Split Second skamm-1

by David Baldacci

  What was it with men anyway? Did they have this dominant gene that made them have to act noble when it came to suffering, however stupidly, as some woman walked all over them? Certainly a woman could pine over a guy just as hopelessly. And too often members of her gender fell for the bad boy who would break their hearts and even sometimes their heads. Yet a woman would have just cut her losses and moved on. Not the boys, though. They had to keep ramming their big pigheaded selves into a wall no matter how cold the heart lurking underneath the blouse and breasts. God, it was so frustrating that a man like King could be taken in by a woman like Joan.

  Then she caught herself and wondered why it mattered so much. They were working a case together, that was all. And it wasn’t like King was perfect. Yes, he was intelligent, sophisticated, good-looking, and had a witty sense of humor. But he was also more than a decade her senior. And on the negative side he was moody, aloof, occasionally rude and at times condescending. And he was so damn neat! To think that she’d actually cleaned out her truck to please—

  She suddenly blushed at this frank admission and quickly refocused on the papers in front of her. She studied the warrant filed against Bob Scott that Joan had found and was the only reason they’d discovered the cabin and empty bunker. Yet from what King had just told her, the conclusion that Scott was behind all of this had become a lot more tenuous.

  And still, it was his cabin, and the arrest warrant had been issued against him for a weapons violation. She looked at the document more closely. What exactly was the weapons violation? And why had the service of the warrant failed? Those answers unfortunately weren’t apparent in the documents.

  She gave up in frustration and continued perusing Joan’s notes. She came across another name that gave her pause. For her, the fact that Joan had drawn a line across the man’s name, ostensibly writing him off as a suspect, wasn’t in itself conclusive. For though she probably wouldn’t admit it to anyone, she was as confident about her investigative abilities as King was about his.

  She said the name slowly, drawing out the two syllables of the last name. “Doug Denby.” Ritter’s chief of staff. Joan’s notes said that after Ritter’s death, Denby’s life had actually taken a turn for the better with his inheriting land and money in Mississippi. Because of that, Joan had concluded he couldn’t be their man. But Michelle wasn’t that confident. Were some phone calls and general background information undertaken by Joan’s people enough? Joan hadn’t gone down to Mississippi to see for herself. She’d never laid eyes on Doug Denby. Was he really in Mississippi playing the country squire? Might he be instead around here somewhere, waiting to kill or kidnap his next victim? King said that Denby had been thoroughly upstaged by Sidney Morse on the Ritter campaign and come to resent him deeply. Maybe Denby had come to hate Clyde Ritter as well. What connection might he have had to Arnold Ramsey, if any? Or Kate Ramsey? Had he used his wealth to orchestrate some sort of revenge-filled campaign? So far Joan’s inquiries hadn’t answered those questions.

  Michelle took a pen and wrote Denby’s name under the one Joan had scratched out. She pondered whether to call King and ask him what he remembered about the man. Maybe she should take these notes over there and force him to sit down and work through them with her. She sighed. Maybe she just wanted to be around him. She was pouring another cup of tea and looking out the window, where it was clouding over and looking like rain, when her phone rang.

  It was Parks reporting in. “I’m still in Tennessee,” he said. He didn’t sound happy.

  “Anything new?”

  “We’ve talked to some folks who have homes nearby, but they were no help. Didn’t know Bob Scott, never seen him, that sort of thing. Hell, I think half these people are felons on the lam themselves. The place did belong to Bob Scott. He bought it from the estate of an old fellow who lived there about five years but, according to this fellow’s family, didn’t even know the bunker was there. And the place was wiped clean. No clues other than that earring you two found.”

  “Sean found it, not me.” She hesitated and then said, “Look, he found something else.” She told him about the name of the village in Vietnam that had been scratched on the wall of the other prison cell.

  Parks was furious. “Why the hell didn’t he tell me that while he was down here?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, then thought about King’s withdrawal from her. “Maybe he’s not into trusting anyone right now.”

  “So you’ve confirmed Scott was a POW there during Nam?”

  “Yes, I talked to an agent who knew the whole story.”

  “Are you telling me somebody came down here, took it over and made him a prisoner in his own home?”

  “Sean said it might have been a trick, to throw us off.”

  “Where is our brilliant detective?”

  “At his house. He’s following up some other lines of inquiry. He’s not really communicative right now. Apparently he wants to be alone.”

  Parks shouted, “Who cares what he wants? He might have cracked this whole case by now but isn’t telling us squat!”

  “Look, Jefferson, he’s doing his best to find out the truth. He just has his own way of doing it.”

  “Well, his way of doing it is really starting to piss me off.”

  “I’ll talk to him. Maybe we can meet later.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be down here. Probably won’t be done until tomorrow. You just talk to King and make him see the error of holding out on us. I don’t want to find out he’s got some other evidence I don’t know about. If he does, I’m going to slap him in a cell that looks a lot like the ones you two saw today. You understand?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Michelle clicked off and pulled the phone line from her laptop out of the wall, winding it back up and putting it in her case. She stood and went over to the other side of the room to get something from her knapsack. So preoccupied was she that she didn’t see it until it was too late. She tripped and fell. Rising back up, she looked at the oar with an angry expression. It was half under the bed, along with all the other junk from her truck. So stuffed was the underside of the bed that her possessions kept falling out, turning her bedroom into an obstacle course. This was the third time she’d tripped over something. She decided to do something about it.

  As Michelle waged war against her junk, she didn’t know that her entire conversation with Jefferson Parks had been captured by a tiny mass of circuits and wires. Inside the housing for her phone lines lurked another device very recently added and of which the owners of the inn were unaware. It was a state-of-the-art wireless surveillance device, so extraordinarily sensitive that it could capture not only conversations in the room or while Michelle was on the phone but anything spoken by the other party to the phone conversation.

  A half mile away from the inn a paneled van was parked along the side of the road. Inside, Buick Man listened to the conversation for the third time and then shut off the tape. He picked up his phone and made the call, talking for some minutes and then ending with, “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”

  These words sent a chill down the spine of the person to whom he was speaking.

  “Do it,” he said. “Do it tonight.”

  He hung up and looked in the direction of the inn. Michelle Maxwell had finally made it to the top of his list. He quietly congratulated her.

  64

  With everything else going on, King had somehow found the time to set up an appointment with a security company based in Lynchburg. He watched from the front window as the van emblazoned with “A-1 Security” pulled up.

  He met the sales representative at the front door and told him what he wanted. The man looked around the house, then eyed King. “You look familiar. Aren’t you the guy who found a dead body?”

  “That’s right. I think you’d agree I need a security system more than most.”

  “Okay, but just so we’re straight, our warranty doesn’t cover stuff l
ike that. I mean, if another dead body turns up, you don’t get a refund or anything like that. That’s like an act of God, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  They agreed on what was to be done.

  “When can you get to it?” King asked.

  “Well, we’re kind of backed up. If somebody cancels on us, we can pop you up higher on the list. I’ll give you a call.”

  King signed the paperwork, they shook on it and the man left.

  As night came, King thought about calling Michelle and having her come over. He’d kept her in the dark pretty long, and she’d been a trooper about it. Yet that was just his way. He always played things close to the vest, particularly when he was uncertain of the correct answer. Well, he felt more certain.

  He called Kate Ramsey’s apartment in Richmond. Sharon, the roommate, answered; Kate still hadn’t turned up.

  He told her, “Sit tight, and I’ll let you know if she turns up. You do the same.”

  He hung up and stared out the big window at the lake. Normally when in a funk, he’d go out on the boat and think, but it was too chilly and windy for that. He turned on the gas fireplace, sat down in front of it and ate a simple meal. By the time he’d convinced himself to call Michelle he figured the hour was too late.

  He thought about John Bruno’s kidnapping. It was clear to King now that the man had been abducted because he had supposedly destroyed Arnold Ramsey’s life with falsified homicide charges. Those charges had been dropped only after the intervention of a lawyer whose identity King now knew. He wanted very much to share this information with Michelle, and even glanced at the phone, thinking he might call her despite the lateness of the hour. It could wait, he decided. Next King thought about what Kate told them she had overheard. Or thought she had overheard. The name Thornton Jorst, supposedly uttered by the mystery man to her father. But King was convinced that what the man had actually said was not Thornton Jorst, but “Trojan horse.”

  And something else Kate said was troubling him. According to her, Regina Ramsey said a police officer was killed during a war protest, and implied that the incident damaged Arnold Ramsey’s academic career. But Kate also told them the University of Berkeley let her father receive his Ph.D. because he’d already earned it. Kate had to know they could easily discern that 1974 was when Ramsey received his Ph.D. and easily conclude that the protest wasn’t about the war. Why had she done that? No answer to that question came to mind.

  He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was after midnight. After making sure all the doors and windows were secured he carried the gun Michelle had given him upstairs. He locked his bedroom door, then slid a bureau across it for added security. He checked to make sure the gun was fully loaded and that a round was in the chamber. He undressed and crawled into bed. The gun on the nightstand beside him, he soon fell asleep.

  65

  It was 2:00 A.M., and the person at the window raised a gun, took aim at the bulky figure lying in the bed and shot through the window, the glass tinkling as it broke. The slugs tore into the bed, blowing feathers into the air from the down comforter.

  Roused from sleep by the shots, Michelle fell off the couch and onto the floor. She’d dozed off while going through Joan’s notes, yet was now instantly alert. Realizing someone had just tried to kill her, she pulled her gun and fired back at the window. She heard footsteps racing away and crawled toward the window, listening intently as she did so. She reached the wall and cautiously peered over the windowsill. She could still hear the strides of the person running away, and he also seemed to be wheezing. To her expert ears, his strides were curious, as though the runner was wounded or injured in some way. Whatever the cause, they weren’t normal. They were more like disjointed lunges, and her mind played with the idea that either she’d hit the would-be assassin or he’d already been wounded when he came to kill her tonight. Could it be the man she’d shot in her truck, the one who’d done his best to wring her neck? Perhaps the man who called himself Simmons?

  She heard a vehicle start up and didn’t even try to race to her truck and follow it. She had no idea if anyone else was out there waiting. She and King had run into one ambush that way. She had no desire to repeat the mistake.

  She went over to the bed and looked down at the mess. She’d taken a nap there earlier, and the covers and thick pillows had gotten balled together. To the shooter it must have looked like her sleeping there.

  Yet why try to kill her now? Were they getting too close? She hadn’t done all that much. Sean certainly had found out more than—

  She froze. King! She grabbed her phone and dialed his number. It rang and rang but there was no answer. Should she call the police? Parks? It could be that King was just sleeping hard. No, her gut told her otherwise. She ran for her truck.

  The alarm woke King. Groggy for a moment, he quickly became alert and sat straight up. There was smoke everywhere. He jumped up, then fell to the floor trying to breathe. He made it to the bathroom, soaked a washcloth and draped it over his face. He crawled back out, braced his back against the wall and, using his legs, levered the bureau away from the door. He touched the door to make sure it wasn’t hot and then cautiously opened it.

  The outside hallway was full of smoke, and the smoke alarm continued to shriek. Unfortunately it wasn’t connected to a central monitoring station, and the single volunteer fire department station that serviced the area was many miles away. And his house was so remotely situated no one may have noticed it was on fire. He crawled back inside his bedroom with the idea of getting to the phone, but the room was so smoky he lost his bearings and was afraid to venture farther in. He slithered back out into the hallway and along the catwalk. He could see sparks and red flames down below, and he prayed the stairs were passable. Otherwise, he’d have to jump, possibly into an inferno, and that wasn’t a very appealing idea.

  He heard sounds coming from down below. He was coughing from smoke inhalation and desperately wanted to get out of the house, but he was still aware this could be a trap. He clenched the gun and shouted out, “Who’s down there? I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”

  There was no answer, which fueled his suspicions even more until he looked out the big front window as he lay on the catwalk. He saw the flashing red lights in his front yard, and he could hear the sirens of other fire trucks coming. Okay, help was here, after all. He reached the stairs and looked down. Through the smoke he could make out firefighters in bulky overcoats and helmets, with tanks strapped to their backs and masks covering their faces.

  “I’m up here,” he shouted. “Up here!”

  “Can you make your way down?” called out one fireman.

  “I don’t think so, it’s a wall of smoke up here.”

  “Okay, just stay there. We’ll come for you. Just stay there and stay down! We’re bringing the hoses in now. This whole place is on fire.”

  He heard the whoosh of spray from fire extinguishers as the men charged up the stairs. King was sick to his stomach and nearly blind from the smoke in his eyes. He felt himself being picked up and hauled swiftly down the stairs. In another minute he was outside and sensed people hovering over him.

  “Are you okay?” one of them said.

  “Get him some damn oxygen,” said another. “He’s breathed in a ton of carbon monoxide.”

  King felt the oxygen mask being placed over his face, and then he had the sensation of being lifted into the ambulance. For a moment he thought he could hear Michelle calling out to him. And then everything went black.

  The sirens, flashing lights, radio staccato and other “sound effects” immediately stopped as the fireman hit the master switch on the control box with one hand and took the gun from King with the other. Everything became quiet once more. The fireman turned away and went back to the house, where the smoke was already starting to peter out. It had been a very carefully controlled “fire,” with all the elements of the inferno artificially created. He went inside the basement, set the ignition switch on
the small device next to the gas lines and left the house. He climbed into the back of the van, and it immediately drove away. The van reached the main road and accelerated, heading south. Two minutes later the small explosive device went off in King’s basement, setting off the gas lines, and the resulting explosion ripped Sean King’s beautiful home apart for real.

  The fireman pulled off his helmet and mask and wiped his face.

  Buick Man looked down at the unconscious King. The “oxygen” he’d been given included a sedative.

  “It’s good finally to see you, Agent King. I’ve waited a long time for this.”

  The van sped on into the darkness.

  66

  Michelle had just turned off onto King’s long drive when the explosion rocked the night. She floored the truck and kicked gravel and dirt all the way up. She slid the truck to a stop as boards, glass and other parts of the destroyed house blocked her way. She jumped out, dialing 911 on her phone as she did so and screaming to the dispatcher what had happened, telling the woman to send everything she could.

  Michelle raced through the wreckage, dodging flames and smoke and screaming out his name. “Sean! Sean!”

  She went back to her truck, grabbed a blanket, covered herself with it and hurtled through the front door, or where the front door had been. The wall of smoke that met her was overwhelming, and she staggered back out, gagging and dropping to her knees. She sucked in some fresh air and this time entered through a gaping hole in what was left of the structure. Inside she crawled forward, calling out every few seconds for him. She started for the stairs, thinking he might be in his bedroom, only the stairs weren’t there anymore. Her lungs heaving, she had to go back out to get some untainted air.