Fortunately she had another idea, one she thought would succeed so long as she played it carefully. And quietly.
So after Peller’s call, having only promised to make a decision on his request within the next hour, she closed her office door, extracted the business card that her military contact had left her, and dialed his number. She gave her name to the receptionist who answered, told her it was an extremely urgent matter, and in another fifteen seconds he was on the line.
“We have a name,” she told him. “Luke Frey. Lives in Columbia, Maryland.”
“Understood,” he replied.
“There’s more. We have reason to believe he’s planning an attack on a gathering of about one hundred people, possibly today.”
“I’ll let you know if we find anything on him.”
“You’d better do more than that. We think this may be a gathering of military personnel, something like a retirement party.”
When no reply came, Morris continued, “We’re talking about the lives of American soldiers. Your people are in grave danger. I need as much information as you can give me so we can stop him.”
“There are national security interests at stake here,” he told her, but he sounded less sure of himself than previously.
“I’m not your problem, sir. I know how to keep my mouth shut. But if this thing goes down as we fear, you’ll have a PR nightmare on your hands. Help me to stop it.”
After a moment, he said, “All right. I’ll see what I can find and get back to you in half an hour.”
Morris hung up and leaned back in her chair, exhausted. About damn time, she thought.
∑
The detectives broke in the door and dispersed to conduct the search. It was a small place: living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, one bathroom. Dumas started in what appeared to be Frey’s room and Montufar searched the other bedroom. Peller did a preliminary sweep of the other rooms.
Dumas found the bedroom sparsely furnished and perfectly organized. The double bed was tightly made, the plain dresser contained neatly folded clothing, the closet contained more neatly organized clothing and little else. There was nothing under the bed, nothing hiding under or behind the clothing. Not even, Dumas thought wryly, any secret compartments or trapdoors.
Finished, he crossed the hall to see if Montufar had had any better luck and found her frowning into the closet. “Anything?” he asked, taking a quick look around. This room was a clone of the other. The identical furniture was even placed in the same positions relative to the door.
“No,” she said. “The drawers are all empty. So’s the closet. There’s a panel in the back of the closet. I thought maybe something might be hidden behind it, but it’s just access to the pipes behind the bathtub.”
Dumas went to her side and looked. “Did you get down there and poke around?” Without waiting for her answer, he got on his hands and knees and took a closer look. “Nope. Nothing.”
He was getting up just as Peller entered the room. “Nothing up front or in the kitchen. There’s a laundry and utility room in back off the kitchen with an access to the attic.”
“I’ll go up,” Dumas offered. “There’s a ladder, I hope?”
“Yeah, back by the furnace.”
They trooped to the utility room, where Dumas climbed up the ladder, lifted the access hatch, and poked his head into the darkness beyond. Peller handed a flashlight up to him and, feet still on the top rung, Dumas took a look around. The space ran the full length of the house with just enough room to stand beneath the ridge of the roof. It was unfinished, with insulation below and plywood above. A ten-by-ten area just around the access had been floored in plywood. A set of five large cardboard boxes lined the left edge of the floored area, and three more sat to the right.
“He’s got something stored up here,” Dumas called down. He climbed the rest of the way into the attic and investigated the five boxes to the left. They had been closed simply by folding the flaps together. Dumas opened them cautiously, only to be disappointed at their contents. “A lot of this looks like old clothes,” he reported. “A few books. Stephen King, Dean Koontz. That kind of thing. Nothing unusual.”
He crossed to the other three boxes and opened the first one. Within, he found a number of objects of varying size wrapped in white cloth. He picked up one and from the shape and weight of it knew instantly what it was. He unwrapped it, careful to keep it in the cloth.
He set it aside and lifted the next item from the box. It was longer and heavier, and the coldness of the metal within stole over him to envelop his whole body.
“Anything?” Peller called up, his voice impatient.
“Yes,” Dumas replied, quickly looking into the other two boxes. Lying at the top of one of them was a nondescript three-ring binder; the sort of thing a fourth-grader might carry to school. He flipped it open.
He was staring at a checklist of the victims.
“What?” Peller said. “I can’t hear you.”
He returned to the hatch and looked down. Peller and Montufar stood directly below. “We got him,” he told them, holding up the ten-gauge shotgun, still swathed in the middle to avoid fingerprinting it. “He’s got a small armory up here. And that’s just for starters.”
∑
Alert for anything out of the ordinary, Freiberg turned onto Cedar Avenue and drove a quarter mile to its dead-end. No other cars were on the road and he saw nobody outside. So far, so good. The last three houses on the right stood across from Cedar-Villa Heights Park, and the paved footpath that looped around the park, offering access to its tennis and basketball courts, came out right at the end of the street.
Another glance around showed all to be quiet. Slowly, he drove his car along the path until he was hidden in the tall trees standing in the heart of the park. Several hundred feet back and around a curve, hidden from view from anyone not following the trail, he stopped, got out of the car, stretched, and casually scanned the woods once more.
All quiet. Good.
Freiberg silently opened the trunk and regarded the trussed-up mathematician. The man returned his stare, his eyes inscrutable. He didn’t seem panicked, which was good. So long as he remained calm, he would be reasonably safe.
“I’m taking you out of the car now,” Freiberg told him. He wrestled the mostly limp figure out and up onto his left shoulder, pressed the trunk lid down, and made his way into the woods. The trees here were dense; the undergrowth springing richly from damp soil and leaf mold. Counting his paces, he stopped when he thought he’d gone far enough, turned through three hundred sixty degrees to assure himself that he couldn’t see anything other than trees, and set the mathematician on the ground, his back against a thick oak trunk.
The other squirmed a bit and tried to say something.
“Sorry. I can’t have you yelling. The gag stays on for now.” Freiberg checked the knots and, assured that everything was holding properly, stood. “I have to run an errand. I’m going to leave you here until I’m done. I should be back after sunset.”
The mathematician made a sound that Freiberg thought was an objection. “Don’t worry. I’m very good at finding my way around. I won’t lose you.”
He returned to his car, stopping just far enough back to be sure that nobody was around before emerging from the trees. He backed the car out the way he’d come, then turned from Cedar onto Lincoln Drive, which ran in front of the park. He left the vehicle in a parking lane there. He took a heavy duffel bag from the back seat of the car, locked up, and entered the park again, this time on foot.
It was about a quarter after three in the afternoon by the time he reached the woods behind the hotel. He took his time watching the parking lot, but at this time of day on a Thursday there wasn’t much activity. He strolled out of the woods, meandered among the cars in the parking lot, and gradually made his way around the west side of the building
to the main entrance. He checked in under his real name rather than the name he had given the police, and went up to his third-floor room.
Once there, he opened up his bag and extracted what he needed for the operation: a nice dark blue suit which he hung in the closet, a disassembled assault rifle, and two ammunition clips. He sat on the edge of the bed to check over the weapon.
He had three hours to kill.
Chapter 17
There are results and there are solutions. In some cases the result may be a proof that no solution exists. It occurred to me as I sat in the woods studying the trees and contemplating my fate that this might be a case in which neither solution nor discernable result existed. For no one can foresee the fallout from such events, and though the danger might be ended, certainly no one can claim that the questions raised by the matter have been solved. ∑
Captain Morris got her answers, although it took three times longer than the promised half hour. When her Pentagon contact called her back, the first thing he told her was that she’d gotten the name wrong. “It’s not Luke Frey, it’s Lucas Freiberg. Likely he gave you an alias, although why pick one so close to his real name? Makes no sense.”
Morris jotted the name on a notepad. “What’s the story on him?”
“I’ve been authorized to discuss that with you, but I have to warn you that this information is for official use only. You are not at liberty to disclose it to anyone except those within your department, and then only on a need-to-know basis.”
“Understood,” she said, impatience starting to get the better of her.
“Freiberg is an ex-Marine who was involved in some sensitive operations. Where doesn’t concern you. He wasn’t Special Ops. It’s more like he operated in a gray area between what regular units and Special Ops units typically do. They say he had a real gift for telling the good guys from the bad guys. He was given a certain amount of leeway in utilizing that gift.”
Morris jotted down notes as he spoke. “What do you mean, ‘gift?’”
“He had a theory that there are patterns governing people’s lives and that if you can see the pattern then you know what they’re up to. It was uncanny how he could tell who was involved in operations against us and who was just an ordinary person going about his life. The point is, he was credited with taking out a fair number of insurgents, at first as part of organized operations based on his insight and later as something of a rogue operative. So long as he was right, the rules were allowed to bend to accommodate him.”
“But then something bad happened.”
“Yes. He murdered an entire family because, he said, they were the endpoint in a supply chain that delivered materials for IEDs to insurgent forces. Some of them might actually have been, but he went in guns blazing and killed eight people, including several children. You can imagine the backlash.”
Morris thought of the murdered family in Columbia. “How did you handle it?”
“Diplomatic assurances that justice would be served, financial payments made, and Freiberg shipped stateside pronto. Word was put out among the locals that he was facing a battery of charges and probable life imprisonment. In fact a deal was struck in which he would keep his head down and his mouth shut, and we’d give him a quiet but honorable discharge.”
“A cover-up?”
“Compensation for the good he had done.”
Morris wanted to say that whatever good he had done didn’t excuse murder. She wanted to say that someone should have realized how unstable he was and at the least sent him for psychiatric evaluation. Instead, she asked, “Do you have his address?”
“He’s got a place in Columbia,” the other replied, and gave the address.
“We have people there now. With any luck it’s already over and done with. I’ll let you know when we have him in custody. What about a possible target?”
“There are no official functions taking place in Howard County in the next few weeks that would fit the bill. But retirement parties, birthday parties, that sort of thing—we wouldn’t necessarily know about them. We aren’t aware of any significant life events coming up for anyone associated with the incident.”
After what she was sure were insincere thank-yous on both sides, she hung up and called Peller. When he told her they’d found a stash of weapons and ammunition, plus a binder filled with maps and notes related to the killings at Freiberg’s house, but no sign of the man himself, whatever relief she’d been feeling turned to dread.
∑
The dress Amber Janetta had selected for this evening was snug, with a bodice that plunged both front and back, made up from a satiny deep burgundy patterned with a lighter burgundy swirl. She had chosen it because it was the dress she’d been wearing the evening she and Master Sergeant Arturo Gutierrez met. He planned to propose to her tonight, a fact that she knew he didn’t know she knew. He would think it an amazing coincidence that she wore this dress tonight of all nights.
The evening’s event had been billed as Amber’s birthday party. She turned twenty-eight today, and in typically lavish fashion Arturo was throwing her a bigger party than she would have wanted under most circumstances. But she certainly couldn’t complain under these circumstances! He had rounded up about a hundred of their friends, nearby family, and military acquaintances to witness as he wished her happy birthday and then—surprise!—popped the question. He’d rented the biggest banquet room at the local Holiday Inn, opted for the priciest menu items, and ordered cake and champagne.
It’s a good thing, she thought with a wry smile, that his family had money and was willing to foot the bill. She wasn’t sure how they’d manage otherwise. His military pay and her receptionist’s wages couldn’t match strength with his extravagance.
She checked her lipstick in the mirror, blew her image a kiss, and picked up her purse just as he called from the living room, “Are you about ready?”
She strode out to meet him, and laughed with pleasure when his eyes light up like a pair of supernovae.
∑
“A notebook?” said Montufar.
The weapons had been seized and sent to headquarters. Now the detectives dug through the binder, matching its contents to the killings. “A notebook,” Dumas confirmed. “The first thing in it is a checklist.”
Peller shook his head. “It’s like the devil’s book the Puritans used to talk about.” A loose page fell from the notebook. “Map of Columbia. Look, there are places marked.”
Carefully, using a closed pen, they turned the pages. “The sequences are here,” Montufar murmured. “And it looks like he has a separate section for each of the victims—he was shadowing them two months ago. I wonder if any of them ever suspected.”
“He was too careful,” Peller said. “Too efficient.”
“What would they have said?” Dumas added. “‘I think someone’s following me’? Would anyone have paid attention?”
“Probably just written it off as paranoia,” Peller said, turning back to the beginning of the book. What Dumas had seen was revealed as a master list on which Freiberg had checked off each murder, as though inventorying a freezer.
Of the final and as yet unexecuted attack, however, there was no trace. “What do you think?” Dumas asked Peller.
“He must have made some record related to it. He’s too meticulous not to. And this is his grand finale. Considering the amount of time and thought he put into his earlier victims—which, the way he thinks, would have been elementary exercises and rehearsals—he must really have spent some time working up this one. Let’s get this to the evidence techs. Eric, you make another pass through the attic, and Corina, you recheck the rooms I already looked through. I’ll search the bedrooms. Maybe one of us will see something the others missed.”
After spending close to an hour examining everything in both rooms, Peller had uncovered nothing of interest. When he returned to the kitchen,
he found Montufar seated at the table, a collection of paper scraps spread out on the table before her.
“Something?” he asked, hoping against hope for an affirmative.
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “I was going through his recycling bin and found this stuff. It’s an envelope, torn to shreds. I’m trying to piece it back together.”
Dumas returned from the attic just as Peller sat down and looked over the scraps. “I hope that’s not just a jigsaw puzzle,” he said.
“Could just be a credit card offer,” Montufar answered, “but I’m going to see if it turns into something worthwhile.”
It only took the three of them a minute to fit it all together. It proved to be a plain white envelope with a first-class stamp in the upper right corner, hand-addressed to Freiberg. In the upper left corner was a sticker featuring an American flag, the name A. F. Gutierrez, and an address in Elkridge.
“No sign of the contents?” Peller asked, glancing back at the blue recycling bin.
“None,” Montufar said.
“Did anybody notice the name while we were looking through that notebook?”
“Nope,” Dumas said. “I’ll get a number and call this Gutierrez.”
Peller nodded and rose, returning to the table a moment later with the recycling bin. While Dumas moved into the living room, cell phone in hand, Peller removed the contents of the bin and spread them out on the table. Mostly it consisted of boxes from frozen microwavable meals, newspapers, discarded junk mail, and a few window envelopes that probably had contained bills. “I shouldn’t have missed those scraps,” he said, irritated with himself.
“I almost didn’t look at them myself,” Montufar said. “Most of them were just blank chips of paper.”
The Fibonacci Murders Page 17
