Pursuit (15 page)

While the marshals futilely barked into their cell phones, calling in a SWAT team and a totally useless ambulance, scurrying about like demented ants, Barrett had carefully wiped all traces of his presence, taking his time. He was good at policing his brass. The spent brass cartridge went into a vest pocket. The polyurethane sheet he’d lain on and the urinefilled Coke bottles into a carry bag, the Barrett and the Harris tripod broken down and seated into their foam beds.

He sprayed the area with a 10 percent bleach solution to destroy any traces of DNA he might have left. While the police dragged the dead witness into a doorway, leaving a black blood trail in his night-vision goggles, he quietly went down the fire stairs, exited, and drove away.

No one saw him come. No one saw him go.

That’s when he started being known as Barrett. That’s when his fee shot up into the six figures.

But sniping was the least of what he did. What he was truly superb at, what made him nearly unique, was his ability as a tracker. He could smoke out nearly anybody, no matter where he—or she—ran to ground.

He did what he had to do to get into his victims’ heads and follow where their instincts took them. Under stress, humans, like animals, followed their instincts, their deepest natures. It was the closest thing to truth Barrett knew.

A rabbit in danger won’t hide in a tree. A leopard won’t dig a hole in the ground and burrow. A gambler will inevitably drift to Atlantic City or Vegas. A drunk won’t end up in Amish country. A gangbanger won’t end up on a ranch in Wyoming.

Each human being has a narrow range of behavior and reverts to it immediately when in danger.

So now he was going to learn everything there was to know about Charlotte Court, and when he knew her, he’d know where she had gone into hiding.

Barrett walked from room to room, soaking up the atmosphere. He wasn’t drawing conclusions, not yet. He had to get a general feel for the woman first. Who was she? What made her what she was?

He looked around. There was wealth here, lots of wealth. Old money. Okay, that was a start. She’d crave a reproduction in miniature of her old life. But she wouldn’t go to ground in a luxury hotel—she wouldn’t have the money for that, and even if she did, she wouldn’t need or even enjoy ostentation.

There were no signs of conspicuous consumption in the big house. The kitchen was at least thirty years old, and the bathrooms didn’t have the Jacuzzis and acres of marble now so necessary to the “new” rich.

That wasn’t her style. Her style was classy understatement.

Good. That narrowed it down a little. Even without much money, she’d be incapable of settling down in an ugly slum, or a trailer park, or a ticky-tacky house in the suburbs. The only kind of place a person like her could settle without much money was a place where other cash-poor but arty people congregated—an art colony. Places like Key West or Big Sur or Martha’s Vineyard in winter.

The hunt was now on. He could feel the energy down to his fingertips. There was an amazing amount of artwork on the walls—even he recognized some of the artists: a Renoir, a Picasso, three Winslow Homers. But most of what was on the walls was by one person, showing the same light, delicate, expert hand, whether oils or sketches or watercolors. Peering closely, Barrett could see that they were all signed with a small cc in the lower-right-hand corner. cc. Charlotte Court.

Charlotte Court was an artist. A good one. An obsessive one, too.

Obsession was good. Obsessions tripped people up like nothing else except sex. Wandering toward the back of the big house, Barrett came across her studio—a big room that had been added onto the back wall, all windows and skylights, capable of catching as much sun as this frigid northern city could give.

There were easels everywhere—each with a work in progress. Unframed canvases were stacked against the walls, and another stack of thick notebooks—each completely filled with sketches—lay on a table. Charlotte Court had been under a lot of stress with a dying father. This was obviously where she came to calm herself down.

Barrett tucked this important information away.

When under stress, cc painted or drew. Obsessively. Barrett bent to look at a large, textured pad. Then another. And another. Interesting. All by the same manufacturer. Fabriano. An Italian company, it said on the back sheet.
Cartiere Miliani Fabriano S.p.A
. Made in Italy. He fingered the paper. Good thick stock.

He would have to find out if Fabriano was sold in the US or whether pretty cc ordered it specially from Italy.

Wherever she was now, she was sketching. On Fabriano paper. He would bet his left nut on it.

Barrett poked around in her bedroom and adjoining bathroom, discovering some interesting things about Charlotte Court, though they were all negatives. She didn’t do drugs. She had a relatively small collection of clothes, considering what she could afford and considering that she was a beautiful woman. That meant she didn’t need to be close to trendy stores. She didn’t have any modern jewelry. Everything in her jewelry box—kept right in plain sight in a big wooden box on her dresser, with a crappy little brass key that wouldn’t keep the wind out, let alone a thief—was an antique, clearly family heirlooms. So she could stay away from jewelry stores.

Barrett had once capped a runaway wife—who’d run away with the chauffeur and a fortune in cash from her husband’s safe—simply because she found it impossible to stay away from her favorite Bulgari store.

Charlotte read a lot, judging from the shelves of well-thumbed books. However, she didn’t read anything she couldn’t find in any well-stocked metropolitan bookstore. If she was where she couldn’t readily find books, she probably used Amazon, and if she did, tough shit for him.

Barrett had long ago quit trying to hack Amazon. It couldn’t be done. Amazon was more tightly defended than the Department of Defense, which Barrett had hacked into twice. Barrett moved back toward the front of the house, walking slowly through all the rooms. He stopped for a moment in the middle of the enormous living room—as big as the ballroom he’d once seen in a drug lord’s villa—and closed his eyes. He drew in a deep breath, trying to analyze what had been tickling at the edges of his subconscious, at a level deeper than words. He exhaled then inhaled again.

What
was
that smell? Citrusy, like . . . lemons.

Yeah, that was it. Lemon. Lemon . . . polish. He opened his eyes again and the realization was there, full-blown, because his subconscious mind had been thinking it through. Which was why he hadn’t wanted Haine here, yapping away.

Someone was cleaning the house on a regular basis, a housekeeper or a cleaning service. Barrett again walked through the mansion. All the furniture was dusted, the windows sparkled, the rugs had been recently vacuumed. The house looked as if it was just waiting for the mistress to walk back in after a hard day’s shopping.

Barrett looked harder, opening his senses wide. It wasn’t a cleaning service. There were too many personal touches. The house was being cared for by someone who either loved the house itself or loved its owner.

There were freshly cut flowers in vases everywhere, presumably from the well-tended flower gardens outside. The gleaming surfaces were full of art objects, silver frames, silver knickknacks, Lalique statuettes. All objects that took time to dust. Time and attention. Now that he knew what he was looking for, Barrett was quick. He rifled through notebooks, checked drawers, opened closets. Finally, he pulled open the top-right-hand drawer of a desk in the huge book-filled study, and there it was. The last two months, in black and white.

Barrett sat down in a big cracked-leather chair that was surprisingly comfortable and took his time slowly leafing through the papers. He would have liked to take the sheaves of papers with him, but the absence might at some point be noticed by the cops. He didn’t think so—if the cops had been halfway competent they’d have caught Charlotte Court in the first twenty-four hours—but he was careful by nature.

Someone—the housekeeper—had carefully kept Charlotte Court’s mail for her, neatly stacked into three piles. Letters, bills, and junk mail. Barrett left the junk mail where it was and started reading the letters, slicing them open with the little silver letter opener on the desk.

He read them carefully. Once, twice, three times. Slowly, absorbing every word. Interesting . . .

Most people communicated by e-mail these days, but it looked like the Court woman actually wrote letters. Three of the letters to her were in Italian, two in French. So she was comfortable with foreign languages. He had enough Spanish to be able to decipher the Italian letter. Something about an art school in Florence. Barrett briefly toyed with the idea that she had escaped to Italy but discarded it. Her passport had been right where you’d expect a passport to be—in the upper-right-hand drawer of the dresser in her bedroom.

Barrett knew that the new security rules enacted by the State Department made passports almost impossible to fake. Certainly, someone like Charlotte Court wouldn’t have access to the type of person who might have already figured out how to get around the security features, holograms and RFID chips.

If she had gone out of the country, it would be either to Canada or Mexico. Barrett thought about that for a moment, turning it over in his mind, letting the options unfold like flowers. Then he bent back to the letters.

The letters were all friendly in tone, enough to tell him what he already knew. Charlotte Court enjoyed art and literature and seemed to be well liked by everyone who knew her. It told him a lot about her as a person. She was friendly, cultured, and smart. Good-hearted, gave to charity.

Peach of a girl.

That didn’t tell him where she’d gone into hiding, though.

When he felt he’d absorbed everything he could from the letters, Barrett moved on to the business correspondence.

This was more like it.

The bank statements were particularly interesting. Court had three bank accounts, two in Warrenton and one in Chicago. He bent forward, rapt. Money told you more about a person than anything else about their lives. Money talked to you, whispered secrets, opened souls. No friend, no lover was as close to you as your money. This was what would tell him what he needed to know about Charlotte Court.

The two Warrenton accounts were with the same bank. One account was her personal one, the other clearly was for household expenses. Barrett quickly ran down the items on her personal account, noting that she was neat and organized and paid all her bills on time.

This was stranger than one might think. A woman who’d inherited a bundle, who didn’t have to work, did not necessarily have the life skills necessary to keep accounts neat and tidy.

But Charlotte did. She was organized and competent.

Barrett noted something else, as well. There
was
a housekeeper, just as he thought. He ran a practiced eye down the household account statements.
Follow the money
was his motto.

The housekeeper’s name was Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald. She was paid $50,000 a year to look after the house, plus was given a budget of another $50,000 a year, presumably for food and household supplies. Generous but not wildly so, given the size of the house. There was a gardener, too, a Luis Mendoza, paid regularly from the household account. Barrett finished looking at the rest of the business correspondence, most of which had slowed to a trickle after Charlotte Court had disappeared.

Barrett also noted that the insurance on Charlotte’s car had been allowed to lapse. The car itself, a Prius, as Haine had said, was in the garage. He’d seen it himself. Whatever Charlotte Court was driving, it wasn’t her own car. She’d either driven away in a borrowed car or had acquired one along the way. Or maybe . . . both.

Maybe she’d escaped in a friend’s car she’d borrowed, then dumped it and bought another one. It might be a thread to pursue.

Barrett put the paperwork away and stood. He’d learned everything that he could here, and he now knew where to get more information.

Removing the gloves and the booties, he exited the house quietly. Robert Haine was nowhere to be seen. Barrett stood for a moment on the stoop, face lifted to the frigid morning air. There was a cold pearly cast to the sky, just enough to see a hundred yards. The dawn wouldn’t come in a blaze of golden reds but as increasingly lighter shades of gray. Even dawn here sucked.

Embrace the suck.
The Special Forces mantra.

When this job was over, he was going to take the 400K personally to the Caymans and stay for two weeks. He hated the cold. Most of his working life had been spent in the tropics and the desert.

Moving quietly was second nature for him, so when he rounded the corner and saw Haine butchering a cat, he was able to watch unobserved.

Interesting.

Haine was totally out of control, slashing again and again at the belly of a cat that was clearly already dead.

Fucking stupid. Never waste energy on a dead enemy.

So Haine was something more than a cool-headed businessman paying someone to remove obstacles for him, which was perfectly reasonable. Happened all the time. No, there was something more there, something that touched a deep chord in the man. Maybe the delectable Ms. Court had rebuffed his advances? That made sense. The new CEO of the family company wooing one of the largest shareholders.