His own was, even as he stood next to Pete, studying the house while they waited for it to be cleared.
“Big attic area,” he said to Pete.
“I noticed that, too. It’s too big, don’t you think?”
A group from the SWAT team cautiously approached the house carrying an “Arizona toothpick” — a four-foot-long metal device, about two inches in diameter, with a claw on one end and a narrow point at the other. Avoiding the doormat — which might have been a pressure-sensitive trigger for a booby-trapped door — they knocked and shouted their warning.
They did not wait long for a reply. The toothpick made short work of the door and they were in, quickly sweeping through the house. The bomb squad was on their heels, dogs in harness. Within minutes, the leader of the SWAT unit came back out to talk to Frank.
“There’s no one in there, but we’ve found an entrance into the attic that looks as suspicious as hell. It’s not your usual crawl-space access. It’s some kind of specially built door, and it’s got an alarm on it. I’m going to order a portable X-ray so that we can take a look through the roof before we go in that way.”
“How about the vent?”
“Sure,” he said with a smile. “Crude but effective.”
They brought a ladder up to the side of the house, attached one end of a chain to the vent, and hooked the other end to the rear bumper of a patrol car. “Stand back!” a SWAT officer warned, removing the ladder and making sure no one was beneath the vent. He then signaled the driver of the car.
“Wagons ho!” Pete said as the car moved forward and the vent came out of the wall with a bang, bringing stucco, the heavy chain, and a cloud of debris with it — and leaving a rough-edged observation port below the roofline.
The ladder was repositioned. Another SWAT team member climbed it, took a cautious look through the hole, then radioed that the attic was a finished room — it appeared to be an office with a workbench of some kind. Someone brought a fire ax to him and he quickly enlarged the hole.
“Our dogs aren’t hitting on anything on the first floor,” a member of the bomb squad said. “We’ll check out the attic next.”
“Can your dogs climb a ladder?” Frank asked a member of the bomb squad.
“Oh, yeah. Part of their training. Mine doesn’t like it much, but he can do it.”
Frank’s cell phone rang. “I’ll get things started on the ground floor,” Pete said.
Frank nodded to him as he answered the call.
“Frank — it’s Reed. Thought I’d let you know what we have so far. Haycroft was seen at the airport this morning. Got there really early, then aborted a flight. Apparently he drove off after he decided not to fly. He’s got a little Cessna. The chief got a search warrant for it, and Vince is going over it now. Vince says it has some kind of special storage lockers on it.”
“Any news on where Haycroft went after that?”
“No, but we think we know which plates he has on the van this morning — he’s actually using the ones registered to the vehicle. The parking garage at the airport videotapes a vehicle’s license plates as they enter, and the tapes are date and time stamped — it’s a way of preventing people from parking for a week, then claiming they were there for a day and lost their ticket. Vince checked the ones from this morning — a late-model white Chevy van went in at about the time Haycroft was seen there, and sure enough, it was his.”
“That’s a break, anyway. With luck, he won’t believe he needs to change them.”
“There’s more — and, man, I’m glad you’re the one who will have to tell this to the chief, because it’s all going to hit the fan when you do.”
“Tell him what?”
“Freeman says that there are over forty files monitored by the program.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“They go back twelve years.”
“Twelve? How can that be? That computer isn’t that old.”
“Haycroft was on the committee that chose the computer hardware and software for the property room. We think he must have kept track of the older cases some other way before the new computers were installed. Maybe he had a program on the old computer, too. However he did it, he had his list of cases, and the property room computer called his whenever anyone looked at the evidence for them.”
“Wouldn’t the evidence control software indicate tampering with the files? Otherwise, we’re way too vulnerable.”
“Apparently there are plenty of safeguards to keep anyone from getting into the evidence control program and making entries or changing anything. But Haycroft never changed any of that data, so no alarms went off. He just rigged a little extra ‘notification program’ that would get word to his computer.”
“If he could get into the property room computer, why didn’t he zap the special program and list of files before he left?”
“That’s the best part — and it’s gonna make you look good with Hale. Flynn said that he took that computer off-line after you were in here on Wednesday night. Guess you had a conversation about it that made him take precautions. By the way, he says to tell you to keep watching out for those ancient Egyptians, whatever that means.”
“So Haycroft was forced to leave his watchdog program behind. What about these files — anything in common?”
“We haven’t gotten very far yet, but after you call Hale, we’ll probably get lots of assistance. I’ve looked at two. That’s not enough to make a study.”
“But you found something.”
“Maybe. They were cases where an anonymous phone call led to discovery of evidence — and then to an arrest.”
“Shit.”
“I had the same reaction.”
“Haycroft was the caller.”
“In the two cases I looked at, the men who were arrested had each previously been in custody on other cases — suspected but ultimately released. This time, they proclaimed their innocence, but the evidence was against them.”
“Lack of evidence on the previous?”
“Sort of. Enough for us, enough for the D.A., but not enough for Judge Curse. Like I said, only two cases, so who knows what I’ll find with the others.”
“Things are hopping here, but as soon as I get a minute, I’ll call Hale.”
“Good luck. I also talked to the bomb squad administrative offices. They looked up the records. You were right — Haycroft was the liaison on the Wendell Leroy Wallace cases. I asked them to put me in touch with the guys who had been on those cases.”
Frank walked along the sidewalk in front of the house as Reed told him about his conversations with four members of the squad who each remembered Haycroft for his avid interest in the cases he worked on.
“He even asked them to let him photocopy Wallace’s notebooks,” Reed said.
“Which I’m sure they took to be a healthy scientific interest,” Frank said, looking up at the high-pitched roof of the house. “Remind me about the other Wallace cases.”
“He blew up three cars, but the bomb squad defused two others — everybody in this company he had a grudge against started taking taxis and riding buses. He also bombed a building — placed explosives in an empty office below the victim’s. He made studies of other kinds of explosives, too. I’ve got the details when you need them.”
“Larson have any further ideas?”
“The guy is useless. He’s seriously pissing me off — he just won’t face it. We still can’t get him to believe this is possible. Even with Chief Hale riding his ass, all he can say is that he trusted Haycroft completely.”
“That may be the problem Randolph saw all those years ago. Or maybe he noticed the anonymous-tip pattern.”
“I’ll bet Haycroft will know.”
“I can’t wait to ask him,” Frank said.
“We did get one other break — the toxicologist says that the Wheeze has been having breakfast with Haycroft at Greenleaf’s and slipping down to the lab for all kinds of other little meetings.”