whole family and Alfie.”
Peering through the other window, Spicer added, “And maybe not.
Somebody left there not long ago. See the tracks in the drive way?”
A vehicle with wide tires had backed out of the garage that was attached
to the white clapboard house. It had reversed to the left as it entered
the street, then had shifted into forward and had driven away to the
right. The snow had barely begun to fill in the multiple arcs of the
tracks.
Clocker opened the rear door, startling them. He climbed inside and
pulled the door shut after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe
on the floor or the two murdered operatives. “Looks like Alfie must’ve
stolen the florist’s van for cover. The deliveryman’s in the back with
the flowers, dead as the moon.”
In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior
of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses
was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably.
Oslett felt claustrophobic.
Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he’d
died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for
blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and
switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.
Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, “Is it
possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a
chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?”
Spicer said, “That’s what I’m going to find out.”
As Spicer’s fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored
graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.
Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker’s
gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows.
He watched the house across the street.
Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the
Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through
foot-thick glass at an alien world.
A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along $
the sidewalk, with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four
white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.
“Got it,” Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when
Oslett had been staring out the window.
What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced,
and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty
minutes after Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had
been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered
it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of
through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.
“The first voice you hear is the caller,” Spicer said, “because the man
who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn’t initially say
anything.”
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
“How did you win them over?”
Stopping the tape, Spicer said, “That second voice is the receiving
phone and it’s Alfie.”
“They both sound like Alfie.”
“The other one’s Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next.”
“Why would they love you more than me?”
“Don’t touch them, you son of a bitch. Don’t you lay one finger on
them. “They betrayed meN “I want to talk to my mother and father
“MY
mother and father
“Put them on the phone.” “So you can tell them more
lies?”
They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the-top creepy
because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically
split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a
renegade but flat-out psychotic.
When the tape ended, Oslett said, “So Stillwater never stopped at his
parents’ house.”
“Evidently not.”
“Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he
interested in Stillwater’s parents, not just Stillwater himself?”
Spicer shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask the boy if you
manage to recover him.”
Oslett didn’t like having so many unanswered questions. It made him
feel as if he wasn’t in control.