Authors: Jeffery Deaver
Claire duBois called. She'd run a title search and collected what information she could about the house. The single-family, eighty-year-old structure was on about two acres outside Ashburn, a large area of scattered town houses and single-family homes halfway between Dulles Airport and Leesburg,
growing rapidly, as commuters moved farther and farther from D.C.
The Loving house had been unoccupied for nearly a year and a half, though the owner who'd been deeded the property sent a handyman occasionally to fix and prune. The owner reported that Loving hadn't contacted him for years but had prepaid more than ten years' rent.
“You didn't find all that on Google,” I complimented duBois.
“It's interesting, I could tell the owner was sort of guilty, even though he hadn't done anything illegal. When you're sort of guilty you sort of want to talk.”
Ten minutes later I slowed on the winding asphalt road, no streetlights, and checked numbers. I braked and pulled into a thick stand of bushes, about fifty yards from the house. There were six or seven houses in the vicinity, all of them set back some distance from the road. Trash littered the ground around me and a fragment of red brake light plastic attested to the treacherous curves and bad visibility.
I pulled out my mobile and placed a call to Freddy.
“You get the warrant?” I asked. There was an argument that we wouldn't need one but in legal proceedings it's best to avoid arguments in the first place and, in case we found helpful evidence inside, I wanted to make sure a good defense lawyer didn't get it excluded.
“Yep.”
“Where are you?”
“About fifteen minutes away, probably less. You?”
“Just got here.”
“Jesus, Corte, your outfit doesn't have those cars with flashing lights on the top. You're gonna kill yourself driving like that.”
“I wanted to move fast. I thought there was a chance I might find him here.”
“But you didn't.”
“I didn't. I'm looking at the house now,” I told him. “No lights, no movement. But there're about fifty good shooting positions in the woods all the way around the place. You guys have thermals with you?”
“Sure, but mostly, if you're talking forest, the deer'll light up the equipment. And Bambi doesn't do much sniping.”
Eyes on the house, I told him, “I'm going quiet.”
We disconnected and I climbed from the car. I removed my body armor vest from the trunk, strapped it on and donned a jumpsuit, the black one. I moved through the cool autumn air, stopping between two broad oak trees. Mist floated around the house, which was about two hundred feet off the road. I could hear the creak and groan of insects that had survived the end of summer. Frogs too. I sensed the faint flutter from invisible motion above me, bats.
I have no superstition within me whatsoever and I don't believe that we can feel the spirits of the dead. But I don't deny that there sometimes occurs a ripening of impressions, clues and the memories of experience that trigger an understanding within us that seems like a sixth sense. I had no sense of dread or foreboding but I suddenly knew that I had to draw my weapon immediately,
kick my mind into a defensive mode and keep it there. I nearly got a crick in my neck as I spun behind me and saw the shape of a man. Finger on the trigger of my Glock, I drew a target. Breathing hard, I eased against the solid, rough tree trunk. Only a moment later the saplings that had configured themselves into the lifter separated in the breeze and then gently drifted back.
The shape of a man but not a man.
Which didn't mean that my concern was unwarranted. Loving could easily be nearby.
I turned back to the house. The two-story country manse, gabled, was painted dark brown. The handyman the owner had hired was long on landscaping and short on woodwork and painting. The railing was sagging, the stairs dipped and three of the beige shutters hung from their last hinge. Scales of dull paint rolled from the siding. On the front porch, which extended across the front of the entire house, a swing was attached to the beams above by only a single chain.
Another look around me. No sign of human life. Gazing at the porch again, I wondered if Loving the boy had spent any time in the swing on summer or fall evenings. And with whom? I noted farmland behind the broken-down picket fence in the back. Would he have gone hunting small game there? I'd heard rumors that he'd tortured animals when he was young. But I didn't believe that. There was no evidence suggesting that Loving was a sadist and enjoyed the physical pain he inflicted; when he set the sandpaper and alcohol bottle in front of the person he needed to extract information from, I knew that the main thought in his mind was my own:
What's your goal and what's the most efficient way to achieve it?
I stared at the dark windows, two of which were broken from BB gunshots or maybe a .22. Unoccupied places like this would be, as the law said, attractive nuisances to local kids. I knew this from the house in Woodbridge that Peggy and I had owned. Two doors down from it was an abandoned Victorian and every neighborhood kid at some point tried to sneak inside the dangerous place. I'd gone to town hall to have the city put up better fences, which they ultimately did.
Once more I wondered if it was the Kesslers or Henry Loving conjuring these memories within me. I pushed them away. No more distractions, I resolved.
I heard cars approaching, though I spotted no lights. I gave Freddy a call to tell him where I was. A few minutes later he and the tactical officers joined me.
“Anything on a car at his cousin's?” I asked Freddy.
The senior agent was looking over the lay of the land, as were the tactical officers, each covering a different quadrant. “We found a few drops of blood in a parking space about fifty feet away. Nothing else helpful. No tread marks. No trace. But what do you expect?”
True, with Loving, you weren't going to find the quality of evidence that led you back to his hidey-hole.
“I want to get moving,” I said, gesturing at the house. I was uncharacteristically impatient. I glanced at the tactical agents and whispered, “I
haven't seen any sign of anyone since I've been here. Loving might not remember what he told his cousinâhe was doped upâand he might've come back to go to ground or at least to pick up his things.” I regarded them gravely. “And it's possible he said what he did to the cousin to make sure it was relayed to us. This could be a trap. And remember, he's got a partner.”
They scanned the grounds, the trees, the black windows of the house with keen eyes.
We divided into three groups and, Freddy and I leading, moved forward.
AWARE OF THE
fine shooting that the partner was capable of, we didn't expose ourselves by surveying any vantage points for more than a second or two before dropping to the ground or crouching behind trees.
In five minutes we arrived at the house and made arrangements for the tactical entry. This is not my area of expertise, nor was I as heavily armed as everyone else in the group. I would remain outside on the front porch and keep an eye out for any flanking movement until the house was cleared. Another tactical officer would do the same at the back door.
Freddy gestured to one of his tac officers. The large man examined the door and with a single kick sent it flying inward, simultaneously blurting the requisite, “FBI, serving a warrant!” Agents streamed inside through the front and back doors. Flashlights clicked on but I ignored the search and continued surveying the front and side yards, crouching and presenting as little target as I could to a sniper in the surrounding woods. Using my night vision monocular, I scanned but spotted no evidence of shooters.
Finally Freddy stuck his head out the front door. “We're clear.”
“Any sign of inhabitants recently?”
“Yep. Food and drinks with pretty far-off expiration dates. A set alarm clock. Five a.m. Boy's an early riser. Fresh linens. Some clothes that don't seem too old. Loving's size.”
So he had been staying here.
I walked inside and drew closed any open shades and curtains, then clicked on the lights. The air was musty and tinged with cedar and rot. An agent appeared in the doorway; he'd checked for evidence of the vehicles but reported that the driveway and apron were gravel and he'd found no tire prints.
“What are we looking for?” another agent called. Freddy tipped his head to me.
“Credit card receipts, correspondence, computers or hard drives, bills . . . anything with or without Henry Loving's name on it. He uses fake identities a lot.”
I doubted we'd find much about his immediate plans; he was too smart to leave obvious evidence but even a player as conscientious as he made mistakes sometimes.
Game theory takes this into account. In a “trembling hand equilibrium,” a player can accidentally pick an unintended strategyâsay, when you reach for a queen's bishop's pawn and accidentally move the knight's in error. If you release the piece, you've made the move, even if the consequences are the opposite of what you'd intended and are disastrous.
Still, we found little or nothing that was helpful.
But one thing I did indeed find was Henry Loving's past.
Virtually all of it. Neither he nor his family had eradicated his history.
Everywhere throughout the house were photographs, framed postcards, ribbons from awards won at state fairs and carnivals, pictures of Loving family vacations. On the mantelpiece and on the shelves in place of books were souvenirs and memorabilia like ceramic animals, ashtrays, hats, candleholders.
And, in the den, scrapbooks. Probably thirty or forty of them. I checked quickly but none was more recent than about five years ago. The most current one contained only a single item about Loving himself. It was a clipping from the
Washington Post,
the same clipping I had in my office, as a matter of fact. About Loving's murder of Abe Fallow and the woman he'd been guarding. Had he clipped it? And if he had, why? I guessed it was a matter of craft: to see how the authorities were handling the investigation.
I flipped through the memorabilia and examined the many pictures of a younger Henry, his sister and their parents. I was struck by the fact that in most of them he seemed somber and preoccupied, rarely smiling and seemingly distracted. But there were also a number of images of the young Henry laughing. One or two showed him with a girl, presumably on a date, though there was little physical contact between them.
Young Henry's sports were track and archery. There were no pictures of him with teammates. He seemed to enjoy solitary pursuits.
I went back even earlier. I opened one page and stared down at it. Beneath a piece of yellowed Scotch tape was a tuft of clipped brown hair. I read
the careful script below. The hair was Henry's, at one year of age. I started to reach out and touch it. Then withdrew my hand when Freddy walked into the room.
“Whatcha think, son?” Freddy asked. “Anything helpful here? You're looking like you found Bernie Madoff's stash.”
I shook my head. “Nothing pointing to his next move. But everything pointing to
him.
”
“That helpful?”
“Not immediately. But ultimately, I hope so. Only there's a lot here to go through. We'll collect it all, take it in. You folks have evidence bags?”
“In the cars.”
I then noticed something against the opposite wall: another shelf on which a dozen shoe boxes sat. I picked one up. Inside were stacks of photographs. I supposed the family had stored them here temporarily until somebody got around to pasting them into a scrapbook. I realized, to my surprise, that there was a dust-free rectangle at the end. The last shoe box had been removedâtoday, if not within the last hour or so.
Had he sped back here from his cousin's for the purpose of grabbing this one box?
What was there about it that Loving wanted?
Did it reveal something about his past that he wished to keep secret?
Or was there something sentimental connected to it?
I mentioned this to Freddy, who noted it without much interest. I flipped through the others. Like the scrapbooks, they revealed nothing immediately helpful, though we'd have forensic teams prowl
through them for clues to summer houses or family members we hadn't been able to locate earlier.
“Corte?” Freddy asked. He was getting impatient, I supposed.
“Okay,” I told him.
“Got something here,” a tactical officer called from the hallway that led to the kitchen in the back of the house. Freddy and I joined him.
“Looks like bills, sir.”
Sitting on the floor beside the kitchen table was a stack of envelopes, bound with a rubber band.
“He must've dropped them and not noticed.”
Trembling hand . . .
The agent picked them up but then froze. They only came halfway and tugged to a stop.
“Fuck,” he muttered and we all stared at the thin strand of fishing line that vanished through the hole in the floor.
Freddy grabbed his radio. “Clear the house, IED, IED!”
From the basement I heard the bang of the booby trapâsofter than I expectedâand saw on the foliage and trees a brief flare as the flash radiated through the basement windows.
The room was eerily silent. For a moment I thought the device might be a dud and I'd have ample time to collect the scrapbooks and shoe boxes.
But I'd taken only one step toward the repository of Henry Loving's history when the nearby basement door blew outward and a vortex of orange and yellow flame shot into the hall, while simultaneously the fire raging in the basement erupted from every floorboard vent and crevice on the first floor.
THE DEVICE MUST
have been made up of a grenade or small plastic explosive charge attached to a large container of gasoline. I could smell the distinct, astringent odor of burning fuel. In seconds, the fire was racing up the walls and consuming the rugs. I kicked the basement door closed but the flames and heat muscled it back open, as the fire spiraled outward and up.