toward Marino's place was off to his right. The last mile or so of the private road was below the forest and steeply down across a mostly bare shelf of tan boulder, so he could see traffic from there a long way off. Every time any vehicle at all went by on the county road he made a mark on the yellow pad on his clipboard. Every time a car went in or out of the private road, he made more elaborate and more meaningful marks.
Most of the vehicles past this spot were pickups, and most of them were repeats. He got a few curious stares the first day, but by the second he'd been accepted as just another guy with a cushy job, and by the third he was part of the landscape.
A few times during the week, he left his post to follow staffers who'd driven away from the house, until he got a sense of their errands, where and for how long they went, what they did or didn't do in the outside world. He did a minimum of that kind of trailing, because he didn't want to become a presence in their peripheral vision.
At the same time, this week, Wiss and Elkins had been going through back issues of the
'The locals could be peeved about that,' Elkins added, 'if they thought about it, but they don't, much.'
'There's eight staff,' Parker told them. 'Six men and two women. They've got three identical white Chevy Blazers, with Montana plates.'
'Leases,' Elkins decided.
'Looks like,' Parker said. 'They get their mail at a post office box in Havre. They don't have anything delivered, they go out and shop, every day.'
'So we don't come in like we're bringing the groceries,' Wiss said.
Elkins said, 'And we're not a pal of theirs from town. They don't mingle with the natives, not at all. Most people think they're snooty, think they're better than anybody else because they work for a billionaire.'
'Well, it's a smart setup,' Parker said. 'They can keep tighter security if their bunch doesn't mingle with anybody else.'
'Then they've got good security,' Wiss said.
Elkins said, 'Parker? What do you think?'
'There's never more than one car away from the place at a time,' Parker said. 'I guess the idea is, they want to keep the staff up to strength as much as they can.'
'Good security again,' Wiss commented.
'I looked up that road once,' Parker said, 'and about a mile up it starts to twist through some pretty thick forest. We wait till they go out, drive up into the forested part, stop on a blind curve, take the Blazer away from them when they come back. Then we can at least get to the house without setting anything off. But once they see we're somebody else, they'll jump to the alarms. The question is, what can Lloyd do, back in Massachusetts, to keep those alarms from getting off the property?'
'We'll ask him,' Elkins said.
8
A little after seven that morning, when it would be nine a.m. in New York, Parker phoned Claire at the hotel. She should still be in the room, finishing her coffee, putting on her face.
She was. 'I'm glad you called,' she said, and he could hear the tension in her voice.
'Something happened?'
'I called Louise,' she said, Louise being the woman who cleaned the house by the lake every Thursday. 'I called her yesterday, to make sure everything was all right, and she said the lock was broken on the lakeside door.'
'Nobody there?'
'Not when she was there, not that she noticed. And it didn't seem to her anything had been taken.'
Or left, Parker thought. That was the more important question. Had anything been left there, maybe to blow up, or maybe to signal people waiting. He said, 'I was calling to say I'm coming back east, I'd see you in the city, we could have dinner.'
'I'd like that.'
'But I think I better look at the house first, then call you again.'
'All right. Today?'
'I'm gonna be on too many planes today,' he said. 'I'll call you tomorrow.'
'All right.'
'The other thing I wanted,' he said. 'In the city, see if you can find somebody who reads Cyrillic.'
'You mean like Russian?'
'Russian. Yes.'
9
