Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (8 page)

As he continued to
scan the room over the sights of his gun for any threats, he
further considered the scene.
This is a
fully-occupied condo building
, he
thought.
Whoever did this couldn’t have
made a lot of noise, or someone would’ve called building security
or the cops.

After a moment, he
had the chilling realization that the living room furniture bore
more than a passing resemblance to Sheldon’s body at the murder
scene. The sofa and chairs hadn’t merely been torn apart: they had
been very methodically dissected. The fabric had been ripped or cut
along the seams and folded beside the bone-like frames, and the
stuffing was piled carefully, with no loose fibers scattered about.
It was all neat and orderly. Precisely cut to pieces.
Just like Sheldon
, he
thought grimly.

Changing position in the vestibule,
he aimed the gun toward the hallway that led to the kitchen,
bathroom, and the two bedrooms. He noticed that all the vent
registers had been unscrewed from the walls and set aside, exposing
the ducts. Whoever had searched this place had been thorough,
indeed.

From what he could see with only the
living room lights on, the kitchen was just as much of a mess as
the living room. The contents of every single container from the
refrigerator, freezer, and cabinets had been emptied onto the
floor. The empty boxes, jars, and cans were stacked neatly along
one wall.

Jack moved quickly from the cover of
the vestibule to the hallway. He quickly checked the lavatory,
again noting how everything that could be opened had been carefully
searched and discarded. Then he moved farther down the hall to the
two bedrooms. The master bedroom, where Sheldon slept, looked just
like the living room: a shambles. The master bathroom was the
same.

Stepping quietly to the end of the
hall, Jack poked the muzzle of his gun into the darkened second
bedroom, where Sheldon had all of his computer and audio equipment.
He flipped on the light.

Like the other rooms, everything had
been meticulously searched. The computer cases, all seven of them,
had been torn or hacked open and the hard drives ripped out. The
two laptops Sheldon used for his audio work, one for composing, the
other for mixing, were cracked open like crabs, the drives pried
from the cases.

The thing that most disturbed him
was the strange ammonia-burning hemp smell: it was the strongest in
here, far stronger than it had been in the kitchen.

“
What the hell were they
looking for?” he wondered aloud. Satisfied that the apartment was
clear, he still held onto the Glock. Just in
case.

He took one last look around the
computer room before moving back down the hallway toward the
kitchen, turning the lights off behind. He wasn’t concerned about
leaving fingerprints, because his prints and fibers were already
all over the condo from the many times he’d been here. He just
hoped that he hadn’t destroyed any possible evidence of the
intruder or intruders in the course of his search.

Jack found himself standing in the
kitchen, careful to stay well away from the mound of dumped-out
food beside the central island. He didn’t want to leave any
smoking-gun evidence that he had been here before the cops or other
Bureau agents.

Looking at the top of the island, he
saw that its surface was smeared with a mishmash of food. Jack
realized that the intruders must have dumped out every container
onto the island’s big cutting board, sifted through the contents,
and then swept it all off onto the floor before setting the
container carefully against the wall. It was bizarre. And the
containers hadn’t been opened as the manufacturers had intended:
cans, boxes, and plastic bottles looked like they’d been gnawed
open, while glass jars and beer bottles were all broken off at the
top, as if whoever had opened them had either bitten down on the
glass, or perhaps had been so strong that the container simply
shattered. Glancing at the mound of food, he could see glittering
glass fragments and crushed lids poking out of the runny
debris.

Kneeling down, he
looked carefully at the pile of food surrounding the island like a
moat.
No footprints
, he thought, shocked. The intruders must have been standing
right next to the island while they tore Sheldon’s kitchen to bits,
dumping all the food on the floor, but there wasn’t a single
footprint in the entire ankle-deep mess to show where they’d been
standing. There also weren’t any prints or smears of food on the
floor leading away into other parts of the house or to the front
door, which was the only exit. It was as if the intruders had been
levitating while they’d made this mess.

“That’s not possible,” he
whispered.

The counters that formed a U shape
around the island held all of the dishes, bowls, glasses, and other
kitchen paraphernalia that had been in the cabinets. In stark
contrast to the mess around the island, the items on the counter
had all been stacked neatly, no doubt after having been removed and
inspected for whatever the intruders hoped to find here. A rack for
Sheldon’s copper-bottomed pans and pots hung over the island, but
Jack knew it couldn’t support a man’s weight. He had helped Sheldon
put it up, and while it was sturdy, it wasn’t that sturdy. There
was no way someone could cling to it to stay clear of the mess
before somehow springing into the living room to reach the front
door to leave. There were no prints evident on the island, although
that could only be verified with a thorough examination by a
forensic team.

The only thing Jack saw that he was
sure was new was a set of deep grooves near one edge of the cutting
board, as if someone had driven some sort of wave-shaped blade into
the wood. It gave him the creeps, but he didn’t know
why.

The fresh condition of the
perishable food dumped on the kitchen floor told him that the condo
had been ransacked recently. He knelt down and with the back of his
hand touched the mangled remains of a frozen roast that had been
hacked apart. It was no longer frozen, but was still quite
cold.

They were here
only a few hours ago
, he thought, a chill
running up his spine as he snatched his hand away and stood up. Had
he gotten it in his mind to drive over here earlier, perhaps after
leaving the Hoover Building that evening, things might have been
interesting to the point of being deadly.

He moved back into the living room,
his mind again returning to the question of why. It was about
information, he felt certain, something that Sheldon had found
before he died. The computers were the obvious thing to start with,
and the intruders had simply torn out the hard drives, just like
the ones at the LRU lab in Nebraska.

But the search of the furniture, the
food, even the toilet cleaning supplies told him that they were
also looking for something else, something that wasn’t in the
computers. They’d spent a considerable amount of time here and
taken a lot of risk to dig through everything, so they had some
expectation that it, whatever “it” was, would be here.

It must have been
small
, he thought,
or they wouldn’t have bothered searching through the smaller
jars and containers
. He couldn’t think of
what it might be, unless it was some sort of small data storage
device, like the thumb drive that Sheldon used for his hacker
tools. Presumably his killers found that, because he never went
anywhere without it, and Richards had said it hadn’t been found in
the search at LRU.

Frowning, Jack recalled that Sheldon
had never mentioned a secret or special place, a wall safe,
perhaps, where he might hide something here. He didn’t even have a
safe deposit box, and Jack felt confident that if he did have one
he would have told Jack, and probably given him a key. That was the
level of trust the two men had shared.

But why didn’t he
tell you what he’d gotten into?
Jack asked
himself.

Frustrated, Jack knew he had to get
down to Quantico, but found himself in a conundrum. He had to
report this and get a crime scene crew in here, but he didn’t want
to be delayed in getting down to the lab or drop himself into hot
water by being here in the first place. He knew he must have been
recorded by the security cameras in the lobby, even if the woman at
the front desk hadn’t gotten a good look at him, so he couldn’t
just pretend not to have been here. If he called headquarters,
there was a better than even chance that Clement would find out in
about five minutes and pin him to the wall for getting involved
after he’d been told to butt out. He also couldn’t just call the
local cops to delay the information getting to the Bureau. Clement
would kick his ass even harder for that. Calling the Washington
Field Office would normally have been the best choice: located on
4th Street Northwest, it had jurisdiction for the greater D.C.
area, its territory extending south and west into Virginia.
Unfortunately, even that would probably land him in front of
Clement’s desk. It would just take about ten minutes
longer.

He only had one remaining
alternative.

“Shit,” he muttered as he pulled out
his phone and dialed.

After two rings he heard, “Special
Agent Richards. This is getting pretty tiresome,
Dawson.”

He’s got me in his
address book now
, Jack thought with a grim
smile. “I’ve got something for you, but I need you to keep Clement
off my back until I’m done at the lab.”

“You’re not there yet?” Richards
snapped.

“No...” Jack hesitated. “I stopped
at Sheldon’s condo on the way.”

“You dumb fuck!” Richards exploded.
“You know better than that!”

“Listen,” Jack said quickly, cutting
him off from what he knew would be a well-deserved tongue-lashing,
but now wasn’t the time, “the place has been methodically torn to
pieces. I’ve never seen anything like this. They pulled Crane’s
hard drives just like they did at the LRU labs, but I don’t think
they found what they were really looking for. And I’m pretty sure
the condo was ransacked in the last few hours.”

“Goddammit, Dawson,” Richards
growled, and Jack could imagine his bald head flushed red with
barely suppressed anger, “you just contaminated the crime scene,
you idiot.”

“Bullshit,” Jack told him. “This
place is already loaded with physical evidence from me: I’ve been
here quite a few times, remember?” He shook his head as he looked
around at the gutted living room, recalling the vision of the mess
in the kitchen without any hand- or footprints anywhere. “No, aside
from the mess itself, I don’t think the forensics guys are going to
find much of anything here. This is really weird, Richards. This
job was tackled by a ghost.”

“Same here,” Richards told him, his
voice taking on a tone more of resigned frustration than anger. “I
hope your lab girlfriend has more luck, because our forensics team
here hasn’t come up with anything at all other than bits and pieces
of Crane. If we had to make a case based on nothing but the
physical evidence we’ve got here, we’d have to say that he gutted
himself.”

Jack cringed at the words, and was
shocked to hear Richards apologize.

“Sorry, Dawson. That was a shitty
thing to say, even for me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack told
him. “But listen, I need you to cover for me. We’ve got to get a
team over here right away, but I want to get down to the lab before
Clement wrings my neck.”

Richards sighed. “Jesus, Dawson,
you’re pulling an awfully big tiger by the tail,” he said. “All
right. Give me the address there so I don’t have to look it up.”
Jack told him. “I’ll come up with some bullshit story to cover your
ass for now, but you’re going to have to pay the piper on this one
eventually. So will I, I’m sure. You owe me, big time.”

“How about a lifetime supply of
Rogaine?” Jack asked as he backed out of the condo and carefully
closed the door, making sure it latched and locked before he headed
down the hall.

“Real funny, Dawson,” Richards
grunted. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” Then the line
went dead.

CHAPTER FIVE

Back in his Defender, Jack made his
way from Sheldon’s condo to I-95 and headed south toward Quantico.
The trip passed in the rhythmic blur and scrape of the windshield
wipers as he tried to focus on what had happened since he’d found
out about Sheldon’s death. He was letting his mind spin again, just
as he had at home, trying to figure out what the intruders at the
condo had been looking for, but his brain refused to
cooperate.

He got off on Exit 148 toward Marine
Corps Base Quantico, then turned right onto Russell Road. From
there, it was one and a half miles to the base entrance. After
showing his badge to the Marines on duty, Jack drove two miles
through the pitch-black woods of the base to the entrance of the
FBI compound where the Academy and the lab were located. He checked
through another guard post before he turned left on J. Edgar Hoover
Road, then circled around the lab complex and entered the parking
garage. He pulled into one of the open spaces on the ground floor
and turned off the Defender’s engine.