Split Second

Apparently he wants to be alone.'

Parks shouted, 'Who cares what he wants? He might have cracked this whole case by now but isn't telling us squat!'

'Look, Jefferson, he's doing his best to find out the truth. He just has his own way of doing it.'

'Well, his way of doing it is really starting to piss me off.'

'I'll talk to him. Maybe we can meet later.'

'I don't know how much longer I'm going to be down here. Probably won't be done until tomorrow. You just talk to King and make him see the error of holding out on us. I don't want to find out he's got some other evidence I don't know about. If he does, I'm going to slap him in a cell that looks a lot like the ones you two saw today. You understand?'

'Perfectly.'

Michelle clicked off and pulled the phone line from her laptop out of the wall, winding it back up and putting it in her case. She stood and went over to the other side of the room to get something from her knapsack. So preoccupied was she that she didn't see it until it was too late. She tripped and fell. Rising back up, she looked at the oar with an angry expression. It was half under the bed, along with all the other junk from her truck. So stuffed was the underside of the bed that her possessions kept falling out, turning her bedroom into an obstacle course. This was the third time she'd tripped over something. She decided to do something about it.

As Michelle waged war against her junk, she didn't know that her entire conversation with Jefferson Parks had been captured by a tiny mass of circuits and wires. Inside the housing for her phone lines lurked another device very recently added and of which the owners of the inn were unaware. It was a state-of-the-art wireless surveillance device, so extraordinarily sensitive that it could capture not only conversations in the room or while Michelle was on the phone but anything spoken by the other party to the phone conversation.

A half mile away from the inn a paneled van was parked along the side of the road. Inside, Buick Man listened to the conversation for the third time and then shut off the tape. He picked up his phone and made the call, talking for some minutes and then ending with, 'I can't tell you how disappointed I am.'

These words sent a chill down the spine of the person to whom he was speaking.

'Do it,' he said. 'Do it tonight.'

He hung up and looked in the direction of the inn. Michelle Maxwell had finally made it to the top of his list. He quietly congratulated her.

64

With everything else going on, King had somehow found the time to set up an appointment with a security company based in Lynchburg. He watched from the front window as the van emblazoned with 'A-1 Security' pulled up.

He met the sales representative at the front door and told him what he wanted. The man looked around the house, then eyed King. 'You look familiar. Aren't you the guy who found a dead body?'

'That's right. I think you'd agree I need a security system more than most.'

'Okay, but just so we're straight, our warranty doesn't cover stuff like that. I mean, if another dead body turns up, you don't get a refund or anything like that. That's like an act of God, okay?'

'Fine.'

They agreed on what was to be done.

'When can you get to it?' King asked.

'Well, we're kind of backed up. If somebody cancels on us, we can pop you up higher on the list. I'll give you a call.'

King signed the paperwork, they shook on it and the man left.

As night came, King thought about calling Michelle and having her come over. He'd kept her in the dark pretty long, and she'd been a trooper about it. Yet that was just his way. He always playedthings close to the vest, particularly when he was uncertain of the correct answer. Well, he felt more certain.

He called Kate Ramsey's apartment in Richmond. Sharon, the roommate, answered; Kate still hadn't turned up.

He told her, 'Sit tight, and I'll let you know if she turns up. You do the same.'

He hung up and stared out the big window at the lake. Normally when in a funk, he'd go out on the boat and think, but it was too chilly and windy for that. He turned on the gas fireplace, sat down in front of it and ate a simple meal. By the time he'd convinced himself to call Michelle he figured the hour was too late.

He thought about John Bruno's kidnapping. It was clear to King now that the man had been abducted because he had supposedly destroyed Arnold Ramsey's life with falsified homicide charges. Those charges had been dropped only after the intervention of a lawyer whose identity King now knew. He wanted very much to share this information with Michelle, and even glanced at the phone, thinking he might call her despite the lateness of the hour. It could wait, he decided. Next King thought about what Kate told them she had overheard. Or thought she had overheard. The name Thornton Jorst, supposedly uttered by the mystery man to her father. But King was convinced that what the man had actually said was not Thornton Jorst, but 'Trojan horse.'

And something else Kate said was troubling him. According to her, Regina Ramsey said a police officer was killed during a war protest, and implied that the incident damaged Arnold Ramsey's academic career. But Kate also told them the University of Berkeley let her father receive his Ph.D. because he'd already earned it. Kate had to know they could easily discern that 1974 was when Ramsey received his Ph.D. and easily conclude that the protest wasn't about the war. Why had she done that? No answer to that question came to mind.

He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was aftermidnight. After making sure all the doors and windows were secured he carried the gun Michelle had given him upstairs. He locked his bedroom door, then slid a bureau across it for added security. He checked to make sure the gun was fully loaded and that a round was in the chamber. He undressed and crawled into bed. The gun on the nightstand beside him, he soon fell asleep.

65

It was 2:00A.M., and the person at the window raised a gun, took aim at the bulky figure lying in the bed and shot through the window, the glass tinkling as it broke. The slugs tore into the bed, blowing feathers into the air from the down comforter.

Roused from sleep by the shots, Michelle fell off the couch and onto the floor. She'd dozed off while going through Joan's notes, yet was now instantly alert. Realizing someone had just tried to kill her, she pulled her gun and fired back at the window. She heard footsteps racing away and crawled toward the window, listening intently as she did so. She reached the wall and cautiously peered over the windowsill. She could still hear the strides of the person running away, and he also seemed to be wheezing. To her expert ears, his strides were curious, as though the runner was wounded or injured in some way. Whatever the cause, they weren't normal. They were more like disjointed lunges, and her mind played with the idea that either she'd hit the would-be assassin or he'd already been wounded when he came to kill her tonight. Could it be the man she'd shot in her truck, the one who'd done his best to wring her neck? Perhaps the man who called himself Simmons?

She heard a vehicle start up and didn't even try to race to her truck and follow it. She had no idea if anyone else was out there waiting. She and King had run into one ambush that way. She had no desire to repeat the mistake.

She went over to the bed and looked down at the mess. She'd taken a nap there earlier, and the covers and thick pillows had gotten balled together. To the shooter it must have looked like her sleeping there.

Yet why try to kill her now? Were they getting too close? She hadn't done all that much. Sean certainly had found out more than-