Return of the Spider, page 20
part #33 of Alex Cross Series
“In about five years,” Missy’s sister said.
“Christiana,” Soneji said to his mother-in-law. “I love the new hairdo and nails. How are things?”
Christiana smiled at him, but it felt forced. He wondered how much Missy confided in her mother and sister and started to feel as if he were being closely observed. He hated that.
He and Christiana had not gotten off to a good start. But after her husband died and she saw just how much business he was bringing into the Atlantic Heating Company, she’d warmed to him. Somewhat.
“Gary,” his mother-in-law said, nodding. “We are as good as we can be with five weeks to plan a wedding reception.”
“Five weeks?” he said, taken aback. He’d figured the following summer at the earliest.
“Christmas Eve, hon,” Missy said.
“You want to get married on Christmas Eve?”
“Perfect timing,” Trish said. “Everyone’s in a great mood, ready to party.”
“And it’s the only time of year my entire family is guaranteed to be in the area,” Missy said, looking at him hopefully.
“And just as important,” Christiana said, “my brother, Missy’s uncle Ari, has a barn he rents out for events. It’s available on Christmas Eve and he’s agreed to let us have it.”
“It’s decided,” Trish said, nodding.
Very close to the top of all things Soneji most despised was being at the whim of others, being under someone else’s thumb. It was bad when men forced him into things. It was worse when women told him what to do or made decisions about his life.
He felt anger building like lava in his brain and he had to summon every bit of control not to blow his top.
“Christmas Eve it is, then,” Soneji said finally and made himself grin as he picked up his daughter. “We’ll have a grand old time, and Roni will be our flower girl, and Missy will make me the luckiest man alive a second time.”
CHAPTER 71
THE AFTERNOON BEFORE THANKSGIVING, after more than a week of failing to get another line on the killer in the white van, Pennsylvania state police detective Tommy French called me. His friends at the DMV had compiled the results of the search Chief Pittman requested.
“They got a hit on an old registration,” French said. “A 1977 White Ford Econoline van, license plate TNS eight five four. It was last registered to a Michael and LeeAnne Lawton of Oxford, Pennsylvania. Both are now deceased. I’ll fax you the VIN and the address. You’ll have to take it from there. I’m headed home to my family for the holiday.”
“We’re right behind you, Tommy,” I said. “And we owe you.”
“Maybe,” the detective said. “You might want to check land records in Chester County, see who owns the Lawtons’ place now.”
I called the Chester County Recorder’s office after we hung up but got a message saying they were closed for the holiday and wouldn’t reopen until Friday morning.
“We’re shut down for now,” I said, getting up from my chair and grabbing my coat.
“Everyone with a brain has gone home,” Sampson said, putting his things away.
“You’re suggesting we’re brainless?” I chuckled.
“Sometimes,” he said, grinning at me. “What time tomorrow?”
“Nana Mama wants everyone there around two thirty. Dinner at four.”
“I’m fasting tonight so I can pack it away tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“Nah. I don’t do fasts.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Forty minutes later, I was home and down on the floor playing with Damon while Maria watched over us and we waited for an order of Chinese food to be delivered. I told her about Sampson’s fasting claim, which cracked her up.
“That man eats six meals a day,” she said. “He’d collapse if he fasted.”
“Right?” I tickled Damon, who squealed with laughter and ran away. “Another runner.”
Maria patted her belly. “Not like this one.”
“Still kicking?”
“I think baby’s doing a Jazzercise routine in there.”
I got up, came over, and put my hand on her belly. I could feel the movements immediately. “What a squirmer!”
“I told you,” Maria said.
The baby continued to dance around the next morning, which we spent helping my grandmother prepare for twelve guests. They started to arrive promptly at two thirty.
Sampson showed up last, around three.
“You’re late,” Nana Mama told him.
“Still on daylight saving time.”
“Shouldn’t you be early, then?”
“I’m a slow learner,” John said.
The rest of the day went on like that, with lots of laughter and stories and too much good food. Everyone brought something, but the crowning glory went to Nana’s turkey, which she deep-fried outside in a gizmo she’d bought for the occasion.
The skin was like crispy thin bacon. The meat was extraordinarily tender and juicy. I ate so much, I fell asleep with Damon crashed in my lap while watching the Detroit Lions game.
Maria had to wake me up to head home, and I was thinking about bed for the night as soon as we had Damon down.
“You going to work tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’m actually off, but I think I’ll make a couple of phone calls from here and then spend the rest of the day with you and D.”
She smiled. “We’d like that.”
The next morning I let Maria sleep in and took care of Damon, changing his diaper and feeding him breakfast, after which I called the office of the Chester County Recorder of Deeds.
A woman answered on the second ring. “Shaina Watson, recorder’s office.”
I told her who I was and gave Ms. Watson the address I was interested in.
“LeeAnne and Michael Lawton used to own that place,” she said immediately.
“You know it?”
“Mmm-hmm,” the woman said. “Off the north side of the Chrome Barrens, big untouched area up there.”
“You know who owns it now?”
Her voice got tighter. “I know who inherited it. LeeAnne’s grandson, Eamon.”
“Eamon Lawton?” I said, scribbling it down.
“Eamon Diggs,” she said, sounding disgusted. “Heard of him?”
“Can’t say that I have,” I said.
“Look the creep up. He did time for rape.”
CHAPTER 72
SUDDENLY I NO LONGER had the day off.
“I have to go,” I told Maria when she got out of the shower.
“Alex.” She groaned. “You said you’d spend the day with us. I need you here.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have a very strong feeling that we just got him, the Bulldog killer, the guy in the white van. There’s a potential suspect we’ve just unearthed who was previously convicted for multiple rapes.”
Maria looked discouraged, maybe a little abandoned, as she sat on the edge of the bed. “Can’t wait until Monday, I suppose?”
“I don’t know if I could live with myself if we waited and—”
Maria held up her hands in surrender. “You’re right. You’re right. Go. I’ll see if Nana Mama can come over and give me a hand with a few things.”
“You’re sure?”
“Go. I won’t be responsible for someone else dying.”
I was out the door ten minutes later. Sampson picked me up in a squad car, and as soon as we were on I-95 heading north, we radioed and got patched through to Tommy French’s home phone.
“You guys are overstaying your welcome,” he grumbled by way of greeting. “I’m about to go out Christmas shopping with my daughters.”
“We apologize, Tommy,” Sampson said. “But a name’s come up in association with the registered owners of that van. You know anything about a guy named Eamon Diggs?”
There was a silence long enough for us to hear one of his daughters complaining in the background. French said quietly, “John, listen to me, that is one bad dude, so bad I can’t talk about the specifics at the moment. How did he come up?”
I said, “Turns out he’s the grandson of the van owner and inherited the farm near Oxford, Pennsylvania, where our Ford Econoline was last registered.”
There was another long silence. French said, “Where are you now?”
“On our way to that farm,” Sampson said. “Gonna look around.”
“You’ve got no jurisdiction and no cause to go in there, John,” French said firmly.
Before we could protest, the state police detective said, “But I do.”
“Two and a half hours?”
“Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Stop and get a coffee and a cruller on the way. I’ll finish up this episode of ‘Daddy the Grinch Goes Christmas Shopping’ and meet you at the Mobil station in Oxford in, say, three hours?”
“Half past noon,” Sampson said. “We’ll be there.”
“Good. We won’t be but ten miles to that farm from there and not twenty to Kirkwood, where Diggs is living now.”
CHAPTER 73
A SHINY BLUE FORD F-150 rolled into the Mobil station in Oxford, Pennsylvania, about ten minutes after we did. Tommy French jumped out of the pickup.
The detective was a short, stocky man with a bull neck and a buzz cut he must’ve had since his days as a U.S. Army MP. He took off his aviator glasses and shook Sampson’s hand and then mine.
“I checked with Diggs’s parole officer, and he confirmed the Kirkwood address but said he had no record of Eamon owning any property.”
“Chester County Recorder confirmed ownership,” I said.
“I know,” French said. “I double-checked, and because Diggs did not declare it, we have ample just cause to go in and take a look around to see if he is in violation of his parole.”
French said that due to the recent rain, the way into the farm that Diggs inherited was likely to be very muddy. He suggested we leave our squad car outside town and ride in his truck with him to the farm.
We put on our body armor and got in. Sampson sat up front and was immediately enamored of the truck.
“I like this, Alex. You’re up here, king of the road. This new, Tommy?”
The detective smiled, said, “Got it last month. More practical than anything for the way I live.”
“I want one.”
“Could be tough to park in DC, John.”
“I’d learn.”
I said, “Tell us about Diggs.”
French visibly stiffened at the wheel. “Diabolical. Smart. Played mind games with the women he violated. Made them think he was going to kill them at any moment.”
“Sadistic control,” I said.
“That’s Eamon Diggs through and through.”
“How’d he get out after only twelve years?”
“Like I said, Diggs is very sharp. Once he figured out the game at the penitentiary, he played it. Zero infractions. Model prisoner. Went through counseling. Found Jesus. All that bullshit. But you know how it is with those guys. They never change.”
“Some do,” I said. “But it is rare for them to keep their urges bottled up for good.”
“Exactly,” French said. “I’ve been waiting ever since he got out for a report to surface that matched his MO.”
Sampson said, “Which was what, exactly?”
“Young woman gets taken, drugged, assaulted, sometimes repeatedly, scoured clean, and then dumped alive in a rural area.”
“Alive. That’s surprising,” I said.
“He was also a suspect in two murder-rapes, but we could never make them stick.”
“So you wouldn’t put homicide past him,” Sampson said.
“Not a chance.”
Within ten minutes we were taking a left at where the preserve began, and French was explaining how the property was managed with fire in adherence with American Indian practices. Indeed, over the next few miles, we saw several long wide strips of grassland that had been burned and now awaited the regrowth of spring.
“Here we go,” French said and turned at a dilapidated mailbox that was leaning so far right, it defied gravity.
The cornfields to our left had been harvested; the odd stalk stuck up out of the dirt here and there. There were several rows of mature pines on our right, which French said had probably been planted as a windbreak.
We had almost reached the farmyard when we bounced through a muddy rut.
One hundred and fifty feet ahead of French’s pickup, dead center on the gravel drive, thunder clapped.
A fireball erupted, blowing a column fifteen feet high.
The truck’s windshield shattered.
CHAPTER 74
WITH GRAVEL, ROCKS, AND mud raining down on his truck, Tommy French roared, “He’s booby-trapped the place!”
The detective rammed his pickup into reverse and floored the gas. The Ford F-150 slid and swung in the wet dirt, throwing clods of greasy mud around as Sampson and I dug for our service weapons.
When we were all the way back to the road, French slammed on the brakes and threw the truck in park, panting as he looked through the filthy, spiderwebbed remnants of his windshield toward the flames at the far end of the drive.
“We need backup, Tommy,” Sampson said at last.
“We need more than that, John,” French said, picking up his police radio with shaking hands, which made me realize my own hands were trembling. “Goddamn it, this was my dream truck!”
The police detective got patched through to the Chester County dispatcher, identified himself, and reported the explosion. “I need enough manpower to seal off the road on the south side of the barrens ASAP. And the east side of the old Lawton place. No one crosses until we know what we’re dealing with.” He went on barking orders, calling for a helicopter, a special emergency response team, and a team from the hazardous devices and explosives unit.
By that point, I’d regained enough of my composure and strength to climb out of the truck. The case was now out of our control.
Squirrels chattered in the pines. Crows cawed somewhere behind me. Falling leaves from the scattered oaks floated on the chill breeze.
If I hadn’t noticed the last of the fireball dying at the other end of the drive, I might have called it an idyllic scene. Instead, my nerves twitched at every sound.
Sampson climbed out. French still had the dispatcher on the line.
“He’s calling in an army,” John said.
“He should. We don’t know what we’re facing here.”
French got out, the radio receiver still held to one ear. In the far distance, from back toward Oxford, we could hear the first sirens.
He told the dispatcher we were going to take a walk to the explosion site. Then he hung up and walked around his truck, looking at all the dings and pockmarks from the blast and shaking his head. Finally, he shrugged. “Chopper won’t be here for forty minutes. Let’s do a little recon before the cavalry comes.”
“And set off another bomb?” Sampson asked.
“No, just up the drive, past that rut we hit before the explosion, so SERT has some idea what we’re dealing with.”
The drive was torn up. There was mud all over from our skidding retreat, even in the leaves and pine needles we now crept across with weapons drawn.
The rut in the drive turned out to be a water bar that was supposed to drain the drive, put rain into the ditches. On the right side, Sampson found a thin cable that snaked to a pine tree ten yards into the woods. Some kind of remote device was linked to the cable and taped to the trunk.
“There’s got to be a pressure plate or something there under all that mud,” John said. “When we drove across it, the trigger was tripped.”
I said, “Kind of a long way from the trigger to the actual bomb.”
“Fifty yards?” French murmured.
“Far enough to make you wonder whether it was meant to kill or warn.”
“I think we’re fair to call it attempted murder,” French said, and continued past the water bar, stopping every few feet to examine the way ahead.
“Look for fishing line, trip wire, or another cable,” Sampson whispered to me.
“What if there’s another pressure plate?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about what we were doing. “Under the leaves, I mean.”
That stopped John for a moment. But not French, who kept on going to the charred bomb crater, which was about twenty inches deep and just as wide.
“Smells more like gasoline than cordite or C-four,” French said when we arrived beside him.
“I’ll let your bomb guys figure that out,” Sampson said.
We scanned the surface of the drive ahead but saw no fresh tracks in the thirty yards before it opened up into an overgrown field, turned to the right, and vanished. The police sirens were getting close now.
French said, “Let’s see what’s what in that field before we head back to the road.”
He eased forward and we followed, eyes searching the ground and the trees ahead for signs of a second triggering device, but we found none. We reached the last big pine standing sentinel above the drive.
French eased left around the tree trunk and took a peek. When he pulled back, he murmured, “House is about seventy out. Place looks dead. Roof’s ready to cave in.”
I was standing to his right and moved aside several of the lower pine boughs on the opposite side of the tree. It gave me a different angle and a new perspective on the field that cut back toward the road.
In the deep pocket of the field, there was a long, low, open-front shed of sorts with a metal roof and pigeons fluttering about.
One of the Chester County Sheriff’s cruisers was close now, siren whooping, almost to French’s truck.
“Let’s head back, Alex,” Sampson said behind me. “Cavalry’s here.”
But I stepped forward another foot and pushed aside the last brushy tree limb blocking my view of the far end of that shed. I took in the scene for a long moment, enough time to be sure that my heart was slamming in my chest for good reason.
