“Let me talk to your dispatch.”
He handed me a walkie-talkie. I took it and called for dispatch. A woman named Helena Rodriguez came on. I identified myself and asked about communications with the family.
“I was talking to Mr. Allison until four minutes ago, when his comm cut out.”
Sampson pulled up and jumped from his car.
“I’m borrowing your radio, Deputy,” I said. I looked at John. “We’ve lost contact with the family.”
We both started to run toward the Allisons’ house, which was on the left side of the road where Dockser Terrace split and looped back on itself.
“No way out of here in a car,” Sampson said.
“Do you have eyes overhead?” I barked into the radio.
“Negative, Dr. Cross,” Rodriguez said. “It’s refueling. Two minutes to takeoff. Six minutes to you.”
That made us run faster.
“I need two uniforms in the trees watching the back of the Allisons’ house. Have them come in through the woods from the far side of the loop.”
“Roger that.”
We were less than two hundred yards from the Allisons’ home by then, a big gray Colonial set back among pines and oaks. Even in the moonlight, it was one of the bigger structures in the neighborhood. The lights were off outside and in.
I slowed and stopped at the bottom of the driveway, gasping. “He’s in there, John. He may have found the family already.”
“How would he get into a safe room?” Sampson said, drawing his weapon.
“We’re about to find out,” I said, drawing mine as well, and we started to move forward, only to stop again.
A middle-aged man came jogging around the corner ahead of us on the opposite side of the street. He wore running pants, a white windbreaker, a headlamp, and a bright green reflective vest over a small knapsack with a water hose coming out of the top. A small red light blinked at his waist. A little dog on a leash ran at his side.
We went at him, guns drawn. The Jack Russell terrier growled.
Seeing us, he stopped and threw up his hands, frightened. “What is this?”
“Metropolitan Police,” Sampson said. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
“Tim Boulter. I’m out for a run?”
“At three in the morning?”
“I own a bakery,” Boulter said. “This is my six a.m.”
“How did you get by the police cruiser blocking the road?” I demanded.
“I didn’t see a cruiser. I came on the trail that comes into the far side of Dockser Terrace from closer to the lake. What’s happening?”
“Where do you live?”
“Arcadia Road. Two miles from here.”
I said, “Go straight to the cruiser behind us and give your contact information to the officer there. Sorry to have interrupted your run.”
He nodded uncertainly. The terrier was still growling. “Thank you. What’s going on?”
“Just checking a suspicious person seen in the area.”
Boulter looked at our guns, nodded again, and turned.
“Hey,” Sampson said. “What’s the name of your bakery?”
“Sunrise,” he said. “We’re in the book.”
“Go home, Mr. Boulter,” I said and turned back toward the Allisons’ house.
Boulter broke into a jog. As we started up the driveway, I glanced back, saw the silhouette of him and his dog stopping to talk to the officer blocking the road.
“I say we go inside before the uniforms,” Sampson said.
It was somewhat against protocol, but we feared for the Allisons. If the killer had managed to shut down power or communications from the safe room, he could have gotten inside. He could be executing them now or getting ready to.
“Dispatch, do we know the location of the safe room?” I asked.
“Center of the basement, behind the back wall of the wine cellar.”
We went to the front door. I tried the knob.
Locked.
We moved fast around the house and found a screened-in side porch. A large piece of screen had been cut and folded down.
“Here we go,” I whispered, crawling through on my hands and knees.
The porch had sliding glass doors. One was ajar.
CHAPTER 74
THERE’S ALWAYS A SPLIT second of stiffness, of hesitation, before you go through a door seeking someone who’s likely to try to kill you.
But then years of training take hold, and the shoulders relax and the mind focuses into an almost hyperalertness, attuned to any movement or sound. Sampson went into the house first, with me hard on his heels and covering our six.
We both turned on Maglite flashlights and held them in our left fists, our pistols braced on top across the backs of our hands. John stepped into a great room that ran the width of the house. We went toward the kitchen, clearing behind the sofas and the floor-length curtains.
We did not have a diagram of the house and were forced to bumble through, trying the lights unsuccessfully after we’d cleared the great room and entered the kitchen. We went to the first door off the kitchen, looking for the staircase to the basement. Sampson slipped up to the right edge of the door frame. He pinned his spine to the wall, gun ready. I pulled the door open.
The pantry. One of two doors at the rear of the kitchen revealed the laundry. When I opened the third door, we saw carpeted stairs dropping into darkness.
Easing down, guns still braced, we dissected every shadow with the powerful flashlights until we reached the floor of a massive basement. There was a small movie theater on the left and a larger game room on the right.
Beyond them, in the center of the basement was a stone wall the height of the room and about twenty feet long. Hallways ran off into the dark on both sides of the wall, which wept, water trickling down the stones into a narrow cache for the fountain.
“I’m guessing the wine cellar’s behind that wall.”
“Left or right hallway?”
I shone my light to the right over the cream-colored carpet, seeing where it was compressed from use and noticing a red-wine stain.
Around the right corner of the rock wall, we found a heavy whitewashed oak door with a wrought-iron thumb latch. Once again, we operated as if we were in the middle of an intense training session.
The door creaked when I pulled it, revealing a two-door wrought-iron gate with the letter A crafted into its face. Beyond it was a terra-cotta tile floor, a tasting table with two chairs, and four walls filled top to bottom with wine bottles.
There had to have been four thousand bottles there, maybe more. But no one was in the wine cellar that we could see, and there was no apparent exit.
Sampson drew up the rod holding the gate into the floor and pushed it open as it made a protesting creak. “This is Detective Sampson of MPD. Mr. Allison? Can you hear me? If you can, please come out.”
I stepped in after John and we stood there, listening to the sounds of our breathing and nothing else for several long moments. Then we heard the distinct sounds of steel bars being thrown. A section of the back wall of the wine cellar swung slowly out about twenty degrees and threw flickering soft light into the wine cellar.
Before we saw anyone, we heard a young boy cry, “You were right, Dad! It worked perfect! He had no idea.”
“I want to sleep, Mama,” a little girl said, coming out from behind the secret door. She was no more than four, with curly blond hair; she was dressed in jammies, holding a blanket, and sucking her thumb.