6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6 (18 page)

Chapter Thirty-seven

Shortly after his marriage to Mary Miller, Blake Fisher switched his days off from Mondays to Fridays. Since his bride had an office job, he figured she would more than likely have her long weekends starting on Fridays than ending on Mondays except, of course, for Labor Day and so he made the switch. It was a change that not all his congregation approved. The sense of it was patently apparent, but change, even something as simple as a day off, is a challenge in a church that measures its time in millennia and this particular parish in centuries, or so it seemed.

He’d also moved out of the rectory, the manse supplied by the church for its rector’s residence, to Mary’s little house in Chesterfield. A much more obvious change, and also not one well received. A resident clergyman provided a measure of security. An empty house was asking for trouble. And now he could ask for a housing allowance, which was not something the church’s budget could swing. So now the empty rectory which stood across the parking lot from the back of the church and which had a view of the office door, failed to provide any measure of security whatsoever. No one was in sight of the church, as he would have been before the move. Added to that, Gloria, the church’s secretary, had a dental appointment with her son, T.J., and had taken the day off as well.

Because he was home Friday and the office was closed, it would be sometime Saturday afternoon before anyone realized that the church had been broken into and another hour later, that his office had been, too. The altar guild ladies, led by Dorothy Sutherlin, had come to set the altar for Sunday and Dorothy, mother of two of Ike’s deputies, had made the calls—to Blake and the sheriff’s office.

Apparently nothing would be missing except one of his newly installed icons.

***

“I checked, Mr. Garland, like you said. The techs didn’t think your friend in Virginia got anything from our database, but there’s a slim possibility we may have missed something.”

Charlie Garland did not like working Saturdays, or weekends in general for that matter. You’d think after a quarter of a century in the business someone would cut him some slack. He also did not like the idea that Ike’s people were skating on thin ice—his thin ice. And he worried that Ike would become entangled in this business and that could create problems. Ike was stubborn and Charlie didn’t need any more problems. It was bad enough for intelligence to be leaking from the inside. He didn’t need Ike and his friends prying it loose from the outside. This news from the security people didn’t sit well.

“Explain to me what
we
might have missed.”

“Well, you know we opened red.ryder’s, that’s Samantha Ryder’s cyber name, opened her hard drives. We scanned her computer and deleted all the files she’d downloaded. Then we looked to see if possibly she had made copies.”

“I thought you said she hadn’t.”

“We thought that, yes, but you asked us to recheck and we, that is, I did, and there’s a problem.” Charlie waited. “See, to find out if she’d copied anything, we had to search her hard drives. Nothing there, we’d purged them once already. Then we inspected her server and logger. Every action the computer does is logged in, and so if a flash drive is plugged in, it will note that and what happened to it.”

“So you found she copied files to a removable storage device.”

“No. No evidence of that at all.”

“You lost me.”

“See…” Charlie didn’t
see
. They were speaking on the phone, for crying out loud, how could he possibly see anything? The guy must think they were on Skype.

“Everything a computer does is noted on the server’s logger unless it’s disabled. We think it was and the only reason for her to do that is to hide an action on her part.”

“You know the logger was disabled?”

“Yes. See,” There was that word again. “According to the log, she never shut down the computer, but there’s a gap, a time lapse in the log we can’t account for, you could say. And the next thing in the log is a boot up. She might have thought if she disabled the logger, copied files and then rebooted, we’d miss it.”

“But you didn’t?”

“We don’t think so. We’ve reported it upstairs. The section chief wants to send people down there and take her into custody. You see?”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

Charlie called “upstairs” and talked to the director’s right hand.
Talk to the hand.
“Jack, I need a favor.…No, it’s important…Can’t say…Yes, it’s about the chip. I hear you’re going to send the goon squad down to Picketsville and hassle a hacker. Can you give me a few days on that, okay?…Thanks.”

Charlie hung up. What was Ike thinking? He needed to talk to him right away. All that blather about never, ever, wanting to be involved with the agency again and now this. He tried Ike’s cell phone but could only raise his voice mail.

“Ike, listen to me. The boys up here are spiffed with Samantha Ryder’s tinkering. They’re about to send a gang down there and charge her. I know you and know you’re mulish enough to put yourself in the middle. Don’t do it. Have Samantha Ryder stand down, and I’ll try to fix things at this end. If she doesn’t, she…no, both of you, will be in the market for a bail bondsman and an attorney. You must call me, Ike, I mean it. You have twenty-four hours before the dogs are turned loose.”

He hung up and drummed his fingers on the worn desk. Another five years and it would be a collectable, like him.

***

Because Ike had promised Ruth he wouldn’t work during the weekend, he’d turned off his cell phone the night before. He’d said he would need to call in from time to time. Ruth said not until after ten. He’d canceled his land line when the reception for his cell became strong enough to use in the mountains. But Ike couldn’t wait. Even though Frank was perfectly capable of handling things in his absence, being out of contact with the office made Ike itchy.

Ruth was in the shower, the water was on full blast, and she was making noises she claimed were singing. The first time he’d heard her do that, he went for his first-aid kit. He listened, gauged the probable extent of the as yet unfinished shower—the singing would sound different, worse in fact, when she washed her hair, but working against that—he hadn’t gotten around to buying a larger volume hot water tank. He looked at his watch and calculated he had ten minutes, no more. He switched on the phone.

Charlie’s message created a deep line between his brows. What to do? He called Sam in Washington and told his very sleepy deputy that she was under no circumstances to return to duty, to Picketsville, even. She was to stay in the city, incognito, and out of sight until she heard from him.

Sam started to argue, but Ike rang off.

He had the phone turned off and back on the chest of drawers when Ruth, wrapped loosely in a towel and wearing her new deputy’s hat, stepped out of a cloud of steam and into the room.

“Just so you know, we’re out of hot water and you still owe me a badge.”

“I’ll shower later. I gave you a badge.”

“A cast metal badge saying, ‘Honorary Deputy Sheriff, Mayberry, RFD,’ and ‘Made in Taiwan’ on the back, won’t play. I want a real one.” She sailed the hat onto the bed and wrapped the towel on her still dripping hair.

“Where would I pin it?” Ike said, admiring the view.

“Be creative. Won’t Opie be missing his tin star?”

“He’s gone on to bigger and better things. I could try two-faced tape.”

“No problem too great or too small for our intrepid sheriff. Where’d you get that badge anyway?”

“As I recall, it was a Chanukah gift from Aunt Dolly when I was nine or ten. It’s an antique.”

“A collectable. I’ll cherish it, but you still owe me a real one. What’s for breakfast?”

***

“We have the picture,” the shorter of the two, the one calling himself Wentz, said. He handed the icon to his control who took it and inspected the surface. Something was not right. He could swear he smelled fresh varnish. He stroked its surface. It was flat. There was no microchip on it. Never had been.

“Where did you find this?”

“It was in the church. He must have sold it to the priest person.”

“This is not the right icon, you idiots.”

“It is the one in the picture.”

“It is not. The one you were sent for is old. Look at this. It’s as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Even the varnish is recently applied. You have the wrong one.” He threw the icon across the room. It skittered across the carpeting and came to rest next to the motel’s trash can.

“Go back to that man’s house and this time don’t bring me a copy, get me the right one.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

At 10:15, Ike called his office. Frank had nothing to report. Dakis’ house had not been invaded as of 11:30, and it seemed unlikely it would be any time soon. Maybe that night. They’d had two college students in the tank for extreme DUI. They’d been arrested for driving their cars in reverse through the mobile home park and raising hell in general.

“Oh, and they had a cell phone that didn’t belong to either of them. We checked it out, and it was the one that belonged to Sacci, it seems.”

“Where did they say they’d found the phone?”

“In the trash bin a block from the urgent care center. No surprise there. They got pretty shirty with me when I asked them if it wouldn’t have been appropriate for them to turn it in. They’d been using it to send obscene texts to people they didn’t like and some faculty members. I guess they figured the messages couldn’t be traced to them. Anyway, we locked them up and gave them a lecture about responsibility, which went over their heads until I told them it was involved in a murder investigation and because it was found in their possession they would be considered suspects—accomplices at least. They sobered up a bit after that.”

“So what happened this morning?”

“Like I said we kept them overnight to let them dry out and were about to turn them loose this morning when Essie came in. She’d forgotten her romance novel or something. Anyway, she got on her high horse and made those kids write a ‘to whom it may concern’ letter of apology to the manager and residents of the mobile home park. It was awesome.”

“Better report them to the injured parties who received the text messages as well. So Essie did that. You know, for someone who used to be the life of the party, she sure has come around about one-eighty.”

“She’s still the life of the party, Ike, but a different party. Also, the lab reports are in from the crime scene at the motel. It will be a month or so before DNA tests can be run. Do you want them?”

“I don’t know, Frank. They cost a bundle to run, and our budget is slim as it is. We’ll hold on that for a while. I’m hoping we won’t need them.”

No money would change hands but the lab charged the sheriff’s office for work done, and interagency exchanges maintained a paper trail the county needed to keep everyone accountable.

“What did the medical examiner have to say?”

“That’s interesting. The evidence technicians at first thought the motel room had been wiped, because they didn’t find much in the way of blood. Figured the little trace they did find meant they’d cleaned. But the towels found in the dumpster were nearly clean as well.”

“So, this relates to the ME how, exactly?”

“As we figured, the gun was a small caliber weapon, a .25 caliber to be exact. The ME thinks the guy was shot by accident.”

“Accident? How does that work?”

“Can’t say as to the how, but you remember me telling you about the ME’s guess as to the cause of death? Anyway, it’s established that Sacci took a single shot on the left side of the chest. The bullet collapsed his lung. That shouldn’t have been fatal, but the ME confirmed the slug hit a rib and ricocheted and punched a small hole in Sacci’s descending aorta. The guy bled out in his lung cavity with hardly any external bleeding. The ME speculates he died slowly enough for the people who shot him to think maybe he could make it if he got medical attention. I guess they figured that he wouldn’t dare to rat them out, considering what they were up to.”

“And they couldn’t very well sign him in to a hospital themselves, so they dumped him in the clinic and hoped.”

“Looks like. I reckon that gives you reckless homicide or a manslaughter charge at best.”

“If we catch them, I’ll push for man two at least. They had a gun, probably not registered, and were in the act of committing a felony.”

“You don’t know that, Ike.”

“I may not have the evidence, Frank, but I do know it. I’ll get the evidence. Call me if anything else turns up.”

Ike studied the lighted face of his phone. Ruth, who had made an abortive attempt to sunbathe, stepped back in the room, bundled up in slacks, sweater, and down vest. She still shivered.

“Coffee, hot and a lot of it. How can it look so sunny and warm on that deck and be so cold when you get out there?”

“A better question is, whatever possessed you to walk out there in the altogether in the middle of March? This is the mountains and early spring, not July at the beach.”

“Admit it, you enjoyed the view while it lasted.”

“Okay, deputy, I admit it, I did. Now, while you warm yourself, here’s a puzzle for you. Did I tell you about the Dakises?”

Ruth shook her head, and Ike filled her in on the story, the separated couple, and the icon’s connection to both.

“Okay, what’s the puzzle?”

“Why ship this bit of information, those documents, into the country this way? For the moment, I assume that the source is Middle-Eastern terrorists or related to them in some way, but having said all that, what I need to know is with all the sophisticated electronic gadgetry available, why ship it this way?”

“I’ll need my thinking cap for this one.” She left the room and returned wearing her uniform hat. “I think better in character. Deputy Harris reports for duty. Okay, the question was why this way and not the fancier, more sophisticated, hi-tech electronic way?”

“You think the hat will help?”

“Shut up. Of course it will. Give me a second. How about this? The microchip is a response to all the stuff Sam described for you. Too much complexity for what they needed to do. All that’s necessary is to send it in on something like the icon, or say, a painting, a tea pot, or a souvenir purchased by someone who is a collector, even a tourist maybe—anything but an obvious threat, someone who is on a list or looks like a bad guy. Then, when it arrives in the States, the people who want it steal the tea pot, or whatever—the icon in this case—or buy it, or grab it. No watch list to reckon with, no TSA or customs problems to contend with. And, if screeners do find the chip thing, the carrier—innocent carrier, in fact—takes the fall. In this case, that would be Mrs. Dakis. No one can connect it or her to the sender or the receiver. So, this gigolo, who wooed and won the Dakis woman, had her be his…do you call them, mules? Whatever. And he figured once in the country he would grab the icon, ship the thing off to the bad guys, whoever they are…don’t ask me who—that’s your line of work—and skip town. Or maybe stick around. He may have figured that if this maneuver worked, he could set up her store as a permanent mail box. How’d I do?”

“Brilliant. How
did
you do that?”

“Occam’s Razor.”

“Excuse me?”

“Occam’s Razor. You know the philosophical principal.”

“Oh, you mean the rationale that posits that when you have two competing theories both of which make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better?”

“
Lex parsimoniae.
Exactly.
There are all sorts of possibilities here, I suppose, and you and Charlie and your buddies up in Langley probably buzzed yourselves into serious headaches mulling them over.”

“Perhaps, but also keep in mind H. L. Menken, who famously said, ‘For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong’. Nevertheless, you have pegged it, I think. It is, indeed, simple and very neat, and in this case, undoubtedly correct. I’ll find you a badge.”

“I solve your mystery—it’s the least you can do.”

***

Louis Dakis had returned early from the party the night before. He didn’t know anyone and felt awkward in a crowd of relative strangers, and academics at that. Also, the sheriff showed up, and he didn’t want to be caught up in a conversation with him. The icon had still been where he’d left it—in plain sight of the front door as the deputy had requested. If anyone had wanted to take it, they would only have had to open the door, take two steps in, and pick it up. They’d told him to make it easy to spot. In addition, and more to the point, Lorraine was sleeping in the guest room. It was her second night in the house, but they’d not spent any real time together. Thursday evening, she’d allowed herself to be brought here, collapsed, and immediately dropped off to sleep in the guest room, her body’s response to the stress she was under, he supposed. When he awoke Friday morning she was gone, and he’d assumed she’d returned to Washington. But no. Late Friday evening, as he was leaving for the president’s party, she’d wheeled into the driveway, said nothing, refused food, and locked herself in the guest room again.

He’d tried the guestroom door when he returned from the party. It was locked. Either she was sleeping, or, if she wasn’t, she still didn’t want company, at least not his. He had shuffled off to bed and slept as well, but badly, his ear alert to the noises of the night.

Saturday morning seemed brighter to him somehow, when he awoke. He dressed and settled in the old-fashioned kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. He found the fixings for breakfast and had toast, scrambled eggs, and bacon laid out in a serving dishes when Lorraine peered around the door jamb.

“Can I bother you for some of your coffee?” She looked bedraggled. A poet might have said forsaken, but Louis was not a poet. She looked a mess.

“I made us breakfast,” he said. She slid around the door in his old flannel bathrobe and sat across from him.

“We didn’t talk last night.”

“No, well, I had that shindig at the president’s house to go to and…well, I thought you’d want some alone time. You didn’t look like you were in a mood to talk. The door was locked when I got back.”

“We never talked. That was the problem, you know. What did I look like if not in the mood?”

Okay, forsaken. “Tired and maybe a little confused, I guess. Sad. Here, eat.” He pushed a plate toward her. She absently stirred her coffee. Her gaze remained fixed on a spot somewhere over his left shoulder.

“What happens now?”

“Now? I don’t know, Lorraine. What do you want to happen?”

She placed the spoon in the saucer and sipped her coffee. “This is a cute little house, Louis.”

“Cute? I’m not sure cute is the word I’d use. It’s nice enough. I’m comfortable here. I have a place to paint, and I have the teaching gig. It works for me.”

She hugged the robe closer. “But it’s not the same as before. The store, the trips, the excitement…”

“Excitement is greatly overrated, I think.”

“So you’re happy here?” She sipped her coffee again and made a face, whether of pleasure or dislike he could not be sure. She was always very particular about her morning coffee.

“Happy? Lorraine, sorry, but that is a silly thing to say. Happy? Everything I worked for, no, that
we
worked for, is gone. Puff of smoke…gone. No store, no business, no painting…My teaching position here ends in June. I have no contingency plans, no future and you are…Why are you still here? I thought you went home yesterday.”

“I intended to.”

“Yes, I know, but you didn’t. What changed your mind?” Did he want to know? When did enough become enough?

“I was turning onto the highway when I had a little problem.”

“A problem? Car problem? What sort of problem?”

“I had to turn around and go to that urgent care facility. That’s ironic isn’t it? I end up where the deputy told me they found Franco’s body. And there I am…same place. Who knows, maybe even sitting in the same chair.” She shuddered at the thought.

“You didn’t answer my question. What problem did you have that required a trip to a medical facility?”

She sat perfectly still, only her lower lip trembled slightly. He waited.

“It turned out to be nothing. I
was
late, that’s all. I thought…It’s…I thought I might be…” Lorraine’s voice caught and she picked up a napkin and wiped her eyes.

“You were late, but you thought you might be what? I’m not following you.”

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Wait, you thought you were late, that kind of
late
…you and Sacci were…and you’re not?”

“Does that make you happy?” She glowered at him, her fist clenched.

“Happy? Why would you think that? No. Sad, I think, for you. Lorraine, I never thought that children were that important. Well, not right away, and there was the store and…”

“If you’d only listened to me…oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter, and I don’t want to fight any more.”

“Believe it or not, neither do I. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I guess I need to work through all the things I probably need to be sorry for, but that will have to do for now.”

She blinked and refocused her eyes back to inspecting the spot on the wall behind him “Okay, I guess. What about me? What now?”

“That’s the question isn’t it? What about you? What happens next for you?”

“I don’t know, Louis. The divorce…the store, I don’t know.”

Louis wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. His world had come apart because of her and her damned now deceased boyfriend, and here she sat looking like Raggedy Ann, only with sad button eyes that pleaded for him to fix everything. To fix her. Well, he sure as hell didn’t want to, even if he knew how. She should be the one doing the fixing. Oh, hell, no, that wasn’t all there was to it. He needed some reworking as well. He couldn’t afford to be angry. But it would take a while, that was certain.

“There’s no need to rush anything. You need time to get through this. I guess we both do, you more than me. Let’s wait and see.” He refilled her cup and gave her plate another shove, the way you might a child’s to remind it to eat. She glanced at the food and nibbled on a piece of toast.

“I don’t know,” she murmured.