Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  Inside, we got the good light. Lane had been burned on the backs of her hands, her forearms, and under her chin. Her eyebrows were singed, and the dark hair over her forehead had taken on some new curls. The burns were pink, rather than white or black. The worst were on her arms; the biggest burn, under her chin, was the size of her palm.

  “What do you think?” she asked, holding her hands away from her body, palms up. She was hurting.

  “You probably ought to have a doctor look at it,” I said.

  “Then the police will know.”

  “ . . . but if you can stand it, we could catch our flight, and you could go to the doctor—or to an emergency room—out on the West Coast. We could tell them that you burned yourself with charcoal lighter at a barbecue, but didn’t think it was bad until it started hurting overnight.”

  “It hurts now,” she said.

  “Which is good,” I said. “Really bad burns don’t hurt right away: the nerve endings are destroyed.”

  She actually smiled, which suddenly made me like her a lot, and said, “If the burns aren’t too bad . . .”

  “I really don’t think they are, but they’ll hurt,” I said.

  “Then I can stand it. Better than going to jail,” she said.

  “ . . . and I’m not a doctor.”

  “Do you think the airline people will notice?” she asked.

  I shook my head: “No. You don’t look bad at all. Keep your jacket over your arms, let me handle the tickets.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  I checked my watch: “We’ve got some time yet. I’m gonna find a pharmacy, see if I can get some sunburn painkiller, or whatever I can get. That could help.”

  “Good . . . I held on to the disks.” She turned her head up to smile at me again, and winced. “I guess I don’t want to move my head too fast,” she said.

  “I’ll go get the stuff.”

  “Don’t tarry,” she said, the woman with the big dark eyes.

  5

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  St. John Corbeil was sitting in a leather armchair, reading, light from the floor lamp glinting from the steel rims of his military spectacles. As he read—Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia—he threaded and rethreaded a diamond necklace between his stubby fingers, as though it were a string of worry beads.

  He liked the cool sensuality of the necklace, and the money it represented. He’d had it made to his specifications by Harry Winston of New York. One hundred diamonds, excellent cut, clarity, and color in each, and each a single carat in size. The Winston people had thought that curious—he’d seen the curiosity, unspoken, in their eyes—because a hundred-diamond necklace doesn’t carry the flash of say, a big central stone or two, surrounded by a constellation of smaller diamonds.

  Corbeil had good reasons: one-carat diamonds were easy to move, easy to sell, and anonymous. The necklace was a bank account. If you popped the diamonds out of their settings, you could put $300,000 in the toes of your shoes . . .

  Another good reason was the sensuality of the stones. Corbeil’s face might have been chopped from a block of oak, but he was a sensual man. He liked the feel of a woman, the sound of a zipper coming down on the back of a woman’s dress, the smell of Chanel. He liked fast cars driven fast, French cooking and California wine, Italian suits and English shoes and diamonds. He hadn’t been able to afford the very best in women, wine, and song until AmMath. Now he had them, and he would be damned if he would give them up . . .

  The doorbell rang; he’d been expecting it. He put the book down, slipped the necklace into a shirt pocket, crossed to the intercom, and pushed the button. “Yes?”

  “Hart and Benson.” William Hart’s voice. Four men were involved in various parts of the operation. Corbeil himself, as coordinator; Hart and Benson, as security and technicians; and Tom Woods, a computer-encryption expert who loved only money more than codes. Woods was not aware of the Morrison, Lighter, or Ward difficulties, other than that Morrison had been killed in a break-in. He was a nervous man.

  “Come in.” Corbeil pressed the door-release button, buzzing them in.

  Done,” Hart said.

  Corbeil nodded. “So. There’s no reason to think that anything remains here in Texas.”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  Corbeil turned away, fished the diamond necklace out of his pocket, and began unconsciously pouring it from hand to hand, as though it were a slinky. “There remains the possibility that he sent his sister something.”

  “He could have sent something to anybody; but we can’t find any really close friends. No girlfriends, right now. The sister’s the obvious candidate. I mean, we’re still backgrounding him, but if there’s somebody else, it’s not obvious,” Hart said.

  “I wish we’d had time to interrogate him,” Corbeil said. “But the pressure to get him out of the way . . . well, we couldn’t both interrogate him and have a credible disappearance, could we?”

  Hart shrugged. The other man, Benson, stood silently, listening. A follower. Hart asked, “So now what? Shut down the ranch for a while?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Corbeil said. “We can do it by pushing a button. No point in pushing it before we have to. There’s a lot of money out there right now.”

  “I’ll tell you, Mr. Corbeil, this whole incident scared the shit out of me. I’m still scared and Les is just as nervous as I am.” Hart glanced at the silent man, looking for support, and got a nod.

  “That’s why we’ve been so careful setting it up,” Corbeil said. “They’d need evidence to put us in jail, and there’s no physical evidence of anything. If I tell Tom Woods to push the destruct button, everything is gone. Not even we could get it back.”

  “That’s well and good, but there’s still Lane Ward,” Hart said. “If she does have something, or if Morrison set up some kind of dead-man’s drop . . .”

  “So we need to go out and look at her house.”

  “That’s dangerous,” Hart objected.

  “You didn’t have any trouble getting into Morrison’s place out there. Or here, either.”

  “That was different. He was supposed to be out of town, and we knew he was dead, so nobody would be coming around to visit. With Ward, we don’t know the neighborhood, we don’t even know what we’d be looking for. It might be on a disk, on a hard drive, it might be stashed online somewhere. It might not exist.”

  “But if it does, and if it were sent on to the FBI, we’d be in desperate trouble,” Corbeil said. “It’s worth the risk. If the worst happened, and you were caught, we might explain it as a security matter. Something that we were terribly worried about: something that you did on your own to keep the nation’s secrets from falling into unfriendly hands. If you did go to jail for a while—what would you get for an unsuccessful burglary, six months?—if that did happen, there would be a magnificent bonus at the end of the time.”

  “How much?” Hart asked bluntly.

  “Say, two million a year, prorated for lesser amounts of time,” Corbeil said.

  Hart looked at Benson, then turned back to Corbeil. “So we look at her house. Actually, there’s an opportunity coming up.”

  Corbeil’s eyebrows went up, and when Hart explained, Corbeil smiled with pleasure. “I so like working with you, William,” he said.

  Benson spoke up for the first time. “You know what I don’t like, Mr. Corbeil? I think we’re really okay with this Morrison character, and his sister. I don’t think he sent anything. We caught on too quick, and he was relying on Lighter to take care of the problem. But what I see . . .”

  Corbeil was made impatient by the preface: “Yes?”

  “I’m worried about Woods. Ever since Morrison was killed, he’s been walking around with this doggy face. I think he knows something happened. They used to hang out a little.”

  Corbeil nodded, and said, “All right, Les. That’s a legitimate concern. You know Tom Woods is a friend of mine, an old confidant who came over with me from the fact
ory. And a mathematical genius, to boot.”

  “I know that, sir, but . . .”

  Corbeil raised one hand: “If he becomes a problem, I will take care of it. I promise. But we already have two deaths that are too closely connected. A third one, if it becomes necessary to remove Lane Ward, would almost certainly draw attention. If Tom Woods had died in the interim . . . Well.”

  Hart said, “Unless Tom was the architect of it all.”

  Corbeil said, “You took the thought right out of my head, William. We can perhaps begin to prepare some documents. . . . So: you travel to San Francisco.”

  Hart nodded. “Tomorrow. We’ll call back. After we see what we’ve got, we can make a call on the Ward chick. Take her out or leave her.”

  Corbeil said, “Mmm,” and smiled.

  6

  The plane touched down in San Francisco a little after three in the morning, taking a turn out to sea, then landing across the stem of highway lights between the ocean and the bay. When we touched down, a tight wire in my spine suddenly relaxed. Whatever happened now, we could fake it. In Dallas, where the cops could look at us, where they could see the burns, we were in trouble.

  A purely selfish reaction: because Lane hurt. I’d found some Solarcaine in a drugstore, and she’d smeared it on the burns, and she’d taken a half-dozen ibuprofen, though we weren’t sure they’d help much. That was about the best we could do before we left for the airport.

  At the check-in counter, Lane hung back, the shy Little Woman in a long-sleeved blouse, head down, while I handled the tickets. On the plane, she sat on the aisle, and got up twice to go to the bathroom, to lather on more of the Solarcaine.

  “You okay?” I asked after the second trip.

  “I’ll make it,” she said through her teeth.

  “The ibuprofen . . .”

  “Didn’t help much,” she said. “I hope I don’t scar.”

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” I said. “I . . .”

  She held up the bottom side of her arm, and showed me a half-dozen blisters the size of quarters.

  “I’m afraid to lance them, ’cause of infection,” she said.

  “Ah, Jesus . . .”

  Halfway through the flight, I half-stood and looked around. The woman in the seat in front of Lane was asleep, her mouth hanging open. There was nobody behind us, and the guy across the aisle had spread across two seats, and had his head propped uncomfortably against a window shade.

  “You know,” I said quietly, “the police know we left Dallas this evening and the house burned down before we left. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”

  “Oh, boy. You’re right.”

  “You’re gonna have to lie a little,” I said.

  “I’m gonna have to lie a lot,” she said.

  “You can pull it off if you think about it,” I said. “You’ve gotta be surprised and you’ve gotta be pissed. It’s their fault—the cops’ fault—that the place burned down. You told them that something was going on, that your brother had been murdered. You gotta yell at them.”

  “Not yell. But I’ll be mad. I am mad,” she said. “Somebody did murder him.”

  “You gotta insist that you go back to Dallas, and you have to demand to look at the hard drives on the computers. That might keep them from having a local cop come around to talk to you. There’s no reason for them to suspect that you were burned in the fire, there’s no reason for them to think that they have to see you right away. And you do have to stay here for the funeral.”

  “So it depends on how long it takes the burns to heal,” she said.

  “Yes. But you can’t stall them: you just have to be busy. You have to leave them with the impression that you’re pissed off and you’re gonna be back in their faces as soon as you have the time.”

  She thought about it for a minute, then said, “I can do that.”

  “Cops aren’t dummies. Not most of them, anyway.”

  “Maybe he won’t be the same guy I talked to last time. I mean, I talked to a different cop the first time. . . . That’d make it easier.”

  “Whoever it is, you’ve got to be careful, and you’ve got to be real. Cops got built-in bullshit detectors,” I said.

  At San Francisco, we picked up her car from a satellite lot and drove south to Palo Alto, went straight to her house, dumped the luggage: “Emergency room,” I said.

  “I’ve got a doctor I see . . .”

  “Emergency room is right now, and it’s anonymous, and it may stop the pain,” I said.

  She didn’t argue.

  We even managed to get a little sleep that night.

  At ten o’clock in the morning, after five hours in bed, I heard somebody knocking around in the house. I rolled off the bed—I’d crashed in her spare room—and pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. She was in the kitchen, making coffee.

  “How is it?”

  “Hurts,” she said. She’d gotten cleaned up, as best she could, but said that water hurt the burns. She was wearing loose khaki pants with a long-sleeved cotton peasant shirt, and again I could sense just a dab of the flowery French scent. She smelled terrific, and looked terrific in the peasant blouse, if you didn’t know that she was dressed to hide new burns.

  Her face was all right; the burn there resembled a bad sunburn, and would heal soon enough. Her arms were the worst of it. The doc had lanced the blisters the night before, to relieve the pressure, but they were filling again.

  “The anesthetic doesn’t help?” I asked. She’d gotten a spray-on topical anesthetic at the hospital. The doctors had said it was stronger than the Solarcaine.

  “Helps for a while,” she said. “Then it starts to hurt again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” she said. “But I don’t think I could do what you do. . . . For a living, I mean.”

  “This usually isn’t a part of it,” I said.

  “Sometimes it must be . . .” She looked me over, and I couldn’t deny that there’d been trouble in the past.

  “Nothing like fire,” I said. “Fire scares me.”

  “Me, too, now.” She reached toward her neck as though she were going to scratch, stopped herself and smiled and said, “I’m going to be a really bitchy patient.”

  I went out and got a sack of bagels and some cream cheese, and we toasted bagels and drank coffee and talked about Jack and the Jaz disks. When we finished, she said she was going to try to lie down again—“The pain really isn’t terrible; it just makes me want to scream. It’s giving me a headache.”

  “All right. Point me to your computer first. You got a Jaz drive?”

  “No. But we’re about two minutes from a CompUSA.”

  She showed me her office, with its standard beige desktop Dell, and then went off to lie down. I walked out to the CompUSA, bought an external Jaz drive and a bunch of disks, lugged it all back, hooked up the drive, and got the disks we’d taken from Jack’s house.

  I started with the top one, and the first thing I found was a file called, simply, notes. I opened it and found a couple of random e-mails, apparently picked up from somewhere else on the disk. Jack had been picking out things that might be significant; making notes.

  The first one read, Add CarlG, RasputinIV to list. High correlation on both.

  CarlG and RasputinIV were on the list of Firewall members mentioned in the Web rumors, and now being investigated by the FBI.

  The second note read, check: endodays, exdeus, fillyjonk, laguna8, omeomi, pixystyx.

  More hacker names? They sounded right. Was this some kind of security thing? Was AmMath worried about Firewall, or dealing with Firewall? Or maybe it was Firewall.

  I started browsing the rest of the files, all under the general heading of OMS, and twice found the heading “Old Man of the Sea.” They’d gotten the Hemingway title wrong, if that’s what it was meant to be. Anyway, the only easily comprehensible part of the files was a huge batch of e-mail and memos that Jack had apparently copied out raw. I looked
at maybe three hundred pieces of it, out of fifteen thousand or so, and all of it was routine company stuff: days off, raises, complaints, scheduling.

  Of the twenty gigabytes of information on the four disks, the most interesting files I couldn’t really open at all. They were five hundred megabytes each and Lane’s computer only had 384 megs of RAM. I looked at the first few blocks of each, though, and figured out that the files were graphics of some kind, probably photographs.

  Bored and frustrated, I spent a while making two copies of each of the Jaz disks. As I finished, Lane got up, wandered out to the kitchen and began dabbing anesthetic on her burns. I shut down the computer and went out to tell her what I’d found.

  “Did his work file . . . did that have a time stamp on it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t even look,” I said, and we headed back to her office, and cranked the computer up. Lane was standing four inches away from me, looking at the screen, waiting through all the stupid Windows-opening stuff. She was an attractive woman; she looked like she’d feel good. I had the sudden feeling that if I touched her, somehow, something might happen.

  But I didn’t; I sat looking at the screen, and the moment passed. She moved a little, and wound up a few extra inches away . . . And when we opened Jack’s work file, it did have a time stamp. It was last closed on Sunday, five days before he was killed.

  “So he did go in on Sunday,” she said.

  “You said the cops said he made a phone call from his house and turned off the security system, a camera, and motion detectors,” I reminded her.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s something we could check,” I said.

  “How?” She reached down to her arm, unconsciously, to scratch the burns; and caught herself.

  “The phone company has these things called Message Unit Details or Message Unit Records,” I said. “We called them Mothers back in the bad-old-phone-phreak days. They’ll tell you where all the phone calls from your telephones went.”