House of Smoke (58 page)

Sundown.

She wakes up, showers, gets dressed: cotton underpants and bra, jeans, long-sleeved cotton sweater, sweat socks, running shoes.

She brushes her hair out and pulls it back into a ponytail. A touch of lipstick, pale red, mascara, hint of eyeliner. She wants to look good, professional.

Her face stares back at her. The left cheek still protrudes, but the swelling is going down, daily. She looks at her face objectively. The scars are receding. Not a face to hide from the world anymore. There will always be some scars, but that’s okay, she can be proud of them, she’ll wear them with honor. The marks of a survivor.

Night.

It’s dark and the moon is clouded over, but she finds her way like a homing pigeon. She parks a hundred yards down the road, out of sight. She’s getting good at that.

The bullet-punctured Rancho San Miguel de Torres sign flaps in the wind. Over her left shoulder is slung a black Nike day pack, empty now. She walks down the dark road, the trees on either side hovering like huge ominous crows over the road. Off in the fields, she sees a few beef cows, shorthorns, who look back at her with blank curiosity.

It takes almost fifteen minutes to walk the mile from the highway to the house. It’s cold outside, not near freezing—it rarely gets that cold in the valley—but bracing. Her hands are in her jacket pockets.

The house is dark. There are no cars parked in front. She prepared for that; before she left town she called Miranda’s office posing as a UPS dispatcher (a hoary but time-tested gimmick), to verify Miranda and/or Frederick Sparks’s whereabouts for a special delivery to their house that evening. Celeste—Miranda’s secretary—bless her trusting soul, had confirmed that Mr. Sparks was out of town on business and Mrs. Sparks would be dining at home that evening with Mr. Sparks’s mother and Mr. Wilkerson of The Friends Of The Sea. (Kate immediately walked into the nearest flower shop and ordered an ornate floral bouquet to be sent up to the Sparks house, courtesy of “Your friends who support removing the oil platforms from the channel.” Miranda could figure out who those friends might be, but in case her secretary mentioned the inquiry, she was covered. She paid in cash, of course, and declined to include a card.)

She reaches the low ranch house, standing off to one side in deep shadow. The house looms dark against the gray hills and black starless sky. The moon is shrouded by the clouds and a low fog lies on the ground, further obscuring vision.

This is risky business, but there’s no other way. The proof of why Frank Bascomb was killed in his jail cell and why she was attacked and would’ve been killed if it wasn’t for Cecil showing up and why those two people were killed last week in Orange County is in this house. It has to be.

She had thought, fleetingly, about asking Cecil to help her, but had quickly decided against it—she can’t involve him in breaking the law, even though she knows he’d do it for her.

Taking one good deep cleansing breath, she walks across the open space in front of the house and up the steps.

“Miranda? Mrs. Sparks?” She knocks on the door, loudly, calling out. If anyone is at home, she’s here legitimately.

No one’s here, of course.

Squatting down, she examines the locks on the door. A tumbler and a dead bolt; Schlage, brass finish. The tumbler’s most likely a B-460 with a one-inch dead bolt. Good quality, solid.

This is going to take some work—she hopes she can open them, she’s rusty, she hasn’t done this for a long time. Otherwise she’ll have to try another door, which will probably also be locked, which would then necessitate breaking and entering, an altogether different situation, not one she wants to do if she can possibly avoid it.

Be here and gone without anyone ever knowing is the idea. To be the hunter, not the prey.

There could be an alarm, of course. It would be a silent alarm, you wouldn’t know you’d tripped it until the security people came breaking in the door. Usually, though, the security service calls to make sure you didn’t trip your alarm accidentally. You give them your secret password and they caution you to be more careful next time.

If the phone rings after she’s entered she’ll be out of there in about one-tenth of a second, if that.

She takes her latex gloves from her jacket pocket—the same gloves she wore when she went into Wes and Morgan’s house last week. Then she gets out her set of lock picks in its nice leather case. Twenty-five different picks, along with an assortment of tension wrenches. Years before, she’d busted a professional burglar—and then, as sometimes happens, she got to know him through the course of following his case through the legal chain. The friendship was helped along by allowing him to cop to a light plea in exchange for working with the force in busting a chain of big-time burglars, which he was happy to do. Part of his payback had been to acquaint her with the time-honored profession of lock picking, even giving her a good set of picks and teaching her how to use them, a piece of knowledge that has come in handy more than once.

She inserts a diamondhead pick into the dead bolt, slides the tension wrench in alongside. The lock is a five-pin tumbler. Slowly, methodically, she rakes the tumblers. It takes time, she’s not a professional at this, and she doesn’t practice it as much as she should.

This is the most vulnerable part of the operation—if she’s caught in the act, she’s dead. Literally, most likely.

It’s chilly out but she starts sweating, beads forming on her forehead, in her hair, getting in her eyes, itching. She wipes her head with the sleeve of her jacket, keeps working.

She can feel the tumblers falling. She turns the tension wrench. The bolt slides open.

She checks her watch. Six minutes, not bad for an amateur.

The knob lock is easier, now that she’s back in practice.

She opens the door, steps inside, and closes it behind her, turning the dead bolt and locking it as a precaution—if anyone comes up here, the few seconds it will take to unlock the dead bolt could be the difference.

It’s dark inside. She doesn’t want to turn any lights on—a single light can be seen for miles out here, so she stands in the blackness waiting for her eyes to acclimate.

It takes a while. She doesn’t move, not one step.

Her pupils gradually dilate so that she can see where she is and what’s around her. The living room is as she remembers it. She walks across the room to the den where Miranda conducted her million-dollar business.

Outside, the wind is picking up, causing pebbles and pieces of board to knock against the walls of the house. She listens carefully. Nothing. Her nerves, that’s all.

Heavy curtains frame the two small windows of the den. She pulls them shut. Then she takes out a small penlight, turns it on, and points it around the room.

The den, like the rest of the house, is decorated in old-fashioned Santa Barbara County ranch style: old leather couch, sturdy wooden chairs, Native American rugs on the floor, which is peg-and-groove oak, worn from decades of being trod upon. Against the widest wall she sees the work area, which consists of an old desk made from Monterey County madrone wood, which must be an heirloom and undoubtedly worth a lot of money, a large leather chair like a lawyer from a Charles Dickens novel would sit in, a new computer and printer, fax, multiline telephone, and other contemporary instruments of commerce.

In four steps she crosses to the desk and quickly begins rifling through the papers on top. Different business and personal transactions, notes, the usual crap people who aren’t particularly neat have on their desktops. She pulls open the drawers on either side, starts leafing through the contents, taking care not to mess things up, to leave everything as it is as much as possible. There is some stuff pertaining to finances; most of it she already has from Saperstein. He’s done a good job, she thinks, looking the material over.

She glances at her watch. She’s been in here for twenty minutes? No way. It felt like it was only a couple of minutes, five tops. You can get entranced in this stuff and lose your focus—when that happens you’re likely to get your ass handed to you.

She goes to the window, peels the curtain back a nervous inch, looks out. There’s nothing there—but it’s so still it’s scary.

Pressing on.

In the corner of the room stands an old open-top pine breakfront with photos and other family memorabilia on it. Pictures of the Sparks family, trophies from riding competitions. Nothing of Miranda, she notices.

Interesting stuff, but this isn’t the time to leisurely study pictures.

She opens the first drawer. It’s crammed full of photo albums, cheap souvenirs from family vacations, personal things that have value only for the people who own them. Not what she’s looking for.

The middle drawer has more of the same.

Maybe she miscalculated. Maybe what she’s looking for isn’t here. It’s back at Miranda’s office in town, or in a vault somewhere, where prying eyes can’t get to it.

She pulls at the bottom drawer. It doesn’t come out.

Shit, she thinks, another goddamn lock to pick. This is getting on her nerves; her nerves are getting too much for her to handle is the truth of it.

She squats on her haunches, checks it out. “Sonofabitch!” she curses out loud: it’s an old skeleton-key lock. The worst fucking kind.

Her picks won’t work on this lock—it’s too old. She’ll have to open this sucker the old-fashioned way, if she can, which is iffy, even professional locksmiths have a hard time with these old skeleton-key locks.

She scrounges around on Miranda’s desktop, finds a box of paper clips. Metal, thank God, people more and more are using plastic-coated clips—if that’s all there had been she’d be up shit’s creek. She opens two clips so that they’re more or less one straight line.

Her penlight is clenched between her teeth, shining on the burnished keyhole. She inserts the clips into the keyhole, starts trying to get a purchase on the cylindrical tumblers. Patience, girl, patience. She’s starting to sweat in earnest now, major flop-sweat, she can feel water gathering in her armpits, running down her sides. She never sweats—“A lady never sweats,” another of her mother’s sayings, she perspires lightly at most.

She must not be a lady anymore, because she’s sweating like a pig. It itches; she scratches her armpits and the sides of her ribs with one hand, keeping the tension inside the lock with the other.

“Come on, goddamnit,” she whispers between clenched teeth.

Is it moving? She can’t tell. She leans closer, looking at the crack between the drawer and the frame above it, turning her head so the light shines in the crack, trying to see the bolt, whether it’s moving or not.

Not yet. Don’t quit.

She glances at her watch. She’s been working this for ten minutes. It could take another ten, or twenty. Or she might not get it at all.

Five more minutes. Then she’ll jimmy the fucker, if she can find something to pry it with. The tolerances between the drawer and frame are pretty tight, it would take a thin screwdriver to force this drawer.

Five more minutes. If she can’t open it by then, she’ll give up.

Patiently, patiently, sweating steadily, she works the paper clip in the lock.

Outside, a gust of wind knocks a loose board against the side of the house, causing her to stiffen, her body almost jumps, if she had moved suddenly she would have lost her purchase inside the lock and would have had to start all over again, and she doesn’t have the time or the guts to start over.

Somehow, her hands remain steady—they’ve taken on a life of their own.

She feels something starting to move. Are the tumblers turning? She turns her head crooked again, squinting through the crack, trying to see the bolt.

It’s moving. She can see it.

Easy now, easy. Like talking to a fractious child. Yeah, baby, that’s good, she can feel the bolt turning.

The drawer slides open. She falls back on her ass for a moment, catching her breath.

The drawer is set up as a file cabinet, legal-size, with tabs on the tops of file folders. She starts reading the labels. Land deals. Her pulse quickens.

She pulls out a thick file that is labeled “San Francisco.” Flips through the pages. Deeds of trust, bills of sale, tax notices, all the paper trail of ownership.

Where is it? she thinks.

Bay Area Holding Company. It leaps out at her.

She stuffs the entire file in her day pack, continues looking through the drawer.

The last file folder in the drawer is the newest. Rainier Oil, typed in neat letters on the edge.

Carefully, as if it might be connected to a detonating device, she pulls it out.

The folder contains a bound document. Stamped on the front cover is a warning—CONFIDENTIAL—and a number under it. Like in the CIA, she thinks, and as important.

She opens it up. It’s a contract between Rainier Oil Corporation of America, Inc., and Miranda Sparks et al. of Santa Barbara, California.

She flips through it, to the final page. There are places for signatures. One side for Miranda Sparks, president of the Sparks Foundation. On the other side, a name is typed in the space where the representative for Rainier Oil NA, Inc., will sign.

The name is Blake Hopkins.

Blake Hopkins. The oil honcho, Miranda’s secret lover.

Pay dirt. She feels her pulse rate going up like a skyrocket.

It’s time to bail out of here. Stuffing the oil company documents in her backpack, she turns off her flashlight, reopens the curtains as they were before. Then she retraces her steps through the house and lets herself out the same door she entered, locking the doorknob from the inside. Fuck the dead bolt, that’ll take some time and she’s already overspent her allotted time, in the karmic sense. By the time anyone finds out it isn’t locked and the place has been broken into, this will all be over.

She walks back down the road to her car, still hiding in the shadows, waving to the cows, the only witnesses to her triumph, as they stare unblinkingly back at her.

She hadn’t realized how much she missed him.

Cecil opens the front door as she gets out of her car. He’s standing under the lintel, framed by soft light from inside.