I went outside. This morning’s Crown Victoria was black. The two young men inside were pretending to read yesterday’s newspaper.
I tapped on the windshield pillar. The agent in the passenger’s seat put down the newspaper and looked up at me, acting surprised.
“Tell Till I’m going to see Anton Chernek.” I walked away.
Five minutes later, as I finished changing clothes, my cell phone rang.
“Why do you need Chernek?”
“Nice job on T.V., Till. You lied about everything.”
“I kept you out of it, Elstrom. Now answer me, or I’ll have you brought downtown. Why do you need Chernek?”
“He’s got old blueprints of Crystal Waters. I want to look at them.”
“For what?”
“For divine inspiration, Till. And for proximity. Have you noticed that all the bomb sites have been clustered together in one section of Crystal Waters?”
“I’ll send an agent to get the prints.”
“No. Let me talk to Chernek; he’s not going to work with you. Besides, you know damned well it isn’t him. Or me.”
He paused. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
I called the Bohemian.
Till must have told the agents tailing me to give me some space. I was already out of the Jeep and going into the Bohemian’s building when they pulled into the parking lot.
Griselda Buffy sat at the desk in the empty reception area.
“He’s expecting me,” I said.
She gestured toward the door to the general office. “Entrez,” she said in what might have been flawless French.
The office was a crypt. No one was in the cubicles. I walked to the back.
The Bohemian’s door was open. I tapped on the jamb, and he looked up.
“Vlodek,” he said, trying to roll the first syllable on his tongue like always. But there was no enthusiasm in it now. He sat small behind his desk, a paled man going through the motions. On a table in the corner, a small color television flickered, its sound turned off. He motioned to a chair.
“A man, his wife, two daughters barely starting school.” His voice was dry, raspy. His eyes searched my face. “How can they think I did this?”
“They don’t. Remember, they’re watching me, too.”
“Agent Till mentioned Michael Jaynes on T.V. Are they getting close?”
“I doubt it. Till said that to give the illusion he had a lead.”
“Was there a note like the other times?”
“Two days before. Two million. But the bomber didn’t wait for the reply.”
The Bohemian put his elbows on his desk and leaned forward. “What is to be done?”
“I’m here to look at your blueprints again.”
He sank back in his chair. “Surely you don’t think I’m involved in the explosions.”
“No.”
“You don’t think I would kill a man, a woman, and two little girls.” His eyes looked like they were pleading.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You give people chances, not take them away. Like you did when you hired me.”
He gave me a tired smile. “I’d like to take credit, but it wasn’t me. Your friend Stanley said you would be ideal and could use the work. I liked the spirit of his suggestion and recommended it to the Board.” He pushed himself up. “Let’s get the blueprints.”
We went to a storage room. He unlocked a cabinet and took out the big paper roll. As he did, he dislodged a tan folder that fell to the floor. He leaned the roll against the cabinet, bent down to pick up the folder, and handed it to me. “I found this among the other papers. The sales brochure. Very selective, very private. We only printed three hundred and didn’t use half of them. As you know, the sites sold out immediately.” He picked up the roll of blueprints and locked the cabinet, and we walked down the hall. “Might as well use the big conference room. Keep the dust off the table.”
He switched on the lights in the large room we’d used only a few weeks earlier, when Till, Chief Morris, Stanley, the Bohemian, and I had met to strategize. Just a handful of weeks. Now a whole family was dead because the people in that room couldn’t put anything together.
The Bohemian set the drawings down on the table. “I will leave you to it, Vlodek,” he said, and went out.
I sat midway down one side of the table and started to unroll the blueprints, but then set them aside and picked up the manila folder the Bohemian had handed me. The sales brochure inside was printed on the kind of heavy tan parchment stock they use for menus at high-end restaurants. CRYSTAL WATERS, the cover proclaimed in two-inch dark brown script. Stacked below, one word per line, it read: BEAUTY. TRANQUILITY. SECURITY.
The first five of the six inside pages presented lavish half-tone drawings of the various stone and brick houses that were going to be constructed. Each residence was shown surrounded by mature trees and featured a view of the fountain in the middle of the pond. Superimposed on the renderings were short, pithy blurbs in tall script: “Secure in our world,” “Safe, because our children trust us,” and, across one idyllic scene of a family picnicking under an oak tree, “Chanticleer Circle, the safest street in America.” The bottom of every page was bordered, side to side, with a drawing of the brick wall that would enclose the development.
With serene drawings and soothing words, the marketing people had rendered the perfect world well. The only thing they’d missed was a sketch of the Stepford Wives, sauntering along in gingham, clutching bouquets of daisies.
The sixth page was the only one that gave details. As I started reading, I recognized the verbiage; they were the same words that had been used by the corn soufflé lady in the Maple Hills Assembler before Crystal Waters had been built.
I reread the closing paragraph several times. “From the impenetrable walls that enclose the community, to the fireproof construction, the security of the guardhouse, and the safety in the underground shelters, Crystal Waters will be the safest community in America.”
Underground shelters.
I unrolled the drawings, flipping quickly over the grading elevations, landscaping details, drainage specifications. I was looking for specifications for concrete, any kind of concrete. The road specifications were there, along with the foundations for the guardhouse, the fountain in the pond, even the base of the wall. But there was no information about underground shelters.
Without the torn-off index sheet, I couldn’t know for sure, but it was likely that at least some of the missing blueprint pages had to do with the underground shelters.
I rerolled the prints and took them to the Bohemian’s office. He was reading a computer printout on his desk, eating a small bowl of cottage cheese. “About the only thing my stomach can tolerate these days,” he said, gesturing with his spoon.
I leaned the roll of blueprints against the side of his desk. “Any chance the missing blueprints I told you about before had to do with bomb shelters?”
He set down the cottage cheese. “As I said, I keep the prints; I don’t use them.”
“It was you, though, wasn’t it, who drew light X’s on the Farraday house and on the old bus shelter?”
He nodded. “I was wondering about their closeness to each other.”
“And the house that just went up, that was close to the other explosion sites.”
“Yes.”
I set the brochure in front of him and opened it to the last page. “The last paragraph says there are underground shelters in Crystal Waters.”
He looked down at the brochure and read.