I’d had Mack run the number, and surprise, surprise, it came back as unregistered. A burner phone. But she’d been able to access the call history, and over the past two months, it had been used seven times. Four times to call our videographer, once to call a Chinese restaurant in Norfolk, again to call an automated banking service, and finally to call a feed store in the small town of Penngrove, just south of Chesapeake. Two connections to the same area—Norfolk and Chesapeake weren’t all that far apart—and the call to the feed store interested me. It had lasted four minutes. Nobody called a feed store for that long unless they were interested in buying animal feed, and if they were buying animal feed, it stood to reason that they had animals nearby. Had we found the mysterious Edwin’s hidey-hole? Nobody thought it was a coincidence that the fixer shared a forename with the dude who’d painted Red After Dark, and who was up to his eyeballs in dodgy art?
Dyson.
I’d agreed to travel to Penngrove with Alaric when he was set to go. Maybe it would lead to something and maybe it wouldn’t, but we had to try. Black was gonna be pissed about me taking off, but if today’s parachute experiment went the way I feared it would, he had no right to feel upset.
“Are you ready?” Ana asked.
“Nope.”
But Sam was. He’d checked and repacked his parachutes in the ballroom at Riverley Hall, put on his jumpsuit and helmet, and strapped a camera to his chest to record what he said was possibly the dumbest thing he’d ever done.
The plan called for Ana to sit in my bedroom at Little Riverley while I flew Sam overhead in the Pitts Special I kept in a hangar beside our grass airstrip. I rarely used the little plane. I’d bought it years ago for aerobatics, but life was all work and no play at the moment. We’d make several passes, going higher each time, and when Ana told me over the radio that she could no longer hear the noise from the engine, Sam would jump.
Of course, skydiving from a Pitts Special was a challenge in itself. To prepare, we’d consulted YouTube, which suggested the best approach was for Sam to hang onto the framework by the top wing while I inverted, then drop away. That way, he wouldn’t strike the tail. I was beginning to understand his “dumbest thing I’ve ever done” comment now.
Fortunately, Sam was an experienced skydiver. He threw himself out of planes on the weekends for fun, a concept I struggled to understand. Sure, I jumped out of planes too, but only when it was absolutely necessary.
After a final briefing beside the plane, Ana hefted her and Sam’s daughter, Tabby, onto her hip and headed for the house. The lack of a babysitter meant we were training her young. I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat, and Sam climbed into the back.
Was it too late to drive to the airport instead? A last-minute break in New South Wales seemed remarkably appealing.
An hour later, it was all over—the experiment, the jump, and quite possibly my marriage. Sam had landed on the very edge of the guest house roof and cracked his shin on a stupid weathervane—another of Bradley’s additions—but he’d still hit the target. I’d deactivated the rooftop sensors, and it had only taken three minutes after landing for him to descend into the guest house basement and hobble through the tunnel to Little Riverley. None of the cameras or the other sensors caught his entrance. We’d found out how the pay-off could have been stolen, but the question was, did it go down that way?
Finding out for sure would be our next challenge. After Sam had taken Tabby back home and the plane was tucked safely back in its hangar, I slumped onto the couch in my living room with Ana and poured myself a large gin and tonic. Fuck knows I needed it.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of becoming an alcoholic.”
She took my glass, opened the window, and poured the contents into a bush outside.
“Nyet.”
“Well, do you have a better idea?”
“We need to either prove or disprove our theory.”
“No shit, Sherlock. How?”
“You said Black used a friend of his as an alibi. Pale? We should talk to him.”
I laughed and laughed and then I laughed some more. “Not even you could persuade Pale to talk. He’s part of Black’s posse, not mine. He, Black, and Nate will always cover for each other.”
Pale looked like a beach bum, but if you fell for the act and crossed him, you’d soon find out the error of your ways. I hadn’t worked a job with him before, but Black and I had joined him for a morning of surfing a year or two ago in California, and we were hanging out on the beach—which made Black twitchy because he hated doing nothing—when some perma-tanned prick in budgie smugglers with muscles bigger than his brain accused Pale of ogling his girlfriend. Probably that was true, but there was no need to start a fight over it. First, we ignored him, but the asshole wanted to look like a big deal in front of the bunch of ladies lying out nearby, so he shoved Pale. Big mistake. Black and Pale both caught the guy under the chin with synchronised uppercuts and knocked him out cold. Then Pale turned around and asked if any of the girls wanted to go out for dinner. A perky blonde young enough to be his daughter gave him her number because under the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts, he still kept in shape and he had one of those faces that only got better with age. And
