Shortly after three o’clock, Journey steered the old minivan off Interstate 44 and exited on Airport Road in Oklahoma City. Even after living in Oklahoma for more than a decade, Journey was still amused that the state’s major airport was named after a man who had died in a plane crash. To be sure, Will Rogers was a favorite son, but the irony of Will Rogers World Airport still made Journey smile. Once he had parked and was in the arrivals terminal, he checked the flight monitors and found the baggage carousel for Tolman’s flight while Andrew whistled his three-note melody.
Tolman came down the escalator ten minutes later. “Didn’t think I’d see you here again so soon,” Journey said.
“Glad you’re driving,” Tolman said. She waved at Andrew. “Hey, big guy.”
Andrew didn’t look at her, fixated on the baggage carousel as it began to move. He took a step toward it, flapping both hands. The whistling stopped and he began to make high-pitched sounds. A few people turned to look.
“Come on, Andrew,” Journey said in a soft voice. “Time to go to the car.”
* * *
“So what about Jim Cable?” Journey asked in the van. “What did you find out about his suicide?”
“I read the police reports. It seems straightforward. No sign of forced entry to the house, no fingerprints of anyone but Jim and his son. He had a pergola over his back porch, he looped a rope over the beams, stood on a chair, kicked the chair out from under him. When he didn’t show up to class for two straight days, one of his colleagues went looking for him. The gate was unlocked, and that’s where he found him. The Norman police talked to the ex-wife. With the divorce and his brother’s murder coming so close together, they had a couple of pretty good indicators of depression. Colleagues and students said he had been quieter than usual the last few weeks. On the surface, it’s pretty clear. You can’t fault the local cops.”
“What do you mean, ‘on the surface’? Do you think it wasn’t really suicide?”
“He knew something was happening,” Tolman said. “In fact, he used those exact words to Dana: ‘something is happening.’ Maybe he was caught in the middle.”
Journey accelerated onto I-44, retracing the route he had taken a few minutes ago. “The middle child, the second to die.”
“Yeah.” Tolman sighed. “So tell me what you found.”
Journey explained Father Fournier’s mission across Texas with the French troops, and the soldier’s revelation of the Silver Cross.
“But there was no cross,” Tolman said when he finished. “He didn’t find it.”
“Apparently not. But it tells us the French were in Texas during the Civil War, looking for something.”
“Which the priest says they found … but didn’t find.”
“Exactly,” Journey said.
“And this helps us … how?”
“It’s the first corroboration of the fact that there was such a thing as the Silver Cross, and that Napoleon wanted it badly enough to send soldiers secretly into another country, a country engaged in a war of its own at the time. That was risky.”
“All this to get something to symbolize that he was right in invading Mexico?”
“Don’t minimize the symbolism. It was a time when that sort of thing was huge. The Mexico invasion was politically shaky for Napoleon. He needed all the help he could get, divine or otherwise.”
“Symbolism doesn’t mean anything,” Tolman said. “Symbolism doesn’t tell me who lured Dana to North Carolina and onto that seawall, and why this damned Silver Cross is such a big deal to people here and now.” She sighed. “And I had to be the one to tell Melissa Cable that Dana was dead. Called her before I got on the plane. Not fun.”
Journey worked his way back to I-35 South, leaving behind Oklahoma City proper and coming into suburbia. The city of Norman, clinging to the southern edge of the metro, had always been a college town, home to the state’s largest university. But in recent decades it had grown into a suburb as well, a progressive and interesting community with a distinct personality.
Melissa Cable and her son Alex lived in a middle-class neighborhood on the north side of Norman. The boy was at a friend’s house, but they spent ten minutes with Melissa and obtained the name of the realtor with whom Dana had listed her brother’s house. Melissa Cable didn’t think her ex-husband had seemed especially depressed in the weeks before his death.
“But,” she said, “he wasn’t a big talker, and certainly not about feelings. He’d talk about work or Sooners football, but that’s about it. I just couldn’t believe he would do this. He and I may not have been a very good couple when we were married, but I know he loved Alex, even if he never said it.”
Five minutes later, Tolman and Journey had an appointment with the realtor. Jim Cable had lived in a 1930s arts-and-crafts-style home on Boyd Street, east of the University of Oklahoma, with an abundance of dark wood and a circle driveway. A real estate sign was staked into the ground at the curb. The realtor was a tall and tanned blond woman in her fifties whose name was something like Gigi or Mimi. She chattered away about proximity to campus, the home’s character, and “lots of extras” until Tolman stopped her with a business card.
“I’m not here to buy,” she said. “I’m here to investigate.”
The woman’s face fell. “So you know what happened here, then.”
“Yes. You met with Dana Cable to put the house on the market?”
“She was here over Fourth of July weekend and asked me to list it. She was supposed to schedule an estate sale to take care of the furniture and such, but I haven’t heard from her. I’ve called and e-mailed her, but can’t seem to reach her.”
“She’s dead,” Tolman said.
“Excuse me?”
“Someone killed her, and I’m investigating,” Tolman said. “Let us in, please.”
The realtor let them in to the house, then retreated to her BMW, where she began making phone calls. Jim Cable’s house had the expected musty smell after weeks of being uninhabited, and it seemed incomplete: vacant spots on walls, empty spaces in several of the rooms.
“He didn’t do too much after his wife and son moved out,” Journey observed.
“Yeah,” Tolman said, thinking of her father’s house in D.C. Sixteen years after her mother’s death, it still had the same feeling, as if her mother had just left and her father was waiting for her to return.
There were no books to speak of in the house, but many engineering journals. No music, no art. It was very utilitarian and clean and organized. Alex Cable’s room showed a little more life, with posters of Oklahoma Sooners football players on the walls and books by Mike Lupica on the dresser, alongside a handsome carved chess set. But the bed was neatly made, the closet empty. It looked like Jim Cable was waiting for the day his son came home.
They crossed the wood floors, Andrew thumping his feet on the hollow planks, liking the sound it made. They stepped onto the back porch, a comfortable spot with a pergola covered in vines. A straight-backed wooden chair—not a lawn chair, as it looked like it had come from the dining room—lay pitched forward on the patio. Tolman looked up—a chalk mark “X” was on one beam.
Her eyes trailed down to the chair. She remembered something from the police report on Cable’s suicide. One of the officers on the scene had questioned the chair’s position.
Tolman stood under the beam with the mark. The chair was upturned in front of her. “This isn’t right,” she said.
Andrew had wandered into the bright sunshine of the backyard and was dipping his fingers into the marble birdbath. Journey, keeping an eye on his son, returned to the shade of the patio. “What do you mean?”
“Look at the X.” She pointed. “If that’s the spot on the beam where he tied the rope, and he was facing the back of the house, how could he kick the chair out from under himself and have it wind up facing that way?”
Journey looked. “I’m not following you.”
“You have a rope around your neck. You’ve used
a chair to climb up, and you’re going to kick it out from under you to hang yourself. How would you do that? Easiest way, with this kind of chair, is to kick backward against the back of the chair. It falls backward, you dangle, you’re dead. Or you even move side to side, swing your foot out, and kick the chair that way. But then the chair falls off to one side.”
Journey looked at the fallen chair, then up at the beam. “You’re sure he was facing the house and not the yard?”
“It was in the police report. One of the officers noted that he was facing the back door.”
Journey squatted down and ran a hand over the woven chair back. “But if you were hanging right there, you’d have to get your feet somehow behind the chair back to be able to kick it forward so it landed like this. The police didn’t catch this?”
“They caught it, but they didn’t follow up on it.” Tolman spread her hands apart. “Why would they? You had no forced entry, nothing amiss, and a guy who had gone through a tough divorce and the murder of his brother, all in the space of a couple of months. To be honest, I wouldn’t have followed up on it either. I would have done exactly what the Norman police did—made a note of the chair for the sake of thoroughness, and let it go. If I didn’t know what I do now—and that’s not much—it wouldn’t say anything to me either.”
Journey stood up. “There’s no way he could get his legs around to kick this chair forward. My God, Meg.”
“Yeah. But you know something? This reminds me of Dana’s death. It’s sloppy. Whoever killed Dana wanted it to appear like an accident, like she was drunk and slipped and fell. But she was pointed the wrong way. Same thing here. Our killer wanted this to appear as a suicide, an obvious suicide. But the killer didn’t quite get the details right.”
“This changes everything, Meg.”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Tolman glanced toward the yard, where Andrew had progressed from dipping his fingers in the birdbath to splashing both his hands in it. “He’s going to get soaked.”
Journey followed her look. “I keep spare clothes in the van. What are you thinking?”
“Barry sent Jim something, and I think both of them, and Dana, were killed because of it.”
Journey turned abruptly and started for the back door.
“Where are you going?” Tolman asked.
“I’m going to search the house.”
“Good idea. I’ll start with Jim’s computer.”
* * *
Jim Cable’s computer was in his study, off the home’s front entry. It felt more complete to Tolman than any other room in the house. Of course, it was his room. It wasn’t built around the life he shared with Melissa and Alex. It was no “man cave,” but was still undeniably masculine, with its neatly sorted engineering journals, several working sets of gears and other gadgets Tolman didn’t recognize, and a few bits of Oklahoma Sooners sports memorabilia.
She booted up the computer, but found it was password protected. She expected no less—Jim Cable was an engineer, someone who lived in the technical world. But he was also very organized, and such an organized mind would no doubt have a list of passwords tucked away somewhere for reference.
It took her half an hour, but she found it between the pages of the program for an Oklahoma-Nebraska football game from 2000, one of many such items on Jim’s bookshelf.
“Sweet Jesus,” Tolman muttered, looking at the neat computer printing on the page. Jim Cable had more than fifty passwords. The man must have come up with a new password for every single computer function he did—from online banking to utility payments to online magazine subscriptions. And he didn’t note what password went with what function. Each function was assigned a number, but she found no key to the numbers.
Damn anal-retentive engineers, Tolman thought, then smiled a little. Jim Cable and his sister could not have been more different.
Gigi-or-Mimi stuck her head in the door, said she had another showing, and left Tolman the key with instructions on how to manage the lockbox. Journey returned from his search, reporting nothing unusual. Lots of empty space, no unopened boxes or packages.
Andrew was beginning to vocalize loudly. Journey told Tolman he was taking the boy for a walk, maybe to get a cold drink. They’d passed a Sonic drive-in on Porter Avenue. Tolman said something about a Diet Coke, but she was feeling the pull of the hunt, the immersion into a technological place that would yield information to help her put it all together. She took the list of passwords to Cable’s padded leather office chair and sat down. She went down the list—none of them were the obvious, such as his birthday, wife’s name, son’s name, employer, Social Security number. They were random alphanumeric collections—Tolman wondered if he’d had a password generator create this, so that no hacker could get into his computer.
Starting at the top was too easy. If Jim Cable was this security conscious, he wouldn’t make it that simple. Still, she gave in to the obvious and entered the first password at the desktop prompt.
“Incorrect password.”
Thank you for the challenge, Jim, she thought, and started down the list.
The thirty-eighth password on the list let her log on to the system. She went straight to his Gmail account. She already had the username from the e-mail Jim had sent to Dana. She caught a break when the third password she tried opened the e-mail account. Gmail was organized into conversations with different people. She clicked Dana’s name and read the same e-mails she’d read on Dana’s laptop.
Her pulse quickened when she clicked Barry’s name. Twenty e-mails were in the folder. She saw instantly that only one had a file attachment.
Yes, she thought.
Then, just as quickly, her heartbeat slowed down. She stopped breathing.
“Holy shit,” she said.
Journey and Andrew returned to the house with drinks. Andrew was rocking on the balls of his feet and hooting. Tolman jerked at the sound.
“What?” Journey said.
Tolman ignored him, clicking on the message. There was no subject line. The text of the e-mail was blank, leaving only the file attachment. Its title was a series of numbers, and its file extension indicated that it was a spreadsheet.
The e-mail had been sent on April 19, at 9:03 A.M. eastern time.
According to the police reports, the members of the April 19 extremist group had entered the GAO office in Rockville at 9:02 A.M. The time was symbolic—it was the same time as the original April 19 bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. The shooting was over within two minutes.
Barry Cable had sent this e-mail to his brother as the killers entered his building and began firing.
April 19, 9:03 A.M.
“This was the last thing he did,” she said, her voice raw. “Before they killed him, he e-mailed this file to Jim.”
She turned around and met Journey’s eyes. Andrew was still bouncing behind him, sipping from his Sonic drink. Journey’s eyes widened. Tolman’s thoughts raced: April 19 had killed Barry Cable, seconds after he sent this e-mail to his younger brother. But April 19 didn’t exist before that killing, and the group had been silent ever since—until last night and three burning federal buildings in different parts of the country.
Tolman turned slowly to the computer and clicked the mouse to open the file.
CHAPTER
20
The Michigan State Scholastic Chess Championship was held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Ann Gray drove with Rick and Joseph from their home in Fremont. They had spent Friday night in a hotel near the campus, and Gray had read the text from Barrientos in the middle of the night.
“What is it?” her husband had asked sleepily, in bed beside her.
“Nothing,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
Joseph was up before dawn, his excitement palpable at participating in the state chess tournament again this year. Rooms in the Michigan Union were set up for students from across the state, long rows of tables with dozens of chessboards. Gray always felt a rush of pride when sh
e saw her son sitting down, shaking hands with his opponent, and when the official said, “Begin,” bending to the board in total concentration.
Joseph won his first game, then his second. At noon, Gray and her husband were watching the third game from the roped-off spectators’ area when she heard her phone beep in her purse.
She dug it out and read the text from Barrientos: “I’m outside in the east parking lot.”
“Be there soon,” she typed, then put her phone away.
Rick was staring at her. She put on an exasperated look. “Bad news?” he whispered.
She nodded.
“Do you have to go?”
Gray frowned and nodded again.
Rick sighed. Gray’s frown deepened. She knew how he felt, and why. But she had to be very careful now. The project was being shut down without her, and The Associates wanted to kill her. She’d set April 19 in motion to send a message to Zale and company, to begin the process of bringing The Associates down. But when it was over, she might have to move, to ensure the family’s safety. Perhaps Canada would be next. She loved Montreal, and all three of them spoke fluent French. She smiled a bit at the irony of that.
Joseph’s third game had lasted over an hour, and he lost. But he was an even-tempered kid, and he showed no emotion over the loss.
“I have to go,” she said in the lobby after the game. “An emergency in Belgium. I was afraid of this.”
“Mom!” Joseph said.
Gray sent a stern look his way. He knew better than to take that tone with her.
“Sorry,” he said, head down.
“I’ll be back when I can. After this project is finished, I should have a lot of free time.”
“Let’s hope so,” Rick said.
She glared at her husband, then softened the look. Of course he didn’t understand. To him, she was an international attorney who would rather trot the globe than be at home with her family. He had no idea the sacrifices she made every day to have a life with the two of them, to even still be alive. He could never understand.
She kissed her husband’s cheek, squeezed her son’s arm, gathered up her purse, and left the building.
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