Randy White - Dead Silence

“Sir, are you serious?”

Watching the cop test the door to my truck, I said, “I’ve never been more serious in my life. Even if it’s a sorority party or some sort of initiation-whatever-the girls should be wearing bikini bottoms. Or towels. It’s January!”

“You are serious.”

I said, “More serious by the second,” watching the cop try the passenger door.

“What did you say, five college girls? I need your name, please.”

I lowered my voice to tell the woman, “My wife’s upset, that’s the only reason I’m calling. But I don’t want to make the girls mad if they’re my new neighbors. See what I mean?”

I turned off the phone and watched. It wasn’t long before the squad car became animated with blue strobes. The officer with the bad back jumped in, moving faster than he had before.

Some people can’t let go of the good old days. Maybe Nelson Myles was one. His emotional attachments to Yale and his fraternity were reaffirmed by every wall. Inside his office desk, too. I had pried the lock and was going through drawers.

The man’s picture was in front of me. A recent shot, Myles and a former governor standing near a Learjet, the same as the model Learjet on the desk.

Myles was a disappointment. I expected square-jawed ascendance. Wealth, breeding, confidence. Instead, Nelson looked dour in his Wall Street suit and European glasses. His face sagged as if he’d sprung a leak. Maybe he had-many people do after college. The grinning fraternity boy I had seen in the Skull and Bones photo had lost his smile, along with his hair, a lot of muscle and some of his vision. But the man’s loyalty to his alma mater was intact.

I could picture Myles on autumn weekends, wearing his varsity jacket and a yellow tie, watching his Bulldogs on cable. Or maybe he took the ferry to Connecticut and joined fellow Bonesmen at the stadium.

Yes, he had tickets in the file drawer. I found the invoice for season box seats. Expensive for the average man but not for a man who had a hefty stock portfolio, accounts with three banks, several million dollars in savings and more than half a million in a checking account. To a man like Myles, having ready cash was more important than a decent interest rate.

In recent weeks, there had been three sizable withdrawals, each for seventy-five thousand dollars, and each had been converted into euros. Cash. So… he had bought more horses or part interest in another jet.

Interesting, but I was looking for something that connected him to an intelligence agency or the Cuban Program. Or some indicator of mental instability. Fear or insanity: It had to be one or the other if Myles was involved with the kidnappers.

He was a qualified pilot, with a stack of FAA licenses and correspondence, all neatly filed. But there was nothing to indicate he’d had military training, as I’d hoped. Pilots get shot down and become prisoners of war. Some are assigned freaks as interrogators. Not Myles, though.

No connection.

I found copies of prescriptions for Valtrex, Allegra, Xanax and Valium. Myles had allergies, and somewhere along the way he or his wife had picked up genital herpes. I wondered if Roxanne knew… or perhaps it was she who had gifted him. It could explain the tranquilizers. Presumably, the pills were for anxiety, but that didn’t mean the man was crazy.

No connection… or was there?

I glanced around the room and realized I had made an error that good field observers aren’t supposed to make. I had failed to note what I did not see. What this private office did not contain was alcohol. There were no rare single malts or brandies. No martini shaker, no books on vintages. A man who bought and sold million-dollar horses would be expected to keep a private stock for clients. Fraternity boys drink, even adults who are also pilots. Nelson Myles was using prescription tranquilizers but not the world’s most common: alcohol. There had to be a reason.

“I am referring to the singular incident of the dog barking in the night,” a London detective once said.

“But the dog wasn’t barking,” his assistant pointed out.

“That is the singular incident,” the detective replied.

Why had the dog stopped barking? Something had caused Myles to change his lifestyle. The leading candidates: alcoholism, pathology or a powerful event.

I went to the bookshelves. The only self-help books were business oriented. Nothing on addiction or dealing with liver disease. My hasty conclusion: Something had happened. An event had caused the man to quit drinking. Maybe quit golf, too.

A judge would have laughed at the flimsy implications. The police wouldn’t have wasted their time.

There was a calendar in the top drawer. As I reached for it, I heard a car door outside. I looked, saw a mail truck, and relaxed a little. Opening the calendar, I turned so I could keep an eye on the driveway while studying Myles’s schedule.

Myles had been in the office eleven days ago, Tuesday, January thirteenth. On the January fourteenth block, he’d written Return S. I’d found documents related to a home he owned near Sarasota.

He, too, was a compulsive circler. Maybe he had marked the magazines in Norvin Tomlinson’s room-Bonesmen, after all, would enjoy brotherly rights when it came to sharing property. And Greta Finnmark still wasn’t talking, even when interviewed by the FBI.

Flipping through the calendar, I noticed an oddity. The numbers 7 and 8 were used often, always singularly and in contexts that made no sense. Ferrier scheduled? 8. Yale/Harv. 7. Buy tickets. 8.

It was a substitution cipher. Sitting at the man’s desk, the first key that came into my mind might have been the first that came into Nelson’s mind. H-o-r-s-e-s? No. B-u-l-l-d-o-g-s? No.

Then I got it. Fifteen new voting members were inducted into Skull and Bones each year. Never more, never less. Eight votes was a positive, seven a negative.

Ferrier schedule-yes. Yale/Harvard game-lost.

Less cryptic was a single exclamation point-! – penned beneath January twenty-second. The date was circled, an important day.

Yes, it was. That was two days ago, a Thursday. Will Chaser was kidnapped.

I paused to check my watch. Seven minutes: That’s how long it had been since the squad car pulled away. The house was too solidly built for sound to carry from the first floor to the second. But the stairway was marble, and even if Roxanne used the elevator I would hear her coming. I allowed myself three more minutes and went back to work

There were several folders dedicated to Skull and Bones. Because I did not expect them to be labeled, I found them faster than Myles would have hoped.

Women being inducted into Skull and Bones had been an issue. There were copies of letters to an attorney discussing a court order to block their admission. There were copies of articles about William F. Buckley, the famous writer, who had successfully gotten the courts involved and stopped an earlier attempt.

Inevitable, Myles had scribbled on the last document in the file. The man had tried but gave up.

I found a Skull and Bones roster from the man’s senior year. The fraternity assigned nicknames. On a roster, Myles had written the names in ink, along with notations. Long Devil-long! Boaz-football capt. Gog-fag, I think. Pancho Villa-spook, gin martinis. Capt. Morgan-distilleries, fruit. Clark Kent-airline.

Myles’s nickname was Magog. Beside it he had written, Can’t help myself! Was it a plea or was he boasting? Boasting, I decided. Gog was gibberish, but the name had been assigned to someone of ambiguous sexuality. Magog, with its prefix, would be the opposite: a heterosexual trooper.

Myles had been a hound and was proud of it. The script for Valtrex confirmed he was still a womanizer, and if he hadn’t liked the nickname he would have scribbled it out. That’s what he’d done to Norvin Tomlinson’s nickname. Myles had used a different pen-no, two different pens-to blot it out. He wanted that nickname gone.