujah, hoorah. Next time I really want to know something I'll just park my butt over at the local station and sic one of their people on the case. Man, oh, man, by the time they get through with you and me this go-round, you'll be serving five to seven up in Orange County and I'll be camped in a stilt house, crewing on a sportfisherman out of Oregon Inlet to supplement my pension. Who's the brilliant TV type?”

“Diane Lemminger.”

“Lemminger? Isn't she the one who… ?”

“One and the same.”

He thought about that. “She's got some cable show out of Richmond now, don't she?”

“It's called
Government Offense.”

“You know what she's got on Drummond?”

“I don't know for sure, but it has something to do with that foundation where those E-mails came from. You know if the FBI's looking into that?”

He shook his head. “Don't know. They weren't too thrilled when they heard you'd pulled it off the hard drive. If somebody wanted to, they could think you all did some tampering. Could try to make a case for obstruction.”

“Obstruction of what, if they aren't looking into it?”

“Guess it all depends on a person's perspective.”

“Cartwright Drummond was suspicious of her father.”

“We know that.”

“Yeah, but she might've been onto something.”

“I'm listening.”

“I think it might be the same something Diane Lemminger's so charged up about, something to do with Second Millennium.” I took three pieces of paper from my pocket, copies of the checks and the note from Drummond's file, and slid them across the table so he could read them.

He looked them over. “Where'd you get these?”

“You don't want to know.”

He shrugged. “Doesn't look like all that much to me.

“People don't usually keep separate bank accounts without a reason,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But it could also be an innocent reason.”

“Maybe.”

“I'm not liking the sound of any of this.” Ferrier's voice was now barely above a whisper. His coffee was long gone.

“Me either, believe me.”

“What if this has nothing to do with Cartwright Drummond's disappearance? What if we're looking at two separate problems?” he said.

“Somehow I don't think so. I think Drummond's made a public career for himself out of smoke and mirrors.”

“What's so new about that?”

“It's new if people died for it.”

We stared at one another for a long moment.

“I'll see what I can do,” he said.