'Property settlements can be very difficult when a great deal of money is involved. Phyllis wanted to make sure she kept all of hers.' Lawton wrapped her arms tightly around her body.
'Why am I standing out here freezing, Chief Kerney?'
'Ambassador Terrell most likely has the highest government security clearance possible. Sometimes federal agencies will monitor the conversations of family and friends. It's a good way to make sure classified information isn't being inadvertently discussed.'
'Are you saying I'm being spied upon?'
'I doubt it,' Kerney said.
'But then you never know.'
Lawton searched Kerney's face.
'This is unreal. I don't like what you're saying at all. What can I do?'
'Call in an electronics expert to sweep your house inside and out. The cost may well be worth your peace of mind.' He shook Lawton's gloved hand.
'Thank you for your time.'
'Unreal,' Lawton said again, shaking her head as she went inside.
The woman who opened the door at the Randall Stewart residence had her long brown hair pinned up. She wore bright yellow rubber kitchen gloves.
In her forties, she had tired eyes and seemed decidedly unhappy about the interruption.
Kerney showed the woman his shield and asked if she was Mrs. Stewart.
'I'm Cynthia Cabot, the housekeeper,' the woman replied.
'The Stewarts are out of town on a skiing vacation. Where's your police car?'
'I walked up from Ms. Lawton's house,' Kerney said.
'When did the Stewarts leave?'
'I'm not sure. There was a note on the kitchen table when I arrived this morning. The trip wasn't planned ahead of time, I can tell you that.
Mrs. Stewart always lets me know when they'll be gone. This must have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. And they took the boys out of school to go with them.'
'Is that unusual?'
'I've worked for the Stewarts for three years and until now, family vacations have always been scheduled during school holidays.'
'Do you know where they went?'
'No, and Mrs. Stewart always leaves that information for me in case something important comes up.'
'Any idea when they'll be back?' Kerney asked.
'The note didn't say. What's this all about?'
'Just a follow-up to an investigation,' Kerney answered.
'The Terrell murder?' Cabot asked.
'A completely different matter. Do the Stewarts call in when they're vacationing?'
'Always. I check the house daily while they're gone, usually in the evening after I've finished with my other clients. If Mrs. Stew art doesn't call while I'm here, I'm sure there will be a message on the answering machine tonight.'
Kerney held out his business card.
'When they call, ask them to get in touch with me. It's not an emergency, but I do need to speak with them.'
Cabot read Kerney's card and gave him a surprised look.
'You're the police chief?'
'Yes, I am,' Kerney said. He turned before Cabot could probe further and walked away.
Through thickening snow Kerney hiked back to his truck, cranked the engine, turned up the heater, and sat for a minute until the throbbing in his knee subsided. His kneecap had been almost completely destroyed by a drug dealer's bullet, and the surgical reconstruction had left him with a limp and a leg that performed poorly. Over the years he'd maintained a fairly rigorous exercise program to keep his legs in good shape. But the pain never completely went away, and his hike up and down the hills had made it worse.
He used his cell phone to call the electric company and learned that no power outage had occurred in the vicinity of the Terrell neighborhood before or after the holidays. He turned on the windshield wipers and the blades thudded against the wet, heavy snow as he drove out of the parking lot. According to the housekeeper the Stewarts' decision to leave suddenly on an unplanned vacation was completely out of character.
He wondered why, and couldn't dismiss the possibility that it was somehow linked to everything else he'd learned so far about the ambassador and his wife.
He drove the loop that passed in front of the Terrell residence, stopped a hundred yards down the road from the driveway, and studied the electric transformer on the power pole through binoculars. Mounted above the transformer a tiny video camera was trained on the security gate and driveway to the Terrell house.
Kerney turned the truck around. He needed to find out who had put the surveillance camera in place. But more important, now that the possibility of hard evidence existed that could identify Terrell's murderer, he needed to get hold of the videotapes.
Brother Jerome had been unable to give Bobby Sloan any information about a return address on the missing envelope sent to Father Mitchell.
He did recall that the envelope had been addressed by hand, not typed, and postage stamps, not metered mail, had been used to send it. Brother Jerome also noted that the quality of the penmanship was excellent and that the hand was most probably a woman's.
Without a name the information wasn't much help to Sloan's investigation. While he now had a clear-cut link between the priest's murder and the aggravated burglary, he still lacked both a suspect and a viable motive.
He left the last video store on his list, which, like all the others he'd checked, had no customer record on Father Mitchell, and walked glumly through the snow to his unit. Reduced to chasing down tangential shreds of information, Sloan felt the rhythm of the investigation fading into one of those unsolved murder mysteries that ten years down the road would be featured by the local paper in a Sunday edition.
He went back to the college and started another round of interviews that focused on the burglary of Brother Jerome's office, sloshing through the wet snow from building to building, meeting with staff and faculty members who'd been on campus around the time of the break-in.
He finished up with nothing to show for the effort and walked toward the parking lot, passing a blocky two- story building with a stepped-down entrance that looked like a modern version of an ancient Aztec temple.
The building housed the Moving Images Arts Department and construction of the facility had been funded by a famous old movie actress named Greer Garson, who'd lived outside of Santa Fe on a ranch until her death some time back.
Sloan stopped, went inside, and asked the college student working at the desk if he knew Father Mitchell.
The young man, who had stringy shoulder-length blond hair and a nose ring, nodded his head.
'Yeah, he was in here all the time, mostly in the evenings after classes ended. That's when I'm usually here working on my own stuff.'
'Did he talk to you about what he was doing?' Sloan asked.
'No, but he spent most of his time in an editing suite, so he must have been producing something. I never saw him in the screening room or in the archives.'
'Is there someplace in the building where he might have stored his materials?'
'There are dozens of places like that where we can lock up film, videos, and shooting scripts. All of the post production rooms have built-in locking cabinets, and there are lots of storage lockers for students to use all over the building, on a first come, first served basis.'
The kid opened a drawer and pulled out a loose-leaf binder.
'But since Father Mitchell had faculty status, he probably got an assigned locker. Yeah, here it is. One seventy-six. You go past the production rooms and the soundstage down to the end of the hall. You'll find his locker there.'
'Who can open it?' Sloan asked.
