Джеймс Паттерсон - The Summer House

Room to the left, room to the right.

The door is open to the right-side room. The other door is closed.

He looks back at his squad, gestures to the nearest two behind him, points to the left door, and they nod in acknowledgment.

He steps into the room on the right.

Empty.

Trashy, of course, but there’s no one he can see.

The window is wide open.

He’s focused on clearing this room, but he can’t help but hear the door to the other room open, a woman scream, and a man call out, “Hey, hey, hey—” followed by the friendly thump of a pistol firing through a sound suppressor.

Then a sentence is uttered, and two more thump s wrap up the job.

He moves through the room, dodging piles of clothes and trash. An overhead light from the top of the stairs gives him good illumination.

The closet is empty.

Fine.

He goes to the window, leans over, peers out.

Lillian is biting her fist, trying hard not to breathe, not to sneeze, not to do a damn thing to get noticed. She’s under one of the two unmade beds in this room, trembling, part of her ashamed that she’s wet herself from fear.

There are slow and measured paces of someone walking through the room, and then going over to the open window.

She shuts her eyes, her mother’s voice whispering to her from more than twenty-five years ago: There’s no such thing as the bogeyman, she would say. Just close your eyes and pray to Jesus, and everything will be all right.

Oh, Mamma, oh, Jesus, please, please, please help me.

He leans out the window, lowering his night-vision goggles to take in the view. More trees, more scrub, and a collapsed small wooden building that looks like it was once an outhouse.

Possible. This place is so old it would fit right in.

He looks closer to the side of the two-story summer house.

He’s up about six or so meters. Hell of a drop.

And what’s below here? Two rusty fifty-five-gallon oil drums, a roll of chicken-coop wire, and a pile of wooden shingles and scrap lumber.

All resting undisturbed.

He flips up the night-vision goggles, ducks back into the room, sees his squad mates have joined him. He holds a finger to his lips.

Moves across the room.

Lillian is still praying, still trembling, still biting into her fist when a strong hand slides under the bed and grabs her ankle, dragging her out.

She shrieks and rolls over and puts her hands up and says, “Please, please, please, no, no, no!”

Someone grabs her shoulders, holds her down. Another man—the one who just shot Gordy—drops to one knee and looks down at her. Lillian takes a deep breath, hoping it will calm her.

It doesn’t.

The man has military-type viewing equipment on his forehead, he’s wearing military fatigues with some sort of harness and belts, and over one pocket where there should be a name tag is a strip of Velcro, meaning the name tag has been stripped off so he won’t be identified. The ski mask from before is pulled up, revealing a friendly and relaxed face.

“Please,” she whispers.

“Shhh,” he replies. “Just a few questions. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

Lillian just nods. Answer him, she thinks. Don ’t ask questions. Just answer.

He says, “There was a man in the bedroom on the other side, with a woman and a child. Downstairs there was a woman and two other men. Is there anybody else here?”

“No,” she says, her whole body shaking, the hands of the man holding her shoulders down firm and strong.

“Are you the owner of the Volvo?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come down here alone?”

“Yes.”

“Is anyone expecting you to return in the next few minutes?”

She doesn’t process the question until it’s too late, for she answers truthfully, automatically, and hopefully and says, “No.”

The man stays quiet for a few long seconds and then lifts his head to nod to the man behind her. When he removes a hand from her shoulder and she feels the cold metal of a pistol barrel pressing against the side of her head, Lillian knows her mamma has always been wrong, that the bogeyman does exist.

Chapter 3

AFTER MY “WORKOUT” for the day, I’m resting on my bed at my condo rental just outside the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, reading Glory Road, the second book in Bruce Catton’s trilogy about the Union’s Army of the Potomac. I’m enjoying the book and hating Quantico, because it’s still not home, and it’s definitely not New York City.

My ringing iPhone quickly pulls me away from the year 1862, and my hand knocks the damn thing from the nightstand to the floor. Bending over to pick it up, I gasp as my permanently damaged left leg screams at me to stop moving.

And I quickly think of those poor Civil War soldiers, both blue and gray, how a shot in the leg with a bone-shattering Minié ball meant near-certain amputation. Some days I’m envious of them, suffering short-term grievous hurt and then living on without a damaged leg constantly throbbing with burning-hot pain. I declined a chance to get my left limb amputated, and some days I wonder if I made the right decision.

I grab the phone off the floor, then slide my fingers across the screen to answer.

“Cook,” I say, and a very familiar voice replies, “This is Phillips. What are you doing right now?”

“Besides talking to you, sir, I’m staring at my left leg and telling it to behave.”

Which is true. My left leg is propped up on a pillow. I’m wearing dark-blue athletic shorts and a blue-and-white NYPD T-shirt. My right leg is slightly tanned, slightly hairy, and highly muscular. My left leg is a shriveled mess of scars, burn tissue, and puckered craters of flesh where metal tore through it last year when I was deployed in Afghanistan.

But my left foot looks okay. Thank goodness for heavy-duty Army boots, which protected my foot during the long minutes when my leg was trapped and burning.

Colonel Ross Phillips, who’s probably a mile away from me in his office this bright Saturday afternoon, quickly gets to it. “We got a red ball case—a real screamer—down in Georgia.”

“Hold on, sir,” I say, and from my cluttered nightstand I pull free a small notepad and a pen from the Marine Federal Credit Union. I snap the pen into place and say, “Go ahead.”

He coughs, clears his throat, and says, “Sullivan, Georgia. About fifty miles from Hunter Army Airfield, near Savannah. We have four Army personnel in civilian custody, arrested by the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department. Their duty station is Hunter.”

“Four?” I ask.

“Four,” he says.

“Names and unit?”

“I’ve got someone tracking that down.”

“What are the charges?”

“Multiple homicides.”

My pen stops writing. I scribble and scribble and no ink appears.

“How many?” I ask.

“Another thing we’re tracking down,” he says. “We should know in a few more minutes. What we do know is that it was a house holding a number of civilians and that they were all shot. Some historical place called The Summer House. How original, eh? Our four guys were arrested by the county sheriff about forty-eight hours later, in a nearby roadhouse.”

“Who’s CID head at Hunter?”

“Colonel Brenda Tringali, Third MP Group,” he says. “But this case is no stolen Humvee from a motor pool. Mass killing of civilians by four Army personnel is one for you and your group. So far it hasn’t hit the news media, but it will soon enough.”

He coughs again. And again.

“Colonel…are you all right?”

“Shut up,” he says. “I expect you and your crew there by tonight. The sheriff for that county is Emma Williams. Get to her, use your folks to find out what happened, where it happened, and why. Do your job. And get it done. This brewing shit storm is going to rile up a lot of people and groups. Lucky for the Army you and your crew are going to be out there, taking the heat and whatever crap gets flung around.”