Devoted, page 28
The administrator, Janet Fegin, said, “There are three during the day, but only one on the graveyard shift. Eric Norseman.”
As the sheriff waited with his team for the deputies bearing shotguns, the words graveyard shift echoed in his mind.
91
By the time that John Verbotski and Bradley Knacker arrived on Greenbriar Road, after driving from the abandoned shopping mall in Sacramento, their associates in Atropos & Company had researched the situation in Pinehaven. They provided necessary information acquired by hacking into the county sheriff’s communications system, the property-title records in the tax collector’s computer files, the county voter rolls, and the records of births and deaths.
At 4:43 a.m., Verbotski and Knacker cruised north on Greenbriar in their Cadillac Escalade, past the Bookman house. The presence of sheriff’s department vehicles and deputies sitting sentinel didn’t surprise them because they learned en route about the fugitive Lee Shacket, his violent acts at this residence, his arrest, and his subsequent escape. Their client, Alexander Gordius, hadn’t mentioned this complication; he was evidently not aware of it.
As they passed the house a second time, heading south, Bradley Knacker called the current number for Gordius. No answer.
“He was going back to his hotel, hit the sack.” Verbotski said.
“We might not be able to reach him for a while.”
“You know the hotel?”
“No. He’s not going to give me that, figuring I might try to get the registration records, learn his real name or whatever other fake name he used to register.”
For Atropos & Company, the only business more profitable than murder-for-hire was blackmailing selected clients who had paid them to kill people. Gordius, whoever he might be, was always careful not to provide a lead on his true identity. He always contacted them on a different disposable phone. And though they had tried to get his fingerprints, he seemed to have none; perhaps they had been removed with acid and CO2 laser treatments, a process that Verbotski had been considering for himself.
“So now what?” Knacker asked. He was the younger of the two and had less patience when the timing of a plan had to be revised. “We just wait around until we can get hold of this asshole?”
“No. Let’s secure our base of operations. Be ready to make our move. And never call a client an asshole.”
“Not even if he is?”
“Especially not if he is.”
The murder-for-hire operation that had called itself Tragedy had been thuggish. Atropos & Company styled itself as a refined person’s option for aggressive problem solving. Maintaining this image required a certain restraint, a sense of decorum.
Because they were here to invade the Bookman house, take mother and son prisoner, assist in their interrogation, eventually kill them, and dispose of their remains where they would never be found, they must be discreet. In a small town like Pinehaven, registering in a motel, even under false ID, would be leaving an easy lead for investigators to follow later.
Instead, from the tax assessor’s records, their associates had identified a potential property on Greenbriar Road, almost a mile south of the Bookman residence. The title was held in the name of Charles Norton Oxley and had been in his name for forty-nine years. Mr. Oxley had been on the county voter rolls for fifty-six years, so by all indications, he was at least seventy-seven years old.
The single-story ranch-style residence stood well back from the highway, shaded by cedars. Even a few minutes before five o’clock in the morning, lights were aglow in the windows.
On Interstate 80, south of Colfax, they had pulled into a rest stop that provided bathrooms as filthy as any in the state’s most deteriorated public schools. After carrying suitcases into the men’s lavatory and assessing the chances of contracting a life-threatening infection, they returned to the parking lot and stripped to their underwear at the open tailgate of the Escalade. They had dressed in black suits and white shirts and black ties, their basic FBI look, which served them well when they needed to deceive people, which was most of the time.
Now, in Pinehaven County, with dawn more than an hour away, looking uncommonly presentable for this time of night, they went to the front door of the Oxley house, unfazed by the wind. Knacker’s hair was short, incapable of being mussed, and Verbotski’s full head of hair looked even better windblown than combed. Their suits were well tailored and of the finest wool blend, capable of holding their shape through a gale.
The lighted doorbell escutcheon was half a century newer than the house and obviously included a camera.
Verbotski smiled at it.
Knacker was too impatient to fake a smile. He was a reliable partner and well trained in the mortal arts, but he looked and acted too much like an assassin. Verbotski was dedicated to mentoring Bradley Knacker, however, because he believed the younger man truly wanted to be the best that he could be in his profession. These days, many of the younger generation lacked a serious work ethic and, having been hooked on tech and social media most of their lives, had the attention span of a Chihuahua with ADHD. Knacker was able to focus, and hard work didn’t daunt him. If he could lighten up, develop a credible smile of some kind, and temper his gung-ho attitude with patience, he would be the perfect partner with whom to go killing.
A stoop light came on and a voice issued from the doorbell speaker. “What do you want?”
“Mr. Oxley? Mr. Charles Oxley?” Verbotski asked, raising his voice against the wind.
“Who wants to know?”
Holding his expertly forged badge and photo ID to the doorbell camera, Verbotski said, “Special Agent Lewis Erskine, FBI. We need to ask you a few questions.”
“Before the damn sun is even up?”
“We saw your lights were on.”
“What the hell questions? Questions about what?”
“There was a serious event at the Bookman residence earlier tonight.”
“Damn sirens all night, so a man can’t sleep. I don’t know a damn thing about what happened up there. I got enough damn problems of my own, what with the social security not paying me for fourteen months. Go away.”
Bradley Knacker looked as though he might shoot out the lock and break down the door.
Smiling, nodding, Verbotski said to the doorbell, “What problems with your social security, sir? Maybe we can help.”
“They stopped sending my check fourteen months ago, said I was dead. Do I sound dead to you?”
“It was your wife who died fourteen months ago.”
“How the hell do you know?”
Verbotski faked a convincing little laugh and shook his head and said, “We’re the FBI, sir. We know just about everything. We’re here to help.”
For a long moment, Charles Oxley said nothing. As a citizen of the modern state, he had uncountable reasons to understand that a slight excess of power rapidly became a lethal excess, that when an agent of the state insisted he had come to help, there was at least a 70 percent chance that he had come to punish or pillage. In the human heart, however, there was a perverse desire to surrender control to those who claimed a right to power and advertised their good intentions, to believe in something, even if the something was a hive lacking human order or a machine without a face. As Verbotski had known he would, Charles Oxley unlocked and opened the door, and welcomed them inside.
Oxley stood perhaps five feet six, a lean bantam rooster of a man. His face was dramatically seamed either by loss and hardship or by hard living, his nose a broken beak, his blue stare defiant.
In spite of his short stature, he might have been a successful scrapper in his day, never an easy target. But he was half a century older than Bradley Knacker and at least seventy pounds lighter, and one punch in the gut from the younger man all but lifted Oxley off his feet, sent him crashing backward into the wall.
Before Knacker could throw a punch or two into Oxley’s face, Verbotski said, “We don’t want blood all over the carpet if someone comes visiting and won’t go away and we absolutely have to open the door.”
Knacker grabbed the dazed and retching old man by the shoulders and steered him into the kitchen at the back of the house and shoved him into a chair at the breakfast table.
Verbotski found a door to a cellar, turned on the light, and went down to have a look around. There was an oil-fired furnace. An explosion and fire could be easily engineered.
When Verbotski returned to the kitchen, Knacker said, “He tells me there’s no children, and there’s no neighbor he’s friendly with.”
Adult children and neighbors were the most likely to drop in unannounced.
In a mudroom off the kitchen, Verbotski found a long woolen scarf hanging on a hook, but better yet were a few extension cords in a utility drawer. He took one of the extension cords into the kitchen and strangled Oxley to death.
Together, he and Knacker threw the body down the cellar steps. Verbotski turned off the light. Knacker closed the door.
The two of them went through the house, closing blinds and draperies where they weren’t already closed.
The two-car garage contained only a Ford Expedition. Verbotski drove the Escalade into the empty stall and closed the segmented door with a remote he found in Oxley’s vehicle.
By the time Verbotski came inside, Knacker was making coffee.
Because four men would be necessary to fulfill this contract, two of the additional principals in Atropos & Company would soon leave Reno in a black Suburban packed with the necessary gear. They would be here in three or four hours.
Verbotski made a phone call to Reno. He listed the items they would need to rig the oil-fired furnace for an unfortunate accident.
As cover and to launder money, the Dark Web entity called Atropos & Company did business as a high-tech security firm, under the name Supersafe Tomorrow. Their headquarters was in Reno because of the considerable advantages of Nevada tax laws.
Verbotski said, “The coffee smells great.”
“The old guy had a good Jamaican blend,” Knacker said, “and I spiced it with a teaspoon of cinnamon.”
92
In less than a day, Rosa Leon had traveled from the middling finances of the middle class to wealth, from a quiet acceptance of the hardness of the world to a belief in the magical nature of it, from a mundane life to one of high adventure, and she marveled at her flexibility.
Mrs. Brickit’s muffins had been eaten, and coffee had been drunk. Especially because of Ben Hawkins’s expertise in the strategy and tactics of war, a plan of sorts had been devised with surprising speed. They were proceeding on the premise that bad people from Tragedy would be coming soon—We Will Find You—and that, because of incompetence and corruption, Sheriff Hayden Eckman would provide them with no useful protection.
Sitting on the bed in one of the two guest rooms, Rosa had already done her part by using her iPhone to call Dorothy Hummel’s attorney—well, her attorney now—Roger Austin, whom she knew to be an early riser, up before dawn. She said nothing of Kipp, because Roger didn’t know the dog’s secret. But she succinctly laid out the incredible story of Woody’s investigation of his father’s accident. She didn’t mention the threat issued by the Dark Web operators behind Tragedy. She asked Roger to keep safe the document—“The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil”—that was even then being emailed to him by Megan. She asked him to read it and then share it with two people in the legal system, judges or lawmen, whom he knew for certain were not corrupt and could not be corrupted.
“But how did you meet Mrs. Bookman and her son?” Roger asked in that deep, mellifluous voice that might have given her confidence in the attorney even if she hadn’t known him. “I never heard you speak of them before.”
“Oh,” Rosa said, “I’ve known them quite a while. It seems like forever. Listen, Roger, I haven’t said who was responsible for the death of Woody’s father. You’ll discover the name when you read his research, and it’s a shocker. The man is powerful and very wealthy. You might be tempted to wonder if it’s a fantasy that Woody has spun. But I swear to you it’s not. There will be additional proof coming.” She couldn’t resist adding, “It’s not a shaggy-dog story, Roger. Anyway, once you’ve read the document and thought about it, we very much need your advice about how to proceed in such a way that what Woody’s discovered will be believed and acted upon. Until the story is out there in the press, it doesn’t seem that Megan and the boy will be safe.”
When she concluded that call, her immediate contribution to the plan had been made, although she had a role to play when the coming day ticked into the afternoon. Now she stretched out on the guest-room bed, hoping to get some rest for what lay ahead, though she doubted that she could quell her excitement enough to sleep. In spite of her doubt, she slept.
93
While Rosa Leon spoke on the phone to Roger Austin, Carson Conroy was on the east side of Pinehaven, at the home of his friend Harry Borsello, who was about to drive into town to oversee the morning rush at his restaurant, Four Square Diner, and grab some breakfast of his own.
Carson and Harry were friends not just because they relished bacon, but because they were in the same poker club and attended the same church and shared a love of nature and were widowers. Three years earlier, Harry lost his wife, Melissa, not to a senseless drive-by shooting, but to a senseless cancer, and Carson helped him make it through the worst of his grief.
Now, as he followed Harry to the barn at the back of the property, the low clouds churned, the pines thrashed, and all the creatures of the night cowered in their warrens and roosts as if the slowly approaching dawn would be the last day of Earth.
The previous owner had used the barn as a stable. Because Harry Borsello had a fear of horses, a love of horsepower, and an interest in comfortable camping, he had removed the stalls to make room for his collection: a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1 Twister, a fastback coupe; a 1976 Corvette Stingray; a 1968 Pontiac GTO; a 1971 Dodge Charger Magnum V8; a new Ford F150 crew-cab pickup; a thirty-six-foot Fleetwood Southwind.
Together, they had twice taken off for a week in the motor home, once south to Yosemite, once north to Shasta Lake for some good fishing, and Carson had borrowed the vehicle for a solo run across Nevada and into Utah. He wanted to borrow it again.
When Harry switched on the barn lights and closed the man-size door behind them, he said, “Where are you lighting out for?”
“I haven’t finally decided,” Carson said, regretting the lie even though it was in Harry’s best interest not to know what use his vehicle would serve. “Just a few days, maybe over to Mendocino. I feel a need for the coast.”
“Should be a hell of a lot less wind there,” Harry said. “And if the rain comes, it’s moving south-southeast, so you’ll have clear weather.”
As Harry handed the key to Carson and used a remote to roll aside the big door, the massive rafters groaned. At the pinnacle of the roof, a large weather vane, in the image of a galloping steed, spun with a shriek and a rhythmic clatter, as if it were ridden by one of the fierce horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“I’ll pull your Explorer in here after you’re gone,” Harry said. “If you wrack up the Fleetwood, for God’s sake don’t kill yourself. I’ll need you alive to buy me a new one.”
“You’re a real pal, Harry.”
“Plus poker night won’t be fun anymore without you losing your shirt to me on a regular basis.”
“I’m well aware you don’t make any money from that pathetic greasy-spoon joint of yours,” Carson said. “That’s why I let you win at cards. It’s a charity thing.”
He drove directly home in the Fleetwood Southwind and parked it in the driveway. He made several trips between the house and the motor home, stocking the vehicle’s refrigerator with bottled water, Coca-Cola, and four pepperoni-and-cheese pizzas from his freezer.
From the mantel over the living room fireplace, he retrieved one of the smaller photographs of Lissa to take with him. He removed the picture from the frame and slipped it into a jacket pocket without folding it.
Although the coming showdown might be violent, Carson didn’t believe he would be killed before Thursday became Friday, eighteen hours hence. Nevertheless, he wanted Lissa’s picture with him, so he could look at it in the moment before his death, if it should come.
94
While Rose Leon settled down to sleep and while Carson Conroy was borrowing Harry Borsello’s motor home, Ben Hawkins moved his Range Rover and then Rosa Leon’s Lincoln MKX into the two empty stalls in the four-car garage attached to the Bookman house.
Perhaps Carson’s acidic assessment of Sheriff Hayden Eckman colored Ben’s reaction to the deputies, but something about their manner and deadpan expressions and ice-pick stares suggested they were here not just to guard against the return of Shacket, but also to maintain surveillance of the occupants of the house.
He removed a suitcase from his Rover. He carried it into the residence and upstairs to the second guest bedroom. In addition to clothes and toiletries, the bag contained his pistol, a Nighthawk Custom .45 ACP. The frame, slide, barrel, extended magazine well, magazine release, and slide stop were forged rather than cast. It looked like a solid artifact, like a machine produced by some 3-D printing process that would be perfected in another hundred years. It was the most accurate and reliable handgun he had ever used.
