Stuart Woods - Iron Orchid

“Okay. Do we have a chopper yet?”

“Not our own; we have a service that operates out of the East Side Heliport. I’ll have someone call and book one.”

HOLLY LOOKED OUT the window of the helicopter and saw Manassas Airport as they approached. It was a quiet little field nestled in the Virginia countryside. “Teddy had a workshop here?” she asked Kerry.

“Yeah. He also kept an RV and a souped-up Mercedes sedan there, too. He crashed the Mercedes, running from the scene after he killed the speaker of the house and abandoned the car in a parking lot nearby. We don’t know what happened to the RV, and we didn’t know he had a second hangar. Apparently, he kept his airplane there. I should have ordered a search of all the hangars on the field.”

The chopper settled onto a taxiway on the side of the field opposite Dulles Aviation, the FBO that serviced local and visiting aircraft. Two rows of hangars took up most of the space there. A man in a warm coat met them and introduced himself as the airport manager.

“Your other people are waiting in a big van over by the hangar,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you over there.”

At the hangar, Kerry met the head of the tech team. “Are we worried about booby traps?” the man asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kerry said. “The manager has already been in there today, and he’s still with us. You take your people in first and establish a perimeter around whatever evidence is there, so we can get out of this cold.”

The man nodded and signaled for his three assistants to follow him. He opened the door of the hangar and looked around, then turned back to Kerry. “You can come in,” he said; “everything is down at the other end.”

Holly followed Kerry into the hangar, which was brightly lit. She stood just inside the door and waited for the head of the tech team to do a quick survey of the items in the hangar. He came back after a few minutes.

“Okay, we’ve got tire tracks of an airplane, Michelin tires, tricycle gear. That’s consistent with the Cessna 182 RG Fay was flying, until he blew it up. We’ve also got a set of Goodyear Wrangler tracks. That’s a truck tire often used on SUVs and RVs, and the width of the vehicle is consistent with an RV or a rental truck. When we have precise measurements, we should know which. There are also a lot of miscellaneous tools and scraps of materials.”

“Check everything for prints,” Kerry said. “To this day, we don’t have Fay’s prints, not even from his house in Maine.”

“How does somebody not leave prints in his own house?” Holly asked.

“We think he cleaned up the place before he left the last time. He had only been back for a few minutes when we went in. His house in the Virginia suburbs was also clean of prints, the first time I’d ever seen a house with no prints at all.”

“Yeah, I was the tech team leader on that one,” the tech guy said, “and I’d never seen that either. This guy is really something. By the way, I won’t put this in writing, but it’s my guess that the truck or RV was driven out of here some time after the airplane left.”

“Any idea how recently?”

“Days, is my guess. Why don’t you folks get a cup of coffee or something and come back in, say, two hours?”

Kerry nodded and led them out of the building. The airport manager drove them to the terminal, and they got sandwiches from the machines in the pilots’ lounge.

TWO HOURS LATER, they were back in the hangar. “Tell me about it,” Kerry said.

The tech team leader laughed. “Teddy’s done it again: not a print anywhere, and believe me, we’ve looked everywhere. The guy is a neat freak, paranoid to a turn.”

“Is there anything at all interesting here?” Kerry asked.

“We’ve determined that the vehicle was an RV, consistent in size with one manufactured by Winnebago. If you find it, we can match it to the tracks in here. One other thing, we found this.” He held up a small plastic bag with an object inside.

“Looks like a computer chip,” Kerry said.

“It is; automotive. It’s from the central computer of an SUV, a stock-standard chip, no alterations. Can you associate that with anything?”

Kerry thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “The Supreme Court justice killed in the automobile accident.”

“Right. The chip we recovered from that vehicle had been altered to reverse the commands sent from the onboard computer to operate the automatic stability control. If the car went into a skid, for instance, the ASC would cause one or more wheels to brake in order to correct the skid. The replacement chip did the opposite, causing it to skid even more. Fucking ingenious.”

“Well, anyway,” Kerry said, “it lets us tie Teddy to the death of Mr. Justice What’s-his-name.”

“It would, if we had found any material evidence that Teddy had ever been in this hangar,” the tech guy said. “Without prints or other evidence, we can’t prove he was here.”

“Better circumstantial evidence than no evidence at all,” Kerry said.

“if you say so,” the tech guy replied. “But this Teddy is really something, you know?”

“I know,” Kerry replied.

Holly knew, too.

HOLLY GOT BACK shortly before dark and took Daisy for a run, cutting over to Park Avenue. She liked the broad boulevard, with its garden down the center and its elegant apartment buildings. She wondered what a small apartment on Park cost, and if there were any small apartments. She could afford to buy something, if it wasn’t too outrageous, and she was getting tired of living in what amounted to a dormitory. There was almost no privacy, unless she locked her door, and if she did that, she felt claustrophobic in her small room.

Back at the Barn, she picked up a New York Times at the front desk and took it upstairs with her. After feeding Daisy, she took a shower and stretched out on her bed with the paper. She came to the classifieds and, on a whim, turned to the real estate section. Almost immediately, an ad caught her eye:

Park Ave. 60’s est. sale , lg 1 BR w/wbf, sep. dr. fur. avbl. 650K.

She called the number, got a woman immediately and made an appointment for the following morning.

Holly arrived at the building, which turned out to be a large, limestone-fronted edifice with a uniformed doorman who found a cookie for Daisy. He called the apartment and told Holly to take the elevator to the twelfth floor, apartment A. She was met by a well-dressed woman in her forties, whom she assumed was the real estate agent.

“I’m Clarissa Bonner,” she said, offering a hand. “Oh, what a handsome dog!” She stroked Daisy’s head. “I grew up with a Doberman, and they’re just lovely. Come and see the apartment.”

Holly followed her around the rooms, which were surprisingly large, with high ceilings. The place was furnished in a rudimentary way, but didn’t look lived-in. When they had seen the whole place and talked about the building, Mrs. Bonner offered her coffee, and they sat down in the living room in front of the wbf, which was blazing cheerfully away.

“Let me tell you what’s happened,” Mrs. Bonner said. “My mother had an eighteen-room apartment covering this whole floor, and when she died last year, we divided it, selling the larger one and keeping this one as a pied-a-terre, just a place to sleep when we drive in from Connecticut for the theater. We kept some of her furniture, too. Then my husband was transferred to San Francisco, so we put it on the market and found a buyer almost immediately. Unfortunately, when she went through the application process, the co-op board turned her down. Her mother, a wealthy woman, was going to cosign the lease with her, but she declined to show the board her tax returns, so that was it. This happened forty-eight hours ago, and we have to be in San Francisco next week. We contacted the two other people who had made offers, but they had both bought other properties, so it’s back on the market, and you’re the first to see it.”