Sunset Bridge (31 page)

No one else was going to do this if she didn’t.

As she crossed the bridge to the key—much easier than it had been in the other direction—she decided that she would follow her own best instincts. Then she would do a bit of peacemaking with the man who had warned her against it.

R
ain was sluicing across the windshield in sheets by the time Maggie pulled behind a crape myrtle hedge about twenty yards beyond Blake’s house. She had driven slowly as she passed and seen no lights, cars or people.

Between the rain and the hedge, she would be well hidden from view for the short time she spent here. She had already resigned herself to being soaked to the bone, and even if her umbrella hadn’t already thrown up its spokes, she wouldn’t have bothered with it. She took a waterproof windbreaker she used when she hiked or kayaked out of the backseat and pulled it on, zipping it to the top and pulling the hood over her hair. She was careful to tie it so it didn’t interfere with her peripheral vision. At least the windbreaker would keep the rain out for a while.

She had given back her gun and her badge, but her lock-picking kit had been purchased at her own expense, and now she took it out of the glove compartment and slipped it into her pocket. She was fairly adept at using it, but she hadn’t
practiced in months, and even at her best she wasn’t successful with the newest locks, with their rotating pin tumblers, false slots and sidebar mechanisms. She was simply hopeful that this, a beach house on a sparsely occupied barrier island, would not be rigged out like Fort Knox.

She pocketed her cell phone, although she knew that was probably pointless. Then she put her keys under the seat, quietly opened the car door and stepped into the downpour.

The rain was cold, and immediately her feet sank into the saturated sand. She hoped that when she was ready to leave, she wouldn’t need a tow truck, but parking in a safer spot would mean possible detection. On the remote chance there was someone left at the house, she didn’t want to be visible from a window. And she didn’t want to be spotted from the road, in case her mother or someone else from Happiness Key noticed her car. She just had to take her chances.

She slogged along behind the hedge, glad on one level that the rain was falling hard enough to provide some cover. She positioned herself where she could see the house without being seen and watched for ten full minutes, looking for lights or movement. When she was satisfied, she dashed across the road to crouch in a tightly clustered grove of podocarpus trees. The stiff branches scratched at her wrists and legs, but she stayed perfectly still. This time she waited only five minutes.

Finally she straightened and started toward the house. She had a plan in place but hoped she wouldn’t need it. After hiding and slinking, it felt bold and unbearably foolish to dash up to the front porch and ring the doorbell, but that was exactly what she did. Once, twice, three times.

As she waited, she examined the lock and knew immediately that this one would not give over easily. The doorknob
was egg-shaped and solid brass. It looked new and expensive, with what was obviously a complex key slot. The sleek new knob was joined by an equally intimidating dead bolt, and all the windows on the bottom floor had elaborate grillwork across the lower panes that both adorned them and kept them inviolate. The house was also used as an office, which could legitimately rate a more advanced security system, but she was glad there were no signs near the door warning of alarms. Still, someone had carefully secured this door, most likely in the last few weeks, if the shining brass was any indication.

No one answered her summons, which delighted her. She had been prepared, if necessary, to ask for Blake. If he’d been here, or answered the door himself, she would have presented him with the two pies in her car that were otherwise earmarked for Felo and any other residents of Alvaro’s camp. She would have told Blake the pies were her contribution to his party, wished him well on his journey to Sarasota like a love-sick groupie and disappeared back into the rain.

Since, as cover stories went, that one was weak and suspicious, she was glad she wasn’t going to be forced to use it.

Five minutes of picking the lock proved she was right about its complexity and the futility of trying harder. She rounded the house, carefully climbed the stairs to the deck off Blake’s bedroom and examined the doorknob and the dead bolt above it. This time she didn’t even pull out her kit. Perhaps with enough time and patience, she might breach this one, which was minimally less high tech, but there was little shelter here, and she had been in hotel showers with less water pressure. She abandoned the deck and the waterfall, and slipped around toward the garage.

A car passed on the road, but as she flattened herself against the side of the house, it continued toward the point. She
wondered if the passenger was one of her neighbors, making a final trip to get her belongings before abandoning the island for good. When the car didn’t turn around, and the road as far as she could see was empty, she finished her trip around the house and stood under the garage overhang.

The lock-picking kit was in her pocket now, since she knew from watching Blake last night that access was via a keypad. Her only chance of getting into the garage was correctly guessing the code. If she was lucky and Blake himself had programmed it, then he might have used a familiar number. And she had some of those numbers on the fax in her pocket, thanks to the friend who had come through for her just as she left the house that morning.

Maggie pulled the sheet out of her pocket, glad that here, at least, she was protected from the worst of the elements. She had circled the most obvious numbers to try, and now she punched them in. The first four digits of Blake’s social security number. The last four. When neither worked, she methodically started deleting a digit at the beginning and adding one at the end until all were exhausted.

Next she tried Blake’s birth date. The month and year abbreviated. The year alone. The month and day, day and last two digits of the year. After every combination she could think of, she gave up on that and progressed to his driver’s license.

Ten minutes later, she was frazzled and pessimistic. She had tried everything that seemed possible and much that seemed unlikely. She had even tried the most basic. The house number. Variations of the house phone number. Blake’s cell-phone number. Nothing had worked.

She was beginning to question her own sanity. Two veteran cops who knew her well, her father and Felo, had warned her
not to do this. Perhaps the fates were telling her the same. Yes, wouldn’t it have been nice to get inside and prove to everybody that she was still good at her job, that with nothing to go on except intuition and guts she had found a link between Blake Armstrong and Harit Dutta that no one could ignore? But to whom did she need to prove herself? Who was questioning her skills? She was the one who had sacrificed her beloved job on the altar of her own ego.

It was time to pack and get out of town.

She folded the fax and slipped it in her pocket. As she did, her fingers touched the other piece of paper she had put there. She debated, but only for a moment. She slipped out the email attachment Felo had sent her and unfolded it. The record he had sent of Blake’s connection to the Atlantis Casino, including the photograph of his player’s card, stared back at her. She fingered the paper, then shrugged. Stepping back to the keypad, she punched in the first four numbers of the ID card.

The door slid open.

For a moment Maggie just stood there, stunned that she’d been successful. Then she stepped into the garage and let her eyes adjust to the deeper gloom. The room was large enough for two cars, but neither side was occupied. The walls held metal shelves and the usual garage paraphernalia, a ladder, a Peg-Board with tools hanging from hooks. A shovel and rake in one corner, a lawn mower in the opposite one. The door leading into the house was on her left. She debated pressing the button on the wall and closing the garage door, but instead she climbed the two steps to the inside door and examined the knob.

This was the door she had hoped for. The knob had probably been installed when the house was built decades before,
well before technology complicated the lives of burglars. Whoever had so carefully secured the front and back doors and windows had counted on the garage door itself to ward off intruders. In only a little more than a minute she had closed the garage door and opened the one leading into the house.

She had given herself an hour to accomplish her search, and now she was down to twenty-five minutes. She would need more than that, of course, but she planned to keep her little treasure hunt as close to that time frame as possible. With luck she could investigate, then pack, grab her cat and be on the road by two-thirty.

She stepped inside and let her eyes adjust again. No lights shone, and even though it was early afternoon, the skies were so dark outside it could be evening. She moved cautiously through what turned out to be the kitchen, then into the dining area. With no suspicion that Blake was anything more than an affable man interested in a casual date, she hadn’t paid much attention to the floor plan or anything else about the house. She refreshed what memories she had as she tiptoed through, still listening carefully.

Vaguely she remembered a wing that housed an office where the housemates conducted business. She moved through the living room and found a hallway close to a freestanding metal fireplace. She listened, then followed it to find two rooms directly across from each other, both furnished with desks and bookshelves, as well as tall file cabinets.

She chose the one on the left and set to work. She didn’t need much time to ascertain that the place had been well and truly cleaned out. The file drawers were empty except for some debris: empty folders, unimportant papers and, in one drawer, a stash of Hershey bars. All the drawers had been ajar,
and she left them that way, stifling an urge to swipe one of the candy bars, since she hadn’t yet had lunch.

The desk was unlocked, and a search showed nothing inside. Although the wall had half a dozen empty spaces with picture hangers intact, a framed commendation remained for Ned Bournes, and she remembered the older housemate from Blake’s party, a gangly balding man in a shirt with long sleeves that still exposed his wrists.

Nothing on the shelves looked interesting. Clearly anything of value or importance had been hauled away in case Phyllis did her worst.

Maggie abandoned Ned’s office and crossed to the next one. Nothing remained on these walls to hint at the occupant’s identity, but a brass nameplate sat askew on the desktop.

“Blake Armstrong,” she read out loud. “Gotcha.”

She began in one corner, moving slowly and carefully around the perimeter of the room, lifting and examining anything of interest. There wasn’t much. There were shelves here, too, with a few books, but she found nothing inside them or under them. Blake was apparently a fan of thrillers, and these had all been read and left to their fate.

When she’d checked the entire circumference, she went to the desk and began a systematic search like the one she had conducted across the hall. Here she didn’t even find candy. The desk had been completely cleared out, and when she pulled out the drawers to look beneath them, she found nothing there, either.

She located an empty wastebasket. No help. A closet turned up nothing except the scent of cedar and four expensive wooden hangers. A bug—she didn’t look too closely—scurried up one corner. She left the closet door half open, the way she had found it.

Although she hoped to have better luck upstairs, twenty minutes later a thorough search of Blake’s bedroom had turned up nothing of interest. Except for furniture and heavy items, the house had been thoroughly cleaned out. She had hoped the safer second story would have received a less exhaustive overhaul, but it, like the first, had been emptied of everything personal.

Maggie was sorry she hadn’t listened to Felo and her father. She had wasted more than an hour, broken the law she had once sworn to uphold and set herself up for a harder, longer drive to Alvaro’s camp. Blake Armstrong was not a fool. If he was involved in the Duttas’ murders, then he had probably gotten rid of all evidence weeks ago. Her hope, that he had missed something that would lead her in the right direction, had been foolish.

She did a cursory exam of the other upstairs rooms, even sorted through the remaining toiletries in the bathroom to see if Blake had anything with a label or tag from the barbershop where Harit had worked, but if he had ever possessed anything like that, he had it with him or had discarded it.

Downstairs again, she circled the living room, lifting abandoned newspapers and magazines to check beneath them, although by now she had more or less given up. She stopped at the wall holding the photographs she had admired on the day of the party and officially gave up the search.

The time had come to go back to her rental house, throw everything of value—mostly sentimental—into her car, put Rumba in her carrier and head out of town. She had hoped to flaunt her success in Felo’s face, but instead she would have to acknowledge he had been right.

And what else would she say to him? How much of this dangerous side excursion had been to find something that
would derail a conversation about their relationship, at least for a little while? How much had been a hope that they could avoid discussing their problems, and how and whether to try to address them?

Outside, the wind was wailing louder, and the house creaked in response. She was staring at the wall, her thoughts spinning away from this house and onto a crowded highway, when something else vied for her attention. Pulled back to the wall of photographs, she looked closer, but nothing jumped out at her. She was tired and discouraged, and hadn’t she already decided there was nothing here?

And yet…

Maggie moved a little closer. What exactly, besides the howling wind, had disturbed her train of thought? She examined the photographs one by one. Bridges were prominent, of course—the reason, she supposed, for this artistically wrought display. These men built bridges, repaired bridges and naturally their handiwork deserved center stage. Not all the photographs contained bridges, though. Several featured roads, one climbing a mountain straight into the clouds, another skimming a cliff. They looked to be a set of sorts, similar sizes, identical frames, matted much the same. She moved closer and saw the photographer’s name in small print in the right-hand bottom corner of one, then another.