hole. And he didn’t have much time to get it done. He rose, dressed, and left the house as quietly as he had moved through foot patrols in the Middle East. He had paused only to check on Cole. She was asleep in her bed, a single sheet over her in deference to the heat outside. He left her a note on the fridge, made sure her front door was securely locked, rolled his car out of the driveway and partway down the street before starting it up. And then he was off.
Thirty minutes later he eyed the bleak concrete-block building. There was no security system. He’d already noted that on his last visit here.
He scanned the area one more time and then moved forward. The front door lock took all of thirty seconds.
He moved through the interior. He hadn’t used his flashlight yet because he had memorized the interior from his earlier visit. Down the hall, fifteen strides, door on the left. He used a penlight to illuminate the lock while he used his tools to pick it.
Twenty seconds later he was on the other side of the door and had closed it behind him. He stared over at the other door. He tried the knob. Surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. He opened it with his gloved hand. The large freestanding safe stared back at him. This would be the trickier one. But he’d brought with him several elements that could be used to defeat it.
He shone his light on the metal face of the safe. It was old but sturdy. He inserted his tools in the lock. He worked with a practiced hand for five minutes. There was a low click, and he tugged on the locking mechanism arm and pulled the door open. It took him ten minutes of searching before he found what he was pretty sure he had been looking for.
He unfolded the blueprints and placed them on the desk. He shone his light over them, going page by page. Then he took pictures of each page, folded the plans back up, replaced them in the safe, cranked the door closed, and made sure it locked properly. Five minutes later he was driving off in his Malibu. He reached Cole’s house, carried the camera in, and sat on his bed going through each frame. When he was finished he sat back and thought about it, trying to put things in order. Strauss had had this in his safe. Eric Treadwell and Molly Bitner had designed a plan to get this out of the safe and make copies of it. If he needed any confirmation that they had done so, he had it.
He had brought with him fingerprint cards of both Treadwell and Bitner. Both of them must have been sweating when they’d pulled their little raid at Strauss’s office, because the moisture along with their prints had been transferred perfectly to the paper. And it was the sort of paper that would carry latent prints pretty much forever. The matches had been perfect for both Treadwell and Bitner.
This is what they had risked so much for. This was ultimately what they had sacrificed their lives for. The one piece he had not followed up on.
Until now.
Now the question was: Did he tell Cole?
The answer was clearer and more immediate than he expected.
He looked at his watch: 0400.
Ironic. He was going to wake her up early again.
CHAPTER
80
SAM COLE ROLLED OVER, opened her eyes, and nearly screamed.
Puller was sitting next to her in a chair he’d drawn up to the bed.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she said, sitting up.
“Waiting for you to wake up.”
“Why didn’t you just wake me up?”
“You were sleeping so peacefully.”
“I didn’t think that mattered to you. You woke me up before from a sound sleep.”
“It was nice watching you sleep.”
She started to say something and then stopped. “Oh,” she said.
Puller looked down.
Flustered, she said, “So you decided to wait and scare me to death?”
“Wasn’t my plan, but it sort of worked out that way.”
Before she could say anything else he held up his camera.
“You want to take my picture?” she said in a confused tone.
“I want you to look at some pictures.”
“What am I looking at?”
“Stay here. I’ll make some coffee and we can look at it together.”
Thirty minutes and two cups of coffee later, Cole sat back against her pillow. “Okay. What does all this mean?”
“It means we have a lot more digging to do. And not a lot of time to do it.”
“And you’re sure this is important?”
“It’s why they broke into Strauss’s safe. And I think it was why the Reynoldses and Treadwell and Bitner were killed. So, yes, it’s important.”
“But I thought they were killed because of the soil report.”
“I did too. But there was nothing on it that would raise any alarm. They were killed because somehow it was found out that these plans had been taken from Strauss’s safe. And they also discovered that Bitner and Treadwell had told Reynolds about it. So they had to die too.”
“So what happened to the soil report?”
“Remember the pieces of the certified mail delivery we found under the couch?”
“Yes.”
“I think the killers planted them there. As a red herring.”
“Why? And why not just leave the whole thing for us to find?”
“Then we don’t waste any time running that lead down. But if we had thought about it some, it was pretty convenient that they left the green pieces of the certified mail receipt for us to find.”
“And Larry Wellman?”
“Was on patrol when they showed up. He had to be silenced.”
“Damn, Puller, it makes sense.” Her features became troubled. “So they killed Larry just to plant pieces of paper to throw us off?”
“Way I see it.”
“And Dickie?”
“In way over his head. I don’t think he knew anything about the killings. When he found out, it was only a matter of time. And when I enlisted his help I pretty much signed his death warrant.”
She looked at him quizzically. “When did you think of all this?”
“When I was back in Afghanistan.”
“What?”
“In my head only,” he said. “My brain tends to work faster when I’m there,” he added in a low voice.
“I can understand that,” Cole said slowly.
She looked at the pictures on his camera. “So what do we do with these?”
“I’m going to download it to my computer and then print out pages. But the bottom line is we need to go there.”
“Go there? You mean just to look?”
“No, I mean more than that.” He checked his watch. “It’s still dark outside. You game?”
“It wouldn’t matter if I am or not. We don’t have any time to waste. Now get out of my bedroom so I can change.”
CHAPTER
81
PULLER AND COLE neared the edge of the woods, knelt, and did a quick scan of what was up ahead. Puller shifted the rucksack on his back from his left shoulder to his right.
He did another look around. They didn’t have a margin of error on this and he could afford no mistakes. Dawn was coming.
Cole copied him and did a long look around too.