As I got behind the wheel, I said, “Next?”
“Viscount Drive,” he said.
I backed out of the driveway and headed for the next house. From the backseat, Grace said, “Do you think, if you give them everything they want, all the money, they’ll let Jane go?”
Cynthia whispered something to our daughter, probably along the lines of, “Let’s not talk about that.”
But Vince answered anyway. “Probably not.”
“Why?” Grace asked.
“They’ll kill her, and me, too, because I’m not the kind of person to let this go.”
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the AC. “Then is there a point to this?” I asked. “Emptying out these houses.”
Vince kept staring straight ahead. “Oh yeah.”
“What? What’s the plan? If you figure they’re going to take the money and kill you and Jane anyway, what’s the plan?”
“I’m working on it,” Vince said.
“Would you like to let us in on it?” I asked.
“Make a left up here,” he said.
The house on Viscount was another two-story. A modest home, white siding, no garage.
“Cleaning lady? Nanny? Furnace repairman? Who you got on the inside here?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Vince said.
We pulled into the driveway. There was an old faded red Pontiac Firebird parked there, had to be more than thirty years old. Cynthia was out of the Escape first. As she got to the door and was ringing the bell, I was three steps behind her.
Ten seconds later, the door opened. A man in his early seventies, I guessed. Neatly dressed, shirt buttoned at the collar. Thin and tall, with a few straggly gray hairs atop his head.
“Yes?” he said.
Cynthia apologized for disturbing him, flashed her creds, and went into her spiel.
“We’ve had a disturbing increase in reports of household mold,” Cynthia said. “Perhaps you saw something about this in the paper or on the news?”
“Uh, the wife might have,” he said, angling his head back into the house. “Gwen!”
Seconds later, a silver-haired woman of similar age appeared, crowding the doorway. “Yes?”
“These people here are from the health department asking about mold.”
“Oh my,” she said. “We don’t have any of that.”
Cynthia nodded. “You’re probably right. The trouble with mold, of course, is that often you’re suffering the effects of it before you actually see it in your home. Mold grows most often in damp places, often behind walls or furniture, and more often than not in attics, maybe as a result of a leaky roof.”
“Oh my,” the woman said. “That sounds awful.”
“Which is why,” Cynthia said, motioning to me and the car with the ladder still attached to the roof, “we are making random attic inspections to check for any mold infestation.”
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I really don’t think that’s necessary.”
Cynthia said, “As you may know, mold presents a greater threat to infants and children, as well as individuals who may already have a compromised immune system. That would be people with, for example, HIV, or who have breathing difficulties associated with allergies or asthma, and of course the elderly are also more prone to infection as a result of mold spores. Can you tell me whether you’ve had any headaches or skin irritations, perhaps dizziness or itchy eyes, even a dry hacking cough?”
I could see worry working its way across their faces. Even I was feeling a little concerned. I’d had all those symptoms at one time or another in the last few months.
“Harold,” the woman said, “if we’ve got mold growing in the attic, we need to know about it.”
“They’re just trying to sell us on some expensive repair job,” he said.
“Not at all,” Cynthia said, handing them an official pamphlet. “We’re not in the business of doing that. If we do see mold, we have a list of bonded companies we can refer you to. Garber Contracting is one that comes to mind off the top of my head, but there are many more. We don’t do the work ourselves.”
I was starting to wonder whether it wouldn’t be faster to do this Vince’s way. Just shoot them.
“Well, okay, then,” the man said, at which point I walked back to the car to take off the ladder.
Vince powered down the window and said, “Try not to go through the ceiling this time.”
“Where should I look?” I asked.
“Along the east wall.”
As I was coming back into the house, I heard the woman ask Cynthia, “Who’s that in the car?”
“It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” she said.
“But school’s out.”
“True,” Cynthia said slowly. I could almost hear the wheels turning. “But it’s a Chamber of Commerce thing, not school related. But I can’t bring her into the house because health regulations stipulate we can’t expose her to the kinds of contaminants that may exist in your home. And that gentleman in the car is a city health department supervisor.”
“He just gets paid to sit on his ass?” the man asked.
Cynthia did a minor eye roll and said, “Your tax dollars at work. But really, if we find a problem, he’s the one who puts the hazmat suit on and goes inside.”
The man paled at the word “hazmat.”
The wife led me to the second floor and into a bedroom that had been turned into a sewing and crafts room. She opened the closet door and pointed to the hatch in the ceiling. This was going to be a tight one.
I set up the ladder as Cynthia entered. The wife was standing nervously in the middle of the room, and the last thing we wanted was her hanging around when I dropped wads of cash down from the attic.
Cynthia, who had clearly thought this scam through, pulled two surgical masks from her pocket. She handed one to me and slipped the other one on over her face, looping the small straps over her ears.
“I wish I had a third one for you,” she said to the woman, who then decided to wait downstairs.
I stuffed mine into my pocket as I moved the hatch aside. I hoisted myself up into the attic, yet another sweltering environment awash in the musty smells of stale air, wood, and what I thought might be mouse droppings. I directed the flashlight to the east wall.
There wasn’t enough room to stand upright, so I moved bent at the waist. My eye caught something on one of the ceiling planks. Something dark and, well, yucky.
“Cyn, can you hear me?”
I heard the ladder rattling, turned, and saw her head poke up into the attic. “Yeah, I’m here,” she said.
“I think they’ve got mold,” I said.
She went back down the ladder.
When I got to the east wall, I started lifting up insulation. In a couple of minutes, I found what I was looking for. A clear plastic bag, about the size of a thick binder, sealed with duct tape and stuffed with neat stacks of bills held together with rubber bands.
I also found something else.
Several small freezer bags, tucked into a larger clear bag, filled with what appeared to be splinters of broken glass, or ice. Except it couldn’t be ice, given how hot it was up here. There were hundreds of these crystal-like pieces, some very small, some as big as the tip of my finger.
“What in the hell is—?”
Then it hit me. It was crystal meth.
When Vince said he was stashing stuff besides money, he wasn’t kidding.
Fifty-three
Rona Wedmore got on the phone to one of the department’s tech guys, who went by the name Spock. She wasn’t even sure what his real name was.
“I’m at a bridal shop downtown and I need you here ten minutes ago,” she said into her cell.