the wrong impression. “I’ll be tied up all morning, but I should be able to get away for lunch. Do you think that would work? For the two of you?”
“I’ll talk to Sean.” I heard the clink of glasses in the background. She’d gone back to doing the dishes. For the moment at least, she’d given up on convincing me to come to the house tonight. “It’s business,” she said, “so Tessa didn’t come along?”
“I was hoping she could come over tomorrow, but with this storm, we’ll see. She’s in the Twin Cities this week.”
“I hope she can make it.” More dishes. “We’ve never met, you know. Your stepdaughter and I.”
Now that I thought about it, I realized she was right. Amber hadn’t made it to my wedding with Tessa’s mother and had been in the hospital with food poisoning the weekend of Christie’s funeral nearly two years ago. “I’ll try to make that happen. I’ll call you in the morning. We’ll set up a time to get together.” I was stumbling for a way to gently ease out of this conversation. “After you talk to Sean.”
“It’ll be good to see you. It’s been too long.”
I wondered if it’d been long enough.
“Good night, Amber.”
“Good night.”
We ended the call, and I slowly lowered the phone.
Hearing her say good night to me again brought back a rush of memories and emotions that I really didn’t need surrounding me at the moment.
A few months back, when Lien-hua and I had started to get serious, she’d told me that she wanted us to look forward and not backward. In lieu of this, she’d proposed that we not talk about past loves, past mistakes, past regrets, and as it happens, Amber fell into all three categories. So, although I would’ve been glad to discuss things with Lien-hua, I’d never spoken to her about Amber. Never even brought her up.
But now, I thought again of what had happened five years ago between me and Amber when she and Sean were engaged. Even though Lien-hua was the one who’d suggested not dredging up the past, in light of our potential future together, I felt a vague wash of guilt just thinking about Amber, and our relationship seemed like something Lien-hua should know about.
This week Lien-hua was on-site in Cincinnati profiling a case of three missing women.
I was about to tap at the phone to speed-dial her but then had second thoughts. It would probably be best to think through how to delicately broach the subject of Amber first, before getting on the line with Lien-hua.
I held the phone for a moment, staring at it, thinking about why the shooter might have returned up the stairs a second time after the murders.
The phone. Hmm.
Yes, check on that first, then call Lien-hua.
Using my laptop I logged into the Federal Digital Database, found that Donnie and Ardis Pickron had only one cell phone between them, registered in her name. I entered my federal ID number again and pulled up Ardis Pickron’s mobile phone records.
13
Elk Ridge, Wisconsin
From his vantage point in the log cabin nine hundred meters from the Schoenberg Inn, Alexei Chekov monitored the entrance using the US military issue night vision binoculars he’d purchased last month on the black market in Afghanistan.
He didn’t like surprises, and he wanted to have at least a cursory idea of how many people he would be dealing with at the meeting at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. He’d been told three, but he anticipated a lot more had to be involved, at least at some level.
Through his sources, he knew that the team would be arriving tonight.
To monitor them, he’d taken the liberty of accessing this cabin. It’d been empty when he arrived, and he was hoping the owners wouldn’t return or he’d be forced to make sure they would not be a problem. That might get messy, and that was a situation he would prefer to avoid.
So far he’d seen nine people arrive at the Schoenberg Inn, a sprawling, stylish hotel that looked out of place here in the northwoods.
All of the people he’d seen had parked in locations that allowed the lights from the front of the Schoenberg to illuminate their faces from more than one direction as they entered-an indicator that told Alexei they were either innocent civilians or, if they were operatives, they were inexperienced.
Using an infrared camera, he’d photographed all nine and was currently running their photos through the Federal Digital Database’s facial recognition to confirm their identities. So far he’d identified four people from Eco- Tech-three men and one woman.
Because of their carelessness while entering the hotel, Alexei was surprised someone as meticulous and careful as Valkyrie was working with them.
Already, $2,000,000 had been wired to their account: Valkyrie had informed him of this. Alexei was here to deliver $1,000,000 more as well as the access codes he’d gotten from Rear Admiral Colberg that morning. The final payment of $1,000,000 would be delivered upon completion, after the message had been sent to and received by the US government at 9:00 p.m. Saturday night. That was all he’d been told-a message sent to the government.
He would pick up that money from a drop point tomorrow prior to the deadline.
When his phone rang and he saw who it was, he quickly answered.
Nikolai Demidenko, his contact at the GRU.
“In reference to Valkyrie, all I have found, my brother,” Nikolai said, “are some suspect ties to an Islamic charity based in Pakistan. But that is all.”
“Pakistan?”
“Yes.”
“Send me the details and keep looking. I will forward the usual amount to your account.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
Islamic charities?
Informative.
Alexei had been on a few cases in Pakistan himself over the years. Perhaps he and Valkyrie had associations with some of the same people. Something to keep in mind. Wait and see what else Nikolai could dig up.
Alexei had grown used to getting very little sleep but decided he would watch the Inn for two more hours and then go to bed.
Until then he would observe the premises, doing the job he had been hired to do.
Simply.
Professionally.
To the best of his ability.
The phone records confirmed my theory.
At 1:54 p.m. an incoming call had reached Ardis Pickron’s cell phone.
The conversation hadn’t ended until 1:58 p.m.
Before the state troopers left, one of them had driven to Mrs. Frasier’s house and found out that the oven clock she’d looked at when she heard the last shot was six minutes slow, so the murders would actually have occurred at 1:54 rather than 1:48.
Someone had called Ardis’s cell almost immediately after the murders.
And yet, now, the phone was charging in the master bedroom.
So the killer went back upstairs to answer the phone?
Possible.
The call had come from an unknown, unregistered number from someone in Egypt, one that had never called, or been called from, this phone before.
