David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

The second one creaked. She felt a loose board shift under her foot. A bird called from somewhere near. A blue jay or a cardinal, she thought, though she could never keep the two straight. This part of the country was filled with them.

Faith blinked. An empty Michelob can sat on the porch railing, the lettering on the can faded as if it had been in the sun for a long time. A Tostitos bag with a few chips trailing out of it blew across the porch in front of her like some kind of latter-day tumbleweed. An open package of Trojan condoms sat on the lip of one of the front windows.

The window was dusty. She drew a line in the dust with her index finger, then rubbed a circle, feeling the grit under her palm. She peered through the circle.

The front room was totally empty.

There was no furniture whatsoever. The wood floor looked as dusty as the window.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered, unaware she’d spoken aloud.

According to Daryn and Sean, thirteen people had been living in this house scarcely more than a week ago. Could the Coalition have cleared out any sign of them in that amount of time, leaving no trace?

Of course, but to clear out furniture, there would have to be a lot of coming and going, trucks filled with the items being moved. Would a group like Daryn had described want the townspeople of Mulhall to see them moving things around? She doubted it. News traveled fast in small towns, and the people of Mulhall would have had to notice such an operation.

The other answer was that Daryn and Sean were both lying.

Faith’s throat tightened. She blinked as another burst of wind stirred up more of the dust on the porch.

She pulled on the screen door that had slammed a few minutes earlier. The frame door behind it was ajar. She took the SIG out of her pocket again, then pushed on the door and stepped over the threshold, her eyes immediately seeking out the trouble spots, the corners.

Nothing.

She sniffed the interior of the front room. It just smelled musty, with an underlying odor of cigarette smoke. That meant nothing-she knew smoke could linger in a room for months or even years.

She made a quick circuit of the downstairs. No appliances in the kitchen, empty cabinets and drawers. The wallpaper, which looked like it had come straight from the 1970s, was peeling. She stepped onto the back deck. Nothing.

Inside again, she decided to check the upstairs just for the sake of thoroughness. There was a single bathroom, the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet standing open. A nickel and a dime sat on the dirty sink.

She poked through bedrooms. There were several small ones and an empty linen closet. One of the windows in the front bedroom was broken. A good-size rock sat on the floor underneath the the window, surrounded by glass.

Faith shook her head. It was all too surreal. She didn’t understand the power this woman Daryn had over her brother, but somehow she convinced him to lie to Faith about all of this.

Sean wasn’t stupid. Troubled, maybe, but not stupid. He should have known Faith would investigate, that she wouldn’t just open her arms give Daryn McDermott a new life in Department Thirty because he asked her to. Two criteria had to be met to gain serious consideration for protection: that the person had committed a crime serious enough to warrant either prosecution and or retribution from others involved in the crime; and that the person possessed information deemed to be of vital national interest.

Daryn McDermott’s crime seemed to be conspiracy to commit an act of terror. But her “information”-the list of banks the Coalition was allegedly going to strike-hadn’t panned out. Daryn certainly seemed frightened of Franklin Sanborn, but other than Faith’s vague sense of knowing the name, there was no evidence that there was a Franklin Sanborn.

She’d come to the end of the hall, to the last little bedroom. Sean had said he and Daryn and the girl Britt had slept together in this room. There was a large gash in the wood of the door. The doorknob was missing.

Faith ducked her head inside. There was a large pile of blankets in the corner farthest from the window.

“Hmm,” she said, and took a couple of steps into the room.

With the toe of her sneaker, she pulled off the top blanket, SIG at the ready. More blankets, all ripped, the lining coming out of them. One was a quilt done in a beautiful Dutch-doll pattern that looked like someone’s grandmother had made it by hand. But it was filthy and the edges were torn. Three layers down, she found a few bottles of water, some packages of cheese and crackers, some stiff French fries in a yellow Wendy’s carton. A threadbare paperback copy of the Gospel of John, with a stain of something that smelled like excrement, was at the bottom.

“Don’t touch that!”

Faith wheeled around at the voice, snapping up her gun arm. Her gun settled with a chest-high aim at a man in the doorway.

“Hey!” he said. “Don’t point that at me. Leave me alone. I’m not hurting nobody.”

Faith couldn’t really tell his age, but she guessed mid-to late forties. He was mostly bald on top, with more than week’s scruffy growth of grayish beard on his face. His eyes were gray and wary. His body odor was overpowering, even from several feet away. His clothing consisted of ripped, baggy jeans, a filthy once-white dress shirt, a gray cardigan covered in grass stains, and mismatched shoes-one hiking boot, one tennis shoe with toes gaping out.

“I got squatter’s rights,” the man drawled. “Door was unlocked. I can stay here as long as I want. You can’t shoot me. If you shoot me it’s murder.”

Faith lowered the gun. “Who are you?”

“You first.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Neither do I,” the man said. “So there.”

“Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

“I got squatter’s rights. You can’t make me leave. This is my room. It’s my whole house. I moved out to the country, you know, for my health.”

Faith shook her head. “How long have you been here?”

“A while. I don’t know.” He scurried around Faith, giving her a wide berth, heading to his corner. “You didn’t tear up none of my stuff, did you? This is all my stuff.”

“Just looked at it, that’s all. This place looks pretty deserted except for this room.”

“Yeah, well,” the man said. “So what?”

“You just live in the one room, I guess?”

“Well, I go outside to take a dump. The plumbing ain’t on. But sometimes I like to pee out the window.”

Faith put the gun back in her jacket. “You see anyone else around here?”

“Anyone else who?”

“Like some sort of commune, bunch of people all living together like one big family.” Faith realized how ridiculous it sounded even as she said it.

“Nope,” the man said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I been here a long time.”

“No furniture?”

“You see any furniture?”

“No,” Faith said. “Any cars ever come out here?”

A shadow crossed the man’s face. “Couple of times. Kids in those cars with the noisy mufflers. They think they’re hotshots, come out here and throw rocks through the windows, drink beer, smoke dope. Shouldn’t drink or do drugs. That’s bad.”

Faith smiled. “So I hear.”

“I stay out of sight when they come around. But I still got the squatter’s rights. Not you and not the kids in the cars.”

Faith tapped her foot on the wood floor. “You think you’ve been here longer than a week?”

“I been here a long time. Prob’ly a month. It’s nice out here in the country. Quiet. I like quiet.”

“So do I. And no one else has lived here?”

The man sat down on top of the pile of blankets. “Just me. It’s my room and my house.”