A Killing Sky (14 page)

The moon hung full in the sky as Toronto and I made our way on Barracks Road out of the city and into Ivy horse country. We passed miles of white board fencing, gates, and side roads, backed by fields and outbuildings and substantial houses, all of which appeared to glow with an almost unearthly pallor. The ghostly hulks of the Blue Ridge, visible off and on at various twists and turns of the road, loomed like sleeping guardians.

“I don't like going in without a layout,” Toronto said.

“Me either. This is kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“You said there's security?”

“There was, last time I was there. Although I'm not sure they'll be so beefed up when neither the congressman nor any of his family is at home. I'm hoping for just a caretaker or something.”

“Long as he's not a caretaker with a shotgun.”

We turned onto a long dirt road that followed the banks of the rock-strewn Mechums River in a wide arc back toward the way we had come. It was not the way I had approached the Drummond house before. Soon the dirt turned to pavement again, and we rolled along in the darkness, our headlights blazing a path. When I noticed a familiar landmark up ahead, the distant hillside from which Nicole and I had observed the house, I cut the lights and pulled the truck off onto a grassy shoulder.

“How far?” Toronto asked.

“I'd say about half a mile, across this field. It looks like there are woods on the other side. We'll have to get through there, then, if I remember correctly, work our way across another field to approach the house.”

“Great… just great.” He was slipping out of his sneakers into black combat boots that rode high up on the legs of his fatigues. “That way they can get a clear shot at us.”

“All the money I'm paying you and you're still being a pessimist?”

“Right, baby. Go ahead and subtract some from my outrageously humongous bill.” He shot me a funny look.

“Now what?” I said.

“Didn't you ever bust in anywhere when you was a kid?”

“I must've been away at a cub scout convention that week.”

“Uh-huh. Well, in my neighborhood,
we were
the cub scouts.”

I didn't have an answer for that, so I said nothing. I made sure my .357 was loaded and slid it into the shoulder holster under my coat. Toronto wore his .44 on his waist and also carried a little sawed-off number that looked like a cross between an Uzi and a Gatling gun.

“What's the current mandatory sentence for armed robbery in Virginia?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Guess I'll have to study up on that.”

“How about an alarm system? Did you see one when you were in there before?”

I nodded. “But it didn't look too complicated. Probably a walk in the park for you.”

“We'll see.” He slipped on a pair of black gloves with cut-out fingers.

Toronto had told me stories of when he was young, running with what we now would call a gang, knocking over houses in Yorktown Heights just for kicks. Sometimes they would lift a television or a stereo; sometimes nothing at all. Of course, all this was before a stint as an Army Ranger rehabilitated the young man's ways. I doubt Yorktown Heights was a part of his history that made it into his application to join the police academy.

“Let's go,” I said.

We walked through the trees nearest the truck and squeezed through a rusty barbed-wire fence. Before us lay the newly plowed field. The darkened soil, with the turning, still emitted a faint acidic breath of loam. We made our way awkwardly across the furrows, Toronto dragging a bushy branch behind us to erase our tracks.

On the far side we entered woods again. Here the trees were smaller, mostly pitch pine in rocky soil, but the bed of needles cushioned our step. After five minutes of descending a gradual slope, I caught my first glimpse of the brown grass of the field and the driveway and the house rising above. The main gate to the compound, which had been wide open a couple of days before, was closed and chain-locked, which, along with the relatively rural location, must've discouraged enough to keep them away. There were no lights on that we could see, inside the house or any of the out-buildings either, but bright floods lit a good deal of the property. We came to the edge of the woods.

“What do you think?” Toronto whispered.

“I think we need to get closer,” I whispered back.

Our best approach appeared to be back up along the slope to our left, where a triangular section of pines jutted into the field and came within fifty yards or so of the back of the house. Five minutes later we reached that point in the woods and lay on our stomachs side by side beneath a thicket. Toronto produced a small pair of binoculars from somewhere, and we took turns sweeping the entire property for any signs of life. There were none. A few early-spring crickets had begun to chirp near the pond, but otherwise the place might as well have been locked up for the season. No cars in the driveway—we would check the garage before making our entrance, though. No dogs or cats or animals of any kind. No outdoor implements or other tools left standing.

Toronto looked at me and I nodded.

He produced a small handgun from somewhere else that was actually a pellet pistol with a customized silencer. There was a short
zip
like the sound of air releasing from a tire, followed quickly by the sound of glass and bulb breaking, and then another. The back of the house and the field we needed to cross went dark except for the moon.

We waited some more. No sound came from the buildings. No movement, no other lights being turned on in alarm. I looked at Toronto and shrugged. He lifted his eyebrows in a bemused expression.

We both turned and stared at the house a little longer. Still nothing.

Without looking, I tapped him on the shoulder, crawled from beneath the bushes, and entered the field. I focused solely on the house, but I could hear Toronto's breathing beside and just behind me. The approach from this side of the main structure was relatively unencumbered by shrubs or ornamental plantings. We had to negotiate a drainage ditch and a low, easily hurdled stone wall, but that was it.

We made a quick sweep of the driveway to check for vehicles. The garage doors were solid, but there was a large window on one side of the building. A quick beam from one of our flashlights revealed the same Chevy Suburban I'd seen Drummond's security goons driving, but whether that meant the two were still camped out on the property or had merely left the vehicle there was impossible to tell. Since they'd locked it up inside and it was clearly a working car and not a family one, I held out hope for the latter.

We moved across the patio to the French doors leading into the kitchen. The floodlights aimed toward the far side of the house bathed the patio in a faint reflective glow. We both switched to latex rubber gloves, and I stood lookout while Toronto checked out the security system. Then he pulled a jackknife and some other type of tool out of a pocket. He ran something along the edge of the door and leaned on the lock. There was a soft pop. He motioned me over and within five seconds we were in.

Silence. The kitchen was still as a tomb. From what I could tell, when my eyes adjusted to the near darkness, it was also spotless. Probably the result of a cleaning service. Toronto found the control panel for the security system next to the door. I moved over to the coffeemaker and used my penlight to check out the contents. It too was spotless—and empty. Jake swept his little beam across the stove, even looked into the garbage. We looked at one another and nodded. Nobody home.

I motioned for Jake to follow me toward the front of the house. Cassidy Drummond had indicated that her father's office was connected to a landing on the main staircase. We passed down a hall floored with inlaid bricks and cedar crossbeams, turned left and made our way across a sunken family room, up a couple of steps to a foyer next to the front door, and there found the stairs, an open flight of treads minus risers with a handrail and banisters to one side. The landing stood only a few steps above the main floor, and the double doors to Drummond's office were held shut by a simple tubular lock that took Toronto all of three or four seconds to open.

Congressman Drummond's home office was nowhere near as large as his office in town or probably, for that matter, the one in Washington, either. Still, the room was elegantly appointed, with built-in bookshelves coated in black lacquer, thick carpet, heavy drapes, an oversized computer monitor, laid out with keyboard on a workstation custom-built into a corner of the room facing one of the windows. We shut the door behind us, pulled the drapes closed, and flipped on our beams.

“Okay,” I said in a low voice, “I'll take the room while you go through the computer.”

“Ever-ready E-file snooper at your service.” Toronto smiled, made a show of flexing his shoulders and cracking his knuckles, sat down, and brought the big screen to life.

I started with the congressman's desk. It too was locked, but without even looking away from his screen Toronto produced for me a little tool that looked like a cross between a corkscrew and tweezers. After a minute or so of poking, twisting, prying, and prodding, I managed to open the desk.

“Tsk, tsk … “ Toronto scolded, typing on the keyboard and clicking the mouse, his eyes never leaving the computer. “You scratched the wood.”

I went through all the drawers. Drummond seemed to be obsessively tidy: paper, pens, other paraphernalia were all neatly organized. There were a few travel brochures touting luxury hotels on St. Croix—maybe the congressman was planning another trip—but all else seemed to be mundane stuff. The deepest desk drawer contained a metal frame from which hung several boldly labeled file folders. There was one for bills, one for insurance and investments. Drummond had recently spent more than ten thousand dollars for a painting and some vintage bottles of wine at a celebrity charity auction. His credit card bills showed several restaurant charges and purchases from catalog retailers. He also seemed to fuel his vehicles, or have them fueled, at one of the same stations I frequented. His bond and mutual fund portfolio was impressive, if only because the current total of the accounts listed stood at more than three million dollars. The last file in the drawer was marked
CORRESPONDENCE-PERSONAL FILES.

“Find anything?” I asked.

“Nope. Dude doesn't seem to use his computer much. Doesn't even use word processing.”

“Probably old school, not like us progressives.”

He grunted.

“How about his personal E-mail? Can you get online and check his screen name?”

“Not without time. Got a new program that'll maybe sniff out the password, but with this clunker of a CPU, it might take four, five hours. I can write down the E-mail addresses he uses, and maybe Nicky and I can hack into them back at your office. What're you holding there?”

I had pulled the last file from the desk drawer. It was pretty thick.

“Apparently Drummond likes to handwrite his personal letters. How about you take one stack and I'll take another?”

I sat in Drummond's desk chair while Toronto spread his pile out on the floor. I read through two letters Drummond had received from his daughters while they were in Japan. The letters contained little news, were almost cryptic in fact. Either they communicated with their father only out of obligation or they gave the details of their lives overseas by E-mail or phone calls. The main excuse for even sending the letters at all appeared to be photos the girls had taken of some sites in Tokyo.

“Gotcha,” Toronto suddenly said.

I looked up from reading. “You have something?”

“Maybe. Didn't you say the woman who ran that foundation was named Roberta Joseph?”

“Yes.”

“Got a note here from her to Drummond, along with copies of some checks. The note and the dates on the checks are from last year.”

“Let's see them.”

He brought them over and we spread them out on the desk.

The note was hard to decipher.

Dear Tor,

     
Did you make an error on these checks? Shouldn't those for
A
and
P
be less than the
checks for the general fund? I assume you may have been in a hurry and just transposed the numbers. Unless you're changing the arrangement. I'm holding on to them until I hear. Just let me know what you want to do. I can deposit them in the accounts, if you want, transfer the money, and we can make the adjustments next month.

Roberta

There were photocopies of seven different checks on two pages, four on one, three on the other. All were in Drummond's handwriting and from his personal account, all made out to Second Millennium Foundation. On five of the checks, the words
GENERAL FUND
appeared on the notation line. The other two had letters handwritten on the same line, a different one for each check:
A
and
P.
Most interesting of all, however, in the top corner of one of the sheets, the one with the three checks, including those bearing the letters, Drummond, or someone else, had printed a word in dark pencil on the copy:
PAITLEY.

“What do you make of it?” Toronto said.

“Looks like our Ms. Joseph's managing several different accounts. And one or more of them have something to do with some dead people.”

He lined up the copies. “You think we should take them?”

“We'd be contaminating potential evidence.”

“Right, like we haven't already done that.”

I pointed toward the corner where Toronto had been working. “There's a fax machine over there. Looks like it's turned on. Let's see if it has a copy function.”

We had just finished copying the last of the checks when Toronto cocked his head. “Hold on a minute. Listen …”

I heard nothing.

“Did you hear that?”

“No, I—” But now the sound became much more distinct—the low murmur of an engine and the sound of tires on stone. A car was coming up the driveway.