Diablo Mesa(68)

She paused again to look around. As she did so, she once again reviewed the reasons she was here. Technically speaking, she was engaged in breaking and entering; the fact that she was a federal agent didn’t ameliorate that. If she was caught, the consequences would be severe.

So what again, exactly, made it worth the risk?

Her interview with Dr. Eastchester had, in retrospect, raised more questions than it answered. She also felt, rightly or wrongly, a sense of guilt that had nothing to do with the Bunsen burner—if she’d made more progress in the case, perhaps Morwood wouldn’t have felt it necessary to take a midnight trip to the lab. She was more than ever convinced it wasn’t just to return the device. The awful postautopsy meeting with the M.E., particularly the mysterious half-burned list of items, hung like a question mark over everything—as did the ruined lab that yielded so few clues. Then, of course, there was the biggest question mark: Why had Morwood left home in the middle of the night and gone directly to the lab? It seemed her best chance was to check whether her mentor had left anything behind at home that might shed light on the question. She felt sure any request she made to search his house would be turned down for lack of sufficient cause—and she knew it would betray her instincts that something was not right with Morwood’s death, when it had been made quite clear to her that it was considered to be an accident.

Self-justifications aside, one thing she felt oddly sure of: Morwood would have wanted her to do this.

She eased the window open, pushed her duffel bag through, then followed it, dropping quietly to the floor. She paused to make sure she hadn’t been wrong about the alarm. Of course, it might be silent: just in case, she’d leave the window open and keep an eye out for any cops arriving with their sirens deactivated.

The basement was unfinished, a concrete slab with the workbench she’d already noted. A staircase rose to the ground floor. Flashlight still hooded, pinhole light angled downward, she climbed the stairs and opened the door. She turned off the light, getting her bearings and confirming her intrusion had gone unremarked. The house smelled faintly of wood polish and—unexpectedly—Morwood’s aftershave.

She composed herself as an involuntary sob rose in her throat. She was here for information gathering, not nostalgia. She’d quickly sweep the house, then focus on wherever Morwood had his home office. And she’d allow herself fifteen minutes—no more.

A brief recon revealed that the house had two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It also revealed Morwood’s cologne: Creed Santal. She went quickly through the house, looking for the office she knew must be there, and found it. The walls were lined with shelves, and there was a desk with a computer, a pile of books, and papers strewn across its top.

If there was anything to be found, it would be here.

The room fronted the street. Setting down her duffel again, she moved quickly to close the wooden shutters. Even so, she could risk nothing brighter than her hooded light. A quick glance at her watch showed her self-imposed deadline was down to ten minutes.

She stood behind the desk, looking around. Trying the computer would be a waste: it would be password-protected. She looked at the shelves. There were no family photographs, no shadow boxes full of medals: just encyclopedias and reference books, along with back issues of National Review, Aviation Week, Military History, and a number of Janes periodicals covering various national security matters. There were no awards or certificates on the walls, either; just two photographs sitting on his desk. She let her light linger on them briefly. One was very old, perhaps from the turn of the twentieth century, showing a man and a woman in shabby clothes standing together on the front steps of a farmhouse. The other was a Polaroid from the 1980s, maybe: three teenagers standing on a baseball diamond, arms around one another’s shoulders. The image was badly faded, but she had no doubt the boy in the middle was Morwood.

Taking a deep breath, she resumed her search. There was a standalone bookshelf beside the desk, which seemed to be where Morwood kept the volumes he referred to most often. Most were military history texts: The Guns of August; The Two-Ocean War; Guns, Germs, and Steel. There was also Herman Kahn’s diabolic On Thermonuclear War and Rhodes’s Dark Sun. All of the spines were rubbed from years of use. There was also a shelf, to her surprise, of early thriller novels: The Riddle of the Sands, Watcher in the Shadows, Rogue Male.

She turned to his desk. To one side was a stack of old issues of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Next to them was a pad of paper and a large book, lying open on the desk, pages down, its worn spine indicating it was a resident of the nearby bookcase.

But Corrie’s eye went past it to the pad of paper. She picked it up. It was the same size and stock as the burnt sheet found in Morwood’s jacket pocket.

Quickly, she took a seat at the desk and examined the pad more closely. Her flashlight revealed some faint grooves in the top piece of paper—the marks of something written on the sheet previously above it.

She took a pencil from a nearby receptacle, placed it parallel to the pad, and very carefully rubbed its point over the paper. Its uncoated surface quickly revealed what had been written on the now-missing sheet above:





ITEM




She frowned. This was strange. There was no list of written items following: the word apparently stood alone on the sheet. Was she missing something? She rubbed some more, but there was nothing else.