Дэвид Балдаччи - The Sixth Man

They found the front door locked, but a minute later it was unlocked due to Michelle’s delicate manipulations of the deadbolt.

The house had a simple floor plan, and it didn’t take them long to make their way through it. Michelle picked out one of the books from a wall shelf full of them. She looked at the spine. “The only word I recognize in this title is the .”

“Well, you’re not a genius.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“No pictures of family. No testimonials from work. No college degrees. Nothing to show the guy even lives here.”

“Except for the books.”

“Right, except for them.”

“Well, this was his parents’ house. Maybe he just has his stuff somewhere else.”

“No, Paul told us their parents bought the place after they got married and before their son was born. This is the only home Roy has ever known.” He looked around some more. “I suppose if he had a computer the cops took it.”

“Good bet.”

They headed to the barn. The doors were unlocked. They opened them and went in. The space was big and mostly empty. There was a hayloft reached by a wooden ladder, some workbenches, and an assortment of rusty tools hanging on pegs on the walls. An old John Deere tractor was parked at the far end of the ground floor.

Michelle studied a patch of the dirt floor that had been dug up on the left side of the barn to a level of about five feet.

“I’m guessing the burial ground was here?”

Sean nodded and walked a perimeter around the turned-up soil.

“How’d they know to look here?” she asked.

“File says an anonymous tip was called in to the police.”

“That’s really convenient. Anybody try to run down this tipster?”

“They probably tried. But it also probably would have led nowhere. Throwaway phone card. Untraceable. That’s standard operating procedure for homicidal maniacs these days if the tipster was actually the murderer.”

She circled the site carefully, studying it like an archaeological dig. “None identified as of yet. Were their faces disfigured or their prints burned off somehow?”

“Don’t think so. They’re just not in any database, apparently. It happens.”

“Kelly Paul seems convinced of her brother’s innocence.”

“Half brother,” Sean reminded her.

“Still a sibling.”

“I find her more interesting than her brother in some respects. And I noted there were no pictures of her in Roy’s house, and no pictures of him in her house.”

“Some families aren’t that close.”

“Granted, but still, they seem to be really close right now.”

“Well, to be fair, we’ve never even heard the brother say anything. And she was equal parts loquacious and stingy with details.”

“Regarding details about her personal history, which was my point earlier.”

Michelle looked around. “Okay, we’ve seen the burial grounds. Now what?”

Sean examined some old tools on the workbench. “Let’s assume he was framed. How do you get six bodies in here, bury them, and no one knows?”

“First of all, the place is in the middle of nowhere. Second, Roy wasn’t here all the time. He worked outside the house and also spent time in D.C. Or at least so we were told.”

“So, easy enough to plant the evidence. Then the question is why?”

“Meaning if he was an unimportant cog in the nation’s mighty tax collection machine, why go to all the trouble?”

“There are two possible answers to that. Either it’s something in his personal history that we don’t know yet. A personal grudge of significant importance to justify six bodies. Or–”

“Or he wasn’t just an unimportant cog. He was a lot more. Other things being equal, I’m leaning in that direction. Like his sister says, he had uncommon intellectual gifts. That would be important to certain people, or agencies.”

“That and the time spent in D.C. make me lean the same way. Plus the fact that the FBI is all over this with unusual interest.” He dusted off his hands. “Okay, let’s make the rounds of the ME, and the office where Roy worked.”

When they came out of the barn an SUV pulled into the front yard and two men in suits got out.

One of them said, “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

Sean gazed at him. “Right after you tell me who the hell you are.”

The men flashed badges. Quickly.

“Didn’t quite catch the name of the agency on your commission,” said Sean. “Want to try that again, slower?”

The creds didn’t come back out, but the men’s guns did. “We’re federal officers and you need to get off this property right now.”

Sean and Michelle showed their IDs, explained what they were doing there, and Sean’s earlier conversations with the local police force and the county prosecutor.

One of the men shook his head. “I don’t really care. Get out. Now.”

“We’re investigating this case for the defense. We have the right to be here.”

“All the same, you’re going to have to leave.”

“How’d you know we were here?” asked Michelle, as they headed to her truck.

“Excuse me?” said one of the men.

“There’s nobody around here. We didn’t pass one car getting here. How’d you know we were here?”

In response the man opened the door to Michelle’s truck and motioned for her to get in.

Sean and Michelle sped off down the dirt road, billowing dust behind them and into the faces of the two Feds.

“They couldn’t have known we were there, Sean. And those badges looked like the real deal even if I couldn’t see what agency they were actually with. They looked like Feds.”

He nodded. “We’re being tailed. I wonder for how long.”

“I swear there was no one following us when we went to see Kelly Paul. There’s no way I could’ve missed that. There was no cover. Absolutely none.”

“That’s the rub. There’s no cover here, either, and they still showed up.”

Michelle gazed out the window. “Satellite?”

“We’re up against the Feds here. Why not?”

“Buying satellite time is a tough step even for the Bureau.”

Sean considered this. “Those guys weren’t with the FBI. They want you to know who they are. They would’ve shoved their creds right in our faces and kept them there.”

“Damn, what have we got ourselves into?”

Sean didn’t answer her because he had nothing to say.

“HE WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL WORKER. Smart as a whip. No – smarter, actually. It was really something. Almost not human, I’d guess you could say.”

Sean and Michelle were in Leon Russell’s office at the IRS in Charlottesville. Russell was short and wide, with thick white hair. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with a T-shirt underneath and suspenders. His fingers were stained with nicotine, and he twitched a lot, as though the absence of a cigarette in his hand was messing with his mind.

“That’s what we heard too,” said Sean. “What were his duties here?”

“He was the troubleshooter. Anything out of the ordinary that no one else could figure out, we went to Edgar.”

“What sort of person was he?” asked Michelle.

“Kept to himself. We’d sometimes go out for a beer after work. Edgar never joined us. He’d head home to his farm. I think he liked to read.”

“Did you ever go out to the farm?”

“Only once, when I was interviewing him for the job.”

“How’d you come to know about him?”

“Friend of a friend. At his college. I keep contacts everywhere. People with exceptional talent I get a heads-up on. Edgar really stood out. He’d been out of school for a while, doing what I’m not sure. But I called him up and he came in for an interview. Impressed the hell out of me. I had one of those old Rubik’s Cubes on my desk. He picked it up while he was talking to me, and kept messing it up and then solving it over and over, just like that. I’ve never been able to do it once. It was like he could see every combination in his mind. Bet the guy could’ve been a hell of a chess player.”