The Collectors (24 page)

CHAPTER 46

I
T TOOK
S
TONE SOME EFFORT,
but he managed to lose the men tailing him. He immediately went to an abandoned home near the graveyard that he used as a safe house. He changed clothes and headed to Good Fellow Street. He passed DeHaven’s house and then Behan’s. There were reporters camped outside Behan’s manse obviously waiting for an appearance by the unfortunate and humiliated widow. The damaged home across the street appeared to be empty.

As he watched the Behan house from the corner while pretending to consult a map, a large furniture van pulled up in front of the home and two burly men got out. A maid opened the front door as the reporters tensed. The men went inside and a few minutes later came out carrying a large wooden chest. Even though the men were obviously very strong, they struggled with the weight. Stone could sense the thoughts of the reporters: Mrs. Behan was hidden in the chest to escape the media. What a scoop that would be!

The cell phones came out, and a number of the journalists leaped into their cars and followed the van as it pulled down the road. Two cars covering the rear of the house zoomed in from the block behind the Behans’. However, a few reporters remained behind, obviously sensing a trick. They pretended to move off down the street but took up positions just out of sight of the Behans’. A minute later the front door opened again and a woman in a maid’s uniform appeared, wearing a big floppy hat. She climbed into a car parked in the front courtyard of the house and drove out.

Again Stone could sense the reporters’ collective thoughts. The furniture van was a decoy, and the missus was disguised as the maid. The remaining journalists ran for their vehicles and followed the maid’s car. Two more journalists came from the next street over, no doubt alerted to this development by their colleagues.

Stone promptly walked around the corner and down to the next block that abutted the rear of the Behans’ property. There was an alleyway here, and he waited behind a nearby hedge. His wait was a short one. Marilyn Behan appeared a few minutes later, wearing slacks, a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low. When she got to the end of the alley, she cautiously peered around.

Stone stepped out from the cover of the hedge. “Mrs. Behan?”

She jumped and looked around at him.

“Who are you? A damn reporter?” she snapped.

“No, I’m a friend of Caleb Shaw’s. He works at the Library of Congress. We met at Jonathan DeHaven’s funeral.”

She seemed to be searching her memory. From her demeanor she seemed a little stoned, he thought. There was no smell of liquor on her breath, though. So was it drugs?

“Oh, yes, I remember now. I made my little quip about CB understanding instant death.” She suddenly coughed and reached in her handbag for a tissue.

“I wanted to offer my condolences,” Stone said, hoping that the woman wouldn’t remember that Reuben, her husband’s alleged killer, had also been in their group.

“Thank you.” She glanced back down the alley. “I guess this seems a little odd and all.”

“I saw the reporters, Mrs. Behan. It must be a nightmarish situation for you. But you did fool them. That’s not easy to do.”

“When you’re married to a very wealthy man who stirs up controversy, you learn how to duck the media.”

“Could I talk to you for a few minutes? Maybe over a cup of coffee.”

She seemed flustered. “I don’t know. This is a very difficult time for me.” Her face screwed up. “I just lost my husband, damn it!”

Stone remained unperturbed. “This concerns your husband’s death. I wanted to ask you about something he said at the funeral.”

She froze and then asked suspiciously, “What do you know about his death?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like to. But I think it might have some connection to Jonathan DeHaven’s death. It seems very mysterious, after all, that two next-door neighbors should die under such . . . unusual circumstances.”

She suddenly looked very calculating. “You don’t think DeHaven died of a heart attack
either,
do you?”

Either?
“Mrs. DeHaven, can you spare a few minutes? Please, it’s important.”

They had coffee at a nearby deli. Sitting at a back table, Stone said bluntly, “Your husband mentioned something to you about DeHaven’s death, didn’t he?”

She sipped her coffee, pulled her hat down lower and said quietly, “CB didn’t believe he’d had a heart attack, I can tell you that.”

“Why not? What did he know?”

“I’m not sure. He never really said anything directly to me about it.”

“Then how do you know he had doubts?”

Marilyn Behan hesitated. “I’m not sure why I should tell you anything.”

“Let me be honest with you in the hopes that you’ll return the favor.” He told her about Reuben and why he was in the house, though he tactfully didn’t mention the telescope. “He didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Behan. He was only there because I told him to watch the house. There are a lot of strange things going on, on Good Fellow Street.”

“Like what?”

“Like the person in the house across the street.”

She said nervously, “I didn’t know anything about that. And CB never mentioned it. I know that he felt that people were spying on him though. Like the FBI, trying to dig up some dirt on him. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but he’s made a lot of enemies.”

“You said he didn’t say anything directly to you about Jonathan’s death, but at the funeral he seemed to want assurance that it was indeed a heart attack that killed him. He mentioned that autopsies are sometimes wrong.”

She put down her coffee and rubbed nervously at the red lipstick on the rim of the cup. “I overheard CB on the phone one day. I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything,” she added quickly. “I was looking for a book, and he was in the library on a call. The door was partially open.”

“I’m sure it was unintentional on your part,” Stone said.

“Well, he was telling someone that he’d found out DeHaven had just had a heart workup at Johns Hopkins and that he was in fine shape. And then he said he’d pulled some strings with the D.C. police and learned that DeHaven’s autopsy results were not making people happy at all. They just didn’t add up. He sounded worried and said he wanted to check more into it.”

“And did he?”

“Well, I don’t usually ask him where he’s going, and he accorded me the same courtesy. I mean, the circumstances of his death evidently showed that he strayed at times. I was flying to New York and was in a bit of a hurry, but for some reason, I don’t know, maybe it was his concerned look, I asked him where he was going, if anything was wrong. I didn’t even know he owned the damn company, to tell the truth.”

“Company? What company?”

“Fire Control, Inc., I think it was. Something like that anyway.”

“He went to Fire Control?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“Just that he wanted to check something out. Oh, he did mention the library, or at least the place where Jonathan worked. Something about his company having the contract to protect it against fire and such. And that he’d learned that some cylinders had been recently removed from there. He also said there seemed to be an inventory screwup.”

“Do you know if he found anything?”

“No. As I said, I went to New York. He didn’t call me. But when I called him, he didn’t mention it, and I had forgotten about it by then.”

“Did he sound disturbed when you talked to him?”

“No more than usual.” She paused. “Oh, he did say he was going to check the pipes in our house. I thought he was joking.”

“The pipes? What was he referring to?”

“I don’t know. I assumed our gas line pipes. I guess they can leak, and there could be an explosion.”

Stone initially thought,
Like what happened to Speaker of the House Bob Bradley.
But then something else occurred to him.

“Mrs. Behan, do you have a sprinkler system in your house?”

“Oh, no. We have a large collection of artwork, so water was out of the question. But CB
was
concerned about fire. I mean, look what happened across the street. He had another system put in, one that put out fire without using water. I’m not sure how it works.”

“That’s all right, I think I know.”

“So you believe whoever killed Jonathan also murdered CB?”

Stone nodded. “I do. And if I were you, I’d go and stay at another of your homes, as far away from here as possible.”

Her eyes widened. “You think I’m in danger?”

“I think you might be.”

“I’ll go back to New York, then. I’ll leave this afternoon.”

“I think that would be wise.”

“I suppose the police will let me. I had to give them my passport, though. I suppose I’m a suspect. I am the wife, after all. My alibi is ironclad, but I suppose I could have hired someone to kill him while I was away.”

“It has been done before,” Stone conceded.

They sat in silence for a minute or so. “You know, CB really did love me.”

“I’m sure he did,” Stone said politely.

“No, I know what you’re thinking. But he
did
love me. The other women, they were just playthings. They came and they went. I was the only one who got him to walk down the aisle. And he left everything to me.” She took another sip of her coffee. “You know it’s ironic, he made a fortune building tools of war, but CB actually hated guns, never even owned one. His background was in engineering. He was a brilliant man, and he worked harder than anyone else.” She paused. “He loved me. A woman can tell, you know. And I loved him. With all his faults. I still can’t believe he’s gone. A part of me died with him.” She wiped away a tear from her right eye.

“Mrs. Behan, why lie to me?”

“What?”

“Why lie to me? You don’t even know me. So why bother?”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not lying. I did love him.”

“If you really loved him, you wouldn’t have hired a private detective to watch your house from across the street. Was he taking pictures of the comings and goings of the women your husband enjoyed?”

“How dare you! I had nothing to do with that. They were probably the FBI spying on CB.”

“No, the FBI would’ve been smart enough to have a team of agents there, at least one man and a woman to make it seem like a normal household. They would’ve also taken the trash out and performed other ordinary tasks, and they wouldn’t have let themselves be seen during the surveillance. And why would the FBI be watching your home? Would they think it even remotely likely that your husband would meet with some incriminating person
there
? Not even the FBI has an unlimited budget to cover every base, however implausible.” He shook his head. “I hope you didn’t pay the firm a lot of money, since they were hardly worth it.”

She half rose from her chair. “You bastard!”

“You could’ve just divorced him. Gotten half and walked away a free woman.”

“After he humiliated me like that? Paraded those whores through
my
house? I wanted to make him suffer. You’re right: I hired a private detective and set him up in that house. So what? And the pictures he’d already taken of my husband and his paid bitches? Well, with those I was going to make old CB bleed and force him to turn over everything to me. Otherwise, it all comes out, and let me tell you, the federal government doesn’t like its contractors putting themselves in compromising positions. CB had top-secret clearances. Maybe he wouldn’t have if the government knew he was doing something he could be blackmailed for. And after he signed everything over to me, then I was going to dump
him.
He wasn’t the only one playing around. I’ve had my share of lovers, and I’ve picked the one I’m spending the rest of my life with. But now I get everything without even blackmailing him. It’s the perfect revenge.”

“You might want to keep your voice down. As you said, the police no doubt still consider you a suspect. And it’s not smart to give them unnecessary ammo.”

Marilyn Behan looked around at the people in the café staring at her. She paled and sat back down.

Now Stone stood. “Thanks for your time. Your information was very useful.” He added with a completely straight face, “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

She hissed, “Go to hell.”

“Well, if I do, I surely won’t be alone, will I?”

CHAPTER 47

A
NNABELLE WAS WAITING FOR
her connecting flight out of Atlanta. As she looked over her new itinerary, she inwardly seethed at Leo’s stupid move. How could he have done that? If she had wanted Freddy to know who she was, she would have told him herself.

Her flight was called, but she waited as the passengers lined up. Even though she was in first class and could have boarded early, out of old habit she liked to see who was getting on the plane. As the line thinned, she picked up her carry-on bag. She had dumped most of her clothes back in D.C. She never checked a bag when flying; it was an invitation for someone to snoop on her. She would buy more clothes when she got to her destination.

As she was walking up to the line to get on the plane, she glanced over at an airport TV tuned to CNN and stopped moving. Reuben’s face peered back at her. She hurried over closer to the TV and read the subtitles. Vietnam vet Reuben Rhodes arrested. Defense contractor magnate Cornelius Behan and a woman murdered by shots fired from the home next door. Rhodes being held. . .

“My God,” Annabelle said to herself.

Over the PA came, “Last call for flight 3457 nonstop to Honolulu. Last call for passengers on flight 3457 nonstop to Honolulu.”

Annabelle looked at the departure gate for her plane. They were about to close the door. She turned to look back at the screen. Shots from the house next door? Behan dead. Reuben arrested. What the hell was going on? She had to find out.

Then her thoughts just as suddenly swung the other way.
This is not your concern, Annabelle. You need to go. Jerry Bagger is coming for you. Let the old guys handle it. There was no way Reuben could have murdered Behan, but they’ll figure it out. And if they don’t, it’s not your problem. It’s not.

Still, she stood there frozen. Never before had she been so indecisive.

“Last call, door’s closing for flight 3457.”

She whispered desperately, “Go, Annabelle, damn it, just go. You don’t need this. It’s not your fight. You don’t owe these people anything. You don’t owe Jonathan anything.”

She watched as the door to her flight from Jerry Bagger slammed shut and the ticket-taker marched off to another gate. She watched ten minutes later as the Boeing 777 pulled away from the gate. As it soared into the sky right on schedule, Annabelle was booking another flight north taking her squarely within the vicinity of Jerry Bagger and his wood chipper. And she didn’t even know why. Yet somewhere in her soul maybe she did.

Albert Trent was finishing up some things at his office at home. He’d gotten a late start after a long night of work and decided to catch up on some things before he drove in. The tasks were all related to his position as the senior staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. It was one he’d held for years now, and he was well grounded in nearly all aspects of the intelligence business, at least the part the agencies shared with their congressional overseers. He smoothed his few strands of hair down, finished his coffee and cheese Danish, packed his briefcase and a few minutes later pulled down the street in his Honda two-door. Five years from now he would be driving something much nicer in, say, Argentina, or he’d heard the South Pacific was truly paradise.

His secret account now contained millions. He should be able to double that in the next half-decade. The secrets Roger Seagraves was selling were at the very top end of the payment scale. It wasn’t like the Cold War where you dropped a package off and picked up twenty thousand bucks in return. The people Seagraves was dealing with operated only in the seven-figure range, but they expected a lot for their money. Trent had never questioned Seagraves either about his sources or the people he was selling to. The man would never have revealed anything, and, in fact, Trent didn’t want to know. His sole but critical piece of the equation was getting the information Seagraves passed to him to the next leg of the journey. His method for doing so was unique and probably foolproof. Indeed, it was the main reason the American intelligence community was currently in shambles.

There were many energetic and skilled counterintelligence agents out in the field trying to ferret out how the secrets were being stolen and then communicated to the enemy. In his official capacity Trent had been privy to some of these investigative efforts. The agents talking to him had no reason to suspect that a mere staffer with a bad hairdo who drove an eight-year-old Honda and lived in a crummy house and labored under the same bills and limited income every other civil servant had was part of a sophisticated espionage crew that was decimating American intelligence efforts.

The authorities had to know by now that the source was deeply buried inside, but with fifteen major intelligence agencies eating up 50 billion in budget dollars a year spread over 120,000 employees, the haystacks were enormous and the needles beyond microscopic. And Roger Seagraves, Trent had found, was chillingly efficient and never missed any of the details, however small and seemingly trivial.

Trent had tried to find out some background on him when they first started talking, yet could discover exactly zero on the man. To an experienced intelligence staffer like Trent, he knew this meant Seagraves had had an entirely covert past professional life. That made him a man you would never want to cross. And Trent never intended to. He would much rather die old and rich far away from this place.

As he puttered along in his dented Honda, he imagined how that new life would look. It would be very different, that was for certain. However, he never dwelled on how many lives had been lost because of his greed. Traitors seldom had such pangs of conscience.

Stone had just returned from his visit with Marilyn Behan when someone knocked on his cottage door.

“Hello, Oliver,” Annabelle said as he peered out.

He exhibited no surprise at her reappearance, but simply motioned her inside. They sat in front of the fireplace in two rickety chairs.

“How was your trip?” he asked pleasantly.

“Come off it, I didn’t go.”

“Really?”

“Have you told the others I left?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew you’d be back.”

She said angrily, “Okay, that really pisses me off. You don’t
know
me.”

“Obviously, I do, because here you are.”

She stared at him, shaking her head. “You have got to be the most unusual cemetery worker I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve met many, have you?”

“I heard what happened to Reuben.”

“The police are wrong, of course, but they just don’t know it yet.”

“We have to get him out of jail.”

“We’re working on that and Reuben’s doing fine. I don’t think many people will give him trouble in there. I’ve seen him take out five men in a bar fight. In addition to his great physical strength, he is one of the most ruthless and dirtiest fighters I’ve ever seen. I greatly admire that in a person.”

“But somebody got the drop on him at Jonathan’s?”

“Yes, someone did.”

“Why do it? Why kill Behan?”

“Because he found out how Jonathan died. That was enough reason.” Stone explained his conversation with Marilyn Behan.

“So they take out Behan and blame it on Reuben because he was ever so conveniently there?”

“They probably saw him coming and going from the house, figured the attic would be a good shot line, and they executed upon that plan. They may have ascertained that Behan brought women by and that they always spent time in that room.”

“Pretty tough competition we’re up against. So what do we do now?”

“For starters we need to see the tapes of the reading room vault.”

“On the way back I actually thought of how to do that.”

“I had no doubt you would.” He paused. “I don’t think we could have finished this without you. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“Don’t flatter me too much. We’re still not there yet.”

The pair sat in silence for a few moments.

Annabelle gazed out the window. “You know it
is
peaceful here.”

“With dead people? I’m starting to find it very depressing.”

She smiled and rose. “I’ll call Caleb about my idea.”

Stone stood too, stretching out his lean, six-foot-two frame. “I’m afraid I’ve reached the age where simply cutting the grass does awful things to my joints.”

“Take some Advil. I’ll give you a call later, once I’m settled back in.”

As she passed Stone on the way out, he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re back.”

If she heard him, Annabelle didn’t react. He watched the lady climb into her car and drive off.