Those Bones Are Not My Child (74 page)

“And the redhead?”

“GBI Organized Crime. Haven’t seen him all night. But he’ll show. I’ve got five dollars riding on it.”

“What about him?” B. J. said, pointing at the floor of the car.

“Just a feeling,” he said again, signaling his partner. The partner handed Alice Moore back the snapshot. “But he strikes me as a professional informer. As I said, it’s just a feeling. We pool information and try to come up with a story. Probably nothing more to it than that, making things up.” He blushed.

“I know what you mean,” B. J. said, sticking close as he moved toward the front of the car. “I guess we all do it. What do you think? I won’t hold you to it, but what’s your idea?” She glanced at Alice, who pushed the button to hold the car.

“Well, in my version, the guy in the sports jacket was an informer for the Organized Crime officer and got double-crossed. Maybe the Intelligence guy blew his cover. Or maybe the three were in together to break the case and were told to forget it by the higher-ups. And now they’re tailing each other to be sure whoever does break the case cuts them in.”

“You think they’re trying to get to the mayor or the commissioner?” B. J. followed the men out of the door, gesturing behind her for Zala and Alice to go on. “Or are they blocking each other?”

Alice pressed the button and looked across at Zala. The others, who’d interrupted their conversations when their smooth descent had been interrupted, looked from one woman to the other. A woman in a black jumpsuit held up her wrist but did not look at her watch. Another one in a dark pantsuit pressed 3 and fished a dime from her pocket.

Zala turned back to the side rail. It should take no more than five minutes for Alice to phone the contact for an update and then join her out behind the U.S. Government Printing Office. Music from the ballroom filled the car when Alice stepped off, and Zala was tempted to get off at the mezzanine to see what Kofi and Kenti had dressed in, most of their things still down in Columbus. But she saw Bible Man below, quick-stepping behind the blond man in the sports jacket. Reaching the lobby, she was the first out of the car.

She shoved through the revolving doors and went down the drive toward the street, nearly colliding with a drunken couple who were reeling up the circular driveway, drinks in their hands.

“Oooops!” the woman said, protecting her coconut. The paper umbrella and two lipstick smudged straws in the shell poked her chin as she sloshed the rum drink on the front of her dress.

“Easy now,” the man, a sailor, said, holding her shoulders till Zala moved past, his white jacket slipping from the woman’s shoulders, a paper umbrella falling from behind his ear where it had been tucked.

Coming up the driveway was Preener, who looked at the couple, reached in his pocket, threw his keys to the ground, and bent down, signaling Zala to keep walking.

Zala kept close to the building line, wondering how the couple fit into the scheme of things. She stopped before turning the corner and looked back. The blond man in the sports jacket was handing a handkerchief to the sailor.

“Keep moving,” Vernon said, coming up on her right and heading toward the Hyatt. Just then Bible Man appeared at the foot of the drive-way and headed her way, his face blank.

Zala turned the corner and headed quickly toward the rear of the gray building.

She saw Speaker halfway down the street in the driver’s seat of Leah’s van, dreads arranging themselves around his face as he wrote quickly on a notepad. He reached up and switched off the overhead light as Bible Man climbed in. Further down the street, Braxton and Lafayette were in a car near the back entrance of the building. They flicked the headlights, and Lafayette pointed to Dave’s station wagon parked behind a silver-tone Mercedes.

She crossed the street and climbed in. “Have we got something?”

Mattie nodded but continued to draw lines on a map. She switched felt-tip markers and continued drawing. Several lines intersected; four in particular overlapped at one point on the map. But before she could begin the debriefing, “Catch this,” Dave said, pointing to the back door of the FBI office.

“Slick!”

“What is?” Clara leaned over Mattie from the backseat.

“Not what—who.”

“Eyes front,” Dave instructed, and the four smiled and chatted as Slick walked to the corner, took a look at a red paper umbrella on top of the newspaper box, then doubled back to the silver-tone Mercedes.

“That’s it,” Mattie said, drawing the marker back round to complete a circle. Braxton’s lights flickered and then came on as the Mercedes pulled out. A minute later Braxton’s car sped off after it.

“Very colorful,” Zala said when Mattie handed her the sheet of paper. “But what does it mean?”

“That’s from Sue Ellen and Teo. The cast of characters include four. In the past three hours they’ve been crisscrossing. One of them stopped off at a phone booth on Memorial a block away from the state police barracks, then showed up near the Lakewood Heights checkpoint where the Klan family in the Geter case live. He hung around there a long time. Number 2 was over in the Gray Street area, then Lakewood Heights, passed Number 1 in the street, then showed up in a sailor suit at Trader Vic’s.” Mattie pointed to the tourist restaurant across the street. “Fifteen minutes ago he ducked out of the restaurant and placed that umbrella where you see it. Wasn’t the least bit drunk. Five minutes ago he couldn’t stand up.”

“He’s in the Hyatt,” Zala said.

“I’m not surprised. Number 3 was at Lakewood Heights too earlier, also at Cap’n Peg’s.”

“Baseball cap?”

“The same. After you saw him then, Larry and Paulette spotted him near the GBI office. Rice followed him into the Hyatt. He had a drink at the bar. The fourth man was with the GBI man.”

“The redhead?”

“That’s correct. They were together out the Lakewood area earlier. Dowell, Gaston, and Preston were told to follow him if the two split up. They did. Gaston passed Number 4 on to Mason.”

“Okay. What does it mean?”

“I think it means that at least individual members of the bureaus are cooperating,” Mattie said. “My guess is they’re putting their heads together to find Innis, or rather McGill.”

“Well, let them lead us. They’re the pros.”

“Move out,” Mason said with only one leg in the car. “They’re all leaving at once.”

Overhead through the trees, the moon kept pace with the green minibus. It bumped along the hard-packed dirt road, the last of the houses and gas pumps far behind. Dipping, swerving—ruts in the road, an occasional hunk of truck tire—the bus slowed as it approached a fallen branch, and the passengers on the floor in back were thrown forward. One hand on the eight-ball cap of the gearshift, the driver curved around a narrow bend. Roots showed thick at eye level in the walls of red clay on either side as the road twisted. Those behind the front seats slid back along the metal floor to the rear when the nose of the van rose sharply. The rear doors, handles looped loosely with a coat hanger, rattled, then separated long enough for a breeze to blow in with the sting of pine resin; then the doors grated against each other and closed.

Steadying themselves against the boxes that held Sunday clothes and the sacks of tools, the passengers pulled up toward the front again, grabbing straps and levers where the rear seats had been removed. They saw it at once when the road widened a bit to an even grade, the brooding water tower in the distance, their cue to douse the lights, cut the motor, and coast downhill to the 6 Star Storage Company warehouse. But the driver only dimmed the lights and drove past the fortresslike building dark inside a circular palisade, its stout wooden stakes irregular in height, width, and thickness, but its message clear: Keep Out.

One mile beyond, no buildings, no vehicles; two miles, a large grassy field, but no signs of a stakeout; three miles, all quiet—the driver then maneuvered a skillful U-turn in a strip of scrub and drove back past the warehouse and parked under the trees a hundred-yard sprint away. She held her hand up to signal for attention, then angled it down in warning. The bus was on a tilt, the shoulder narrow, the drop swift and dangerous to rocks below. They divided up. Were they all to disembark from the passenger side, the wheels opposite would lift from the ground.

Pine resin was sharp as they got out; then it was masked by gasoline fumes as they inched around the van to survey the terrain. The doors were left slightly ajar. Sound traveled far at night in the country silence. Two members of the team, with the same thought from facsimile operations years ago, hunched each other. On their return, they would finger around in the tailpipe and check underneath. In threes and fours they scooted across the road, two dropping out to take up their posts as lookouts.

Twelve shadows came up from behind the twelve members, grew long, then marched up the stakes of the fence before they faded. Two metal signs—
NO TRESPASSING, K-NINE PATROLLED
—were old and rusty. The chain on the gate was old too. It gave under the wire cutters and one good tug. Work on a herringbone pattern of bricks at the very entrance had long been abandoned, the last bricks, loose, disappearing under the weeds. Midway between the gate and the front door of the warehouse, they found themselves walking on trash.

The yard was dense with bottles, stomped cans, and stacked papers. One stack had been set afire but hadn’t burned. A sturdy see-through bag of flattened tin cans was slumped against a ground-story window. Electrical wires ran through the heavy mesh between the windowpane and the burglar bars. The door, though, was wooden, and the lock was a Singler. It gave after nicking two corners of a Tillie card. Pried open with the flat end of the chisel, the door swung out. But behind it was a heavy metal fire door. A red horizontal rod, waist high, ran left to right. It was coiled with electrical cable that had been stripped. It looked alive.

They split up, going around the sides of the three-story building to the rear. There were more bundles, some reduced to ash. The windows were barred, meshed, and wired. The fire escape had been removed.
Parts of the support brackets that remained were jagged and too short for a handhold or a foot up. The gutters above, though, looked promising. Fairly new, they were thick and reinforced at twelve-inch intervals by bolted bands of heavy metal. They held the most athletic member, who then pulled his partner up by the wrist. Boosted from below, two others reached the second-story ledge and hooked their arms around the metal bars of the wide industrial windows. It took the others five and a half minutes to form a climbable pyramid as one of the team instructed, making ascent easy for those who weren’t wearing thick gloves and tennis shoes.

With the tools, they pried off the roofing material. They dug through the wood to the tarpaper and cut through, then tried to chip away an entrance. One of the team spotted a countersunk magnet. It looked like a claymore mine. They found the second alarm in the framing of a trapdoor that had once been a skylight. Carefully they unpacked their own magnets and inserted the horseshoes they’d liberally coated with adhesive compound. Pressed against the alarms, the Woolworth toys stuck and the warehouse circuit remained unbroken. They gouged out the frame of the trapdoor till the opening was large enough to lower the first person through, the lightest member of the group.

Squeezing through and using the tool to enlarge the opening, she was glad to find that insulation was foil-back packaged, not loose fiberglass that cut the skin no matter how well greased with Vaseline. She heard a ticking, froze, and tugged at the rope. It tightened across her breastbone and burned through her jumpsuit. Bomb? Had one of the suspects planted a bomb to destroy evidence? She kicked around to the right, twisting the rope. There was a red eye suspended, it seemed, over industrial shelving. She kicked in the opposite direction, the rope biting under her armpits. There was no matching eye on the opposite side. Not an infrared beam, then, that she was about to interrupt. Bomb? She hung loose, her arms prickly, and forced her eyes to make out the forms in the dark. A box was around the red eye. She tugged the rope and threw her head back toward her shoulderblades.

“Ticking. Sonic rodent deterrent.”

She was lowered close enough to the floor to disengage herself. It was like dropping to the ground from a playground swing. She crouched, listening, then stood up and gave the rope a hard yank. She massaged herself as she waited to pull the next member down.

The second-lightest member, ropes around her hips, realized that tough skin built up over the years against the chafing of her Sam Browne belt was as tender now as a rookie’s. Wordlessly, the two women pulled the others down. Then they spread out for a general reconnoiter.

The first and third floors of the warehouse were joined by huge, rough-hewn support columns. Wheelless bicycle frames and galvanized garbage cans hung on butcher nails along the crossbars. If there’d ever been a second story, all that was left was an office set kitty-corner in the rear of the building, access provided by the fire-escape steps and a foot-wide metal catwalk. Half the team went down, pausing to inspect a block-and-pulley chain that dangled from the grid of the catwalk. It might have been the chain that once operated the wide windows midpoint between the ground floor and the top, where the other half of the team searched.

Lit from the trapdoor opening above, the third floor was easy to cover. Shelving divided the space into living quarters on one side and storage on the other. A table set between booths and pushed flush against the window held ordinary things: a glass ashtray with a horse-head imprint etched in silvery white on the bottom; Hummel-like salt and pepper dwarves; plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard; a Welch’s grape jelly jar half-filled with sugar and covered with a square of gauze held in place by a red rubber band. A spoon was stuck to the green painted table. The two booths, from a bar or a diner, gave the area an innocent breakfast-nook look. Then a box of candles was found under the table. The camera flash went off and two candles were put in a bag.