Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(74)
“Can you find out where he is now?”
“According to Wikipedia, he’s off the map. As in vanished, location unknown. The Internet thinks he’s dead.”
“The Internet thinks?”
“You know what I mean. The general fucking consensus, okay? The man wandered into the woods and never came back. Although some conspiracy geeks out there say Sasquatch is alive and well and running a secret lab for the United States government.”
“Was he ever declared dead?”
“How the fuck should I know? I just got started.”
“Maybe you should stop. I’ll do some digging on this end.”
“Jarhead. What the fuck is going on up there?”
June emerged from the gas station. She’d bought a few snacks.
“I’ll call you back,” Peter said, and hung up.
He wondered if a paranoid genius ex-billionaire could muster the enthusiasm to kill his ex-wife over a promising software application.
He thought maybe so.
If he only had one percent of his earlier wealth, he’d have the resources to make it happen.
June looked at him and smiled. She dug into a plastic bag and held out her hand. “Twizzler?”
38
They turned off the commercial strip into a dark, quiet neighborhood of long looping streets in a modified grid. No sidewalks, just gravel shoulders and low ditches to carry the runoff of the near-constant rain. Ranch houses and split-levels and a few older bungalows, some with elaborate landscaping, some adrift in a sea of thriving weeds. Lots of tall pines and cedars and hemlocks, their deep greens clogging up the light.
Dexter Smith’s most recent address was a sprawling 1960s split-level with a big attached garage in Seattle’s North End.
It sat at the back of an enormous corner lot, almost entirely concealed by a dense wall of overgrown cedars and evergreen shrubs along all four edges of the lot. A heavy wooden gate blocked the driveway, held shut by a fat padlock in a wrought-iron hasp. The padlock was closed, although floodlights were lit at the corners of the house, bright in the dim, damp afternoon.
A security camera stood atop the gatepost, facing the driveway.
June cruised by, slightly slower than the speed limit.
She said, “What do you see?”
“A soft fortress in disguise. All that plant growth will keep out prying eyes, burglars looking for an easy target, maybe even neighborhood kids. I’d guess there’s some fence inside those bushes, too, maybe even barbed wire. Inside the perimeter, it’s probably lawn, mowed short, and cameras showing everything. This is someone who thinks about layers of protection and fields of fire.”
“Crazy?”
Peter shook his head. “Just careful. He probably can’t help himself. It might not even be a set of conscious decisions, just choices that felt right. He sure didn’t plant all those trees. Those have been there for fifty years.” Peter shrugged. “Or maybe he just liked the house.”
June came to a stop sign and glanced at her notebook. “Dexter Smith. He was the oldest of them. Twenty years in the Army, a master sergeant.”
Peter nodded. When he was hanging from June’s redwood at the end of a rope, eavesdropping, one of the men had been silent, working his way slowly through the brush, intent on the search. He was the one that Peter had been most concerned about, the one that had finally noticed him. That was probably him. The master sergeant.
“You understand these guys,” she said.
“Sure. We were forged in the same fire. But I’m the flip side of their coin. They went one way, I went the other.”
“Which way did you go, exactly?” She glanced at him as she turned the corner.
“I’ll let you know when I get there.”
She feathered the gas, easing her way back around the long, irregular block.
“Would you need to live in a house like that? Like a fortress?”
Peter kept his head on a swivel. “I have no idea. I haven’t slept inside anything but a tent or my truck for almost two years.”
“But is that the kind of place you’d want?”
“Honestly, I have no idea.” He looked at her now. “But I’m starting to think about it.”
She pulled the car up to the gate and he got out with the bolt cutters and a can of spray paint. They already had their hats on to shield their faces from the cameras. Keeping the brim of his hat down, Peter took the can of spray paint and hit the lenses with a quick blast. The cops would be here as soon as the master sergeant’s body was identified by the burned Tahoe. No reason to give them any more information than necessary.
The fat padlock’s shank was hardened steel, and he was glad he’d sprung for the long-handled version of the bolt cutters. Leverage is all. The shank broke with a distinct pop.
He removed the ruined lock and swung the gate wide. June pulled the van inside and he walked the gate shut behind her. There was a piece of heavy steel channel that slid in a track to lock the gates together from the inside. The master sergeant didn’t fuck around.
Peter saw another camera above the attached garage and hit the lens with his spray can.
If there was anyone watching the monitors, he didn’t show himself.
June parked behind a big orange-and-black three-quarter-ton Dodge Power Wagon from the eighties, the truck looking like new and freshly waxed, raindrops beaded up on the paint. This was one of three vehicles June had found registered to Smith. The other two were a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a Lexus sedan, which were not in evidence. Probably parked wherever the burned Tahoe had been garaged.