Spectre Black (5 page)

Chapter
6

Jolie Burke lived in a rented house on Turner Avenue, an old part of town. Turner Avenue was a generic name for a street where the houses were jostled together cheek by jowl, many of them with small but cluttered yards. Toys, old cars on blocks, dogs of unusual ancestry, and old walnut trees pushing up the sidewalk. Most of the houses were plain-wrap Victorian, which meant they had wood siding and porches with spindly posts. The spindly posts outside Jolie’s place were painted dark green. Landry noted the home protection sign planted in the grass. He also noticed that her yard was neat and the plants and tree were healthy.

There was an empty lot on one corner and a convenience store on the other.

Landry made one pass by. Hardly anyone was out on the street. None of the dogs were barkers. They either sat morosely in the shade or trotted up to the fence to get a look at the man driving by. It was a weekday and many of the driveways were empty—people at work. Only one middle-aged woman, dressed like a hippie from the sixties, black hair down to her waist, was spraying her flowerbed with water. She was careful not to look in his direction as he drove past in his Diaz Landscaping Service van. He could have been on the moon for all she cared.

There was an alley behind the row of houses, choked with weeds, smelling of garbage and the sharp, medicinal stench of alcohol. Landry had counted the houses—Jolie lived four down from this end of the street. He cruised through the alley between the two rows of backyards facing the alley, parking as close to the back wall of Jolie’s yard as he could get.

Nothing going on in the hot sunlight. Everyone either at work, or at school, or indoors under the air conditioners. Landry noted several swampbox coolers, could hear them rattling on the roofs.

You could have staged a theater production here, and no one would notice.

Landry parked up close to the wall behind Jolie’s place. In his blue work shirt, jeans, work boots and cap, he looked like a guy sent to clean up the backyard. He even had a rake and a plastic garbage can.

This wall had been added to—it was much higher than the other walls on the alley. He tried the gate but it was locked.

As he approached, he heard a bark. A suspicious sound, low and guttural.

Of course she had a dog. She was a cop. Cops by nature were paranoid. Cops by nature were all about mitigation. Mitigation and control. Control your immediate space, keep things from getting out of hand. Smother trouble in its sleep. If at all possible, run to meet trouble and hit it before it could hit you. That was the reason her wall was higher—the new blocks creating a sort of waterline. Gray on the bottom, and coral on top. He had no doubt her house would be hard to get into. There was already a regular obstacle course. High wall, big dog, alarm service sign.

He could jimmy the back door if he could get past the dog. But Landry doubted if Jolie would leave it just at that. Cops—at least cops like Jolie—tended to be anal when it came to personal protection.

Landry looked around.

Nothing going on. Just the heat, the sun bearing down on his head.

He climbed up onto the wall.

The dog was a Rottweiler. He was lying down in the shade of the house, by the sliding glass door out to the yard.

The yard wasn’t dry and parched and half-dirt, as some Landry had seen as he drove past chain-link fences and old pickets. In the shade on the terrace was a paradise of potted plants and flowers, colorful blooms—pinks, whites, deep-rose-colored petunias, small cacti in pots, a veritable rain forest of ferns and exotic bushes and small fruit trees.

Smelling of water.

The terrace dark from a recent spraying.

Her neighbor? A friend?

A boyfriend?

Or was she holed up there, hiding?

The Rottie woofed once from his spot on the cool terrace.

Hard to know if he was friend or enemy.

There was water in his bowl.

There was food in another bowl. Big bowls for a big dog. A full bag of Pedigree Large Breed dog food was propped up against the redbrick house.

Someone was taking care of the dog—and the plant. Maybe it was Jolie, hiding inside the house or staying elsewhere and coming by to look after him, or maybe it was a neighbor, or maybe it was someone she worked with at Branch Sheriff’s Office.

If he knew one thing, it was that nothing would likely happen here except at night, under the cover of darkness. If he stayed around here much longer, landscaping van or not, he would draw attention.

He was ninety-percent positive that if Jolie moved in and out of the house, or if her agent moved in and out of the house, they would do so by night. If she had someone to care for the dog, that person would likely come either early in the evening or early in the morning. Usually people who took care of pets had to work around their own schedules, unless pet-sitting was all they did.

No car in the driveway—at least not now. So Landry was leaning toward the theory that whoever took care of the Rottweiler and the plants wasn’t staying there.

He drove two blocks to the Subway shop he’d noticed on the way in to the neighborhood, and bought two sandwiches. One for himself, and one for the Rottie.

It didn’t take him long to install the two hunt cameras—one focused on the back door and one at the front. First, Landry tossed meat from the sandwich to the Rottweiler. The dog ate it and lumbered over for more, tail wagging. Landry thought:
now or never
. He hopped down from the wall into the yard and was nearly licked to death. He found a lawn trimmer in the storage shed, put it in the van and drove back around to the front. There, he ran it around the little patch of lawn.

He had an audience of none. The carports and driveways were still empty and no one was about, not even the hippie woman with the long black hair. The sound of the lawn trimmer, he knew, would be an expected sound and no one would question him being here. He stopped partway through, found a suitable place for the camera, made sure it lined up with the door, and installed it—two minutes tops. He did the same in the backyard.

He wanted to know who was taking care of the dog. Jolie, or someone else? He wanted to know if her place was being monitored, or whether or not the house needed monitoring at all. If they had her—whoever “they” were—they would not bother monitoring her house. Unless they thought someone was coming.

Unless they knew about Landry himself.

It occurred to him that whoever had taken Jolie might be the same person feeding the dog—just to maintain the status quo.

Landry raked the small yard, making plenty of noise. The Rottweiler decided to join in, wriggling his hind end and dashing around the small yard before wriggling again.

A real killer.

After raking for ten minutes, Landry took a break and looked for the home alarm sensor leading to the central control box. He found the magnet where he expected to find it: attached to the doorsill. A home alarm system like this one passed a minimal amount of electrical current to the magnet. The current arced across a very short distance between the sensor and the magnet, sending it back and forth—a cycle. If that cycle wasn’t repeated constantly, the alarm would go off. Say a window was opened, or a door—that would break the cycle.

Landry donned latex gloves from one pocket of his jeans before reaching into the pocket of the other, past a roll of electrical tape and a couple of bobby pins until his fingers closed around a sheet of tin foil. He fed the tin foil into the narrow crack between the doorjamb and the door—it was a nice tight fit. As long as the foil pressed against the sensor, he could open the window or door with impunity. The foil acted as a de facto magnet, aping the alarm’s cycle.

Next came the deadbolt.

Wisely, Jolie had made her home security redundant. She had deadbolt locks as well. But any lock could be picked. Landry removed one of the bobby pins and bent it into a right angle. He removed the second bobby pin and straightened it out flat, all the way. He started with the straight pin, working it back and forth inside the lock, then added the pin with the right angle. He worked the two of them until the latch clicked.

Inside, Landry walked down the hallway, reconnoitering, and made sure he knew the house. Next, he returned to the open door on the left. This was Jolie’s home office. Inside, he smelled stale air. The house was cool, though—Landry had seen and heard the working swampbox cooler on the roof. It sounded like a bucket of rocks.

A black-and-white cat was curled up on the desk chair.

The desk was clear, except for a jar of pens and pencils. He’d hoped for a laptop but found none. Under a standing lamp a printer sat on a stand you’d buy at OfficeMax, paper stacked on the shelf beneath. He opened the desk drawers, but he saw nothing important in them. He went to the filing cabinet with its four drawers, and used the bobby pin to open each of them.

The filing cabinets were half empty. The cabinet held old files from old cases, some even from Florida.

Who used filing cabinets anymore? These days a person could file everything they wanted on a USB disk.

He searched everywhere for the computer and for a USB disk, but found nothing. Wondered if she’d taken her laptop or if someone else had come along and taken it.

There was nothing else. No iPad, no tablet of any kind. Just a potted plant. He poked his finger in the pot and the soil was crumbling and dry. The pet sitter apparently wasn’t a plant sitter. He went to the kitchen and took down a glass from the cabinet, filled it with water, came back to the office and dumped the water on the plant.

A little bit of the sun came through the slats in the blinds, and the cat stretched and then curled up again, covering its face with one paw. It ignored him completely.

Landry liked cats. They minded their own business.

The missing laptop (if there
was
a missing laptop) meant a few things. She could have taken it with her, she could have cleared out fast and hidden it, or the person who fed the dog and cat could have been charged with keeping it.

Or whoever had abducted her in the first place also had her laptop.

The cat came into the hallway and cried at him, turned around and went into the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator. It looked at him briefly, then focused its attention on the refrigerator. It didn’t cry and it didn’t beg. Just stood there expecting him to open the refrigerator and give it something to eat.

Another reason he liked cats.

There was no pretense with them: they were what they were and they wanted what they wanted. They didn’t have to get all polite about it.

Still gloved up, he opened the refrigerator. He saw no cans of cat food. He looked in the cupboard next to the refrigerator and found some cat treats. He didn’t know how much to feed it. The whole bag? Or just a couple? He settled on a handful, and shook the treats on the Saltillo tile floor. The cat ate each one delicately and looked at Landry for more. As if it hadn’t eaten anything at all and was starving.

“I met a con man like you once,” Landry said.

The cat gave him a look, then turned his back and cleaned himself.

Landry didn’t want to spend too much time here. He searched the house thoroughly but quickly, found nothing associated with Jolie’s job as a sheriff’s deputy, except for a couple of uniforms in her closet.

If Jolie had been abducted—and when she’d called him, she had escaped from somewhere—then when did she contact the person who fed the dog and cat? Did she call her after her escape?

She’d called the right person. The water bowls were full. Both the cat and the dog looked fine to him.

Back in the yard, he stowed the lawn trimmer back in the shed. He said to the Rottweiler, “Some watchdog
you
are.”

Next, he went to the donut shop two blocks down from the motel. The donut shop was called Duncan’s Donuts, which not only treaded on a well-known copyright, but also went well with Dina’s Diner. He briefly wondered if they had all gotten together in a town meeting and decided what to name their businesses to present a unifying, alliterative theme. Maybe there was also a Rosa’s Restaurant, or a Ginny’s Gin Mill.

Landry knew that the FBI would send an agent to investigate a missing cop, no matter what the jurisdiction. They would do this within three days. If he hadn’t wasted time waiting by the Circle K, fruitlessly calling the pay phone number, he might have been able to intercept the agent, find out what he knew, and become his replacement. But Landry had no idea how long Jolie had been missing. He was way too late to intercept the FBI agent now.

But he could still strike up an acquaintance with the right cop. He could still pump him for information, if he did it skillfully.

And so he chose the donut shop.

Landry had dressed like an off-duty cop, which basically meant jeans (the more faded the better), sneakers, and an open-necked polo shirt. The polo shirt was banded at the bottom, a cop trick used to conceal a gun or knife secured to his belt. The shirt puffed out a little above the band, so there was no telltale outline. The banded polo shirt, along with the fact that the jeans had plenty of legroom to fit over boots (or a leg holster) did double duty, making him easily identifiable as law enforcement or former law enforcement. He could be anything, from a retired cop to an off-duty cop to an undercover cop. His hair was short but not too short.

There were uniformed cops here—three of them at a four top. The table, like his own, was on a single stand and tottered a little under their elbows, just like his did. Landry put a matchbook under the table, to add to the matchbook already there. He had the newspaper open and coffee at his elbow, and he could watch them.

And then he realized he was being watched himself.

A good-looking woman stared at him from her table, her gaze open and interested, before returning to her iPad.

Landry liked that she didn’t attempt to hide her interest. That set her apart right there.

He looked at her, willing her to look back up, but she didn’t take the bait. She appeared to be concentrating on whatever she was reading.