“Digital pad.”
She cocked her head in reappraisal. “That helps too.”
Sands climbed into her van and soon emerged with a small black carrying case that said liberty safe on it. “My husband and I are their certified techs in this area.”
“Good to know.”
“People forget their codes all the time,” the locksmith said.
We returned to the storage unit. Sampson had climbed over a couch, a kitchen table, and several chairs and was rummaging through boxes stacked on the far wall.
“Anything?”
“Lot of books and knickknacks.”
“Lenora says she can get us into the safe.”
“I’ll check the filing cabinets,” he said and climbed over a credenza to four filing cabinets along the rear wall of the unit.
Sands struggled but reached the black safe at the back and soon had a notebook computer plugged into the underside of the digital keypad. She gave the computer a series of commands, then looked up and around.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m not getting a clear satellite signal through … oh, now it’s talking.”
“Who’s it talking to?”
“A security computer at Liberty, which should generate a onetime code to override the real combination. And you are law enforcement, which we click here.”
The locksmith hit Enter and looked at the safe expectantly. Several moments later, a light on the pad flashed green and heavy steel bars rolled back. Sands turned to us. “She’s all yours.”
“Leave us an invoice at the front counter,” I said. “And thanks.”
“It’s what I do,” the locksmith said, and she left.
I opened the safe door, revealing seven weapons. Three were bolt-action hunting rifles with Leica scopes. The other four were AR-style rifles with Aimpoint sights. Boxes of ammunition were stacked on the floor at the back.
I went through the top inner drawer and found various legal documents, including Tull’s will and the title and deed to his home on Moosehead Lake in Maine. There was a Glock nine-millimeter pistol in a holster in the second drawer. The third drawer was empty.
“Find what you were looking for?” Sampson asked.
Every person who’d died in the Family Man murders had been shot with a .40-caliber pistol.
“Not today,” I said, unable to hide my disappointment as I turned to face him.
“That’s okay. I did,” he said, grinning and holding a pen stuck through the trigger guard of a black pistol fitted with a suppressor. “Glock, forty cal. And it smells like it’s been fired recently.”
CHAPTER 82
THAT EVENING ALEX CAME home exhausted but happy that they’d all but nailed Tull to the wall. The poor guy had slept less than four hours in the past two days and went to bed after dinner so he could wake up early and be there when the writer was arraigned in the morning.
Bree had to be up early too to catch the train back to New York, but she wasn’t feeling tired and was uninterested in the movie Nana Mama, Ali, and Jannie were watching. She climbed up to Alex’s attic office with a pair of earphones.
After closing the door, Bree sat on the couch and listened to the recording she’d made the previous day in Ohio. At first, she heard only branches scraping her jacket and the wind blowing as she ducked through the back hedge of Theresa May Alcott’s estate and crossed the lawn.
Her feet crunched gravel; the door to the greenhouse creaked. But then the big Polynesian’s voice came through loud and clear: “Who are you? What are you doing here? You do not have permission to be here.”
And then Alcott herself saying, “It’s all right, Arthur. You have exceeded my expectations, Chief Stone. I predicted a phone call or a knock at my front door, not a barging into my greenhouse.”
Bree smiled when the billionaire laughed and said, “But then I guess you are a barging-in kind of person, aren’t you?”
After hearing herself say, “I guess I am. All elbows and knees,” Bree paused the recording. Alcott’s demeanor had been disarming. She’d liked the woman almost instantly, and when was the last time that happened?
Still, there was something about their interaction that had nagged at her most of the day. Bree fast-forwarded the recording to where she and Alcott were in the library.
She listened closely as the billionaire described her dear granddaughter’s downward spiral at the hands of Paula Watkins and perhaps Frances Duchaine. Alcott then said she believed some kind of cosmic justice had been done.
Bree heard herself say, “You won’t go to the journalists with the evidence I dug up?”
“Again, will that bring back my granddaughter?” Alcott replied. “The media will get its meat when Frances Duchaine goes on trial.”
“She claims she’s innocent.”
“So did Saddam Hussein.”
Listening to the recording, Bree again noted the chill in Alcott’s voice. The phone on the desk rang.
“Can you hold on a moment?” the billionaire asked. “I rarely get calls on the landlines anymore.”
Her footsteps were audible as she crossed to the desk. Bree heard her say, “This is Terri … Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear? I’m with someone and I’ll need to pick up in another room … I am sorry, Chief Stone. This won’t take long, but it can’t wait.”
Bree listened to herself say, “Please. Take your time.”
Bree stopped the recording, rewound it several seconds, and hit Play.
“This is Terri … Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear?”
Bree stopped the recording again, feeling puzzled. But what about? She played that sequence again.
“This is Terri … Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear?”
Bree had that same internal response—something was off there, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what. The inflection of the words? The tone of voice? The emphasis on certain syllables? What was it? What was being said on that tape that she wasn’t getting?
Bree listened two more times before yawning and glancing at the clock. It was nearly eleven. She needed sleep.
Climbing down the stairs, she thought, Emma is probably someone who works for Paladin in the investor relations office, and it’s nothing more than that.
CHAPTER 83
AT EIGHT FORTY THE next morning, a good twenty minutes before proceedings were scheduled to start, Sampson, Mahoney, and I were in federal judge Margaret Twoomy’s courtroom in Alexandria.
It was a good thing. By the time her bailiff told everyone to rise, the six benches on both sides of the main aisle were packed with journalists, attorneys, court buffs, and lookie-loos. Twoomy, a tall brunette with sharp features, took the bench and called the court to order.
“We have a full arraignment docket, so I would like to move quickly this morning,” Twoomy said, peering out at the audience. “Counsel, when your client is called and the charges are read, I want a simple guilty or not guilty. Are we clear? Guilty or not guilty. You’ll get a chance to tell your side of things when I consider bail.” The judge looked over at her clerk. “First case, Randy?”
“United States versus Thomas Adrian Tull,” Randy said. “Multiple homicide charges.”