Firebreak

7

"Time to go home," Elkins said, "think it over, figure something out."

Saturday morning, their fifth day here, and they were seated around breakfast again at the family restaurant. Wiss said, "Parker? What do you think? There's something there?"

"Your paintings are there," Parker said.

Lloyd had taken the Cherokee with him, to turn in at the airport at Great Falls. The others had rented a pair of nondescript Tauruses, muddy maroon and muddy green, to spend their week learning about the staff and their house.

It had been Parker's job to chart the movements of the staff. The mountains around here were heavily forested in pine, but the lower slopes, where the roads and towns were located, were much more barren and open, expanses of rock or prairie, where a house or a car or even a man could be seen for miles. That made it harder to be an unnoticed observer than in a city, where somebody seated in one car among a thousand parked vehicles would never attract attention.

So Parker did it the other way. He got a clipboard and a yellow hard hat and dark blue coveralls and a plastic-and-tube folding chair and sat beside the gravel county road and read the Havre Daily News. The muddy green Taurus was parked just to his left, the turnoff from the county road up toward Marino's place was off to his right. The last mile or so of the private road was below the forest and steeply down across a mostly bare shelf of tan boulder, so he could see traffic from there a long way off. Every time any vehicle at all went by on the county road he made a mark on the yellow pad on his clipboard. Every time a car went in or out of the private road, he made more elaborate and more meaningful marks.

Most of the vehicles past this spot were pickups, and most of them were repeats. He got a few curious stares the first day, but by the second he'd been accepted as just another guy with a cushy job, and by the third he was part of the landscape.

A few times during the week, he left his post to follow staffers who'd driven away from the house, until he got a sense of their errands, where and for how long they went, what they did or didn't do in the outside world. He did a minimum of that kind of trailing, because he didn't want to become a presence in their peripheral vision.

At the same time, this week, Wiss and Elkins had been going through back issues of the Daily News in the Havre library, and searching records in the county clerk's office, and chatting with locals in diners and bars, and now, Saturday morning over family breakfast, they told one another what they'd come up with: "Staffs all imports," Wiss said. "None of them local."

'The locals could be peeved about that," Elkins added, "if they thought about it, but they don't, much."

"There's eight staff," Parker told them. "Six men and two women. They've got three identical white Chevy Blazers, with Montana plates."

"Leases," Elkins decided.

"Looks like," Parker said. 'They get their mail at a post office box in Havre. They don't have anything delivered, they go out and shop, every day."

"So we don't come in like we're bringing the groceries," Wiss said.

Elkins said, "And we're not a pal of theirs from town. They don't mingle with the natives, not at all. Most people think they're snooty, think they're better than anybody else because they work for a billionaire."

"Well, it's a smart setup," Parker said. 'They can keep tighter security if their bunch doesn't mingle with anybody else."

'Then they've got good security," Wiss said.

Elkins said, "Parker? What do you think?"

"There's never more than one car away from the place at a time," Parker said. "I guess the idea is, they want to keep the staff up to strength as much as they can."

"Good security again," Wiss commented.

"I looked up that road once," Parker said, "and about a mile up it starts to twist through some pretty thick forest. We wait till they go out, drive up into the forested part, stop on a blind curve, take the Blazer away from them when they come back. Then we can at least get to the house without setting anything off. But once they see we're somebody else, they'll jump to the alarms. The question is, what can Lloyd do, back in Massachusetts, to keep those alarms from getting off the property?"

"We'll ask him," Elkins said.