Dave answered with a growl, although Allen knew he’d been awake. Dave was a nocturnal creature even when he wasn’t on a job.
“Got an electronic keypad for you,” was Allen’s greeting, and he gave the man what details he could see of it. “Internal,” he added.
“How’d you get through the outside one?” Dave asked.
“It wasn’t set.”
“Trusting citizens,” he grunted. “God bless ’em.”
Allen didn’t think there was any point in distracting Dave with the fact that O’Connell might not be your everyday trusting citizen. It would only worry him.
“Try these,” Dave told him, and began producing a list of four-digit numbers for Allen to try punching into the pad. Fortunately, the pad was not one of those that freeze up after a set number of unsuccessful tries, or Allen would not have had a chance. They tried the O’Connell Social Security number—last four numbers, first four, first and last pairs—and the birth dates of the man himself, his wife, and Jamie. They tried turning the numbers backwards, they tried elements of the man’s driver’s license number, they tried his wedding anniversary and the date of his mother’s birth. Twenty minutes later, Dave was beginning to run out of ideas, and neither of them had to say that the longer they stayed on the air, the greater the risk of some idiot with a scanner tuning in.
“You sure you don’t want to bash it down?” he asked hopefully.
“It’s two inches of hardwood here, I’d need a jackhammer. You got any more?”
“A few, and after that I’ll just have to talk you through surgery.” This was a thing Dave hated, since his skills were closely linked with his own fingertips. He read off the address of the Revista office, the Revista phone number, and a number that appeared a lot on the O’Connell phone bills to George Howard, whom Allen had pegged as the bodybuilder assistant. Dave’s voice was wearing thin when he gave Allen the suggestion “Try eleven-sixteen.”
The light went green. “Christ, that did it. What the hell is eleven-sixteen?” Allen asked, straightening to ease his aching spine.
“That’s the day his wife committed suicide,” Dave told him flatly.
Allen’s gloved hand froze on the doorknob. “His wife’s death?”
“Weird, huh? But it’s open?”
“It’s open. Thanks. I’ll be talking to you.”
Allen turned off the phone and zipped it into his waist pack. What could it mean, to use the date your wife had shot her brains out as the security code on your private office?
Allen shook his head to clear it of unnecessary thoughts, eased the door open, and studied his surroundings. The room was ill-lit, with illumination from the street casting thin stripes through the slatted blinds onto the ceiling. If he kept his own light pointed downward and moved it little, no chance passerby would notice.
There was a safe on the wall, poorly hidden by a painting of a windswept beach, but Allen thought he’d leave it, just for the moment: Two tricky locks in one night was pressing his luck, and the kind of thing he was looking for might not be shut behind steel, anyway. He sat down behind Mark O’Connell’s desk and got to work.
None of the desk drawers were locked, although they all could be, separately or together. Two of them were nearly empty, and to Allen’s eyes appeared to have been cleaned down to the dust, although the other four side drawers and the long one in the center were untidy collections of office debris, files, and innocuous papers. In the center drawer he found an address book of leather stamped with gold and crimson patterns. He thumbed it open, not expecting to find anything of use, but at the very beginning something caught his eye, and he opened it more deliberately to the front page, where someone had written a number string: 06-23-14. Allen’s gaze rose to the painting of the beach; he shrugged, and went over to give it a try.
The safe opened.
He’d have been less astonished to find the number string trigger a trap that showered him with dye or fried him with a knockout jolt of electricity, but the steel door merely swung out to reveal several slim books leaning against the right-hand side of the twelve-by-twelve space, and three leather jewelry cases leaning to the left. The cases did hold jewelry, the first a woman’s diamond necklace and earrings set into velvet, the second a gorgeous creation of gold and sapphires, the third a diamond tiara. Dave was going to shoot him for leaving these behind, Allen thought: Even a fence would give him six figures. But it was the books that interested him.
Five books, all of them ledgers that communicated little information to Allen other than telling him the man had a lot of money. In the inner flap of each had been taped an envelope containing a CD. He slid out the CD from the previous year’s ledger, and saw the date written on its shiny surface with a felt pen. He was tempted; if he took them away, he could find someone to peel apart the man’s finances and look for fraud, but on the whole, Allen thought it unlikely that a cautious crook, which O’Connell appeared to be, would leave his real records in a home office behind a bad painting, waiting for any cop with a warrant to find them. He slid last year’s CD back into its envelope, and put all the ledgers back inside the safe.
Only when he was returning the ledgers did he discover the safe’s last offering, propped in the dark recess behind everything else. He felt a very slight resistance as he was sliding the final ledger into place, so he reached back and drew the object out.
Another book, smaller than the others. DIARY, this one proclaimed; stamped below the word was the year of Jamie’s birth. Inside, January 1 had a line drawn through it, but there the writing began: My son was born today, nearly a month prematurely. Jamie had been born in November, but other than using the appropriate year, O’Connell hadn’t been much interested in following the dates. He had used the diary as a notebook, noting the day and month of the entries (which a quick glance showed spanned a number of years) without always bothering to cross out the printed dates.
Allen slipped the journal into the shirt pocket under his sweatshirt and closed the safe. He laid the address book back into its drawer, and continued searching the room, but he found nothing else of interest aside from another provocatively clean drawer and two ornate boxes similarly scrubbed.
Back in O’Connell’s bedroom, his search revealed a drawer in the bedside table that was cleaner than when the piece had left the showroom. When he knelt and put his face directly into it, however, he caught a whiff of a familiar and distinctive chemical odor: There’d been a gun in the drawer, and recently. While he was on his knees, patting the area around O’Connell’s bed, Allen noticed something else he wouldn’t have seen in another position. He shone the penlight to the corner of the raw silk bedcover, and saw where the delicate fabric was frayed and crumpled. Just the very corner, where it brushed the carpet—the freshly vacuumed carpet.
Allen got to his feet and hurried down the stairs to the storage closet he’d seen, switched on the light and squatted down to pop the front off the upright vacuum. No bag. He thought about it for a while: He could picture Mrs. Mendez changing the bag after each use, given a particularly demanding view of housecleaning (hers or her employer’s), but there was a fresh package of bags on the shelf; why would a responsible housekeeper fail to put a new one in then and there? Turning the machine over, he saw pale threads the color of raw unbleached silk caught at the corner of the beater, which confirmed his suspicions: The machine had sucked up the edge of that expensive bedcover and chewed away at it before the person running it had found the OFF switch. Not something an experienced housekeeper would do, although it had happened to Allen once or twice. Here it indicated that Mark O’Connell had done a thorough, if amateurish, job of cleaning the house.
Back upstairs, the rest of the bedroom gave him nothing. There were rather a lot of empty hangers in the closet, and he had yet to find any suitcases, but then, O’Connell might have been going for a while—except that his secretary expected him Monday. Allen stood in the brightly lit walk-in closet, thinking hard. What was he missing?
Not a lot of jewelry, apart from the necklaces in the safe, but then maybe O’Connell didn’t wear expensive watches and diamond signet rings. And the suits: what about . . . He began to go through the clothing on the hangers, and soon found that every one of the garments had a maker’s label. Not one of the suits, shirts, or jackets here had been custom-made. Which was not what he’d have expected.
He glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly three A.M., and turned off the closet light. The odd empty storage room drew him back, and he stood for a while pondering the holes in the walls on which something had hung, the stains and bashes in the floor. The light in that windowless room had burned out, but his flashlight gave him nothing but more questions. In the end, he peeled away one or two strips of stained wallpaper and put them into one of the sandwich bags from his waist pack. They looked like blood, but could as easily be wood stain from some home improvement project.
At the door to Jamie’s room, Allen found himself curiously reluctant to go inside. The poor kid had been invaded enough; having another adult paw through his things seemed offensive. It was absurd, Allen knew that, but he disliked the sensation of following in Mark O’Connell’s footsteps. And he was absolutely certain that the man had come in here regularly, keeping the boy under constant control. With a clench of his jaw, Allen made himself step through the mangled doorway.
Jamie’s bedroom was almost as spartan as the downstairs quarters assigned to Mrs. Mendez. Narrow bed, its mattress zipped into a waterproof cover and the sheets and blankets folded at its feet; nearly bare bookshelves; a bedside table with a radio alarm on top; and a child’s-size wooden desk with a lot of dramatic gouges and dents in the top. (Had that been done at the same time as the door? Allen wondered. Or was bashing up the boy’s possessions a regular event?) It was hardly a child’s room at all—no clutter of toys, no posters of rock groups or computer games, none of the collected treasures of a life, the beach pebbles and flattened coins, the sprung shoe boxes full of defunct games and pieces of string. Nothing but a few books (including the boxed set of Lord of the Rings) and a corkboard with five snapshots pinned in a neat line along its top border. Allen stepped closer to look.
The first photograph showed a pale young woman with fine bones and dark, long-lashed eyes. She was sitting on a bench under a tree, her hands crossed in her lap to show off a ring with a stone as large as the knuckle above it. She looked shyly happy. In stark contrast was the photograph beside it, showing a horribly wizened infant in a hospital nursery, tubes coming out of its old man’s face, everything gone slightly yellow, as color photos do over the years: the month-premature baby referred to in the journal that was burning a hole in Allen’s breast pocket. The third photo was of the young woman again, but with all her gentle beauty trodden down. She sat on a chair and her ring still hung (loosely) on her finger, but she had dark purple smudges under her dark eyes, a desperate expression on her thin face, and a squalling infant in her awkward arms. It could have been a textbook illustration of postpartum depression.
The fourth picture was of a dog, an unattractive animal with dirty white fur and nervous ears. Sitting beside it on the lawn, bony knees crossed between shorts and sandals, was a young Jamie O’Connell, recognizable even at that age (five? six?), a skinny kid with huge and compelling eyes. He’d obviously been ordered to smile for the camera, and he looked like he was trying to remember how to do it; behind the pasted grin he appeared every bit as nervous as the dog.
Last in the row was a more recent picture of Jamie with his father, dressed for the outdoors in jeans and heavy jackets. Both held guns, Jamie’s rifle a diminutive version of his father’s. O’Connell’s right hand was resting across his son’s shoulder, and the boy seemed more aware of the hand than he was of the gun, the snow around them, or the antlered buck bleeding at their feet.
Taken as a whole, the series presented a disquieting history of Jamie’s family life; studying them, Allen grew more and more certain that Jamie was not responsible for the montage. Surely no sane child would have deliberately chosen those five photographs to gaze down at his desk every day. A tube-baby who had reduced his mother to a wreck, a sorry-looking dog who must have died, since he was nowhere in evidence now, and a father who killed things for pleasure—would a boy pick these? No—but a father wishing to underscore the boy’s worthlessness (Can’t even keep a mangy old dog alive) might well choose them as his constant representatives, to watch over his son.
Allen had a sudden urge to rip them down from the wall and set them alight; instead, he pulled open a drawer in Jamie’s desk.
Pens and the heavily gnawed stubs of pencils, homework assignments, and a couple of school portraits of children Jamie’s age, which Allen tucked into his pocket as possible future interviews. Two empty candy wrappers stuffed into the back corner and three CDs for violent games. In the back of the bottom drawer, a small stuffed monkey and a chewed rubber dog toy. Other than the discarded wrappers, everything was arranged with a mechanical precision unnatural for a twelve-year-old. Had the housekeeper or the father been through, tidying the desk and bookshelves along with the bed?
Two comic books under the mattress, no screw-off dowels in the posts where a boy might hide things, but when Allen tugged at the carpet in the back of the closet, it came up, revealing a small cache of photos, all of a young woman and baby, including a duplicate of the one he’d seen in the boy’s pack. He left them where they were.
Finally, Allen removed each book from the shelf and rifled it to see if anything had been hidden in the pages. Nothing fluttered out but a bookmark. He picked up the boxed set of Tolkien, Karin Rao’s complicated expression of discomfiture and professional responsibility that Jamie had mistaken for love. Without having intended to do so, Allen tucked the box under his arm. The hell with them all; nobody would notice that the books were missing. Even if they did, so what? It’s not like he was taking the jewels from the safe.
The house had told him everything it could. He went through a last time to make sure the doors were as he had found them and that he had left no lights burning in the closets, then he let himself out, locking the door behind him.
Dawn was not far off. Allen crouch-trotted across the wide lawn to the wall, scrambled over awkwardly with the Tolkein stuffed into his shirt, and kicked the supporting logs back into the undergrowth. The car had not been disturbed. At the road he paused to listen for approaching cars before opening the padlocked gate; he drove through, snapped the lock shut, and was in gear before anyone came along. He stripped off the sweat-slick latex gloves and threw them on the seat beside him, wiping the paint from his face with a rag, then he leaned back in his seat, and laughed with the pleasure of release, just another innocent working stiff headed for the morning commute.
Safely back in his motel room before six o’clock, he kicked off his shoes and lay back on the bed to watch the morning drivel while he contemplated his next step: the Revista secretary, or Señora Mendez? However, in two minutes, a pair of cleaning women going past heard his snores, and giggled to each other in the morning sun.
Chapter 27
He woke three hours later with a mouth that tasted like old roadkill. He jerked upright on the sagging mattress, his brain trying desperately to reconstruct where he was and what he had been doing the night before. As it came back, he relaxed, scowled at the still-driveling television set until he uncovered the remote and silenced the talking heads, then staggered into the bathroom to stand beneath the cool shower, slowly warming it to comfort. He shaved and found a relatively clean shirt, noting that he’d have to drop into a Laundromat today, or a clothing store.
Before clean clothes, however, he required food, of the sort offered by the pancake house down the street. He bought a newspaper from the box at the door and read it with care, but found that they knew nothing more than they had the day before about O’Connell’s missing plane. After three cups of what they called coffee and a large plate of greasy flour products drowned in syrup, he was ready
for the day. He walked back across the parking lot to his room, and while he was stuffing clothes in a string bag, he booted up his laptop. There was one message:
G has what you asked for.
A
“Damn,” Allen said in disappointment. He had hoped Gina might dig out a lot for him, even if what she found was mostly peripheral. To have reached an end after less than twelve hours was not a good sign. He hit REPLY, and typed in:
Need to talk. 4 okay?
A
By this afternoon, he might know enough to be able to tell her that it was safe to bring Jamie home.
He tossed the laundry bag into the backseat of the stifling car, kicked up the air conditioner, and drove the ten miles to Gina’s information headquarters. The print shop in the front was open and a delivery truck was unloading into the back, but the garage under her building had the same five cars in it, and Allen parked in the same place he’d used the night before.
The elevator door did not magically draw open for him this time. He walked around the side of the shaft and thumbed the button to open the other set of doors. Inside the cubicle, he put his foot down to keep the doors from closing and unclipped the emergency phone from the wall. After a moment, Gina’s voice said, “Hello, Allen.”