House of Secrets - v4 (3 page)

His… hers… his… hers…

Theirs
.

Smallwood’s shin banged against a hard object that was sticking out of the ground. The white flash of pain fueled his surging anger. Smallwood knew what he’d hit, and he reached down and wrenched it from the ground. It made no difference to him that the metal horseshoes on the ground clanked. The couple inside the house couldn’t hear a goddamned thing other than their own animal
grunts
. Smallwood flipped the iron horseshoe pole deftly, catching it just at the base.

In ten seconds he was on the back patio.

Through the sliding glass door he could now see what he had been hearing. His breath was pouring furiously from his nostrils like that of an enraged dragon as he tried the door. It was locked. The ghostlike figures on the bed didn’t seem to notice a damn thing except themselves.

The
crash
of the horseshoe pole breaking through the glass changed all that.

Smallwood brought the iron rod down on the glass door in a swift series of blows, sweeping it in a circular motion to snap away the hanging shards. Joy was screaming. The two bodies scrambled in place, kicking the white sheets into a pile.

Smallwood reached inside the broken glass to flip the lock. Jerking the door open, he charged forward, the iron bar lifted over his head. His naked targets were stranded on the bed. Joy the Disappointment and some irrelevant quivering dark-haired man.

Robert Smallwood had never felt more alive or more important than he did as his arm — itself feeling long and liquid and, in such a peculiar way, sublime — began its powerful descent.

He hoped the stars were watching.

“
H
oly Josef!”

Dimitri Bulakov’s beer bottle fell from the bedside table and glug-glug-glugged its contents onto the floor.

“Child of Jesus,” Dimitri muttered, lurching closer to the laptop. His hands went to the headset, pressing the miniature speakers hard to his ears.

The laptop showed a split screen. Earlier in the day, Dimitri Bulakov had planted three fiber-optic cameras in the bedroom of the house atop the nearby hill. Two of the slender devices were located in the brass casing on the overhead fan, spaced in such a fashion that should one of the fan blades come to a stop beneath one camera, the second camera would still have a clear view of the bed below. The third filament had been run along the power cord leading from the wall outlet to the bedside clock radio and secured against the bottom of the appliance by good old-fashioned chewing gum, Dimitri’s proud marriage of high and low tech. He had learned this trick at the last full-time job he had held, that is if two and a half months could be considered full-time. Dimitri Bulakov knew electronics, but what he did not know was cooperation and playing well with others. It was the temper thing, and the drinking thing. One thing or another. Often both.

The bedside filament also collected the audio. Both the images and audio routed wirelessly through a feeder MacBook that Dimitri had hidden under the shoes on the floor in the bedroom’s closet, and from there to Dimitri’s laptop in Room 5 of the Sunset Motel, half a mile’s distance away. With a sequence of keystrokes, Dimitri could bring to his screen either the image of the entire bed as seen from the overhead fan locations, or the tight bedside close-up on the pair of pillows. Or both images at once — hence the split screen.

This was the configuration on Dimitri’s monitor — on the left side, two pale bodies as seen from above, contorting, and the woman’s face on the right side — when the jarring sound of breaking glass abruptly sounded. The woman’s screams assaulted Dimitri’s eardrums as the couple on the bed swiftly separated. A figure moved into the frame of the overhead shot.

Which was when Dimitri’s beer bottle fell.

The figure could have been a bear, it seemed so large. A white blur bled across the screen as limbs and torsos scrambled crablike up against the wall. Dimitri watched as the naked man lurched toward the intruder. But the intruder swung his arm, and the man pitched sideways and fell from the bed. The woman’s screams intensified.

“No! Please! Robbie! No!”

The intruder was holding something long and thin in his hand. In the dreamlike image on the screen, it looked to Dimitri like a wand. With a
crack
that Dimitri could plainly hear, the weapon landed on the woman’s face. Her screams died instantly. The man continued swinging his weapon furiously, bringing it down over and over. At one point, the woman’s arms seemed to float upward — it almost looked as if she were beckoning her attacker to accept her embrace — then she fell backward onto the pillows, still as a stone. On the left-hand screen, the naked man appeared, rising partway to his knees. The attacker gave an almost nonchalant backhand swing, landing his weapon on the side of the man’s head. The man dropped once more from view.

Dimitri glanced at the computer’s toolbar:
INPUT DOWNLOADING.
He was getting it all. On-screen, the intruder turned back to the woman, and Dimitri tore off the headphones. He swung his feet to the carpet and lurched over to the window. Behind him, the grunting sounds were rendered cheap and tinny in the headset’s tiny speakers. Dimitri ripped the curtains aside.

The partly hidden house on the hill was black. No suggestion of the brutality that was playing out inside its walls. Dimitri was hyperventilating, unaware of the tears that were streaming down his face.

He waited. He was impotent to do anything else.

Dimitri could not have said how long it took for the noises coming from the laptop to subside and then finally cease altogether. Not long. But still, too long. In its way, the silence that replaced the horrible noises was just as ugly.

Dimitri released the curtain and picked up his binoculars. He was sweating furiously. At first he saw nothing. But then, from the rear of the house, a shadowy form appeared. It moved swiftly around to the front of the house, where it paused, its hands on its hips, stretching backward, working out a kink. The figure pulled open the driver’s side door of the sports car and squeezed in behind the wheel. Seconds later the headlights lit up a corner of the house as the car swung a tight turn to aim itself back down the driveway.

Dimitri lowered the binoculars and watched the twin cones of light flicker deftly along the woods and disappear from sight.

C
hristine Foster stood nose to nose with her reflection in the black glass of her hotel room. The snow had not let up, although now it was mixed with an icy slush, lending a sense that chunky pieces of the sky were being propelled to earth.

Christine wanted to be back in New York. Although she hadn’t appreciated just how difficult three and a half days — now to be a full four — away from Michelle would prove, she
had
anticipated the challenge of spending those days with her own mother.

She was drained.

Twelve years distant from her marriage to Christine’s father and Lillian was still fully capable of casting herself as a person tossed blithely into exile. This was the role she relished. Sufficiently lubricated — as it seemed she’d been for much of Christine’s visit — Lillian showed no compunction about prattling away to anyone within earshot about all the charms and excitements of her former life, beginning with accounts of her fairy-tale life as New York’s First Lady and then moving on to her time as an ambassador’s wife in London. Although Lillian’s manic reminiscences gave the impression — initially — that the woman had actually
enjoyed
these heady days, nothing could have been further from the truth. Even in Lillian’s legendarily vivacious early years in Manhattan there had already existed a certain dark-eyed danger lingering in the young woman’s shadows. By the time Christine was a child her mother’s eccentric charms had begun to devolve into the tedium of erratic behavior and social hostage-taking. The seductive honey of Lillian’s tongue had transformed into something decidedly more acidic. The black moods had begun appearing with greater frequency. Especially after the move to London, when Christine was sixteen, Lillian blew ever hotter and colder, and Christine and her brother came to wonder whenever they heard their mother approaching just which Lillian would be walking through the door.

Of the two siblings, it was Peter who had been more adept at accommodating his mother’s growing instability. Being more naturally possessed of an instinct about fragility, Christine’s older brother had displayed the sort of caring and forgiveness for their mother that Christine had been much less inclined to generate. Christine resented the upheaval that her mother’s petulant whirlwinds brought to the household. Peter argued that their father’s ungenerous response to Lillian’s behavior was contributing enormously to the discord.

Christine raised a hand and placed her fingers on her reflection in the window. It was impossible for her to recall her father’s years as ambassador — nine in all — without the stinging memory of his and Lillian’s wretched return to the States. Christine had long since fled the nest, married for several years to Andy. There was general agreement that it was Peter’s tragic death, only months after Whitney and Lillian’s return from London, that had provided the final tipping point for Lillian’s crack-up. Though in Lillian’s telling of the tale, her son’s sad fate played no part. She would always contend that her collapse had everything to do with her husband’s coldness and meanness and eagerness to cast her off.

Lillian still prized the pain. Or at least she enjoyed letting it out of its cage and taking it about for a walk. Fortunately, she now employed more serpentine ways of making her feelings known than in the past, and so her digs at Christine and Whitney and his current wife, Jenny, and pretty much the entirety of the East Coast came more in viper’s bites. Sharp and quick. The relative mellowing had come in part from her surprise move to Denver and her marriage to the eminently squishable Ben. But partly the change was in Christine herself, who learned over time to adopt some of her late brother’s benevolence toward the challenging woman. Lillian was not unaware of her daughter’s increased patience, and in her own way she was willing to declare her gratitude on that front.

“You’re the real diplomat in the family, sweetheart. I understand that it’s partly because you can’t stand the thought of people not liking you. But you try. I see that.”

Only from her mother’s tongue could a word like
diplomat
take on such a sour taste. Christine leaned her head against the cold glass. She wanted to be home.

T
he chirping cell phone nearly made Dimitri wet his boxers. He plodded to the second bed. It was Irena.

“I cannot talk now, I am busy,” he said into the phone, eyeing his chunky form in the dresser mirror.

“When do you come home?”

Dimitri always felt that his wife’s voice sounded like a mouse. When they first began seeing each other, he had loved that funny sound.

“Tomorrow,” he said thickly. “Like I said.”

“Dimitri, Leonard is in the hospital. It is to do with his heart again. How early can you be home?”

Leonard was Dimitri’s brother. The two of them owned and operated a Ping-Pong parlor and tavern in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Only thirty-seven and Leonard was already having heart problems. Partly it was the business, Dimitri was convinced. The business was not doing well. He and his brother were hemorrhaging money.

“How is he?” Dimitri asked.

But the little mouse insisted. “When?”

Dimitri exploded, in Russian.
“Tell me how my brother is! You do not order me around! I am home when I am home! Tell me where he is and how he is doing!”

Irena held her ground. “Where are you? Why are you so secret, Dimitri?”

Dimitri looked down at the laptop. The scene on the screen nearly made him gag.

He snarled into the phone. “I am somewhere to make us money, okay? I work! I make you happy. That is all you need to know, Irena. I am working!”

He glanced down at the laptop again. There had been a movement. Not from the bloodied form on the bed, but from the naked man on the floor. The man was rising unsteadily to his feet and turning to look at the bed. His long, gruesome moan was easily audible to Dimitri. Irena began to speak, but Dimitri cut her off.

“Wait! Hold on.”

The man on the screen made his way haltingly around to the far side of the bed. A black trickle ran from the side of his head all the way down onto his chest. He paused and then bent down slowly, placing his ear gently against the woman’s chest. Dimitri stared fiercely at the close-up image.

I know this man!

Over the phone, Irena was calling his name. “Dimitri? Dimitri, are you still there?”

Dimitri leaned down so close to the computer that his nose was nearly touching the screen.

“Dimitri?”

He jerked upright.

“Irena! Listen to me. Do not ask me any questions, but listen to me. This is
very
important. I will explain to you. Later.”