The Death Trust

TWELVE

I watched from the car as Masters walked up the cinder path and made her way around the fountain. I lost her until she climbed the steps to the porch and stood in front of the door. She rang the bell. Rang it again. Thirty long seconds later, the door opened a fraction. I could see her having to talk her way inside. Eventually the door opened wide and the darkness behind it swallowed her.

I got out of the rental and took the driveway. The cinders crunched underfoot, so I detoured onto the grass. The neighborhood here was quiet and serene, the kind of place where the day’s single biggest event was the arrival of the mailman. Off to the south, the Palatinate Forest made the hills look as if they’d been upholstered with dark green fuzz, and the usual riot of rainbows — or whatever the collective noun is for a bunch of the things — hovered overhead. The air was calm and the sun’s thin light shining between the purple and gray clouds held a rumor of warmth.

The Scotts’ garage was spacious. It was dry inside, and smelled of cold concrete, gasoline, and grease, the old Mustang probably contributing two out of three of those smells. There was a workbench running the full length of the back of the garage, and various woodworking tools spotted with rust and dust lay scattered over it. The skeleton of an old chair was held in the jaws of a bench vise, the job — whatever it was — half finished. Like the tools, the chair was covered with dust, layers of it. The scene reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. Some disaster had happened here, something that had forced the carpenter to leave in a hurry and not come back. I half expected to see a plate of food, now petrified, left behind. I knew exactly what that disaster was — the clues were up on the wall: photographs, dozens of them, showing father and son enjoying quality time together. It was almost possible to chart Peyton’s life through the photos. There was one of him as a baby in a nurse’s arms. There was Peyton the boy, throwing a ball; Peyton, the young teen, sitting in the cockpit of some aircraft; Peyton and father, fishing; Peyton water-skiing. There was also Peyton with various girls; Peyton graduating from college; Peyton in the cockpit of Scott’s glider; Peyton in the uniform of a U.S. Marines sergeant; Peyton with his squad on the biscuit-colored streets of Iraq. There was also the clipping of Alan Cobain’s article “Death Row,” with its sad accompanying picture. Father and son were undoubtedly close. I took the snapshot of Peyton in uniform and pocketed it.

The driver’s door of the Mustang was locked, as was the passenger door. I conducted a quick search for the keys and ran my hand over the tires under the wheel arches. Nothing. I looked on the tool board, hoping to find them on a hook. The search there was also fruitless, but I found the next best thing — a thin metal bracket. I removed the chair frame from the vise and used the jaws to curl the end of the bracket into a hook. Then I opened up the space between the Mustang’s window and the door panel with a screwdriver, fed the tool down into the guts of the door, and jiggled it around until I snagged what I was looking for. The button popped up and I was in.

I slid behind the Mustang’s wheel and had the eerie feeling of being inside General Scott’s skin. The smell of grease and vinyl — the smell of old car — was strong. I took the cell from my pocket, called up the number from the memory, and hit the green button. Seconds later, there was a muffled buzz emanating from under the seat, not on the floor, but right up inside the springs. I had to get out of the car and kneel on the floor to get the angle. The cell stopped buzzing so I had to ring again. Eventually, on the third redial, I found it: General Scott’s private cell phone. There were one hundred and twenty missed calls indicated on the screen, and only one bar of battery power left. The thing had nearly lost its charge. If it had run out of gas completely, it might not have been found for a considerable time. Scott’s gliding and his car were part of his other life — the one outside the base. If the cell was going to be anywhere predictable, it would be somewhere in this car. That was my theory, anyway, and the intuition had paid off. “You’ve still got it, pal,” I said as I checked the cell’s received calls.

According to the memory, there’d been only one other caller besides me. A single message had been left in voice mail, if an empty silence punctuated by breathing could be considered a message. Whoever it was on the other end had decided not to say anything and had hung up, but the automatic message service didn’t realize that and kept re-calling and re-calling to let the deceased general know that he had a message. Creepy — worse, even, than looking at photos of the dead when they were alive. I checked the cell’s phone book. No names or numbers had been stored there. This was like the Bat Phone: It had a single use only, and that was to call one specific person, the person who’d left the message of silence.