House on Fire

24

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “We wouldn’t have these if it weren’t for me and my magnet. You came here to find his will, and you got it.”

“We wouldn’t be in this office if it weren’t for me shutting off that alarm.”

“True,” I admitted. “Where’d you get the key to the study?”

“From my client. Who thought the alarm would be off.”

“Who’s your client?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell me. “Let me take this first,” she said, “take some pictures, hand it back to you.”

“What’s inside?” I said, ignoring her suggestion.

She was already unwinding the string from the paper button on the back of the envelope. Then she pulled out a small pile of brown folders, maybe an inch thick.

“That’s it?” I said. “Just paper?”

“Some photographs. Who’s Eric Sidney Tucker?”

“Megan’s ex-husband.”

“If Eric Sidney Tucker has a mustache, this must be photos of him in bed with some woman. Who is clearly not his wife, Megan Kimball.”

Kompromat, I thought. The Russians were famously great at collecting blackmail on people and exerting it to get their way. So was Conrad Kimball.

“He must not want his daughter to know he hired a PI on her husband,” I said. “That he has evidence against him.”

“But Megan’s divorced. Maybe she knows already.”

“Maybe, maybe not. What else is there?”

“Here’s a folder on Cameron Kimball.”

I took a look. “Jesus,” I whispered. I scanned through the folder, saw the police report, the court documents. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. “What else?”

“You mean something like this?”

She held up a thick brown file folder. Its label, in a clear plastic tab, typewritten, read, oxydone/phoenicia. That referred to the contract research organization that had done the tests whose explosive results they had buried. Phoenicia Health Sciences.

“I’ll take that one.”

“How about you let me have it until breakfast? Which is when this birthday party is over, right? That’s when I’m leaving.”

“How about you take your pictures right here?”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Of course I trust you. It’s a matter of speed.”

“The light will be better in the room I’m staying in.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “But let me take a quick look.” She handed it to me, and I flipped through the file. Correspondence, but I didn’t find any clinical trial. I handed it back to her.

Then we both heard a high-pitched beeping, three beeps in a row, coming from the study. The alarm. We looked at each other. If the door to the safe room had been closed, we wouldn’t have heard it.

“Shit, Heller,” she said.

“Did it just rearm?”

“The batteries in my jammer must have died.”

“We’re stuck,” I said.

Not necessarily in the file room, but in the study. It was now alarmed. We couldn’t open the study door from the inside without setting off the alarm.

She bowed her head, which was what she always did when she wanted to think hard. Then she said, “No motion sensor inside the study. But we can’t open the door.”

“Right,” I said, impatiently.

“Windows are all alarmed.”

“Not all,” I said, thinking of the narrow bathroom window. “We can get out through the bathroom,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“No contacts on the windows. I noticed earlier.”

“Fantastic, Heller.”

Envelope in hand, she left the safe room and went to retrieve her dead Wi-Fi jammer from where she’d left it standing, on the wooden floor by the door to the hallway. The room was still mostly dark. I could smell the faint cigar, the lemon oil. The highly polished surface of his desk now gleamed in the moonlight. It was a few minutes after three in the morning. I pushed the safe room door closed. It clicked smoothly into place. A fairly recent installation, I thought, very high-end. That he hadn’t cheaped out on.

Maggie opened the bathroom door, saw the narrow window I was talking about. “I can fit through it no problem, but you’re a big guy, Heller.”

“But lithe,” I pointed out. Which was an overstatement. She opened the window — double-hung and heavy — and swung her feet around, and in a neat maneuver she slid through the open window and thumped onto the grass outside.

I followed, though it took an extra bit of maneuvering, given the tight space between the toilet and the sink. But a moment later I landed on the grass below. It was chilly fall weather out there, with a strong breeze and a few drops of rain.

Maggie put a finger to her lips. I nodded, and I followed her across the lawn until we reached a manicured chess garden enclosed almost entirely by tall hedges. From here you couldn’t see the house, which made it a good place to talk.

In the center of the garden was a gazebo, and inside that was a small stone table topped with a black marble chessboard.

“Nick Heller saves the day again,” she said, shaking her head.

“Just lucky I noticed the window,” I said.

“Man, I really fucked up. I should have put that jammer through a field test. Good thing Nick Heller was here.”

It was sort of strange, the way she kept using my full name, like I was a brand, or maybe a superhero. She’d called me Heller when we were seeing each other, so I was used to her just saying my last name. But full name? That was new.

“You’re not actually with Sukie Kimball, are you?” she said as I sat down.

“No. Hired by her. You were hired by Cameron?”

She paused, looked at me. “Can I trust you?”

“What do you think?” I said.

She nodded. We had to trust each other, and she knew it. She was grateful to me for pointing out the unalarmed bathroom window. “I was hired by Megan, but Cameron’s cooperating.”

“Megan wanted to see her father’s latest will?”

“That’s part of it. They’re all afraid Natalya’s going to cheat them out of their inheritance. They have reason to believe Daddy revised his will again, but he’ll never talk about it. So she didn’t just want the will. She wanted to find out where he stashes his secret assets. So I was also looking for records on shell companies, that sort of thing.”

“How long have you been private?”

“Four years.”

“You’re out of the army?”

“Seven years. Since — us.”

“What have you been doing?”

“You mean, have I been dating?”

“No, that’s not what I said.”

“Isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve been staying busy, got a lot of work, building this private-eye business. Staying in trouble.” She grinned.

“Am I forgiven?” I said after a pause.

She was silent for a long time. “You know, what happened before, we don’t need to get into that, Heller.”

“Maybe we should.”

“The way we left things between us maybe was a good place to leave things.”

“Now I get it,” I said. “It took me a long time, I’ll admit. But I understand now why you were so angry.”

“Why are women always described as angry?”

I didn’t want to get into it with her. “Remember when you made that bouncer at the bar in Fort Bragg back down?”

She laughed. I’d forgotten how much I loved this woman’s laugh.

“You scared the shit out of him,” I went on. She laughed even more. “Talk about female anger.”

She took my hand in hers. “You could always make me laugh, Heller.”

“Okay,” I said. “You have to get back to your room and take some pictures. Then get the envelope back to me by eight, okay? Put it in a bag so it’s not recognizable. Break’s over.”