The trailer doesn’t look any more inviting, maybe less as I pass through to the loud tearing and rattling of heavy paper. Camera flashes are going off, police dressed in protective Tyvek wrapping up weapons and ammunition, and carrying them outside to a crime scene truck.
I walk out the open doorway, down the porch steps, making my way through the sloppy wintry mess as a K-9 unit pulls up, diesel engines rumbling, the sound of the dog barking reminding me of Mr. Owl. I find myself scanning the trees, the sky, looking for him at the same time I wait to hear from Lex.
If I don’t pretty soon, I’m going to do something about it, and I hope he and Nonna are okay. I head toward a cigarette glowing like a tiny orange coal, Fran by her Tahoe with Major Pepper, and I remember that after the incident in the tunnel, she started smoking again and swearing more than ever.
She quit going to the gym and church, eats and drinks whatever she wants, can be as mean as a snake, and won’t get away with any of it forever.
“So much for a Sunday night when most people are furloughed or having fun,” I say when I reach them. “It’s no wonder I have no social life,” my same lame joke, and truth be told I don’t have a social life on any day or night of the week.
“You never know what’s in your backyard,” Major Pepper says grimly, and it’s rare he’s not in uniform.
Dressed casually in corduroys, a ski jacket and boots, he’s busy on his phone, bombarded I can tell. Second in command of the Hampton Police Division, he also works closely with NASA, is in his 50s, nice looking, and drives a racing-yellow Corvette.
“This was a good find, Captain,” he says to me with a congratulatory nod. “Good job following up on a tip,” as if that’s all I did.
“I’m not seeing much that’s good about it except there’s one less a-hole in the world, I guess,” I reply, and I ask Fran to open the back of her truck so we can put away our heavy gear and weapons.
I think we can do without ballistic helmets and vests, gas masks, submachine guns, and she locks them up. I tell her I need a moment alone, and we walk through snow and slush to my Chase Car as ART turns it on, and I make my secret motion to free the locks.
“What have you got?” Fran eyes the bags of journals I’m carrying. “And where are you taking whatever it is?”
“The guy kept a detailed record of each job, 42 of them,” I reply, “and it’s significant that there’s not one for last Tuesday.”
“Now I’m really confused,” she says, her vague face frowning in the dark.
“December 3rd, Vera Young,” I explain. “There’s no log that might be for her, suggesting she wasn’t a job. Not his job at any rate.”
I imagine Neva showing up at the Fort Monroe apartment to get the GOD chip, and when Vera wouldn’t hand it over, things spun out of control. In a rage, Neva garroted her sister with a computer cord, and I assume at some point after this the hitman was there in his Denali to pick up the big boss. He may have given her a hand with staging the scene for all I know. But I have a feeling he didn’t, that he had his pride. It wasn’t his job or a good one, and he didn’t want credit.
“You can’t just take evidence home with you,” Fran says as I set the bags of journals on a seat.
“I’m doing it, end of story,” I reply. “I intend to go through all of them carefully before anybody else does. Maybe we’ll figure out who he was. Maybe we’ll find something that definitely links the victims to Pandora Space Systems.”
I leave out the most important part, the hitman’s own written record of Noah Bishop’s death. My sister had nothing to do with it.
“Seriously?” Fran says cynically. “You’re thinking Neva Rong’s behind every one of his hits?” she drops the cigarette into an ice-watery puddle. “What makes you so sure a scumbag like that wouldn’t do jobs for other people, anybody who’d pay enough?”
“Neva has to control everything and everyone,” I reply. “If he did jobs for other people? Then he didn’t answer only to her, and she wasn’t the center of the universe.”
My Tahoe’s headlights illuminate Pebo Sweeny’s trailer where he was enjoying retirement with his exotic pets, I can only suppose. He was home alone, possibly running a load of laundry when a stranger showed up at his door. “Pretending to be lost,” his killer describes.
They struck up “a pleasant conversation” about car races at the nearby speedway, and what it was like to live so close to NASA. Then the hitman “got around to business,” I recall from the log with its Cracker Jack plastic owl.
“Plain and simple,” I’m saying to Fran, “this is how the hitman did location scouting and acquired habitats that would go undetected,” and I can see faces in the lighted windows of mobile homes across the street, people looking out at what’s going on over here. “He needed a local off-the-grid place to do his work, and a trailer that backed up to the woods was the perfect spot.”
There was no motive other than that, I summarize. There was no competitor or adversary to intimidate or eradicate, no score to settle, just an old man retired from the Air Force who had something the hitman wanted.
“Based on what I saw a few minutes ago, I have a feeling Neva kept her personal attack dog plenty busy. I’m not sure he would have had time to work for anybody else,” and then I tell Fran the rest of the story, that this same assassin who planned to wipe out all of us had victimized her in the past.
The purpose wasn’t robbery then, I explain as she stares at me in cold silence. The goal was to traumatize, to create chaos, and maybe to send a warning. By his own accounting, the plan was to follow Fran home, to wait for an opportune time to disable her vehicle with tire spikes, I paint the nightmarish picture for her.
“And I’m betting he’d put a tracking device on your Land Cruiser long before that,” I add.
“I don’t understand,” she stares off at the trailer, the lights harsh inside, police carrying out weapons wrapped in brown paper. “Why?”
“To destabilize, to create huge distractions and emotional distress,” I emphasize.
“If Neva’s really behind it,” Fran decides, “why sic him on me three years ago? I had nothing to do with her then.”