Chapter 12… Tinted Windows
Fish put the phone down and gazed blankly out his office window, the smell of rain tickling his nostrils. Flashing back to their college days together, he reflected on the recent reunion, thinking most of the brothers carried a bit more outside polish, but basically they were the same guys he’d known for more than half his life. Harry certainly hadn’t changed much.
For a while, he thought Harry was imagining things and that his stunt at the wake was a bit extreme, but there was no way Harry imagined his way into the hospital with three broken ribs. Now, the crazy phone call he’d gotten from Harry the previous Monday about him being followed on I-95 didn’t seem so crazy and he regretted saying it—that Harry was crazy, that is; he should have given him the benefit of the doubt.
Thinking about the situation further, he’d thought more than once that Harry’s preoccupation with Hutch’s death was getting on toward manic obsession, but he wrote that off to the fact that Harry and Hutch had been more like real brothers rather than frat brothers back in the day—that, and the fact that Harry had always been an all-in kind of guy. Now, as Fish reviewed some of the occurrences that Harry had told him about which had taken place in the last week, Harry’s fixation on proving that Hutch did not die by natural causes seemed understandable, if not downright logical. As for himself, there was something to be said for the relationships he’d maintained with his Zeta Chi brothers over the years. To him, it wasn’t like joining some club; it meant they had an obligation to look out for each other. If Hutch’s death was not due to natural causes, then that meant he was murdered, pure and simple, and if looking out for each other meant that they had to find out who did it, then that’s what needed to happen.
“Think,” Fish said to himself. That’s what he was good at. That’s what mechanical engineers did. Through the use of analysis, modeling, design, and synthesis, mechanical engineers solved problems. Think. Research, testing, development, and implementation: those were the hallmarks of his trade. Think. Predicting situations and manufacturing solutions is what he got paid for; dealing in reality while experimenting in innovation were his methodologies. Think. He needed to put it all to work here.
The facts were these: there were two ATM machines within a stone’s throw of the spot where Hutch was found. One of the ATMs was at a branch location for Hampshire Bank, and was visible from the spot where Hutch’s car had been parked. It wasn’t exactly close to the scene, however. The other ATM was a standalone machine located next to a tiny lunch deli inside the vestibule of an office building across the street from Slick’s. There was a third ATM located inside a convenience store gas station about a block away, but like the ATM located in the office building lobby, if it held a security camera it would have no view of the street and Hutch’s car. Fish had also contacted the Wallingham police department, but they had no security cameras located on Newberry Street. As for Slick’s itself, forget it, the place was a dive, or maybe even a dump aspiring to be a dive; the owner laughed when he was asked whether he had any security cameras in the place. Hampshire Bank it was.
Okay, thought Fish, he’d gotten that part worked out, but what did he know about security cameras and surveillance systems? One word answer: zotz. Think. Figure it out. And he did. Come to find out that ATM security had turned into an industry in and of itself. Most security cameras these days were FTP cameras that supported uploading of recorded images to an offsite FTP server. In this way, one of the biggest vulnerabilities of security cameras could be avoided, that being the destruction of the camera and the recorded images by intruders or anyone else who wanted the data gone forever. By uploading the data in real time over an IP protocol, even if the camera was destroyed, the data was not. If the security camera on the Hampshire Bank ATM was configured in this way, whatever it recorded in its purview on the evening of May 4th would be on a server somewhere.
So far so good, now what? “Think,” Fish said to himself again. He’d just got done working on a problem a lot more complex than this, surely he could figure out how to get to the images from that ATM. Wait. The problem—actually the project—he’d just thought about: his company had just resystemized and reengineered the entire manufacturing process for a company that manufactured oil tankers. Talk about your complexity. One of the biggest challenges for his own company in meeting the requirements for such a massive project was that they had to rethink and reinvest in their own computer aided design and database management technology so that any one of thousands upon thousands of drawings and specifications were available at a moment’s notice to anyone on the project at any point in time, quite a chore given that the manufacturer was located in Bangladesh, but that’s exactly why it was a requirement. Reinvesting in their own technology to meet this requirement meant bringing in additional expertise into their IT technology department, and her name was Sally Westerman. Fish picked up the phone and looked up the extension.
“Sally?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Don Fischer. You remember me, don’t you?”
“Of course. The Bangladesh trip. That was fun, wasn’t it?”
That was good to hear. Fish thought she was interesting in an off-beat sort of way and had been debating for a while now whether he should ask her out. “It was fun,” he said. “Did you have fun?”
“I just said that.”
“Oh.”
“What can I do for you, Fish?”
“Listen, I need to talk to you about something personal—”
“Wait, is Sanders from materials sciences there with you? Did he put you up to this? If he is, tell him no, I can’t touch the tip of my nose with my tongue, okay?”
“Uh... that’s not what I wanted to know, but thanks for the intel.”
“Oh, sorry. A girl has a couple of drinks on a trip and some guys never let her forget it. It was the jet lag, you know?”
“Sally, my question has nothing to do with that. Like I said, it’s kind of personal. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Personal, huh? You know, I wasn’t the only one on that trip who got sloshed.”
“Sally, slow down. My question has nothing to do with the trip. It has to do with your knowledge of computer systems security.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Security as in have I ever worn leather handcuffs? Sanders is right there laughing his butt off, isn’t he?”
“No, he’s not... really.”
“For real? What about oil wrestling? That’s another of his favorite topics.”
Geez, thought Fish, he needed to get out of his office and talk to people more often. “No, nothing to do with oil wrestling either.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, okay then, I guess. What’dya want to know?”
“How would you rate your knowledge about computer security and firewalls and stuff like that?”
“Quite good, actually.”
“Quite good, or really good?”
“I guess you could say really good. Why?”
“So how hard would it be to hack into a storage database and copy some information?”
“What kind of information?”
“Say photos from a security camera.”
“Not anyone’s financial information, or tax return, or social security information? Nothing like that?”
“Not at all, just photos from a security camera.”
“Anything military, or something requiring top secret clearance?”
“No, it’s from a business security camera.”
“Well, it depends on the organization’s firewall, but that doesn’t seem like anything that an experienced hacker couldn’t get through. Probably pretty easy, actually. Why do you want to know all this stuff?”
The magic question, thought Fish. It was probably a situation where honesty was the best policy, so he told her.
“And this guy who died, h
e was a friend of yours?”
“A very good friend, with a wife and three kids. They need to know the truth.”
Sally said, “I wouldn’t do a hack from a company IP address, but if you’re okay with doing it from your personal IP address, I guess I could check it out for you and see what’s involved. Sounds like a good cause. How old was your friend?”
“Same age as me, fifty-two. I knew him for over thirty years.”
“Oh man, how sad. When do you want to do this?” Sally asked.
“How about tonight, after work? Would you mind coming to my house? I don’t live far from here.”
“Done. Just email me the directions.”
“This is just between us, right Sally?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you sure about this?” Fish added.
“Hey, if it’s ever discovered it will be your IP address that gets traced, not mine. Besides, maybe you’ll help me squash that rumor about what happened after I lost at beer pong at the company picnic.”
* * * * *
Pruitt pulled up to 91 Clifton Street in North Cambridge and found it more than interesting to see a Cambridge patrol car and what was clearly—to her—an unmarked detective’s car parked in front of the house. Taking note of the neighborhood, she had an idea instantly about what was happening. All of the homes were old, eighty years old or more, she guessed, and as such it was a mixture of tired and sometimes dilapidated structures mixed with reclaimed homes being brought back to their original glory by people looking for the stability of a family neighborhood like this one. Across the street she could see the football field and baseball diamonds of Russel Field. The home she was looking at was immaculate and it had to be worth a million plus. She took a parking spot a couple of doors down, then made her way up the recently painted but creaky porch steps and knocked on the stained glass front door. It was slightly ajar, and she could hear voices inside. A moment later the door swung open and she was greeted by a uniformed officer. Beyond him she could see Suzanne Hutchinson, she assumed, speaking with a casually dressed detective who was nodding and taking notes. She flashed her state police detective shield to the officer and he let her pass without saying a word although his confusion was evident as to why a statee would be here for a routine breaking and entering.
Examining the scene as she entered, Pruitt noted instantly that the drawers on every cabinet or table in the room had been opened and the contents were either strewn on the floor or disheveled within. Somehow, she knew immediately what the intruders had been looking for, and without going into the other rooms in the house, she knew it would be the same there. The detective’s back was to her and she heard him ask Suzanne, “Do you know how they got into the house?”
“I think they just unlocked the back door somehow,” she answered. “I didn’t find anything broken and I found the door unlocked when I got home from my hair appointment. I always use that door because it leads to the garage and I’m sure I locked it when I left.”
Upon hearing her answer, Pruitt knew immediately that this was no ordinary break in. Common thieves usually went the smash-and-grab route and did not use lock-picking tools where some degree of skill was involved. Furthermore, the search inside the house was obviously systematic, something that dumbass crackheads were not. They usually went to the offices or bedrooms looking for any jewelry or cameras or anything else they could carry away easily and hock to finance their next high.
“You’re sure?” Lopez questioned, but he turned when Suzanne caught sight of Pruitt and looked her way. “Can I help you?” he asked as he shot an annoyed look at the officer for letting someone into his crime scene.
“State police,” the officer called as he hunched his shoulders.
“State police?” the detective repeated, his surprise as evident as the officer’s. “What’s this all about?” He gave Pruitt an up and down. “Can I see some ID?”
Pruitt looked past him and asked, “Are you Suzanne?”
“I am,” said Suzanne. “Are you Detective Pruitt?”
Pruitt took out her shield and showed it to both of them.
“I’m Detective Lopez,” the detective said, his tone softening. “Funny, I thought I knew all the state police investigators operating out of the Middlesex unit.”
Pruitt looked him square in the eye. There weren’t many female detectives with the Massachusetts State Police, and none of them were fifty-somethings. One got respect by giving respect, however, and she held steady and said, “I’m out of Troop B in Northampton, and I’m here on another matter.” She was careful not to use the word case, as there was no case. “Forgive me for stepping into your crime scene, but I think this B&E and what I’m working on might be related.”
“So what are you working on?” Lopez asked.
The guy looked like he’d been on the job for a while, thought Pruitt. Salt and pepper hair, crow’s feet at the temples, narrow eyes—no sense in beating around the bush. “I’d rather not say, but I think I might be able to make this quick for you if you’ll allow me to ask Mrs. Hutchinson just a couple of questions.”
Lopez looked at Suzanne. Clearly he was no dummy and he absorbed her body language immediately. “Knock yourself out,” he said flippantly.
Pruitt turned to Suzanne. “Those items we talked about on the phone, Mrs. Hutchinson, were they here in the house when this occurred?”
Suzanne had been dabbing her eyes with a tissue the while Pruitt was talking with Lopez. Suddenly, her demeanor did a one-eighty and she speared Lopez with an ominous stare. “I hid them,” she spat out. “I put them where no one would find them in a hundred years.”
“Were they in the house?” Pruitt repeated.
Resolutely, Suzanne replied, “Not on your life.”
Seeing the abrupt change in behavior, Lopez inquired, “What items are we talking about?”
Blowing past his question, Pruitt went on, “Is anything else missing?”
Suzanne got her meaning immediately. “No, nothing.” She turned to Lopez and said, “I’m sorry to have bothered you, Detective, but I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Dumbfounded, Lopez looked at the two women and spat out, “I don’t know what’s going on here, Mrs. Hutchinson, but whatever it is, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Suzanne looked at Pruitt and said, “Quite sure. Thank you for coming out, Detective. I’ll show you to the door.”
Lopez looked at Pruitt and said, “What the hell?”
* * * * *
Pruitt picked up her tea and waited for Suzanne to compose herself. The woman had been through an enormous strain and the prospect of her husband’s death being of suspicious nature was an added shock she didn’t deserve. Looking at the pictures of her kids in various stages of development, Pruitt could tell that Suzanne Hutchinson was a wonderful woman, wife, and mother. “How are you holding up?” she asked.
Sitting on the other side of the well-worn but obviously expensive eighteenth-century dining table, Suzanne looked at her with crimson eyes. “You know,” she began, “when I got that call from Harry on Wednesday and he started asking me about Brendan Phillips—”
“Who’s Brendan Phillips?” Pruitt asked. She remembered that Curlander had mentioned the name to her the day before from his hospital room.
“He’s the former CEO at the bank where my husband worked. According to Harry, someone was pretending to be Brendan Phillips at my husband’s wake. I thought Harry had totally lost it.”
That’s right, thought Pruitt, now she remembered. She was careful not to pepper Suzanne with too many questions, but made a mental note to come back to Brendan Phillips. “Why is that important, Mrs. Hutchinson?”
“Call me Suzanne, please. Mrs. Hutchinson was my mother-in-law.”
Pruitt smiled and that seemed to put Suzanne at ease. “And you can call me Catherine. Go on with what you were saying about Mister Curlander.??
?
“Well, when Harry ordered me to take Hutch’s phone and laptop and get out of the house, I got really scared, especially after I found out there was no Jennifer in the HR department at the bank.”
Pruitt calmly sipped her tea. Suzanne needed to tell her story. “So what did you do then?”
“Well, I parked down the street and stayed in the car for a while like Harry told me, but no one came to the house.” That made me even more suspicious in that they’d made an appointment to pick up that phone and laptop, so why didn’t anyone show up?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, but I had this feeling that maybe they were watching me too.”
“Were you using the same car your husband drove on the night of his death?”
“No, I used my own car. The Mercedes is parked in the garage. My son Bobby drove it back from Wallingham and it hasn’t been used since that night.”
“So if someone was watching you, they’d have to be aware of what car you drove.”
“That would make sense. In any case, I got to thinking that Harry was right; there was something on that phone or laptop that had to do with Hutch’s death.” Suzanne indicated the surroundings and all the evidence of the burglary. “It’s pretty clear that’s what they were after.”
“So you hid them,” Pruitt concluded.
“You’re damned right I did. Those bastards killed my husband and we need to get them.”
Pruitt offered no comment. While she was personally coming around to that same opinion, she needed to follow the evidence, which up to now was close to none. “So where did you put the phone and the computer?” It was the question she’d been dying to ask for the last twenty minutes, but suddenly, in that very instant, some instinct inside her told her that Suzanne should not answer the question. Reflecting on what she already knew about this non-case, all of the unexplainable occurrences and coincidences were becoming too much to swallow, and she knew whoever had tried to rob Suzanne had also run Harry Curlander off the road the day before. Also, whoever had performed these acts could still be out there ready to try again, and that made the situation even more dangerous for both of them.
Suzanne was about to speak again when Pruitt stopped her and quickly scrawled the words don’t talk on the notepad in front of her. Suzanne froze, her eyes wide and connecting with Pruitt’s immediately. Pruitt did a quick scan of the room, noting there were four windows there, two of them looking out onto Clifton Street where her car was parked. The curtains were parted, she noticed, long, filmy floor length sheers tied back to let in the light. She got up from her chair and took a path along the edges of the significantly-sized room, trying not to put herself into view to anyone who might be looking in from outside. Looking back at Suzanne, she put a finger to her lips and Suzanne nodded.
Instinctively, Pruitt’s right hand moved to the butt of her nine-millimeter Glock. Reaching one of the front windows, she carefully undid the tiebacks and let the sheers fall to the middle of the window. She moved to the second window and did the same. Suzanne got up and took care of the open windows on that side of the house and they were suddenly enveloped in a muted, spooky dimness, the only sound being the chirping of robins from the huge maples shrouding the front yard. From the side, Pruitt moved the heavier long side drapes just enough so that she could peek out onto the street and beyond. What she saw were the baseball diamonds she’d observed previously, the one closest to the street flanked by metal bleachers along the first base line, in front of which were a few parking spots. That’s when she spotted the dark sedan parked in one of those spots, facing the house, directly, like whoever-was-behind-that-windshield-was-looking-at-them-right-now directly.
Pruitt didn’t recall whether that car was there or not when she’d arrived about an hour earlier. The squad car and Detective Lopez’s car had been parked in front of the house then, but with those cars gone now the hairs on her arm began to tingle and she wondered if they were safe. She wondered further if whoever had broken into the house was sophisticated enough to have planted a listening device somewhere in the event that if the burglars did not find the phone and laptop they were after, they might ascertain its location by listening to the conversation between Suzanne and the police that she would surely call when she discovered the break-in. Pruitt concluded that was indeed quite possible, but luckily Lopez didn’t get the chance to ask Suzanne if she knew what the burglars might have been after.
Noticing a cord for a pleated shade that would come down to cover the window interior, Pruitt pulled it and completely blocked the window from outside perusal. She did the same for the window on the other side, and it wasn’t more than a minute later that the dark sedan pulled out of its parking spot and disappeared down Clifton Street. The tingle she’d felt moments earlier turned into a full-blown shiver up her spine and she knew they needed to get out of that house immediately. She stepped over to the notepad still sitting on the dining room table and wrote out we need to leave—NOW. With Suzanne right behind her, Pruitt pulled her Glock and undid the safety. They walked not so calmly to Pruitt’s unmarked car parked two doors up on Clifton Street, and left quickly.
* * * * *
Mary Swindell had been with Curlander and Curlander since well before there was a second Curlander in the picture. She remembered how proud the old man had been when Harry finally decided to join the family practice, but it had been a long time coming. With the family situation the way it was after Curly’s death, Harry had gone off into the world of big law in the early days, insisting on making it on his own without help from his father or anyone else. Watching Harry break his back in the meat-grinder world of billable hours took as much of a toll on the old man as it did on Harry, it seemed, perhaps more so in that Harry reaped the rewards of his hard work in dollar signs, millions of them Mary guessed from the looks of things, but the old man said it wasn’t worth it.
“Being a big firm lawyer isn’t what it used to be,” the old man preached. “You gotta claw your way in, and then you gotta watch who’s behind you the whole time ‘cause they’ll steal the fork right off your plate. Working with cutthroats isn’t the way to go.”
It took Harry almost twenty years to come to the same conclusion, but he finally came back to Point Pleasant and they changed the stationary to include a second Curlander on the letterhead. Now, as she was driving to Harry’s house to drop off some work to him, Mary smiled as she recalled Harry’s early days with the old man. She could still hear them arguing.
“The world has become a litigious place,” Harry had contended.
“And we’re no better off for it,” the old man had countered.
“Dad, we can only go so far with family law. We don’t need to take every case that blows in the door, but I think we need to expand and bring in a couple of other lawyers with experience in areas where we’re not experts.”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to turn this firm into a bunch of Philadelphia lawyers and ambulance chasers,” the old man had bellowed.
“What about kids?” Harry had countered. “Where do they go to get a fair shake? Do you know how many child abuse and neglect situations there are in Ocean County? Or how about environmental law? The way these developers are gobbling up land around here, who’s going to protect central Jersey from becoming another Love Canal? And how about all those casinos going up in Atlantic City? Do you know how much work in regulatory law and contract law can come out of an environment like that? We’re right here in their back yard.”
The old man paused for a moment. “And you think we can make headway in all those areas?”
“Absolutely.”
That was fifteen years ago. They tried it and never looked back. Harry rebuilt the practice with that vision, and the old man died at his desk a happy man at eighty-two.
Now, pulling into Harry’s cul-de-sac, she wondered when would be a good time to tell him that she was thinking about retiri
ng. Maybe after he recovered from this accident, she thought as she approached the house, either that or when he got through this situation with his fraternity brother passing away. Talk about getting wrapped up, it seemed like Harry had forgotten about everything else in the world.
Harry opened the front door and said, “Thanks for driving this stuff over here, Mary. As long as I’m going to be house-bound, I figure I might as well get some work done.”
“Not a problem,” she said. She turned to Denise and added, “If he gives you any trouble you just call me and I’ll come over and sit on him for you.”
“I might just take you up on that,” Denise responded. “And don’t think you have to do all the traveling. It’s no problem for me to bring these documents back when Harry is done with them.” She got up close to Mary and whispered loud enough for Harry to hear, “It’ll do me good to get out of the house.”
Mary smiled and said, “See you later, you two. Just call if you need anything.”
“Thanks again,” Harry said as he went to close the door while Denise carried the file box into his home office for him. He looked out momentarily as if to check the weather. “Honey, how long has that van been parked outside?”
“What van?” Denise asked.
“The van with Roker Plumbing printed on the side. I swear I saw it parked further up the street the other day.”
“Could be,” Denise called back from down the hall. “Maybe another homeowner saw it in the neighborhood and contacted them for some other work. You know how that goes.”
“Guess so,” said Harry, thinking nothing of it, but no sooner were the words out of his mouth when the van started up and crept stealthily past the house. That’s when he noticed that the van’s windows were completely blacked out. How odd, he thought. That didn’t look like any plumber’s van that he’d ever seen.
He carefully took a seat behind his desk. Even with the pain killers his ribs were killing him. Good thing it was Friday, he thought; he’d have the whole weekend to lie still and try to get past this. He dipped into the file box and pulled out a couple of folders, but found himself unable to concentrate. Instead, in his mind’s eye, he reran the scene of the van crawling past his house. No plumber uses a van with tinted windows, he thought again. Wait, what was the name of that plumbing company? He pulled up the internet and did a search on Roker Plumbing: nothing. Then he did Roker Plumbing in New Jersey: nothing again. He went to the window and the van immediately rolled away as if it had detected him. It was as if it had listened to his conversation with Denise.
“Well fuck me sideways,” he whispered to himself. Someone had stalked him at his office and tried to run him off the road on Wednesday night, could it be possible that whoever had done that could be inside that van? Of course it was possible, he thought immediately, and now he was convinced of it. No plumber used a van with tinted windows. He reached for his keyboard again and this time typed in electronic eavesdropping devices and was stunned by what came up. There were devices that could fit into clocks, light fixtures, inside phones, smoke alarms, devices that could be pointed at the house from outside—from that fucking van, he thought instantly—voyeur cams, pinhole bugs, all sorts of tiny, inconspicuous little gadgets that could let someone know if you farted under the bedcovers.
Up to now, and even with the accident, Harry thought that everything that had happened had been about Hutch. Sure, someone had been following him two nights earlier, but in actuality he’d run off the road because he’d clipped a curb and sent his own vehicle into a skid spin. Now, looking around his office, at his cell phone, at the light fixtures, anywhere and everywhere that a listening device could be hidden, he came to realize that this was now also about him, and that he could be in real danger. The creepiness of it was starting to make him sweat.
He picked up his cell phone and put it down immediately. He couldn’t trust it. He debated whether he could use Denise’s cell phone, but decided against that also. Mary had just left and couldn’t be more than five minutes away. He picked up his cell phone and called.
“Mary, Harry here. Sorry, I need for you to turn around and come back... No, nothing serious, I just forgot to give you something, that’s all... Sure, take your time, see you in a couple of minutes.” He sat there in dead silence, detecting Denise’s voice in the background. She was out on the patio on her phone with someone... good... if anyone was listening in on her phone they could concentrate on that for a while. Four minutes later, Mary’s car rolled into the driveway and he made his way carefully to the front door.
Not saying anything, he waved her in. Noting the confused look on her face, he held a finger to his lips and whispered in her ear, “Can I use your cell phone?” To say that she looked at him oddly was an understatement, but she gave him the phone.
“Don’t talk, okay?” he barely whispered, and she nodded tenuously. Then, “Which button for text?” he whispered. She reached over a pushed an icon and Harry checked for Ducky’s cell number on his own phone and entered it into Mary’s text screen, along with a message: Ducky, Harry here. Will call you in 30 seconds. Need you to play along, okay? Please reply via text. Less than a minute later, Mary’s cell phone bonged its incoming text signal and Ducky’s reply appeared on the screen: OK.
On his own cell now, Harry punched up Ducky’s number and spoke out clearly, “Ducky, Harry here. Listen, I found out who killed Hutch and I think we need to call the authorities.” Mary looked at him as if he’d lost his mind and he waited for Ducky to say something. C’mon Ducky, say something, anything to flush these bastards out.
“I knew you could do it,” Ducky finally shot back. “How did you find out?”
Harry was on the spot now. “Some people tried to run me off the road the other night and I got the license plate number of the bastard who did it and tracked him down. It has to be connected.”
“I suppose you want me to let Monica know,” Ducky responded.
“Yeah, and tell her to contact both the state police detective who investigated the scene and the district attorney and let them know we finally got some hard evidence on this thing.”
“Will do, Harry. Anything else?”
“Yeah, as the ADA your wife is tight with the medical examiner, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, tight enough, I guess. Why?”
“Ask her what’s involved in getting Hutch’s body exhumed. I think the ME is gonna need to reexamine the body and determine the real cause of death.”
“Will do, Harry.”
Ducky sounded serious as hell. “Thanks Ducky. I’ll be in touch.” Harry ended the call and looked at Mary. He gave her a hug and as he did he whispered in her ear, “Thanks Mary. Just go back to the office like nothing happened.”
Mary shot him a yeah, right look but did as he said. When her car was out of the driveway, he noted that Denise was still out on the patio talking on the phone. She had no idea of what had just taken place. He moved purposefully to his office and removed several heavy law books from one of the built-in bookcases. Wincing as he dropped them on a chair, he dialed the combination to the wall safe and pulled out a Sig Sauer P320 .40 caliber automatic and loaded it with a fourteen shot magazine. Next, he took one of the guest chairs from in front of his desk and dragged it into the hallway to face his front door. If anyone was after him—and he was convinced now that someone was—and if that someone had had been listening to his conversations, they knew he’d been hurt, they knew where he was, and now they had no choice but to believe that he knew their identities. Whatever it was they were afraid of, now would be the time for them to do some damage control before their situation got worse. For them, damage control would be getting him out of the picture permanently, as they’d already tried to do, and now he was giving them another chance—or so they’d think. He only wished he knew what that situation was, but clearly he was getting close to discovering it and someone was getting spooked.
He took a seat in the hallway between the vestibule and the kitchen and put the gun in his lap. If anyone was going to burst through his front door, they’d be hard-pressed to see him in the darker hallway and he’d have a split second advantage while their eyes adjusted from sunlight to shadow. That’s all he needed, but, looking at it another way, that’s all he’d get. He wondered what to do about Denise, but that situation sort of took care of itself as she came up behind him, evidently having finished her phone conversation. She came around and faced him as he sat in the chair. She looked down and the gun, and then she looked into his eyes. He prepared himself for the are-you-out-of-your-damned-mind onslaught which he figured was sure to come, but instead she asked as calmly as could be, “Are you sure about this, Harry?” When it came right down to it, there weren’t two people on the planet more suited to be soulmates for each other. She’d follow him into hell if he was serious about it, and he’d do the same for her, no questions asked.
“I’m sure,” he replied as calmly as she’d asked the question.
“This looks serious.”
“It is.”
“Is there another way to handle this?”
“I don’t think so. They’re after me too and I think they’re gonna keep trying until they succeed.”
She paused now, and he could see her weighing her options in her head. “I see,” she said. “Are they in that van you kept asking about?”
“I think so.”
“Do you need any help?”
“I might.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Do you remember where we keep our other self-defense weapon, the one we bought for you when we took that gun safety workshop?”
“Of course. It’s in the dresser drawer under your socks.”
“I’d like you to get that gun, sweetheart, and I’d like you to load it and stand over there on the other side of the door so that if anyone comes in they won’t see you.”
“Okay, and then what?”
“Well, if anyone does come in and they are uninvited, I’d like you to be prepared to shoot them dead if I tell you to do that.”
“Not a problem,” Denise said, and she marched off and retrieved the weapon, it being a Walther PPK .380 that they purchased because it fit her hand better than his larger Sig Sauer. She then pulled another chair from the office and parked it on blind side of the front door. “Do you mind if I read?” she asked. “I know how you hate to talk when you get intense like this.”
“No not at all. What are you reading?”
“One of my romance novels. You wouldn’t like it.” She retrieved her book from the patio and sat cross-legged in the chair, reading her book as if she was waiting for a bus instead of a possible assassin. After about twenty minutes she asked, “Are you certain someone is coming?”
“I wasn’t entirely sure, but I think our guests are arriving now.”
She looked at him. “I love you, Harry. You’re the only man I could ever love.”
“I love you too, sweetheart, with all my heart. It’s time to pay attention now.” He could feel his heart begin to race. He carefully pulled the slide and chambered a round on his Sig Sauer and Denise did the same on her titanium-coated Walther. They could hear a couple of car doors slam shut in the driveway, and Harry flashed two fingers to Denise, who nodded in return. A few seconds later, one shadow and then another shot across the hallway tiles as their guests passed the decorative square windows ringing their front door. The doorbell went off, sounding like a cathedral bell in the stillness. Some seconds passed and it went off again.
Denise looked at Harry and croaked lowly, “Should I answer the door?”
Harry raised his pistol, aimed it at the middle of the door, and said, “Do it.”
Denise got up and took hold of the doorknob with her left hand while holding her automatic down low behind her leg with her right hand. Harry gave a nod and she yanked the door open with an urgent swish.
“Move one inch and you’re a dead man,” Harry called from the chair. “Hands up, now! Both of you!”
“Jesus, take it easy! Easy... okay?”
“Hands up I said. Now! Get down on the floor, on your knees... now!”
“Okay, okay, my hands are up.”
“Down on the floor! Both of you!”
Easy now, Mister Curlander. It’s not what you think.”
“How do you know what I think? Who the hell are you?”
“Can I reach into my pocket and get my ID?”
Denise came around, her gun pointed right between his eyes. The second guy was down right beside him, on his knees now, looking back and forth nervously between Harry and Denise. “Where’s your ID? What pocket?”
“Inside breast pocket of my jacket, left side.”
Denise took a step back so as to be out of arm’s reach and said, “Take it out and put it on the floor, slowly.” He did so. “Slide it over here.” He did so, and she picked it up.
“Who is he?” Harry called to her.
Denise lowered her gun and said, “Meet Special Agent Darryl Breckenridge, CIA.”