“Did you ever overhear anything you weren’t supposed to?” Chapel asked.
“No, never. I was still trying to be a good kid back then. I thought it would make them like me more. Mom and Dad were both cold fish, and I was always trying to find some way to get their approval. I used to look forward to the CIA guy’s visits. It made me feel like my life was a little more exciting than other kids’. He was always nice to me, too. Nicer than my parents.”
“Angel,” Chapel said, under his breath.
“Already working on it, sugar,” the voice in his ear said. “Give me a sec.”
Julia stared at him. More specifically, she stared at his ear. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’ve got a Bluetooth. What a nonsurprise.”
He reached toward the hands-free set nestled in his ear, but he didn’t touch it. “I need to stay connected,” he told her.
“The only people in New York who wear those things are bankers and finance types,” she said. “People who are rich enough that nobody dares tell them they look like douche bags. We all got pretty tired after a while of them walking around talking to invisible people all the time. It used to be you could tell if somebody was a crazy bum because he did that. Suddenly you had to take that kind of behavior seriously.”
Chapel could only shrug. “Excuse me for one second,” he told her.
“Whatever,” she said, and turned to look out her window.
Angel eventually came back on the line. “This one took some digging. There are a lot of sealed records here… Helen Taggart née Bryant, William Taggart — they were both on somebody’s payroll, definitely, up until the mid-nineties. Tax records only show they worked for an unspecified government agency. That’s unusual — the IRS doesn’t mess around. The CIA should have been generating pay stubs and W-2 forms like anybody else.”
“Sounds like they were being paid out of a black budget.”
“Which is pretty much a brick wall when you’re trying to follow a money trail,” Angel agreed. “I did find one thing, though, that’s going to make you so proud of me. William Taggart is still working as a research scientist, and that means he depends on grant money that has to be accounted for scrupulously. In 2003, he got a grant from an anonymous donor, but the check was paid by a bank in Langley, Virginia.”
Which was where the CIA had its headquarters.
“That was some inspired detective work, absolutely,” Chapel said. Not for the first time he uttered silent thanks that Angel was on his side. What she’d uncovered wasn’t cast-iron proof that William Taggart had worked for the CIA, but it was pretty damning — and it was enough to confirm what his daughter had said.
“One other thing,” Angel said, “I can definitely confirm that a William Taggart, a Helen Taggart, and a Julia Taggart all lived in Phoenicia, New York, until 1995. The elder Taggarts paid mortgage payments and property taxes there, and the woman you’re sitting next to was a student at the local elementary school.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Chapel said, with a chuckle. “I don’t suppose there are any military bases in that area? Maybe a detention facility?”
“No likely suspects yet,” Angel said, “but I’m still looking and—”
“Hey — that’s my house,” Julia said, rapping on the Plexiglas partition between them and the cab’s driver. “Slow down. You can let me off at the corner.”
“Hold on, Angel,” Chapel said. Julia was reaching into her purse, but he put out a hand to stop her. “This is on me,” he told her.
“Fine.” She closed her purse and reached for the door handle.
“I still have some more questions,” Chapel said, before she could get out of the cab. “If you’ll just give me a little more of your time—”
“I don’t think so,” she told him. “You’re definitely not coming inside, and I have to start planning my mother’s funeral.” Her face fell. Maybe she had been able to put aside her grief while she was talking to him, but he could see it had only been delayed. “It’s bad enough she’s dead. I didn’t need any of this. I really didn’t—”
She stopped in midsentence. She was staring through the window of the cab, looking up at her house — a modest two-story building not unlike the one where her mother had lived.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Beyond the obvious?”
“Captain Chapel,” she said. “I didn’t leave the lights on when I left this morning.”
He leaned across her to look up at the house. There were definitely lights on in the second-floor windows. As he watched, someone walked past the window, someone big and definitely male.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:59
“Dr. Taggart,” Chapel said, “give me your house keys, and stay in this cab no matter what happens.”
Her eyes searched his face. She wasn’t stupid. She knew this couldn’t be a coincidence. Still, she clearly had her doubts.
“I am not kidding,” he told her.
She nodded once and reached in her purse to fish out her keys. She slapped them into his outstretched right hand.
He tapped on the partition between them and the cabbie. “Wait here. Keep the meter running — it’ll be worth your while.”
The bearded cabdriver just shrugged.
Chapel stepped out onto the sidewalk. With his artificial left hand he brushed the front of his jacket, just to remind himself his sidearm was still there.
Approaching the house he saw right away that he wouldn’t need the keys after all. The front door had been forced open. It was a heavy steel-core door with a Medeco lock, a lock that was supposed to be impossible to pick. Whoever had opened the door hadn’t bothered to try. He’d simply smashed the lock mechanism, maybe with a sledgehammer. Chapel looked up and down the street but saw nobody watching him. Breaking that door must have made a lot of noise but nobody had come to investigate.
He shook his head and pushed past the swaying door. There was a second door inside, a security door with an electric buzzer. That door, too, had been smashed open and the buzzer was whining a plaintive cry.
“Up the stairs. It’s the apartment on the left,” Angel told him.
The building had been a single house once, from the look of it, but had been subdivided at some later point to make four apartments. Chapel headed up the stairs and found himself in a narrow corridor between two identical doors. These were simple wooden doors, child’s play to kick in. It looked like both of them had been bashed open by force. Maybe the intruder didn’t have an Angel to tell him which door he wanted.
Chapel drew his weapon. He reached for a safety switch before remembering there wasn’t one on the P228. The handgun had an internal safety — the first pull on the trigger was a double action, cocking the hammer a moment before the handgun fired. That meant his first shot would be slightly slower than expected.
It had been a long time since he’d fired a pistol at anything but a paper target. Chapel set his jaw and pushed open Julia’s apartment door with his foot.
From behind the door he heard shattering glass. Had the intruder jumped out a window? No — he could see blue glass fragments all over the floor.
The apartment might have been nice, tastefully decorated and cozy, once. He saw framed pictures of dogs on the walls and a bricked-in fireplace. Other than that the place was a shambles. The furniture had been broken into sticks of wood. Books had been torn from their shelves and thrown across the floor. Foam stuffing from ripped-up pillows and cushions floated on the air.
The place hadn’t just been ransacked. It had been demolished.
A loud clattering, rattling noise broke his concentration. Stainless steel cooking implements — salad tongs, spatulas, slotted spoons — bounced and danced across the floor. The intruder must have pulled out one of Julia’s kitchen drawers and just thrown it through the opening to the kitchen.