Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) (7 page)

“Nice neighborhood,” the cabbie said as we drove through. “I had a buddy used to do yard work for one of these families. The guy shorted him for twenty hours of labor, on account of the fact that he used the wrong kind of fertilizer. Ain’t that messed up?”

“Sure is,” I said.

“You try to do right, and the world shits on you anyway. My wife says it all evens out in the end, but I don’t buy it. I’m always telling her you can’t get justice in this world. Maybe in the next, eh buddy?”

“Maybe so.”

I had the cabbie drop me off a few streets over from my destination, just in case. Told him I was meeting a friend. The cabbie didn’t care, he just wanted to get paid. I saw him press a button on the meter at the last second to kick up the fare a few bucks. Maybe he figured he could squeeze it out of me, given the neighborhood. No justice, indeed.

I walked the streets of Monticello Estates with my jacket collar up and my cap pulled low. Neighborhoods like this usually had private security firms patrolling. If one of them saw me, might be game over. But there were no people out walking or cars driving around now, nighttime in December in the cold.

“Pay no attention to me, good people of Monticello Estates,” I said to no one in particular. “Please go back to your private theater viewing rooms, drinking your fine barrel-aged bourbons and leveraging your liquid assets to plot your next corporate takeover. I won’t stop you.”

Edgar Hartford’s house was a massive stone thing with white columns out front and a tall wrought iron gate surrounding the property. I half-expected the fence to be electrified or to have security cameras every few feet, but I didn’t find any evidence of either thing. I walked half the fence to be sure, staying on the street and trying my best to casually toss my head to steal glances.

At the corner of the property, the fence ended in a stone pillar with certain stones jutting out at odd angles, which looked like perfect hand and foot holds.

I cast one last look around, and still didn’t see anyone else out in the dimly-lit night. People in Dallas don’t walk, anyway. Most of the streets don’t have sidewalks for them to use.

“This is it, Candle. You’re committing yourself now. No turning back after this.”

I swallowed hard and ascended the pillar. When I dropped to the other side, I now realized I was trespassing, for the second time in two days. Breaking the law. Considering all of the other things I’d done in the last month, this wasn’t nearly as bad as some. I’d killed people. Maybe in self-defense, but that didn’t make it any less troubling, at least to me.

Thick grass shuffled under my feet, surprisingly green for December. I remembered fields of yellow in the winter months when I was younger.

I crossed to the side, keeping my distance and staying low. I circled for five minutes, searching for a crawlspace entrance. Didn’t find anything. And no easy way to scale the house to find any attic window to open.

That had been a terrible idea. Looked like I’d have to get inside the regular way.

It took me a full minute of walking back through a row of garden hedges to get close enough to locate the front entrance. A massive door at the front of the house was lit by floodlights, so that was a no go. Besides, this late at night, it would be locked, anyway.

No cars in the circular driveway in front of the house. They would be stashed away in the garage. A few lights in the house were on, and I sat in the grass for ten minutes, waiting to see if they would change. Nothing happened.

“So, either no one is home, or they are home, and they’re staying in one room. Time to keep looking and come up with a new brilliant plan.”

Near the back of the house, a sliding glass door led into a sunroom. If anything were going to be unlocked, that would be it.

Checked the time on my phone. 8 pm. Now, I just had to figure out what I would do when I opened it.

***

About twenty minutes later, I decided I’d waited long enough. A few lights in the house had shifted off and on, so there were definitely people home. I figured that if the house had an alarm—which it probably did—I was more likely to get in before it was set if there were still lights on. If they even left the alarm off during non-bedtime hours.

Way too many guesses. Assumptions would get me caught, but they were the best I could do.

I wished I’d had the luxury to wait and attempt this at a better time, maybe with some help. But with Thomason’s warning that he was going to
rain hellfire
down, I needed to hurry. I’d already wasted seventy-two hours tooling around Denver, harassing Alison, assaulting security guards, getting fake IDs. Thomason hadn’t given me a firm deadline, but he’d left the impression that time was of the essence.

I couldn’t leave Dallas empty-handed.

“Okay, Candle,” I whispered to a newly-planted tree, “just remember why you’re here. This is for Grace and little Candle, because of the raining of the hellfire and all that.”

As I crossed a grassy backyard section full of hedge animals made to look like elephants, a tennis court, a basketball court, and Koi ponds, I thought back to the conversation with Thomason on the plane. When I asked him why IntelliCraft hadn’t killed me already. They’d so freely killed many others around me, but aside from some bumps and bruises, hadn’t seriously harmed me.

Outside that shack near the Rio Grande, Glenning had threatened to kill me slowly, but would he have actually gone through with it? Somehow, I doubted it. Wyatt Green and Darren had implied they were going to kill me, but I don’t think they would have, either. I think they wanted to scare me.

Why had I been spared? Why was I so important, or lucky, or blessed by the gods? Or was I simply misreading the whole situation, and they hadn’t had the opportunity to kill me yet?

When I finally reached the patio, a motion sensor clicked on, casting light in a wide swath around me. I jumped to the left, out of the path of the beam.

While I panted, I took the latex gloves out of my back pocket and slipped them on. When my pulse had slowed enough that I was a few shades below heart attack level, I crossed the patio and tried the sliding glass door. Just as I’d hoped, it was unlocked. Crept inside a sunroom filled with patio furniture and more than a dozen hanging plants. The humidity in this room brought an immediate sheen of sweat to my exposed skin. As I slinked along in a crouch, tentacles of hanging plants brushed against my shoulders and head. All this foliage reminded me of the jungly area by the pond where Omar and I had met the coyote.

Where Omar had died and floated down the Rio Grande like a piece of driftwood.

I closed my eyes to focus as I crawled on my hands and knees to the door that would lead into the house. The tiles felt good on my hands, probably warmed by some expensive under-the-floor heating system.

I don’t know why I despised the affluent so much.

I inched my head up until I could see inside. Through the glass panels in the door, I spied a kitchen, with some running lights above the cabinets, casting the room in a dim amber glow. I pressed my ear against the glass and listened. Couldn’t hear anything.

I reached up and gripped the knob. It twisted in my hand.

I let go, realizing that if I turned that knob and was wrong about my alarm guess, the whole mission would end right there. I’d have to run for the fence as a blaring siren pounded in my ears. Or, even worse, Edgar could have a silent alarm on the house.

But what choice did I have? I was here. I was committed.

“Okay, Candle,” I whispered. “Time to man up and do this. Pick your balls up off the floor and get inside.”

I twisted the knob, opened the door, and nothing happened. Just the hum of the fridge broke the silence of the room. My eyes flicked all around the kitchen, looking for blinking lights or the sound of any subtle beeping. Nothing.

I checked the time on the phone. Gave myself five minutes to allow for the cops to show up if I’d just triggered a silent alarm.

Taking a breath to steady my nerves, I slipped into the kitchen, full of shimmering granite and stainless steel appliances. Not a single thing out of place. Like Kareem’s house in Boulder, except much larger.

From the kitchen, I could go two ways. A dining room to my left and a swinging door straight ahead led to something else.

I crept forward to the swinging door and closed one eye to spy through the crack along the doorjamb. I saw a woman, sitting in a leather chair, who looked about half Edgar’s age. Daughter, maybe, or trophy wife. Tablet computer in one hand, glass of wine in the other. She was wearing a pair of fleece pants and a Michigan State sweatshirt.

In a few seconds, the sound of footsteps thumped down some nearby stairs.

The woman turned her head toward the sound. “Everything okay?”

Edgar sat at a second leather chair, letting out a prolonged grunt as he sank into it. “Yes, he’s fine. He just needed his binky, and I rocked him a little bit. The doctor says we should stop swaddling him. He’s old enough.”

“Maybe so,” she said, “but let’s hold off on that for a few days. I can’t be up half the night right now. I need my sleep before I go on my trip.”

“Of course, dear,” Edgar said. “We’ll try it your way, for now.”

So, trophy wife.

“Did you set the alarm?” the woman said.

Bolt of panic. Getting inside without triggering any loud blaring sound had given me the foolish hope that I had beaten the alarm problem. Hadn’t bothered to solve the problem of getting out yet.

Stupid, so stupid.

“I forgot,” Edgar said. He stood and walked out of my field of view. I heard the sound of a few beeps, and as Edgar sat back in the chair, the door I’d come in from clicked.

I was trapped in the house.

CHAPTER NINE

I could have berated myself for not properly planning for the alarm, but what was I to do? I hadn’t thought any of this through. Doing anything different would be out of character for Tucker Candle.

The fact that the doors—and probably windows—were all now set to trigger an alarm if opened didn’t change what I was here to do. I’d have to find the evidence I came for, and then deal with the alarm when it was time to go.

With Edgar and his wife—or girlfriend, or baby mama—sitting in their reading chairs in the next room, I diverted through the kitchen and into the adjacent dining room, which was out of sight of the two of them.

The walls of the dining room were covered in a collection of Persian rugs. An odd decorating choice for North Texas, but I assumed Edgar had money to burn. Then, a memory flicked by: standing in Wyatt Green’s IntelliCraft office a month ago, noticing he had the same kind of rug mounted to his wall. I’d thought it weird then. The patterns seemed to match. Maybe Edgar had given Wyatt that one rug as a gift.

An open archway at the near end of the dining room led to the main hall, which I had to assume would be visible from the living room where they were sitting.

But another, smaller arch at the far end of the dining room led away from them, so I clung to the wall as I eased down this hallway. Along one wall, cutouts for shelves were decorated with a series of vases, complete with little cards in front of them, like a museum. How rich was this guy?

I listened for the sound of their conversations as they discussed how best to get the baby to “self-soothe,” and kept pushing down the hallway, one slow step at a time. Bathroom on the right. After that, a laundry room. A basket just inside the door contained a mass of baby clothes.

Thought about Grace, stuck up there in Keystone, probably feeling our child kicking against her insides right now, shifting and making her have to pee. Soon enough, we’d be having those conversations about self-soothing and binkies and swaddling.

We would if I found a way to finish what I’d started tonight. Otherwise, neither of us might live to see the birth of our son.

I ducked into the laundry room to collect myself. Unlike the IntelliCraft building in Denver, I didn’t expect to find a server room with a bundle of cables I could climb like Indiana Jones to enter a secret vault. I only found a washer and dryer and cabinets full of toilet paper and cleaning products.

But there had to be a second staircase somewhere. “Come on, house,” I whispered, “help me out here. Show me something.”

I went back out into the darkness and crept further along the hallway, which ended at a door. Opened it. On the other side was a spacious room lined with mirrors all the way around. Exercise equipment spaced out across a foam mat floor. The size of this room was bigger than the entire square footage of the dojo where I practiced judo.

And, in the back of the room, a set of stairs, lit by a single nightlight plugged into an outlet.

Jackpot.

I hustled across the room, foam squishing under my shoes. The stairs led both up and down, and my first impulse sent me up. To where Edgar’s office would probably be, on the second floor.

At the top of the stairs, I turned left down a long hallway with plush carpet underfoot. Stopped at a plaque honoring Edgar with twenty years of employment with some Californian company I’d never heard of. The end date was only about five years ago. Interesting, because this meant he hadn’t been with IntelliCraft for long.

At the first door I passed, the tinkling of mechanized lullabies floated out. I peered inside at a crib and the projected image of stars dancing across the ceiling, rotating the same constellations in a sequence. The baby fussed, on the verge of tears. I needed to get away from this room.

To the next door and peeked inside. Looked like a guest bedroom, with pristine furnishings and a bed with perfectly folded sheets.

Behind me, the baby started screaming.

I ducked into the guest bedroom and pushed myself up next to the door, taking long and slow breaths to keep calm. And for some reason, the thought occurred to me that I hadn’t silenced my cell phone before coming in here. I slipped my hand into my pocket.