Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

Franks whispered, "What about the dog?"

"There was one, he'd be barking by now," Corde said.

Kresge said, "We knock, or not?"

Corde thought of the Polaroid of the girl possibly his daughter. He said, "No."

Kresge grunted his agreement like a veteran SWAT team cop and pulled open the screen door for Franks to hold.

"Pit bulls don't bark," Franks said. "I saw that on Current Affair or something." He flicked the trigger guard of his rifle with a nervous finger.

Kresge stepped back but Corde touched him by the arm and shook his head then stepped into his place. "I've got fifteen years' experience on you. Just stay close behind."

"But I got sixty pounds' weight on you, Detective," Kresge said and lowered his shoulder and charged into the door. It blew inward, the jamb shattering under his momentum. He slipped on the carpet and went down on his hip as Corde then Franks leapt into the living room after him.

A half dozen mangy pieces of sour overstuffed furniture and a hundred books stared silently back at them.

Franks kept his M-16 up, swiveling from door to door nervously with his head cocked, listening for malevolent growling.

The sunlight was fading fast and throughout the house the colors of rugs and paintings and wallpaper were vanishing. The men walked like soldiers through this monotone. Corde listened for Gilchrist and heard only old boards moaning beneath their feet, the tapping and surges of tiny household motors and valves.

Franks stayed downstairs while Corde and Kresge climbed up to where they had seen the light. They paused at the landing then continued to the second floor. Corde was suddenly aware of the smells: lemon furniture polish, musty cloth, after-shave or perfume.

They swung open the door to the master bedroom. It was empty. Corde smelled the dry after-shave stronger here and he wondered if it was Gilchrist's. It seemed similar to a cologne that he himself had worn, something Sarah had bought him for his birthday. This thought deeply upset him. The sun was low at the horizon, shining into his face. Maybe that was the light he'd seen, its reflection in the window. The sun dipped below the trees, and the light grew murkier. Corde reached toward the bedside lamp to pull the switch.

"Damn!"

The bulb was hot.

He told this to Kresge. The two men looked at each other, put their backs together, squinting through the gloom at the half dozen menacing near-human shapes they knew were a coat rack, an armoire, a shadow, a thick pink drape, yet at which each man drew an equivocal target with his pistol.

Kresge reached for the light switch. He laughed nervously. "Wall's hot too. I think it was the sun. It was falling on the lamp and the wall here."

Corde didn't respond. He opened his mouth wide and began to take slow breaths. He listened. No footsteps, no motion, no creaks. Walking around the edge of the room where the noise from sprung floorboards would be less, Corde looked in both closets. They were empty. He stepped into the hall and examined the other bedrooms and their closets, filled with musty coats and jackets, faded floral blouses, blankets stinking of camphor.

Kresge said, "The attic?"

Hell. Going up through a trapdoor into an attic that was surely packed with furniture and boxes – perfect cover for a gunman…

But they were spared that agony. Corde found the trapdoor in the ceiling of the hall. It was padlocked from the bottom.

He exhaled in relief.

On the ground floor again, they moved through the dining room and living room.

Corde thought: Hell's bells the basement, just like the attic only ifs not going to be padlocked at all and that's where Gilchrist is going to be. Has to be. No question.

"How about the basement?"

"Isn't one," Franks said.

Thanks, Lord, may be time to reconsider this church business, yessir …

Kresge said, "I'm pretty surely tense in here." He said it as if he were surprised and Corde and Franks laughed. In the kitchen Corde saw colorful labels that said Heinz and Goya and Campbell's, dented aluminum pans, bottles and chipped canisters, refrigerator magnets of barnyard animals, which had turned dark with years of cooking grime.

Corde said to Kresge, "Let's keep at it." He held his pistol with cramping pressure, his finger caressing the ribbed trigger inside the guard where he had told Kresge it should not be. "I saw something I want to check."

Franks said, "There's a room in the back, I listened at it and didn't hear anything. But it's locked from the inside." He poked a stained yellow drape with the slotted muzzle of his soldier gun.

"Just a second we'll go with you," Corde called from the living room. He was looking at a pile of ash in the fireplace. He crouched down and sifted through the gray dust. Kresge stood guard over him. In the midst of a pyramid of ash Corde found the scorched cover of a photo album. His hands shook with the excitement of being close to a picture of Gilchrist. But there were none. Almost everything was burnt and the ash dissolved.

But one remained. A Polaroid had fallen through the log rack. Though it was badly blistered from the heat it hadn't burnt completely. The square showed a street in a city, a line of faded row houses, with a few trees in front. Breaking through the Maginot Line of the tops of the residences was a shiny office building five or six stories high.

On the back was written: Leon, come visit sometime. Love

Corde wrapped the photo in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket then stood, the familiar pop of his knee resounding through the dark room.

The pop was loud. But not loud enough to cover the crack of Assistant Sheriff Franks breaking through the doorway of the locked room and the thunderclap of the shotgun blast that took off much of his shoulder.

Corde spun fast, dropping into a crouch. Kresge grabbed the convulsing deputy by his leg and dragged him toward the kitchen, along a wall now covered by a constellation of slick blood.

"Okay, okay, okay!" Corde shouted to no one and he rolled forward into the doorway, prone position.

His elbow landed on a bit of sharp bone from the deputy's shoulder. Corde ignored the pain as he fired five staccato shots at the figure inside. Three missed and slammed into the armchair to which was taped the double-barrel Remington wired to the doorknob. Two of Corde's slugs though were aimed perfectly and found their target.

Which wasn't however Professor Leon David Gilchrist but a four-foot-high ceramic owl, which in the dim light resembled not a bird but a laughing man and which under the impact of the unjacketed rounds exploded into a thousand shards of brown and gold porcelain.

Bill Corde sat in the Auden University Library.

This was a musty Victorian building, latticed with oak dense as metal and wrought-iron railings that coiled through the balconies and stacks like ivy boughs. The structure might have been imported brick by brick from sooty London and reassembled on this grassy quad within sight of thousands of acres of stalky fields growing a green pelt of corn shoots.

This was the library of a university that Bill Corde would not be admitted to and whose tuition he could not have afforded if he had been.

He had just gotten off the phone with Sheriff Willars in Lewisboro and learned that Dudley Franks was in critical but stable condition. Whatever that meant. Willars had said, "I'm not a happy camper, Bill, no sir," and Corde knew there'd be some hefty reparation payments between the two counties.

Gloom had settled on the New Lebanon Sheriff's Department after the shooting. The manhunt that seemed so like a game several days ago had now turned rooty and mean. Gilchrist was both far crazier and far more savage than any of them had guessed and though those two adjectives were rarely if ever found in the vocabulary of modern law enforcement, Corde now felt the full pressure of their meaning.