No Safe Place (Joe Hunter Thrillers Book 11) (4 page)

The haul wasn’t unusual. In the other home invasions the gang had targeted high value, easily transported goods. But there was an anomaly. The taking of Ella’s ring from her finger didn’t fit their
modus operandi.
But then she had been their only female victim to date, so maybe temptation was just too much for the thieves. Having chased her through the house, perhaps they felt she owed them extra payment for their effort. They were monsters, but Clayton didn’t really need reminding.

‘How is your boy doing?’ I asked instead.

‘It’s been tough on him, but you know kids, right? They’re tougher than adults at times like this. You’re probably wondering where he is.’

‘I am.’

‘School. He’s better off there with his friends than hanging around his old man.’ Clayton must have thought about the boy’s vulnerability, because he added, ‘He gets picked up and dropped back again at the gate by the school bus. The school has security guards on patrol, and particularly at this time the principal has assured me she’ll keep a close eye on Cole.’

‘When he’s home, I’ll be here for him,’ I said, and meant it. ‘He’s my priority, you can bet on it.’

Clayton stood up, and extended his hand a second time. When I accepted his grip this time there was no associated pissing competition.

Andrew Clayton was watching a movie on his recently acquired replacement TV.
It was a huge flat-screened affair that took up almost an entire wall in his den. It had a surround sound system that’d accommodate an auditorium crowd. The movie was a Stallone actioner, and I could hear the muffled sounds of explosions and gunfire even down by the pond where I stood. I looked back at the house and saw lights behind a number of windows. Blue flickers came from beyond the blind over Cole’s bedroom window, and I took it he was sneaking some late TV while his dad was engrossed in the celluloid mayhem a few rooms over. I’d come out for some peace, but also to do a circuit of the grounds. Best that I was familiar with the outside as I was growing with the interior of the house. Earlier I’d scouted nearer the building, checking out the flowerbeds where a prowler had recently stood, while peering inside. The soil had been forked over, so there was nothing left of the footprints discovered by the responding police patrol. There were indentations in the lawn, but Andrew, Cole, or even the gardeners employed to keep the grounds in tip-top shape could have made them. Now, standing by the pond, I checked lines of sight, and saw that the grounds were largely clear for a good forty or fifty paces on three sides, protected on only one by the expanse of water. The moss-hung trees looked eerie in the half-light of the moon, and any number of prowlers could approach through the woods before they were spotted. They’d have to be determined to travel through the tangled thickets though, and unalarmed by the proliferation of insects. Easiest way in was via the drive, but a sturdy wall and a wrought iron gate with an electronic lock protected access from the main road.

I could hear the soft hush of traffic on Hillsborough Avenue, and from more distantly on the causeway that took commuters from northwest Tampa across the bay towards Clearwater. A dog barked over in Bayport West, barely decipherable over the sound of cicadas. But I could hear yapping closer, too. I immediately walked up the lawn, rounded the house and on to the drive. I stood there and listened. The yapping came again, and this time I recognised the high-pitched vocals as those of a girl and boy in an excited flap. I moved adjacent to the drive so they didn’t hear the crunch of my feet on the seashells. When I got to within twenty feet of the gate I stood still, but was hidden from them by the shadows from the trees flanking the drive. A young guy leaned against a parked car, gesticulating with a beer can at a teenage girl who was peering intently between the bars. She was answering without looking at him. She sounded tipsy, and I thought she’d had something stronger than the beer he was quaffing.

‘I dare you to climb the gate,’ the guy challenged the girl.

‘I’ll do it if you do it,’ she countered. She held onto the bars with both clenched fists, leaning back so that her hair hung loose over her shoulders as she eyed him. ‘C’mon, Bobby, you said you would.’

‘You have to be nuts. Crazy Clayton will get us.’ The youth pushed a hand through his floppy blond hair, grinning absurdly at her, as she used the gate as a pivot to swing sideways.

Just a couple of kids doing what kids do, I decided. Daring each other to approach the murder house. I wondered if already rumours of hauntings at the Clayton House were going around the nearby high schools. On top of the harassment Andrew was getting from those with an axe to grind, he didn’t need drunken would-be ghost hunters creeping onto his property. I stepped into view. The youth spotted me immediately, and made a visible jerk of surprise. He hissed a warning at the girl and she spun around, her mouth falling open, eyes widening as I approached from the gloom. She immediately released the bars and took a couple of backwards steps. She glanced at her boyfriend, at me, and then at him again in an exaggerated double take. I wondered if she was about to run and jump in the car, and that would have suited me, but she didn’t. Her immediate shock had been replaced by inquisitiveness.

‘Hey, mister! Is it true a woman got murdered right here?’

‘Hush, Mel,’ Bobby cautioned, because he’d no way of knowing who I was. I could have been the notorious Crazy Clayton for all they knew.

I didn’t answer directly. I said, ‘It’s not a good idea hanging around here.’

‘Why not?’ said the girl, as excitable as before. ‘Will the crazy man get us?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But the cops might. You know you’re trespassing on private property, right?’

‘It isn’t private out here, this side of the gate,’ argued the girl.

I pointed back the way they’d arrived from. ‘All the way back to Hillsborough,’ I said, with no idea if I was right or not. ‘It’s all private property. Maybe it’s best you go back up to the main road and park there, eh?’

The youth, Bobby, reached for his girl, but she pulled gently out of his grasp. ‘Who are you?’ she asked me directly.

‘An employee,’ I said.

‘Some sort of security guard?’ She sneered at me. ‘Maybe if you’d done your job right, nobody would’ve gotten killed.’

‘I wasn’t here then.’ I didn’t need to explain myself, and doing so might have encouraged more questions from the girl. I could see Bobby was already keen to leave, but didn’t have the
cojones
to command his girl to get back in the car. ‘You know the police are still patrolling around here, right?’ I made sure both of them got the point.

‘It’s not like they’re going to arrest us or anything,’ Mel said, and laughed at the absurdity of my warning.

‘They won’t for trespassing, but they might be more interested in how much you kids have been drinking.’ I pointed at Bobby. ‘Especially you. I take it you want to hang on to your driver’s licence a bit longer than you’ve already had it?’

Bobby looked at his can of Budweiser and the thought of throwing it clear must have gone through his mind. Visions of being forced to take a sobriety test were enough to send him packing. He grasped Mel a second time, and this time when she tried to prize free, he held tight. ‘C’mon, Mel. Let’s get out of here. If I get run in on a DUI charge, my dad will kill me.’

The car was his father’s, I’d have bet. I took out my cell phone. I’d no intention of calling the cops, but the suggestion was enough for Bobby. ‘C’mon, Mel, for crying out loud!’ He tugged her towards the car. She pouted, scowled daggers at me, while I dabbed buttons on the phone, actually calling up my empty voicemail account. She flipped me the bird. But Bobby pressed her inside the car, then ran round to clamber into the driver’s seat before she decided to get out again. He gave me a pleading look before ducking inside, and I raised a thumb and put away the phone. Bobby drove off.

I waited until the brake lights first flared then died as the car turned right on Hillsborough Avenue a few hundred yards away. Rink had promised an easy job: well if seeing off a few ghoulish kids was the extent of my duties then I could live with it. Of course, that wasn’t all I was here for. I was Bryony’s eyes and ears on the ground, but up until now I’d nothing to report. Andrew Clayton had given me no reason to believe he was anything but a grieving husband, with a small child to contend with. Earlier, when the school bus had dropped him at the end of the drive, Andrew had brought Cole in after explaining who I was. Cole had been polite, but distracted, had hung his head and then followed his dad to the kitchen for chocolate milk and cookies. Afterwards he’d gone to his room, giving his X-Box his full attention. I thought the boy would come around in a day or two, and wasn’t about to push him into accepting me. It wasn’t easy filling a hole in your heart, and I wasn’t the one to bridge the gulf that had opened in Cole’s when losing his mom.

I sauntered back towards the house. Andrew had left his room. He was backlit as he moved slowly through the sitting room. He might have wondered where I was, but I’d mentioned to him earlier I’d probably patrol the grounds, so maybe not. He stopped, stood staring out, but he couldn’t possibly see anything but his own reflection in the picture window. His mouth worked silently, and his spectacles were again blank mirrors. I moved away. Went around the side of the house and stopped to check the double garage doors. They were unmarked from where entry was made, but I recalled that Andrew and Cole had not long left on their fishing trip when the home invasion crew entered. Perhaps one of the garage doors had been left open when Andrew took out his SUV and they hadn’t needed to force inside. I’d taken a look earlier. The locks had been replaced on both the utility room and kitchen doors. Both doors still retained the dusting powder used to lift the latent prints the police had discovered: they had been partial imprints from footwear. One was identified as a brand of work boot; the other of a sneaker with a distinctive tread pattern. Similar tracks had been found indoors, as well as other shoe prints, but these had long since been removed by a professional cleaning firm who’d also scrubbed all trace of blood.

Moving away I went around the back of the house again, took a quick glance up at Cole’s room and saw he’d either personally elected to turn off his TV, or his dad had busted him and made him go to sleep. The room I’d been allocated was two over from Cole’s and in darkness. Something plopped in the pond, and I turned to check it out, but couldn’t see a thing. I walked across the lawn, not so much to check what had caused the splash but just to be moving. I could feel the ache in my muscles from yesterday’s run, and had missed the one I should’ve done today. Distractedly I rubbed at the healed wound on my chest. It was only one of many scars I wore, but the most recent, and it still occasionally tingled with residual discomfort.

There was a crackle of underbrush.

I came to a halt.

Waited for the sound to repeat.

It didn’t, but it wasn’t the only thing to have fallen silent. The cicadas had momentarily seized their incessant chirruping. I began a nonchalant saunter towards the pond, but drew up short before I reached its boggy edge. The reeds barely stirred in the faint breeze blowing inland from the Gulf of Mexico. I stood as if unconcerned, my head slightly tilted as if I peered up at the moon, but I was listening, and allowing my gaze to zone out, using my peripheral vision to check for even the tiniest hint of movement. I didn’t catch anything moving, but my senses were on full alert. Back in the days when I’d soldiered in some of the most dangerous places on earth, I’d honed my senses to a point I’d almost come to believe in the fabled sixth sense. The military had designated the talent of detecting a hidden watcher, or sniper, or lion crouching in the long grass, the title “Rapid Intuitive Ability”. The military liked their designations. But really, the RIA gift isn’t anything wondrous or preternatural, but simply instincts we all possess from back when we were still prey to more savage beasts. Most people have suppressed what they no longer need, but a soldier can’t afford to drop his guard. As I stood, pretending to be unaware of my watcher, I felt a prickle on my neck and the hairs on my forearms rose almost as if there was a buzz of electricity in the air. I could almost feel eyes boring into me from the trees to my left.

My SIG Sauer P226 was a comforting weight in its carry position in the small of my back. But I didn’t reach for my gun. I simply turned and returned the stare, though I could see nothing in the deep gloom beneath the moss-strewn boughs of the trees. Without averting my gaze I began marching purposefully forward. Whoever was hiding there held their position. But not for long.

As I got to within five paces of the trees there was a scuffle that turned into full-on crackles and snaps as someone – or something – large forced a route away from me. My gun stayed in my belt. I didn’t believe for a second it was an animal; it was human. I could hear the thuds of feet, and the muffled curses of a male getting snagged on the undergrowth. I didn’t think it was one of the home invasion crew – what purpose would any of them have for lurking in the woods? – and it might not even be the prowler who’d been spotted previously. Perhaps Bobby and Mel hadn’t arrived at the gates alone, and this was some other stupid kid, half-pickled on beer, sneaking around.

I paced along the perimeter of the woodland, staying almost parallel to the guy in the woods. His need to get away was growing more urgent as the copse began to thin towards the side of the house.

‘You’d best get the hell out of here,’ I said loud enough for my voice to carry. ‘The police are on their way and will be here in no time.’

The sounds of crashing footsteps and splintering branches faded abruptly, but not because the prowler had stopped running, only that they’d broken from the cover of the trees onto a short strip of lawn at the far side of the copse. I jogged around the trees, and made it to the fringe of longer grass that formed the demarcation zone in time to see the back end of someone clambering over the top of the boundary wall into the adjacent property. He paused briefly, clinging to the wall for stability before leaping to the ground.

‘Yeah, you’d better keep running, you arsehole!’ My holler was for effect, because I’d no intention of pursuing. ‘And don’t show your damn face around here again.’

I’d only got a fleeting look him as he scrambled to freedom. But it was enough to spot unruly brown hair poking from beneath a wool cap. A dark jacket and trousers. Sneakers on his feet. But the odd thing was I saw both hands as he’d clung to the top of the wall, and only one of them was gloved. I turned and scanned the woods and saw a few freshly broken twigs, the paler interiors bright against the deep grey bark. I moved closer, but it was too dark within the woods to see anything. I took out my cell phone, and brought up a torch app. I swept the beam away from the broken twigs, calculating his path through the woods and spotted more signs of passage. I entered the woods, feeling the tug of spreading vines around my ankles. Spanish moss netted my path, and I used my free hand to sweep it aside. Insects dropped on me, but I ignored the wriggling and scratching as they got under my collar. Maybe twenty feet in I saw the dropped glove. Actually, that wasn’t correct. The glove wasn’t dropped but snagged on the tip of a sturdy branch. It had caught, been pulled off the prowler’s hand as he yanked away to free himself, and had partly turned inside out.