Nothing.
She sniffed the interior of the front room. It just smelled musty, with an underlying odor of cigarette smoke. That meant nothing-she knew smoke could linger in a room for months or even years.
She made a quick circuit of the downstairs. No appliances in the kitchen, empty cabinets and drawers. The wallpaper, which looked like it had come straight from the 1970s, was peeling. She stepped onto the back deck. Nothing.
Inside again, she decided to check the upstairs just for the sake of thoroughness. There was a single bathroom, the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet standing open. A nickel and a dime sat on the dirty sink.
She poked through bedrooms. There were several small ones and an empty linen closet. One of the windows in the front bedroom was broken. A good-size rock sat on the floor underneath the the window, surrounded by glass.
Faith shook her head. It was all too surreal. She didn’t understand the power this woman Daryn had over her brother, but somehow she convinced him to lie to Faith about all of this.
Sean wasn’t stupid. Troubled, maybe, but not stupid. He should have known Faith would investigate, that she wouldn’t just open her arms give Daryn McDermott a new life in Department Thirty because he asked her to. Two criteria had to be met to gain serious consideration for protection: that the person had committed a crime serious enough to warrant either prosecution and or retribution from others involved in the crime; and that the person possessed information deemed to be of vital national interest.
Daryn McDermott’s crime seemed to be conspiracy to commit an act of terror. But her “information”-the list of banks the Coalition was allegedly going to strike-hadn’t panned out. Daryn certainly seemed frightened of Franklin Sanborn, but other than Faith’s vague sense of knowing the name, there was no evidence that there
She’d come to the end of the hall, to the last little bedroom. Sean had said he and Daryn and the girl Britt had slept together in this room. There was a large gash in the wood of the door. The doorknob was missing.
Faith ducked her head inside. There was a large pile of blankets in the corner farthest from the window.
“Hmm,” she said, and took a couple of steps into the room.
With the toe of her sneaker, she pulled off the top blanket, SIG at the ready. More blankets, all ripped, the lining coming out of them. One was a quilt done in a beautiful Dutch-doll pattern that looked like someone’s grandmother had made it by hand. But it was filthy and the edges were torn. Three layers down, she found a few bottles of water, some packages of cheese and crackers, some stiff French fries in a yellow Wendy’s carton. A threadbare paperback copy of the Gospel of John, with a stain of something that smelled like excrement, was at the bottom.
“Don’t touch that!”
Faith wheeled around at the voice, snapping up her gun arm. Her gun settled with a chest-high aim at a man in the doorway.
“Hey!” he said. “Don’t point that at me. Leave me alone. I’m not hurting nobody.”
Faith couldn’t really tell his age, but she guessed mid-to late forties. He was mostly bald on top, with more than week’s scruffy growth of grayish beard on his face. His eyes were gray and wary. His body odor was overpowering, even from several feet away. His clothing consisted of ripped, baggy jeans, a filthy once-white dress shirt, a gray cardigan covered in grass stains, and mismatched shoes-one hiking boot, one tennis shoe with toes gaping out.
“I got squatter’s rights,” the man drawled. “Door was unlocked. I can stay here as long as I want. You can’t shoot me. If you shoot me it’s murder.”
Faith lowered the gun. “Who are you?”
“You first.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Neither do I,” the man said. “So there.”
“Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”
“I got squatter’s rights. You can’t make me leave. This is my room. It’s my whole house. I moved out to the country, you know, for my health.”
Faith shook her head. “How long have you been here?”
“A while. I don’t know.” He scurried around Faith, giving her a wide berth, heading to his corner. “You didn’t tear up none of my stuff, did you? This is all my stuff.”
“Just looked at it, that’s all. This place looks pretty deserted except for this room.”
“Yeah, well,” the man said. “So what?”
“You just live in the one room, I guess?”
“Well, I go outside to take a dump. The plumbing ain’t on. But sometimes I like to pee out the window.”
Faith put the gun back in her jacket. “You see anyone else around here?”
“Anyone else who?”
“Like some sort of commune, bunch of people all living together like one big family.” Faith realized how ridiculous it sounded even as she said it.
“Nope,” the man said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I been here a long time.”
“No furniture?”
“You see any furniture?”
“No,” Faith said. “Any cars ever come out here?”
A shadow crossed the man’s face. “Couple of times. Kids in those cars with the noisy mufflers. They think they’re hotshots, come out here and throw rocks through the windows, drink beer, smoke dope. Shouldn’t drink or do drugs. That’s bad.”
Faith smiled. “So I hear.”
“I stay out of sight when they come around. But I still got the squatter’s rights. Not you and not the kids in the cars.”
Faith tapped her foot on the wood floor. “You think you’ve been here longer than a week?”
“I been here a long time. Prob’ly a month. It’s nice out here in the country. Quiet. I like quiet.”
“So do I. And no one else has lived here?”
The man sat down on top of the pile of blankets. “Just me. It’s my room and my house.”
Faith reached into the pocket of her jeans. The man tensed and flattened himself against the wall. “Don’t shoot me!”
Faith pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to him. He looked at it as if he’d never seen one before, then held it up by the window. “That’s one of them new ones. Jackson’s head is bigger.”
“Sure is,” Faith said.
“Not counterfeit, is it? You didn’t make it, did you? That’s illegal.”
“It’s real. I’m going now. You take care.”
“That’s right, you better go. You can’t make me leave. Not even with your gun. I know my rights.”
Faith quietly stepped out of the room and retreated to the stairs. She took them slowly, then let herself out of the house. The front porch step creaked under her feet again. The screen door banged behind her.
She took one look back. It was as if she’d never been there. The place looked the same.
In a moment she was over the rise. Ten minutes later the Miata was back on Interstate 35 heading south.
Alan Davenport watched her go. He craned his neck and watched the car. From the second floor of the house he could see the little gold sports car until it left the driveway and turned back onto the road.
When it was out of sight, he dug in the pocket of the filthy cardigan and pulled out a new cell phone.
He made his call. When it was answered, he said, “Contact.”
“Understood,” said the voice on the other end.
Davenport broke the connection. Then, just as he’d been instructed, he left the house by the back door and took the steps down from the deck. He checked underneath the wooden floor of the deck, looking at all the furniture where they’d shoved it, far back from the edge, wedged into the corner where the deck met the foundation of the house. Most of it was junk anyway, not worth stowing, but the object-so Sanborn had said-had been to ensure that the house did not look lived in, and not to attract attention by moving the stuff out onto the road. So under the deck it went.
Davenport had even embellished the look of the house, by transporting dirt from the field near the creek and scattering it around. He’d earned his money.
He had no clue who the woman was, although he could tell she resembled the man that Kat-or whatever Kat’s real name was-had brought to the house for that crazy week. All Sanborn had said was that he was sure a tall young woman with long red hair would come around. She hadn’t had long hair, but other than that, Sanborn was right.
He walked through the tall grass in the field behind the house until he came to the banks of Skeleton Creek. He took out the new cell phone-the one call was all that had ever been made on it-and threw it into the middle of the creek. Then he started walking, not back to the house, but cross-country toward the spot where he’d hidden his car, nearly a mile away.
Davenport had no clue what it all meant. He’d played a part and played it well. Sanborn had told him so. Now it was finished and he was ready to go home. If he drove straight through, he’d be home in Dallas by nightfall, where he could take a bath, have a good meal, throw away these filthy clothes, and sleep in his own bed.
Davenport gave no further thought to the woman with the red hair.
24
“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” DARYN ASKED THE heavyset deputy marshal with the curly hair.
“No,” Leneski said.
“My father is a United States senator.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m also a whore. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t care,” Leneski said again, and left the living room of the safe house for the kitchen.
Daryn sat back in the uncomfortable armchair. None of the deputies assigned to her would talk about anything other than her immediate needs-did she want to eat, was she going to bed, did she need any Tylenol for her headache? It was a strange existence. She knew why she was here, she knew what she was doing, and still believed it would advance The Cause.
But she couldn’t talk to anyone. She’d been able to make people pay attention to her for her entire life, through her intellect and her looks and later, through her sexuality. This entire plan had been about getting people to pay attention.
But now, in this anonymous house with its sparse garage-sale furnishings, she sat in a bubble of nothingness, not quite Daryn but not Kat anymore, either.
