Dykes began to rock, his arms collapsed over his chest. He nodded.
“What else? What were you expecting to happen?”
“Nothing. They said they’d go out the back,” Dykes said. “I’d let the phone ring three times, that’s all I had to do, just warn them. Nothing more. I heard them laughing later about firecrackers. When I asked them what they meant, the old guy, Mr. Grace, he laughed some more, said he’d like to scare the bejesus out of the cops, if he could, said the lot of you weren’t worth spit. If he only had one firecracker, that’s all he needed, he said. But he didn’t have one, did he?” He looked at the burnt heap of rubble that was, up until an hour before, his main support, then raised smoke-reddened eyes to Dane’s face. Dane wanted to smack him upside the head for being so greedy, so stupid. “He didn’t lie. He didn’t have a firecracker, what he had was a bomb.”
Dykes whispered, “Why did they lie to me, Agent Carver? Why? I did what they asked, called their room when you showed up, let the phone ring three times. This was crazy, mean and crazy. They ruined me.”
Savich said, “No, Mr. Dykes, you did this yourself.” He was still trying to get his brain around what this man had done, for five hundred dollars.
“It was the girl with all that beautiful hair; she paid me to let them know if you guys showed up. But I wasn’t born yesterday, people are always trying to stiff me because they figure the rooms are cheap, the name of the hotel is a joke, but look, I believed them. And she was so pretty, and she liked me. Her stomach was so white and—I guess I didn’t call this one right at all, did I? I’m an idiot.”
Dane said, “Yes, I’d say tonight you were.”
Dykes, skinny as a nail, wrapped up in a coat two sizes too large for him, thick mousse glistening on the half dozen long gray hairs plastered down over the top of his skull, realized fully now that he was in deep trouble. “No, I—I—I’m not an idiot, and it isn’t nice of you to agree with me like that. I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen, Agent Carver, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t have a clue what they were planning. Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marlene is going to kill me.”
“You took five hundred dollars knowing that our lives were on the line.” There was no rage in Dane’s calm voice, but it was there, clear as could be, in his eyes, if Dykes had looked up at him. But he kept his eyes on his shoes, and shook his head.
Savich asked him, “They requested room two-twelve?”
Dykes nodded. “Yeah, that’s a prime room since it’s on the end and there’s a window in the bathroom.”
Dane said, “You realize now that they either cut through that thin back bathroom wall or they went out the back window and were gone by the time we walked into your office. They meant to kill as many of us as they could. The bomb was powerful enough. Do you have a family, Mr. Dykes, or are you only at the mercy of your sister Marlene?”
“No, Joyce left me two years past for a trucker whose eighteen-wheeler smoked up every state he traveled through. I’ll bet he told her he’d show her all the sights and the dip believed him.”
Savich said, “Then you can think of Joyce enjoying the Grand Canyon while you’re nice and snug in jail.”
Dane said, “Maybe Marlene will visit you in your cell.”
Dane accepted a pair of handcuffs from one of Police Chief Tumi’s deputies, clicked them around Dykes
’s bony wrists, and handed him over to a deputy, who stared at Dykes like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. The deputy hauled him off, none too gently, to a cruiser. Chief Tumi called out, “Read him his rights, Deputy Wiggins. It’s a right shame that stupidity isn’t a felony.” He turned to Savich. “So the two gunshots we heard—they really were gunshots, weren’t they?”
“They were well timed, whatever they were,” Dane said. “Maybe the arson investigators will find the remains of a tape recorder in the wreckage. Maybe the conversation we heard, as well as the gunshots, was recorded to play at a specific time.”
Chief Tumi nodded, looked over at his deputy, who was stuffing Dykes into the backseat. “Roy, don’t leave that yahoo alone. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Savich said to Dane, “One thing we can bank on—they were long gone out of that room, with Pinky, before we heard the gunshots. They might have been watching.”
Connie said, “You can fry Rolly when I reel the little bugger in.” She shook her head. “This will sure shake Ruth’s belief in her snitches. Do you know the little geek reminded me about his extra pint because he’s throwing a goth party?”
Chief Tumi said to Savich, “My deputies are reporting no sign of them yet, but we’ll find them. I’ve called the State Police, given them descriptions, told them about Pinky. We’ve done what we can.”
Savich knew there was a lot more to do but mostly for the forensic team. Connie said, “That old Chevy van over there—it was bait, the lure to keep us here. I wonder if they really are heading for Arlington National Cemetery.”
“Or is it more misdirection?” Sherlock wondered aloud.
But Savich knew they had no choice but to run another complicated operation, and they only had about four hours to get everything nailed down. He couldn’t imagine how much manpower they’d need to cover that huge expanse of land, with its thousands of white markers and monuments and rest areas. “I hate to say this, I really do, but I have a feeling they’ll actually be there. Find Rolly, Connie.”
“Dillon, do you want to call Ruth, bring her back in?”
Savich started to nod, then thought of how excited she’d been about the trip, about going into a cave this time, and just wait until he saw what she brought back. “No, let her have her time off. There are enough of us here. She’ll be back on Monday.”
They looked up to see an older woman striding toward them, boots to her knees, a head scarf tied tight around her face, a thick wool coat flapping around her calves. She stopped at the cruiser, leaned in, and screamed, “What did you do, Raymond?”
Savich cocked an eyebrow. “Marlene, I presume.”
CHAPTER 4
MAESTRO, VIRGINIAFRIDAY EVENING
SHERIFF DIXON NOBLE shrugged into his leather jacket, pulled on his gloves, and left his office at Number One High Street just before five o’clock. It was colder than Brewster’s nose against the back of his knee in the dead of winter. Snow was coming, forecasted to dump a good one and a half to two feet. He really didn’t want to think about the phone calls it would bring, from downed power lines to car pileups, older citizens with no heat, sick folks without a way to get to the hospital—the list was endless. He’d learned a long time ago to have a solid number of what he called “disaster deputies” he himself had trained to handle the worst that bad luck and nature could throw at them. It had been a slow February anyway, he thought, except for Valentine’s Day. Will Garber had brought his wife, Darlene, a three-pound box of Valentine chocolates as an apology, but Darlene wasn’t buying it. She grabbed up a handful of chocolates and rubbed them in his face, at which point he slugged her, slammed out of the house, got drunk at Calhoun’s Bar, broke Jamie Calhoun’s nose, and ended up in jail.
“Hey, Dix, anything going on this weekend for you?”
Dix paused a moment, nodded to Stupper Fulton, owner of Fulton’s Hardware, as his father had been before him, and said, “Not so’s you’d notice, Stup. Me and the boys will be sledding down Breaker’s Hill along with half the kids in town if this storm coughs up enough snow. If it coughs up too much, I’ll be all over town with a shovel, digging people out of ditches.”