Hard Cold Winter (5 page)

Still. The wings, Elana’s wings, had my full attention, if that was what they were asking for. I could be pretty damned determined myself.

The first question on the employment agency’s application form, after the boxes for name and address and all of the usual identification details, was:

W
HAT SPECIAL SKILLS DO YOU HAVE?
S
EE LIST OF EXAMPLES ON
P
AGE 3

I could think of a few talents. None that I should put in writing.

Sitting around me in the agency’s waiting room were a dozen other kids about my age and a handful of older people. Some scribbled on their own copies of the same application, while the rest waited to see if they would be called for what the agency called a pre-interview. I guessed that the other teenagers had either just finished high school, or had dropped out.

I pretended to fill out sections on the form for a couple more minutes, until the receptionist stepped away from her desk. Then I folded the papers in half and left the office. I followed signs to the stairs. Instead of going down to the lobby, I went up two flights to the top floor. The stairwell door was locked. I used the pick gun in my pocket to open it.

The hall on the other side of the door was empty. The employment agency was open until seven o’clock, to allow potential candidates to come in after work or after school, but most of the other offices in the building were empty at this hour. I listened for a moment, just to be sure. Then I walked softly down the hallway to the firm of Gallison Engineering, to see what I needed to see.

Five minutes later, I was leaving through the building’s lobby, employment forms still in my hand. I passed Dono.
He was chatting amiably with the security guard. His voice had no hint of an Irish accent, as it often did when he was at home. He wore a polo shirt with a Verizon Services logo, and a matching baseball cap. His face was angled away from the lobby camera.

Outside, I crossed the street to the brown Sentra that Dono used when we needed to be inconspicuous. While I sat and waited, I looked at the back of the building.

At one of the fourth floor windows, to be exact.

Behind that window was the secure storage room of Gallison Engineering & Equipment. Where I would be in thirty more hours, sharing space with about five hundred thousand bucks’ worth of top-quality optical lenses. We’d clear ten percent, with another twenty grand going to the guy who’d sold us the information. Dono had already made the arrangements for the sale with Hiram Long.

Dono came out. He checked his surroundings and when he was sure no one was watching him, he ambled across the road and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Well?” he said.

I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. “It’s really soft. There are no cameras in the stairwells or anywhere on the fourth-floor hallways, except by the elevators.”

“What about the office door? What kind of lock?”

“Key card. A Jackson Command model.”

He frowned. He’d been hoping Gallison would have a punch code, or even a plain old deadbolt. “So we’ll use the frequency scanner. But I don’t like you standing out in the hallway that long.”

“Or I could use this.” I held up a GE&E employee badge.

“Where’d you acquire that?”

“Lifted it from a guy leaving for the night as I came in. With luck he won’t even know it’s gone until Monday morning.”

“Without luck, he’s already reported his badge missing. In which case it won’t work when you need it. And maybe the system will alert the guards at the front desk.”

“What’s worse? We take a chance on the card, or I just cross my fingers that the scanner works before a guard wanders by?”

Dono looked at me. He didn’t like my tone. But he also couldn’t deny it was a better choice.

Still, I was a little more polite when I spoke again. “How’d it go with the guard?” I said.

“Let’s find out.” He took a handheld receiver out of the center console and switched it on, and tuned it to the right frequency. A male voice came through like he was in the back seat of the Sentra.

—tol’ her that if she wanted to have them over for damn dinner she shoulda tol’ me sooner and I coulda stopped—

Dono smiled and switched it off. “I pasted the bug right under the desk. A little advance notice if someone hears you and calls it in.”

“Nobody’s going to hear me.” I grinned.

“Not if you go slow. You’ve practiced enough with the cutter?”

He knew I had. But my grandfather would check everything ten times for himself, and make me take another lap through the plan just for good measure. Even if he was letting me run the plays from the field, he couldn’t let it go.

“We’re ready,” I said.

“Not without transport we’re not. You recall where Willard lives? Near Green Lake?”

“The little house.” It always struck me funny that such a huge guy lived in a house that had less square footage than our home’s first floor.

“He’ll have a suitable truck for us. You go up there tomorrow morning and fetch it.”

“Is Willard going to be there?” The notion made me a little nervous, even though all I had to do was ask Willard for a set of keys. I’d met him a dozen times, but it was hard not to be uneasy around a guy whose face never told you what he was thinking. Plus, he could probably pop my skull like a grape with just one hand.

“Don’t bring the truck to the house. Park it three blocks down from us here.” Dono pointed out the direction. “Take a bus home.”

I gaped at him. “Come on. We’re forty miles from Seattle.”

Sultan County was north and east of home. One of the latest hubs of business real estate, as the population swelled and pushed farther and farther inland. The office complex where Gallison was located was new and shiny and stupidly generic, one of a dozen just like it in a square mile. “I don’t even know if they
have
buses out here.”

“There’s a park-and-ride two miles west.”

“Geez.”

Saturday morning came up hot and quickly got hotter. Short sleeves in October, and made even weirder when the overcast skies refused to clear up with the heat. Even the Halloween pumpkins on the lawns were sweating beads of water.

Willard’s house was walking distance from Green Lake, on a short cross-street packed close with other homes, most of them larger than Willard’s. His was a little older, too, just a bungalow with a porch and maybe a loft. It was painted about the same dark brown as the suits Willard always wore.

From behind the house, I heard a faint clink of metal on metal. The driveway ran along the side of the house, and I walked up it toward the back. Most of the fenced yard was paved. A big silver Lincoln and a white Toyota pickup truck with a covered bed took up all of the cement. On the remaining strip of grass was a chaise lawn chair, and on the
chair was Elana Coll. She wore big gold sunglasses and jeans shorts, and a red T-shirt with the WSU Cougars logo. The shirt was tight enough to show the complete outline of her bra. She held a plate piled high with eggs and sausage and diced potatoes.

“You made me breakfast,” I said.

“Ha ha,” Elana said. “This is all mine, and I need it. My sure cure.”

“That explains the shades. Where was the party?”

“Shit. I forgot my coffee. It’s in the kitchen. Would you? I’m settled in.” She stretched her legs out to their full length on the chaise.

“Where’s Willard?”

“Out of town.” Elana flipped her brunette ponytail behind her shoulder, picked up the fork, and took a big bite of eggs.

“Do you have the keys to that truck?”

“D’you have my coffee?”

To hell with it. I could jump the ignition. I started toward the truck. Elana waved her fork like a little home-team flag.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. God, you’re so serious. Willard left me the keys for you. Lemme eat something and I’ll get them.” She took another bite. “There’s ’nuff coffee for both’ve us.”

“You could have opened with that,” I said.

Willard’s kitchen was just inside the screen door. It was so narrow that he could cook and wash dishes and put them away, all by just turning his body. I wondered how he lived here without going nuts. Maybe he had to spend all his money on custom clothes. I found Elana’s coffee mug on the counter—still messy from her cooking—and poured another cup for myself.

“Are you living here now?” I asked Elana after I’d taken a seat on the back stoop.

Mouth full, she shook her head. Her plate was already half clean.

“Mom’n Dad are somewhere in South America. Chile, I think.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Shit, what do they always do? Commune with the vibrations, get naked with the other hippies.”

I grinned. “Not your thing.”

“
Hell
, no. Even if I wasn’t in school.”

“What’s sharing a house with Willard like?”

“Like living with your vice principal. He’s always checking on me. I’ve got a curfew, if you can believe it.”

Yeah, I could. Dono had been like that when I was fifteen, too. I had to be home by ten o’clock on the dot, except when he and I were working on a job.

“Doesn’t matter. End of this semester, and I am
gone
,” Elana said.

“Gone? Dropping out?”

She chair-danced in triumph. “Meltoun Academy. I got the letter last week.”

“What’s Meltoun Academy?”

“Boarding school, in Oregon.
Very
exclusive, thank you very much.”

I smelled bullshit. “They needed a ringer for the high jump?”

“Hey, my grades are kick-ass.” She saw my expression. “No shit. Straight As. And Dad went there on account of his folks being rich once. Even if he screwed that up for us, I’m a legacy. It counts.”

“Willard’s going to throw a hell of a party when he gets his house back.”

“He’s too cheap,” Elana said. Her fork stopped in midair. “Well, no. Uncle Will doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s real careful, you know?”

“Cautious. About what work he takes.”

“Yeah.”

“Dono is, too. I guess he wasn’t always. He used to be kind of crazy, when he was young.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “Prison. The last time was when I was about ten.”

“No shit? What’d you do? Stay with relatives?”

We had no relatives. I’d gone into foster homes for a year and a half.

“You have the keys?” I said.

Elana looked at me for a moment, then set the empty plate on the grass and stood up. “Hang on.” She walked lightly on the balls of her bare feet to the truck, and leaned deep into the driver’s window to snag the keys off the seat. I tried not to stare.

She spun like a ballet dancer and tossed me the keys. “I’ll follow you there.”

“Forget it.”

“You’re going to walk all the way back?”

I started to reply that I was hopping a bus, but that sounded even more lame than walking. Elana had a point. We’d be leaving the truck three blocks away from the Gallison building. It wasn’t like I was going to point and show her which office Dono and I would be breaking into later tonight.

“Try not to get busted on the way,” I said.

She lowered the sunglasses to blink her green eyes at me. “Please.” Then she frowned. “Wait. You really think I don’t have fake ID?”

I really had.

But as Elana was fond of implying, I was an idiot.

T
HE CONDOMINIUM BUILDING WHERE
Kendrick Haymes had lived was off of Galer, on Queen Anne Hill. Twenty-eight or thirty large units arranged in a wide H-shape to maximize sun and privacy. And profits.

It was seven in the morning. A lousy time of day to break into a place, with all the neighbors likely to be home and getting ready for work. But if I waited, I might lose my chance to be the first inside.

I turned onto the cross street and parked a few doors down. The morning was damp. A black vinyl carrying case that had belonged to my grandfather made a warm rectangle under my jacket. I’d found the case the week before, where it had been hidden behind the ventilation mesh in one of the house’s eaves. Dono had kept it out of the reach of a standard police search.

As I walked back to the building, I heard a mechanical clacking and the gate to the parking level began to rise. A late model Acura flew up the short ramp from the garage and zoomed down the street without pausing. I ducked under the gate before it closed again. A good omen.

Kend’s driver’s license had listed his unit as #D8. I found the garage stairwell and went up. The fourth-floor hallway was dead quiet, and
carpeted in a deep wine color that matched the accents on the wallpaper. Nicer than any room in my house.

Number D8 was at the end of the hall. It had a cream-painted door, like all the other apartments. And like the others, a Baldwin brand single-cylinder, jimmy-proof deadbolt. I rang the bell. No answer. I could barely hear the chimes from out in the hallway. Another point on my side. High quality condo equals good soundproofing.

I opened Dono’s vinyl case. Inside, held in place by elastic loops, were a dozen key rings. Each ring had multiple keys. All of the keys had their jagged cuts filed down to stubby points.

Bump keys, arranged by brand name—Schlage, Kwikset, Master, and more—and by type of lock. I took out the Baldwin ring, and picked the key that matched the 8200 series. It went into the lock like it was coated in goose fat.

The hallway was still quiet. I took a screwdriver from the case, put a little tension on the bump key, and tapped it with the screwdriver’s rubber handle. A couple more taps, and the pins inside the lock lined up neatly on the shear line, and the key turned.

Now came the fun part. I stepped inside and closed the door.

Ten seconds. The air inside the condo was stale and odorless. Twenty seconds. No blaring siren. I locked the door behind me.

The entryway was wide enough to allow for a bench, and a wrought iron coatrack hung with half a dozen coats. A man’s coats, mostly, leather and microfiber jerseys and Gore-Tex from a higher price range than most outdoor enthusiasts could afford. There was one woman’s jacket, a sleek waterproof raincoat in dark green. Assuming it was Elana’s, she might have chosen it to match her eyes.

There was a narrow chance that the condo had a silent alarm. I searched around the entryway for a telltale keypad, and found only a closet stuffed to the ceiling with more clothes and shoe boxes.

His home was spacious. I guessed it at two bedrooms and maybe thirteen hundred square feet. But despite the size, the apartment felt stifled, like a cocoon. The soundproofing blocked any exterior sound, creating a private little world.

The first piece of furniture after the bench was a thin table with a stack of junk mail on it. The envelopes were addressed to Kendrick B. Haymes, or K. B. Haymes, or to just to Resident.

The flat anonymity of
Resident
summed Haymes up for me, too. Beyond his famous name, he was a blank. Had Kend been a violent whack job who’d killed his girlfriend in a rage and then taken the express train to Hell himself? Was he just some sorry bastard tormented by depression or fear? That was another kind of victim, I supposed. But any pity I might have felt was swept away by the memory of Elana’s wings.

Kend must have had friends, other than his girl. His phone had given me a few names and numbers. Maybe I could learn more here, find the people closest to him. Or I could paste the pieces of his life together myself. Figure out what he was thinking behind that crooked smile in his license picture.

You think that will explain anything?
Willard had asked.

I started in the bathroom, checking the medicine chest. Kend had a Mantelukast prescription for seasonal allergies. Elana had a mild antidepressant. I’d taken shit a lot heavier when I’d been in therapy. There was nothing in the cabinets to imply Kend was bipolar or fighting anything more serious than clogged sinuses. Nothing that might signal that the poor bastard was a risk for suicide. Unless of course he’d decided to flush his meds.

In the living room, a brocade sectional couch took up a majority percentage of the living space. Broad sliding glass doors revealed a narrow balcony. Real hardwood floors and eight-foot ceilings, with the walls painted the color of eggplant. The furniture was sleek and low to the ground. It was a toss-up which had cost more: all of the furniture, or the eighty-inch flat-screen that looked like a glass tabletop bolted to the wall.

Everything was so immaculate there had to be a regular cleaning service. Even the appliances shone. I wondered what days the service came, and what time. Hopefully not first thing in the morning.

The living room also had a black walnut desk with a Macintosh
laptop in a docking station. I tapped the space bar and saw the password prompt. No checking Kend’s e-mail, unless I wanted to steal the machine and find a way to hack into it. Better to leave the forensics for the cops.

There were photographs in wooden frames on the shelves, and taped to the fridge. One on the wall showed Kend as a young boy, red curls flying as a woman who I guessed was his mother swung him around. I didn’t see any pictures of Kend’s famous father, Maurice. Elana appeared in half a dozen pictures, in groups at parties or candid shots. She looked good in the candids, striking when she turned her gaze on the camera. A few faces repeated in the party pictures. I took snapshots of each with my phone.

I found one other picture, facedown in the desk drawer. The photo showed two white women in their midtwenties, both in glossy black dresses. The woman on the left was short and gamine, with bobbed hair the shade of thick honey. The other was taller and darker. A beauty mark accented the corner of her mouth. The girls were winking broadly and brandishing champagne flutes at the photographer. Both of them were good-looking. That seemed to be the kind of circle Kendrick Haymes ran in. All the men were rich, all the women beautiful. At the bottom of the picture was a line written in neat feminine cursive—
Barr and Tru at Bob’s wedding
.

The rest of the slim drawer was full of Post-its and bits of notepaper. The one on top read
You’re So Much Marvelous, Mister
written that same cursive, inside a felt-pen heart. Love notes that Elana had written to her man, and a few that Kend had scrawled back. The notes ranged in tone from cute to NC-17 for sexual content. None of them seemed to have been written as apology, or in anger. Maybe the lovers only kept the nice ones. Sweet, even if they were all stuffed in a drawer.

My phone buzzed. It was Bill Eberley. Major Eberley, of Eberley Tactical. Calling to give me news about the possible job, most likely. It buzzed once more while I decided. The walls here were probably thick enough.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice low.

“Van?”

“’M in a library, but didn’t want to miss your call.”

“Okay. I’ll do the talking. It’s not good news. We couldn’t make the deal with the Oregon state troopers. They want us, but February’s just too late to get onto their budget for the year. I’m still talking to Olympia, but those conversations are looking bleak. Short answer, I don’t think we’re going to have capacity for extra resources soon. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks for letting me know fast.”

“Like I said, these things wax and wane. Oregon might have funds free up later for extra SWAT training. But I expect you’ll be settled into another job well before that.”

In other words, don’t stare at the phone expecting it to ring. I said thanks again and we hung up.

Shit. Double shit. I had been counting on that job, maybe more than I’d let myself realize. But I couldn’t dwell on my employment situation right now. I might not have much time left in Kend’s apartment. Kend’s really upper-fucking-class apartment.

I went to the master bedroom. It had the same dimensions as the living room, with the same identical set of glass doors to the balcony. Framed large-print photographs decorated the blue walls, artfully time-lapsed prints of a Japanese street, a casino floor, an empty restaurant. In the nightstand drawer by the California King bed I found sticky buds of pot in an unlabeled aspirin bottle, along with rolling papers and an ashtray with a few layers of smudged resin. I examined the nightstand surface and the inside of the drawer closely. Addicts nearly always kept their works close to the bed, the better to collapse. There were no pinprick holes or scratches, like clumsy handling of a syringe might leave. No scorch marks in the soft wood from a hot pipe set down quickly.

Elana’s things were neatly tucked away in the dresser and the closet. She had lived simply. Almost minimalist. I got that. When you relocated every couple of years, you found you could cast off a lot.

There was something else I hadn’t found, I realized. No box of 9mm Parabellums, or a carrying case or gun cleaning kit. Had Kend lifted the Glock from somewhere? Or had he kept it hidden?

A small dog barked in the hallway. Then more barks, loud and frantic, right outside the door.

Crap.

I liked dogs. K9 units had saved our company’s collective ass in the Army more times than I could count. None of that kept me from wanting to punt this particular canine through uprights from twenty yards out.

The owner called to it from farther down the hall. The little terror kept up with its yapping. Finally I heard footsteps and the dog protesting as it was being carried away.

I couldn’t stay much longer. Maybe I’d been heard on the phone. Or the neighbor down the hall would start thinking about his dog’s sudden interest in the Haymes apartment.

I’d searched Kend’s place for drugs, or signs of psychological distress. There were other ways a person might be pushed to the limit. Even a rich man. Romantic woes. Family suffering. I knew a little something about that.

An antique rolltop desk and matching file cabinet took up the bedroom corner. I rummaged through stacks of bills on the desk. Most were standard. I found a bank statement and a car registration. Maybe Kend had been buying himself new wheels. He could’ve done all the window-shopping he wanted at Willard’s card game.

The registration wasn’t for a purchase, I realized with a second look. It was the seller’s record for a Porsche Panamera, two years old. Kend had signed over the car to someone named Torrance X. Broch about three weeks ago. There was no entry in the space labeled
Sales Price
.

I glanced through the recent bank statement. Kend’s checking account had less than two hundred in it at the time the statement was printed. His savings were nonexistent. Maybe he had another account, or kept all his money elsewhere.

A rich guy with a practically zero balance. Thirty seconds earlier I would have said I had nothing in common with Kendrick Haymes. But based on the quickest of glances, he looked just as broke as I was.

The file cabinet was a mess. I had just figured out which drawer
held the scattered piles of bank and credit card statements when I heard voices from the hall.

“. . . a court order if we have to, but given the state of the family . . .” said a man’s low voice.

“Of course. Let me just . . .” Keys jingled.

Terrific. I was missing the mutt already.

I grabbed the stacks of papers and stuffed them into a canvas messenger bag that was next to the desk, and slung the bag over my back. The key turned in the front lock just as I eased open the sliding door to the balcony.

Fourth floor. I’d have to hope Kend’s downstairs neighbors weren’t at home. I climbed over the railing to clamber down and hang. My feet touched the railing on the third-floor balcony below. I jumped down and without pausing did it again, down to the second floor, and then I dropped the last ten feet to the alley.

My landing slammed my knees all the way up to my chest and gave me an instant headache. But no busted ankles. I eased back to a standing position and walked away, picking up speed and a little more oxygen as I went.