We drove through the town, which takes less time than it does to tell it. A couple of stoplights. Rows of craft shops. A surprising number of cafes and bars, though most of them looked run down. More for drinking than eating, I thought. The biggest intersection had the Terrance Wolfe Memorial Medical Center across the street from the Saul Weinstock Ball Field. The hospital looked new; the ball field was overgrown and a hundred crows huddled in a row along the chain-link fence. Ditto for the hospital.
I noted it away and kept driving. The place was starting to get to me, and that was weird because I had worked a lot of shifts in West Baltimore, which was probably the most depressing place on earth. Poverty screamed at you from every street corner, and there was a tragic blend of desperation and hopelessness in the eyes of every child. Yet this little town had a darker tone to it, and my overactive imagination wondered if the storm clouds ever let the sun shine down. Looking at these streets was like watching the sluggish flow of a polluted river. You know that there’s life beneath the grime and the toxicity, but at the same time you feel that life could not exist there.
We left town and turned back onto Route A-32 as it plunged south toward the Delaware River. This was the large part of the township, occupied for the first mile by new suburban infill—with cookie-cutter development units, many still under construction, and overbuilt McMansions. More than three quarters of the houses had FOR SALE signs staked into the lawns. A few were unfinished skeletons draped in tarps that looked like body bags.
Then we were out into the farm country and the atmosphere changed subtly, from something dying to something that was still clinging to life. Big farms, too, like the kind you’d expect to see in the Midwest. Thousands of acres of land, miles between houses. Endless rows of waving green cornfields bright with pumpkins, and row upon row of vegetables. A paint-faded yellow tractor chugged along the side of the road, driven by an ancient man in blue coveralls. He smoked a cheap pipe that he took out of his mouth to salute us as we went by.
“We just drive into the nineteen forties?” asked Bunny.
“Pretty much.”
Mist, as thick and white as tear gas, was slowly boiling up from the gullies and hollows as the cooler air under the storm mixed with the August heat.
The GPS told us that we were coming up on our turn.
The lane onto which I’d turned ran straight as a rifle barrel from the road, through a fence of rough-cut rails, to the front door of a Cape Cod that looked as out of place here in Pine Deep as a sequined thong looks on a nun. Heavy oaks lined the road and the big front lawn was dark with thick, cool summer grass.
“Okay, gentlemen,” I said softly. “Place should be empty, and except for a brief walk-through by the handler, no one else will have disturbed the crime scene.”
“Wait,” said Top, “you want Farm Boy and me to play Sherlock Holmes?”
“We’re just doing a cursory examination. If we find anything of substance we’ll ship it off.”
“To where?
I rolled the car to a slow stop in a turnaround in front of the house. The garage was detached except for a pitched roof that connected it to the main house. A five-year-old Honda Civic was parked in that slot. The garage door was closed.
“Looks nice and quiet,” Benny said as he got out, the big shotgun in his hands. We split up. Bunny and Top circled around to the back and side entrances. I took the front door. We had our earbuds in place and everyone was tuned into the team channel.
“On two,” I said. I counted down and then kicked the door.
The door whipped inward with a crack and as I entered, gun up and out in a two-handed shooter’s grip, I heard the backdoor bang open, and then the side door that connected to the garage breezeway. We were moving fast, yelling at the top of our voices at whoever might be in the house and at each other as we cleared room after room.
Then it was quiet again as we drifted together in the living room, holstering our guns and exhaling slowly. No one felt the need to comment on the fact that the place was empty. It was now our job to determine how it came to
“You take the bedrooms,” I said to Bunny. “Observe first before you touch.”
He was a professional soldier, not a cop. There were no smartass remarks when being giving straight orders that could remind him how to do his job.
“Why don’t I take the garage and around the outside,” offered Top, and off he went.
I stood alone in the living room and waited for the crime scene to tell me its story. If, indeed, it
The doors and windows were properly closed and locked from inside. I’d had to kick the door, and a quick examination showed that the dead bolt had been engaged. Same went for the side and back doors. I went upstairs and checked those windows. Locked. Cellar door was locked and the windows were block glass.
Back in the living room I saw a laptop case by the couch, and one of those padded lap tables. However, the case was empty. The power cable and mouse were there, but the machine itself was gone.
Significant.
The question was . . . was Simon Burke crazy enough to actual
I hadn’t met him, but I read his psych evaluations. He had that dangerous blend of overblown ego and great insecurity that creates the kind of person who feels that any idea he has is of world-shaking importance, and must therefore be shared with the whole world. They typically lack perspective, and everything I’d read in Burke’s case file told me that he was one of those. Probably not a bad person, but not the kind you’d want to be caught in a stalled elevator with. Only one of you would walk out alive.
So . . . where was he?
My cell rang, and I flipped it open. The screen told me that it was an UNKNOWN CALLER.
That’s . . . pretty unsettling. Our phone system is run through MindReader, which is wired in everywhere. There are no callers unknown to MindReader.
It kept ringing. Before I answered it I pulled a little doohickey the size of a matchbox from a pocket, unspooled its wire, plugged the lead into the phone and pressed the CONNECT button. MindReader would race down the phone lines in a millisecond and begin reading the computer and SIM card in the other phone. One of Mr. Sin’s toys. He did not like surprises.
It rang a third time and I punched the button.
“Hello—?” A man’s voice on a phone fuzzy with static.
“Joe?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Joe? Is this Joe Ledger?”
“Sir, please identify yourself.”
“It’s me, Joe,” he said.
“Who?” Though I thought I already knew.
“Simon Burke.” He paused and gave a nervous little laugh. “Guess you’ve been looking for me.”
“Where are you, Mr. Burke?”
“C’mon, Joe, cut the ‘Mister’ stuff. Mr. Burke was my dad, and he was kind of a dick.”
I looked through the window at the white fog that was swirling out of the cornfields. It was so thick you couldn’t see the dirt. Between the black storm clouds and the ground fog, visibility was dropping pretty fast. That wasn’t good. I said, “You told me that same joke the first time I met you.”
“Did I?”
“Can you verify
“Sure,” he said. “Central District police station on East Baltimore Street.”
“Okay,” I said, “good to hear your voice, Simon. You want to tell me where the hell you are?”
He laughed. “Too far away for you to come get me. At least right now.”
I turned away from the window just as tendrils of fog began caressing the glass. “We need to get you back into protective custody, Simon.”
“Joe,” he said, “listen . . . I’m sorry for doing this to you.”
