the corner, looking at house numbers. There were no lights in any of the windows on this block, but he could see that the dim purple luminescence in the east had begun to make colors distinguishable. He turned up the street. The houses were old, most of them Georgian or early Victorian, but there were modern touches—sidewalks and driveways poured within the past few years, porch lights and fixtures that were shiny and recent. When he braked as he approached 117, Stillman said, “Keep going and park around the corner.”
Walker stopped in front of a low fence that separated the street from the beginning of a pasture. He got out and waited while Stillman went to the back of the Explorer and opened his leather bag. Walker could see him putting things into his jacket pockets, and then he appeared at Walker’s side. “We’ll have to do it efficiently,” he said. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before the sun comes up.”
“Maybe we should come back at night.”
“No,” said Stillman. “This is fine. It’s not prime time for burglars, so if somebody sees us, we’re not automatically in trouble.”
He walked briskly up the block, turned in at 117, then kept going around to the back door, looking up at the eaves of the house, stopping to study windows. When they reached the back door of the house, Walker stood by and waited, but Stillman kept going. There was a sloped wooden cover for a basement entrance a few feet away with a door on it and a padlock.
Stillman knelt on it, put a thin metal object into the padlock, and opened it as though he’d had a key. He lifted the door and went down the narrow concrete steps. Walker came down after him, then pulled the door shut.
As he watched Stillman pull out his pick and tension wrench and insert them into the lower door to the basement, Walker said, “How did you open the padlock?”
“A shim pick. I’ll get you enrolled in a class on locks sometime, and buy you a set of picks for graduation.”
Walker didn’t respond. He watched Stillman swing the door open and step inside.
Stillman said, “Or, if we get caught one of these times, we can spend a couple of years on it.”
The basement was the sort of place he remembered from his grandparents’ house in Ohio. In the summer it had been cool and damp, and had a faint musty smell. Stillman switched on a small flashlight and moved it slowly around the walls.
The walls were bare and the concrete was coarse and old. It seemed to have crumbled in places and been patched and painted over with whitewash. There was a hot-water heater in one corner, a work bench with a vise and tools in another, and in the middle an oil furnace with a big storage tank. There were a new washer and dryer along one wall beside a big metal sink.
Stillman switched off the light and quietly climbed the wooden stairs to the landing above. When Walker joined him, Stillman whispered in his ear, “Give me five minutes.” He opened a door and disappeared into the first floor of the house.
Walker listened, looking out the back door at the lawn. The sun was beginning to rise, and he felt each second passing, taking away a little of the darkness. When Stillman opened the door again, he jerked in nervous surprise.
Stillman said in a normal voice, “He lived alone,” then turned and walked across the kitchen. Walker could see a gleaming stove and marble counters, a big side-by-side refrigerator.
“Are you sure?” he whispered. “Look at this kitchen.”
“I have. Look in the fridge and you’ll see this is just where he came to open his next beer. Anyway, there’s no women’s stuff anywhere, and no toys or clothes for kids. He slept up there.” Stillman pointed up the stairs to the second floor. “He had a sort of den down here. I’m going through that. You go up and do the bedroom.” As Walker climbed the stairs, he added, “Remember, we’re looking for things that will give us the names and locations of his buddies—address book, phone bill, photo album, birthday card.”
Walker found the bedroom and did a quick survey, but found no photographs or papers in the open, so he looked for storage places. He had watched Stillman do this enough times that he could dispense with wasted motion. He searched the drawers of the dresser, pulled them out to see if anything was behind them, and looked under the bed and in the closet. He found nothing, so he looked for hiding places. He went into the small bathroom, lifted the tank cover of the toilet, searched the area under the sink, tested the baseboards and tiles to be sure none of them were loose. He moved quickly back to the bedroom, checked the mattress for slits in the fabric on the top and bottom, squeezed the pillows. He moved close to each light fixture to be sure nothing was in it. He tested the carpets to be sure no section had been lifted. Just as he was running out of places to look, he found the gun.
He had noticed that the headboard of the bed seemed thicker than most, so he tapped it in a few places to see if it was hollow. When he tapped the center just above the mattress, a small door opened outward. There was a squat, square-cornered SIG pistol sitting where James Scully could reach it in the night. He closed the little door and kept searching.
The walk-in closet was another proof of James Scully’s neatness, but the clothes surprised him. Walker counted twenty-two suits and sport coats hanging neatly side by side, all facing to the left. His shirts were all, likewise, hanging with their fronts to the left on another pole. His shoes were in a cupboard, four pairs to a row with the toes outward.
Walker stood on a chair to look at the top shelf. There were hats—mostly baseball caps with the bills facing forward and the logos of heavy-machinery companies on their crowns, and a short-barreled shotgun with a box of deer slugs beside it. Walker patted each pocket of the coats and pants, looked inside the shoes, then knelt and was checking whether anything was taped to the bottom of each shelf when Stillman appeared in the doorway.
“Find anything?”
“A shotgun up on that shelf, and a pistol in a compartment in the headboard of the bed.”
“No paper, huh?” said Stillman. “We’d better go.”
Walker got to his feet and walked to the stairs with him. “What about you?”
“Not a lot of surprises. He had quite a bit of money. You can see that from the furniture, the way his house has been remodeled. Damned if I know where a dime of it is, though. He didn’t leave anything that we could use to find it. His little den has a desk in it, but he seems to have used the place mostly to read magazines, watch TV, and talk on the phone.”
“You mean there’s no paper around at all?”
“Sure there is. Birth certificate, deed to the house, pink slip for his car, bills—water, power, heating-oil company, credit cards. That was a disappointment, because he hasn’t been using them on his travels. He’s got another set somewhere besides the one he had on him in Florida. The phone bills don’t have any long-distance calls on them. I don’t think I missed much. I even found his spare set of keys.”
They were at the cellar stairs. Stillman started down, but Walker said, “We can’t give up like this.”
“We’re not. I plugged bugs into the phone jacks upstairs and down. And, of course, I took the keys,” said Stillman. “I’m looking forward to the luxury of opening a lock with the actual key.”
“But we can’t come back. Pretty soon the cops in Miami or the FBI will identify him and announce it. His buddies will come and clean this place out.”
“Then we’ll pick it up on the bugs. That’s another luxury I’m looking forward to,” Stillman said. “The minute they get started I pick up the phone and call the cops to come get them. And you know what? Whoever comes in to look for incriminating evidence about themselves will experience a moment of intense pleasure just before they hear the sirens. Because this guy didn’t have any.”
29
Walker could already see his shadow on the pavement, a fantastic elongation of his silhouette that stretched across the road, stepping into the shadow of the Explorer that was nearly a square. He started the engine as soon as he could get inside.
Stillman said, “Very slowly, just the way we came.”
Walker eased the transmission into gear and rolled off the shoulder to get the Explorer moving, then very gradually accelerated in the direction it had been aimed when he had parked. He concentrated on keeping the engine running just above idle and the speed low enough so he could coast to a stop at each corner.
Stillman said, “Go down this street, turn onto Main just before the river, then head for the highway. I think
