Hard Cold Winter (9 page)

I
N KEEPING WITH ITS
name, A. Borealis had an arctic motif. The glass ceiling of the rooftop bar was held up by sandstone pillars, each carved with Inuit-inspired designs. Eagles and humpback whales and caribou. The cocktails on the menu started at fourteen bucks. I ordered a rye, neat. If I enjoyed it, I could mortgage my house and have a second round.

From where I sat at the center bar, the mirror allowed me to watch most of the tables. Borealis was a big place, designed for large wedding parties and small convention crowds on the weekends. The midweek rush of business people from the Mansfield Georgian hotel downstairs still left plenty of elbow room.

Most of the business types were still wearing their suits, though the men had loosened their ties and the women had slipped off their high heels under the tables. The few who weren’t completely engrossed by their phones or laptops engaged in animated chatter with one another. In my jeans and flannel shirt, I was the gamekeeper crashing the country estate’s cocktail hour.

Barrett and Parson Yorke came off the elevator lobby into the bar. I knew they were siblings from their social media posts, but in life I
never would have guessed. One or both may have been adopted. Barrett was recognizably the petite fashion plate I’d seen in the snapshots. The honeyed bob had been restyled in a wedge cut that fell over one eye. Parson was a very big boy. Not a square slab like Willard, but round, with a midsection that made his head look undersized by comparison. The shearling coat he was wearing must have set him back two grand at the Big ’n’ Tall. He towered behind his sister, carrying her coat. The princess and the palace guard. Or the whole palace.

They scanned the crowd and I raised a hand. Barrett glided across the room, a sharpened shadow in a black sleeveless blouse and black pants. She extended a hand to shake, frowning.

“How d’you do,” she said.

“I’m Van,” I said. Parson was inexpressive, and his handshake was soft and damp. Still, I had the feeling he could have squeezed until my fingers gushed out between his like toothpaste.

I motioned for them to sit at the bar, but Barrett chose a table and sat at it without a word. Parson followed. I took my drink from the bar—still a few dollars of liquor left in the glass—and sat with them. A server came over immediately and took their drink orders. Vodka for Barrett and a Newcastle for her brother.

“You knew Elana,” Barrett said to me.

“Back when we were kids. Our families are friendly.”

“Then you don’t really know her now,” Parson said. He was younger than I’d first guessed, perhaps only twenty or twenty-one, and his mud-brown goatee was more attempt than reality.

“Well enough to say hello. That’s why I was at the cabin.”

“Can you prove that?” said Barrett. “You could be anyone. We’ve already had calls from the press, wanting quotes about Kend.”

“I can prove I know Elana’s uncle Willard,” I said. “He’s the one who told me she was on the Peninsula.”

“That’s not quite what I want.”

One well-tailored young businessman two tables over found Barrett much more interesting than his cell phone. It was understandable. She was very poised, as cool as the single large sapphire stud pierced
through her upper ear. The gem was real. I wasn’t sure about the ice princess act. Her black-coffee eyes gave off a challenge.

“Okay. How’s this?” I said. “Kend and Elana drove her blue Volvo hatchback up to the cabin. Sometime after that, Elana was shot twice in the face at close range, and then Kend probably put the gun to his own head. Both of them died immediately. I’ve seen enough gunshot wounds to be sure. The cabin door was left open, so animals and decomp had a couple of days to whittle away at both of your friends before I happened along. The last thing I did there was drag Kend’s body, which was mostly in one piece, back inside to protect what was left.”

It was cruel. Maybe crueler than I’d intended. But it had the right effect. They were both openmouthed and pale. In Barrett’s case, paler than usual.

“I’m sorry,” Barrett said. “That—that must have been awful.”

“Worse for them. Tell me about their relationship.”

“Their relationship?”

“Were they happy? Did they fight? Was one of them in trouble? I’m trying to understand what happened at the cabin.”

“I-I don’t think they were fighting. They argued some, but not like angry arguments.”

“What did they argue about?”

“Oh. Who said what when, and who was right about so-and-so.” Barrett shook her head minutely. “Inconsequentials.”

I turned to Parson. “How about you? When was the last time you saw them?”

“I saw Kend last week,” he said.

“At the cabin?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There were lots of new tire tracks around. Somebody visited them.”

Parson frowned. He suspected trickery, but maybe that was normal for his attitude. He seemed easy to trick.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

“So you believe the rumors are true?” said Barrett, regaining some of her earlier self-possession. “That Kend killed Elana?”

“No,” said Parson flatly.

“I don’t know if he did or not,” I said. “Just what the scene looked like.”

“He didn’t.”

Barrett reached over and squeezed her brother’s prize ham forearm. “Parson was a great friend to Kend,” she said, smiling sadly at him. “And Kend looked out for Parson.”

“He was my best friend,” said Parson.

“Then I’m sorry, Parson,” I said. “I know what it’s like to lose guys who’ll have your back, no matter what.”

He nodded, looking at the table.

“Barrett, it’s probably time for your own special friend to join us,” I said, pointing to the businessman in the navy suit. He saw me pointing and scowled.

She flushed. “That’s just Charlie.”

“No point in Charlie sitting alone.”

She waved him over and he came, reluctantly. By the time we shook hands he’d apparently decided to pretend the whole secret-agent thing didn’t happen.

“Charlie Shearman,” he said. He was a
GQ
-cover match for Barrett, with curly dirty-blond hair and sideburns. His navy suit had been fitted down to the quarter inch, until it was practically scuba gear.

“We were telling Van that we don’t know why Kend might have done what he did,” Barrett said. “What the police
suspect
he did,” she amended, off Parson’s hurt look.

“Hmmm. And is that all you’re wondering about?” Shearman said. He sat down and placed a protective hand over Barrett’s.

“I was curious whether you use a laser level to get those sideburns just so,” I said. Shearman’s jaw clenched.

“Van described the cabin to us, Charlie,” said Barrett. “It sounded horrible.”

“I’ll bet,” he said. “Enough to file a mental distress suit against the Haymes family, if the official ruling goes his way.”

“Charlie!”

“You’re a lawyer for them?” I said.

“I’m a financial consultant,” Shearman said, like I’d impugned his honor.

“A junior partner with Lyman and Goode,” said Barrett.

“Good for you,” I said.

He scowled. “Go to hell.”

“All right,” I said. “We got off on the wrong foot. Was the idea to hang around until I left Barrett and Parson, and then follow me and make sure I was who I claimed?”

“You can hardly blame us,” Barrett said.

“You’re protecting your friends. I get that. But the idea of spending years wrangling a settlement out of Kend’s family makes me want to jump off this roof.”

Civilians had a range of reactions to my facial scars. Some people pretended to ignore them, like Barrett, who had glanced once and then studiously kept her eyes on mine. Charlie Shearman couldn’t help examining the white grooves every time I looked at someone else. I wasn’t sure Parson had even noticed my scars at all.

Shearman’s eyes flicked back to me. “So this isn’t some angle?”

“I’ve had enough stress in the past ten years. I don’t need to pretend to having more.”

He didn’t reply, but as the server took his drink order, he asked me if I wanted another round. I took it as a peace offering.

“No matter what happened up at the cabin,” I said, “nobody wins. But the cops are likely to ask Kend’s friends all kinds of rough questions, looking for motive. Like whether he was ever violent with her, or anybody else. Or if he got into fights.”

Head shakes all around. Parson was getting agitated again.

“Was he taking anything?”

“He wasn’t some
drug
addict, if that’s what you mean,” Shearman said.

“What about antidepressants? Mood elevators?”

“God, isn’t everyone?” said Barrett. “But Kend was a very positive guy. It was part of why everyone liked him so much.”

Shearman’s eyes flickered to his girlfriend, then down. I remembered the picture of Barrett and Trudy Dobbs in Kend’s apartment. Facedown in a desk drawer, instead of up on the wall with the rest.

“What about money?” I said.

“What about it?” said Shearman.

“Did he have any? I know his family does. But that’s different.”

“We wouldn’t be so rude as to ask.”

“Even as a junior partner at Lyman and Goode?”

Barrett stiffened. “It’s not a requirement for our friendship. No matter what you might think.”

“I don’t care about your entrance criteria,” I said. “I want to know if Kend was broke.”

“We were friends with Elana, too. Unless you believe she was some token.”

Damn it. I was digging myself a hole, and fast.

Worse, the whole private-school bunch of them seemed to be genuinely out of the loop. None of them was giving any sign that they might know of the ghost book, or T. X. Broch, or even that they knew Kend had liked to gamble.

“Your other friend didn’t show tonight,” I said. “Trudy Dobbs.”

“She’s away on vacation,” said Barrett.

“Away where?”

Barrett downed the last half of her second vodka rocks in an impressive shot, and exhaled slowly through her nose. “Trudy’s my best friend. And Elana’s. If you have any questions for her, I’ll ask her myself.”

Shearman took out his wallet and handed an Amex card to the server as he passed. The Black Card, of course.

“Sorry we couldn’t help you more,” he said to me. “We’re all very upset, and we just want to make sure Kend gets every consideration.”

Over any considerations for Elana, was what I took from that. Closing ranks.

Shearman sipped the last of his scotch. Parson’s beer was mostly untouched. We all stood up. Shearman took Barrett’s thin leather coat
from Parson and draped it over her shoulders. He led Barrett back toward the bar.

Parson lingered behind.

“If you make trouble for us,” he said softly, “I’m gonna break your spine.”

They left.

No-limit credit cards. Sapphire earrings. And threats of bodily harm. I was coming up in the world.

Five minutes later, I was standing around the corner of the hotel, watching each of them drive out of the parking garage. Shearman chauffeured Barrett in a Mercedes sedan. Parson scraped the bottom of the curb with his red Chrysler 300C.

No sports car with fishhook treads. No dually.

I shrugged to myself. It had been worth a shot.

The office park where Gallison Engineering & Equipment made its home was beyond quiet, as Saturday night ticked over into Sunday morning. Just me, and Dono, and the occasional squirrel, startled by our truck cruising slowly behind the building without its headlights on.

Willard had chosen the truck well. The little white pickup could be a landscaper’s, or a utility truck, or a personal vehicle. As a bonus, the hard plastic cover over the truck bed had hinges and stiff pneumatics to open and stay open, like a box top. Or a coffin.

Dono came to a stop at a precise spot, right under the fourth-floor window I’d been examining the day before.

He handed me a burner phone. “Don’t forget this.” Like I would have left it behind. I plugged my headset into it.

“You remember the right frequencies?” I said, pointing to the police scanner. He had already programmed the SPD dispatch channels in, I knew. I was just giving my grandfather shit for treating me like I was in kindergarten.

I shouldered the backpack, which contained most of the gear I’d need during the next hour or so, and walked quickly around the corner of the building. I wore a black baseball cap and dark, long-sleeved Henley and black sweatpants with running shoes. Except for the surgical gloves, I could have been out for a jog.

A small delivery door near the loading ramp had a Schlage-brand deadbolt, a six-pin model from a few years ago. With the lockpick gun, I had it open in one minute. From there, it was thirty paces across the dark mailroom to the hall, and another twenty-four to the same stairwell I’d used before.

At every corner I paused and listened, for patrolling guards, or cleaners, or anything at all. I was in no rush. Not yet.

Opening the door of Gallison was the part that made me nervous. Not that it was tough. I had the keycard; how much easier could it get? But the doors and walls were windowless. No way to tell if some GE&E employee might be behind one, still at his work computer at midnight, frantic to make a deadline. I took an earbud out for a moment to listen hard at the door. Nothing.

I took a deep breath and swiped the card. The scanner gave an answering chirp, and the thunk of the lock opening sounded as loud as a hammer whacking an anvil in the empty hall. I opened the door a few inches and stuck my head in for a look. The place was dim and deserted, every third ceiling light glowing with minimal wattage. I exhaled.

North wall. Third room from the end. The secure storage room with the small fortune in optical lenses had a keypad code for its lock. I could beat the lock, and without even burning a lot of time. But the guy who’d sold Dono’s fence, Hiram, all of the information about the lenses had also known the code. Some underpaid or laid-off desk jockey, probably. The human element could screw up even the best security, and Gallison wasn’t exactly a bank vault. A quick punch of 4-1-4-3 and I was in.

Once the door was closed behind me, the room seemed pitch-black. My eyes gradually picked up a faint blue glow from the night sky through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I tapped the microphone button. One beep to Dono. One beep in reply. It was safe to talk.

“I’m all the way in. Anything from the guards?”

His voice was clear but sanded smooth of emotion through the phone. “
All quiet. There are two on duty tonight. One is walking the halls now. He’s been gone six minutes.
”

We had timed the guard’s rounds at fifteen minutes.
With five floors, three minutes per. That was during the workday. It might be a little faster at night. So he’d be on this floor within two or three minutes, and gone in six or seven.

I used a pencil flash to scan the shelves of the storage room. Loads of equipment whose functions I could only guess at, maybe bit and pieces of laser generators, and some kinds of thermal imaging cameras that looked like tiny televisions on sticks. Gallison specialized in optical engineering, which was why they had the top-quality lenses I was looking for.

I found their cases bungee-corded in place on two of the lower shelves. Twenty-six cases in all, in varying sizes. Each was made of hard black plastic with a built-in handle, like a toy suitcase. The smallest case could hold a baseball glove, and the largest could hold all three bases stacked together. I undid the bungee cords around one of the small cases and clicked the plastic latches open. Inside, wrapped in clear oiled plastic and tucked into gray protective foam, was a thick circle of glass that cost about five thousand dollars, retail price. The biggest cases would be worth ten times that. The value increased exponentially along with the size. I grinned as I stacked the cases neatly by the window. You could light one hell of a campfire with one of these magnifiers.

The contents of the backpack came next. Fuel tanks. Hollow alloy rod and attached torch. Plexiglas safety mask. Gloves. Tongs. And two hundred coiled feet of slim cotton rope, with rubber-coated carabiners attached to it on little loops every four feet.

My watch said seven minutes had passed since Dono and I had talked. The guard would be off my floor by now. I attached the fuel tanks to the torch, put on my gloves and mask, and beeped Dono three times. That was the signal that I was ready to start. Four minutes later, I heard his answering beeps. The guards were back in the lobby.

I lit the torch. It whuffed to thick orange life, bright as a
birthday cake in the black room. I quickly dialed it back to a narrow flame that ran along the inside of the hollow alloy rod. The rod tapered to a point. It was a very special piece of metal, as expensive as some of the lenses for its ability to retain heat. Over twelve hundred degrees Celsius, once it really got rolling. The tip glowed red, then white, then almost clear. I could feel it even through the silicone-coated Kevlar gloves.

I picked a spot on the window, about one foot above the floor. And started melting through the glass.

It was slow going. The window was two panes of tempered safety glass with a thin layer of argon in between for insulation. The panes would crumble if I created too much stress. So I let the heat do the work, just like a hot blade cutting frozen butter. The glass popped and sizzled in tiny beads, almost launching itself away from the superheated rod. I wondered if one of the hot beads might somehow fall four stories to land on the truck. We’d have to check, later. It could be evidence.

I needed to make a hole about one foot by two feet, for the largest cases. After five minutes, I’d melted a three-inch line. If I kept the same pace, I’d have my hole in two hours. The liquefied glass smelled like candle smoke and paint thinner.

This was the first big score—not just a house job or piecemeal stuff—that Dono and I had done together in months. He’d had other work, with other crews. Dono didn’t like involving me in scores that required a team. He said the fewer people who knew about me, the better. I was at the age where the law might prosecute me as an adult. It made some sense.

But I wondered if his secrecy was also to keep me from branching out. I knew I could get work with some of his partners. Maybe even set up my own scores, with Hiram as the buyer. Hell, I’d have to chew through the leash, someday.

The earbud beeped once. I kept cutting. I was nearly to the end of the first side. It beeped again, a longer blast.

I spoke as it was starting again. “Yeah?”

“
You’re supposed to signal back before talking,
” Dono said.

Jesus. “I’m here now.”

“They
’re making rounds. Two min—no, three minutes in now.”

The torch was quiet enough. The guard didn’t come into the Gallison offices from the hallway. “All right.”

The guards finished that patrol, and made one more an hour later, while I was closing in on the last inch of uncut glass. The piece I’d carved out of the window was warped into tiny crocodile bumps at the edges. A cool bit of sculpture. If it wasn’t a dead giveaway, I might want to keep the thing. I gripped the big rectangle with the tongs in my left hand, lifting its weight off the rod. Drops of sweat had been rolling off my forehead and the tip of my nose for the last hour, drizzling the inside of the face mask.

Then the rectangle of glass was free, and I had to drop the tongs to catch the sudden burden. I set the glass aside and rolled out my shoulders. The night breeze came in through the open hole and chilled the perspiration on my chest. I shivered, and it felt great.

I took off the face mask and heavy gloves, and beeped Dono. He responded instantly.

“Fresh air,” I said.

“Go.”

I grabbed the end of the hundred-foot rope, and fed the end out the open hole. When I came to the first rubberized carabiner on its short loop, I grabbed the nearest carrying case—one of the little ones, no need to risk fifty grand on the first try—and clicked the carabiner onto the handle. The case went out the window, and down a few feet before I got to the next loop. I heard the case tap softly against the side of the building. I repeated the process with the next case and carabiner, and the pricey pieces of custom glass steadily inched their way down the side of the building.

I worked quickly now. The cases could be spotted as we lowered them, from the inside or by someone who happened to walk by the building, not that pedestrians were likely in an office park at two in the morning. But there were other buildings, other guards who might step outside for a smoke. And I didn’t like the way the cases tapped randomly against the building. Faster was better.

At the bottom, Dono was receiving the first of the cases, unhooking them, laying them in the open truck bed. I couldn’t hear him over the wind, but I felt the tug on the rope as the weight of each case came off.

Onto the last of the cases now, the big ones. They fit through the hole I’d made with an inch to spare. Hot damn. I let the cord play out, giving Dono just enough slack.

Then there was a sound from outside the storage room. The heavy clunk of a door closing.

I stuck my head out the window. The last case was still two stories above Dono.

My earbud beeped. He must have seen me looking.

I beeped back.

“
Everything all right?
” he said.

It could be a janitor, in the outer offices. Or just a regular spot check by the patrolling guard. No reason to panic.

“Keep going,” I said.

“That’s not an answer.”

Someone turned on the lights in the outer office. The yellow glow came under the storage room door with an almost audible rush.

“
Talk to me
,” Dono said.

From the outer office, a radio receiver squawked with an indecipherable voice. And footsteps. I definitely heard footsteps now.

Coming right toward the storage room door.