Five minutes later I was behind closed doors in the spanking-new office of Lieutenant Commander Alison Whitehead, an old friend and colleague who owed me a favor or three. Without revealing exactly what was happening, I got
Whitehead to sign a requisition slip giving me access to several pieces of equipment that I believed might help my situation. The entire visit took less than fifteen minutes.
So I was well within the time parameters of a trip between Arlington National Cemetery and home. Twice during the drive, John Sampson called, and twice I ignored him. I parked the unmarked car in front of the house and went past the construction Dumpster and inside, hearing the phone ringing from the porch.
When I got inside, my partner and best friend was leaving a message about Easter dinner tomorrow. I’d forgotten that Bree and Nana Mama had invited them. Billie wanted to know what to bring.
“Call me so I can get her off my back,” Sampson said, and hung up.
I smelled something faintly putrid in the air then. At first, I flashed on my son, Ali, and thought Mulch might be in the house, but then I realized that one of the crabs must have gotten behind something and died.
It worked in my favor. Grumbling about the dead crab gave me cover to move furniture and clamber around the house, carrying a small handheld device that measured radio waves and electrical activity.
I found the first bug around 10 a.m. It was a tiny audio unit pinned to the upholstery on the back of one of the couch cushions. Barely giving it a glance, I set the cushion back in place as if I’d seen nothing.
That was a good thing, because I realized soon after that there was a camera of some kind in the bristles of the small broom we use once in a blue moon when we have a fire in the fireplace.
The optical bug in one of Nana Mama’s spider plants was located thirty minutes later, soon after I began picking up activity from the ceiling light over the dining room table. Luckily, the dead crab wasn’t a foot away from the camera, under a stand my grandmother uses for her houseplants.
Making a show of it, I picked the crab up by its claw and held it away from me as if it were a skunk. After putting it in a plastic bag and going out back to dump it in the trash can, I went upstairs and through my bedroom, grateful to find no bugs there.
My attic office was a different story. Pacing back and forth as if in a total fret, I was able to locate a listening bug attached to my wedding picture and a fiber-optic camera between two old homicide textbooks on the highest shelf of my choked bookcases.
By then it was noon, I’d been up for thirty hours, and I was completely exhausted. But I felt as if I was making up some ground. I knew where Mulch could see or hear me. I also knew exactly where he couldn’t.
From now on, I decided, I was going to become a creature of the dead zones in my house, making only sporadic trips to the dining room, the television room, and my office.
I yawned in the general direction of the camera in my office and then went downstairs to my bedroom. The pillows still smelled of Bree when I lay down and looked at my cell phone and the Ziploc bag that held my grandmother’s.
Theoretically, my phone was clean. As far as I knew, unless Mulch was some kind of Houdini, it had not been tampered with, which meant I was probably free to send text messages, or even to call from my bathroom with the shower on full blast. But what if Mulch was sophisticated, using intercept technology to monitor any transmissions from inside my house?
There had to be a way for me to communicate with John Sampson and Ned Mahoney without triggering a reprisal from Mulch. If a man says he’s going to kill your family, the last thing you want to do is risk a false move.
My indecision turned to drowsiness and I fell into a troubled sleep in which a faceless man with flaming-red hair taunted me as I tried to run after my family, who were sprinting around Banneker High’s track. But try as I might, I gained no ground, not even on my grandmother.
That was when I realized that Mulch had attached strings to my arms, legs, and head. Still running, I looked over my shoulder and up to see the strings stretching high into the sky, where they met a crossbar held by white-gloved hands.
Aside from the red hair and a polka-dot bow tie, all I could see of the puppeteer was a mouth populated by the gravestones of Arlington National Cemetery.
Church bells tolled in the distance.
The bells became my doorbell ringing downstairs and I roused groggily, realizing I’d been asleep for hours. It was nearly seven in the evening.
Somebody started knocking, and then I heard John Sampson’s voice calling up through the open bedroom window, “Alex? Bree? Anybody home?”
I snapped wide-awake, thinking, What if Mulch could hear that? What if he thinks I called my partner?
Chapter
104
For a second I was frozen, staring at my phone and at Nana Mama’s inside the Ziploc bag. The plan came to me in an instant, and rather than questioning it, evaluating it, I ran with it.
“Be right down,” I yelled toward the window.
I picked up the Ziploc bag and palmed it. Then I took a big breath and went downstairs, remembering the placement of the optical bugs. If I was right, Mulch had no view of the front hallway, though he could probably hear any conversation at the front door.
Time for a little disinformation, I thought, turned the handle, and swung the door open so I was looking through the screen.