Billy gives me his worldly look. “Bob Anderson pulls a lot of weight in this state.”
“Who’s the guy who read the warrant?”
“Sheriff’s detective.”
Summoning as much indignation as possible, I stalk into my office and shout, “Well? Did you find him?”
A stumpy red-faced deputy gives me an eat-shit look and continues tearing out the contents of my closet. A rumbling from overhead alarms me until I realize that somebody must be fighting his way through our attic with a flashlight, an invasion of privacy that is its own punishment.
A muffled conference in the hall draws me to the door. Then sharp banging noises pull me across it to the den. I want to laugh. A gangly deputy is hammering his hand along the wall like a man searching for a stud in which to place a nail.
“Looking for secret passages?” I ask.
“Why don’t you wait outside?” he says coldly.
“Because this is my property.”
“Yeah? B.F. deal.”
I can’t resist rattling his cage. “Why don’t you introduce yourself, so I can be sure to get your name right when Bob Anderson asks me who was here?”
His hand stops in midstroke. He looks at me with naked hatred, then continues his pounding, albeit more softly.
“Got something!” shouts a deep voice from the kitchen.
A wolf’s grin spreads across the deputy’s face. I fight the insane urge to trip him as he bulls past me with one hand on the pistol grip of a nickel-plated revolver.
In the kitchen, my heart jumps in my chest. Three deputies have crowded up to the pantry door. They have discovered either Miles or the trapdoor leading to the bomb shelter.
“Whose is this?” asks the sheriff’s detective.
Red-nosed and beagle-eyed, he steps out of the group holding a dark suit jacket. It takes only a second to recognize the cashmere coat my father brought back from Germany, the one reproduced perfectly as a sculpture in my office.
“Well?” he says.
“Mine,” I confess, still dazed. That jacket hasn’t been out of my closet in months.
“Sorta hot for a jacket today, ain’t it?”
As I meet his stare, something else rises slowly into my line of sight. Gripped between the detective’s tobacco-stained thumb and forefinger is a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Why or how this man zeroed in on this disk rather than the hundreds in my office, I don’t know. But I have no doubt that he is brandishing the results of Miles’s marathon of coding-the Trojan Horse.
“What about this?” he asks, shaking the disk in my face.
“What about it?” I ask, praying that he’s smeared Miles’s fingerprints beyond recognition.
“What’s on it?”
“I don’t know. Where’d you get it?”
He looks at the deputies, then back at me. I feel more men squeezing in behind me, but I don’t break eye contact.
“Your pantry’s a wreck,” he says. “Cans all over the floor. And the back door was open.” He nods through our laundry room, toward the exterior door. “The jacket was on the floor by the door. This disk was in the inside pocket.”
“My wife was mending it,” I tell him. “It’s old. Nothing but mending thread keeping it together.”
A quick examination of the coat confirms my answer. “You can’t buy nothing like this around here,” he says doggedly.
“My Dad bought it overseas. When he was in the army.”
Someone behind me grunts as though serving in the army constituted some kind of subversive activity.
“What about the disk?”
I shrug. “I’ve got a million of them. For all I know, that one’s been in that coat since last year.”
“Says you, bud.” The beagle eyes do not waver. “We’ll find out soon enough what’s on it.”
“We can find out right now,” says the lanky deputy I met in the den. “He’s got computers out the ass in his bedroom.”
“Leave ’em be,” says the detective, his drooping eyes still on me. “Sure you don’t want to change your story?”
The truth is, I’d like nothing better. But right now Miles is either crouched in the dark tunnel beneath our house or snaking through the cotton fields on his belly, dragging his briefcase and computer bag behind him. He needs time. “I suggest you be careful with that coat,” I say mildly. “It has a lot of sentimental value.”
The detective blinks, then folds the coat over his arm and hands the disk to a deputy, who slips it into a transparent plastic bag. “Don’t you worry, sonny. We’ll take plenty good care of it.”
He turns and walks through the laundry room and pulls open the back door. I see more brown uniforms in the sunlight beyond him.
“Anybody make a break for it?” he calls.
“Nossir,” answers a chorus of voices. “Windows or doors.”
He sighs interminably. “Le’s go, boys.”
He shoves roughly past me and plows through the deputies toward the hall. My eyes track the cashmere coat until it disappears through the kitchen door.
When the front door finally bangs shut, I take a slow walk through the house. Every closet door is open, with shoes and boots and clothing strewn across the floors. The attic door hangs down on sprung hinges. Heavy Detroit engines rumble out front as I make my way back to the kitchen. After checking to be sure the back door is shut and its curtain pulled, I open the trapdoor in the pantry floor. The odor of mildew and insecticide hits me in a wave.
“Miles?”
No answer.
“Miles! You down there?”
Nothing.
Leaving the trapdoor raised, I return to the back door and open it. Across our backyard stands the long open toolshed where my grandfather kept his tractor and plow and disc and hand tools. The rusted brick-and-tin structure has fallen into ruin and now serves mostly as a picturesque prop for the huge fig trees that surround it. Miles could be hiding there, but I doubt it. The exterior entrance of the bomb shelter opens twenty feet beyond the shed, in the field. If Miles came out there, he would have crawled deeper into the enveloping cotton.
My gaze wanders across the dusty white sea, already shimmering with heat at eight in the morning. I half expect to see Miles rise up like a scarecrow from the middle of the field, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s still hunched over his briefcase in a corner of the bomb shelter. But at some level I know he is not. He promised Drewe that if the police came for him, he would leave and not come back. And Miles keeps his word.
A movement at the far edge of the field catches my eye, but when I try to focus it disappears. Miles? It could just as easily have been a deer.
After locking the door, I pour a cup of scorched coffee and sit at the kitchen table. I can just see the propped-up trapdoor in the open pantry closet. I’ll give Miles another half hour before I close it.
As I sit drinking, I ponder the morning’s riddles. Why didn’t the police confiscate my computers? I can think of two answers. One: the FBI ordered the raid on my house, but instructed the sheriff’s department not to touch my computers. That would mean Baxter still wants me working as sysop, which suggests he might try a repeat of Lenz’s ill-advised EROS strategy. Two: last night’s debacle in Virginia convinced the nonfederal police agencies involved in the case that the FBI has lost control of the investigation. They told Sheriff Buckner to find out once and for all whether Miles was here or not. Leaving my computers alone suggests that while Buckner doesn’t mind thumbing his nose at federal authority, he won’t risk screwing up an FBI investigation by interrupting the running of EROS.
This leaves me with the enigma of the cashmere jacket and the disk. Why in God’s name would Miles take my
