The Fix

  They hustled into the revealed room and Brown hit another key on her phone. The door closed and the section of wall slid back into place.

  A light came on in the room and Decker and the others looked around. There was a TV screen on one wall. It obviously had feed from just outside the door, because they could all see the room they had just been in.

  As they watched, the door to the room burst open and the armed men moved inside.

  Decker said, “We need to call the cops.”

  “My security system automatically did that when I activated the door to the safe room.”

  “So that’s what this is?” said Jamison, gazing around. “A safe room?”

  “Steel-wrapped, soundproof, bombproof, bulletproof, with its own air supply, independent power source, and enough food and water for a week. Plus a portable potty.”

  “Is this room your doing?” said Jamison.

  “It’s one of the ‘special features’ I mentioned.”

  “You need a safe room?” asked Decker.

  “Given what’s happened just now, apparently so. And, Decker, you’re bleeding.” She pointed to his face.

  He rubbed at the spot. “Something must have hit me there. It wasn’t a bullet. Maybe some debris stripped off by the gunfire.”

  “I wasn’t that lucky.”

  They turned to see Mars holding his bloody forearm. “Think it’s just a graze, but boy does it burn like a bitch.”

  Brown grabbed a first aid kit from a cubby on the wall and began, with Jamison’s assistance, to treat Mars’s arm.

  As Decker watched on the screen, the men searched the room.

  “Cops are on their way,” said Decker. He could hear the siren sound from the audio feed tied to the TV.

  Frustrated at not finding them, the masked men sprayed the walls with gunfire. Yet none of it could penetrate the shelter they were in. Then the men turned and dashed from the room as the sirens drew ever closer.

  Four minutes later they all emerged from the safe room in time to meet the cops peering cautiously into the room. Brown pulled her creds and did the explaining.

  The cops looked slowly around at the devastation. One of them said, “Somebody really doesn’t like you, lady.”

  “Well, that’s why you have homeowner’s insurance,” quipped Brown.

  After the police finished their search and took down particulars, they left, leaving the four to stare anxiously at each other.

  “That was close,” said Mars. “How did you even know they were coming, Harper?”

  “When I looked outside I saw the red dots on their night-vision goggles lined up with the middle of their foreheads. That’s because they were wearing an older-generation device. Our agencies have phased them out for obvious reasons. Way too big of a target.”

  “Well, thank God for safe rooms,” voiced Jamison.

  “I wonder what the hell they wanted?” said Mars. “Other than to kill us.”

  “They must have been following us,” said Brown. “And cut the power before making their attack.”

  “I wonder,” said Decker thoughtfully.

  “You wonder about what?” asked Brown.

  But Decker never answered her.

  CHAPTER

  69

  IT WAS RAINING once more.

  It was actually bucketing down outside, accompanied by bold streaks of lightning followed by guttural punches of thunder.

  Oblivious to the inclemency, Decker sat in a chair staring at his laptop in the kitchen of their apartment.

  There were two FBI agents in a car outside the building as there were at Harper Brown’s home. Mars had stayed over at her place.

  Bogart and Milligan had come to the scene of the attack. Forensics had found nothing but a mountain of shell casings tossed out by the MP5s and an open power box the attackers had broken into to cut off the lights to Brown’s home. Neighbors had heard the gunfire, and two had seen the men jump into a waiting SUV, but the license plate had been blacked out. With nothing more to do, Decker and Jamison had come back here, leaving Mars and Brown to pick through the pieces of the attack.

  Decker had been sitting here for over an hour now. Jamison had long since gone to bed. He touched the spot on his face where a piece of debris had impacted. Brown had cleaned up the cut for him and bandaged it.

  He refocused on the computer screen. He’d been staring at one page now in particular for about twenty minutes.

  He closed his eyes and thought things through. When he reopened his eyes he checked his watch.

  It was nearly seven in the morning. He’d not been to sleep yet but strangely felt quite energized. He made a phone call and the woman answered. A minute of conversation later, he snagged Jamison’s keys off the hook, waved to the FBI agents in their car, hustled across the parking lot—getting drenched in the process—and climbed into her car.

  He drove to the Hoover Building and, by prearrangement, met the ME, Lynne Wainwright, in the autopsy room.

  She was dressed in scrubs and her eyeglasses hung at the end of a chain across the front of her chest. She yawned and said, “It was a bitch getting in this morning. D.C. drivers and rain do not mix well.”

  “Right.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Had some questions. Wanted to do it face to face”

  “That I figured.”

  She led him over to a desk in the corner and they both sat down. “Fire away,” she said.

  “Let me give you some medical symptoms and maybe you can give me a root cause.”

  “Okay.”

  “Birth defects in children. Toes missing off a foot and a deformed arm.”

  “Okay. There could be lots of reasons for that.”

  “I’m not finished. Add to that asthma in all the kids?”

  “That narrows things down a little, but not enough, Decker. Where are you going with this?”

  “Let me add to that some medications.”

  He had written them down from memory and handed over the slip of paper.

  Wainwright ran her eye down the list.

  She pointed with her finger. “That one’s for a liver condition. This one for kidney disease. The Lipitor is for high cholesterol. Because of the TV commercials, most people know that. Zoloft is for depression, and that one is to increase bone density.”

  Decker nodded. “Anything in Dabney’s postmortem results that struck you?”

  “Not really. We got the blood work and tox screens back. As I told you before, he was on painkillers but he had no other drugs in his system, in case you were wondering whether he was high on something when he did what he did.”

  “None of the prescription bottles were under his name. They were all under his wife’s.”

  “He was actually in decent shape, except for the brain tumor, of course. Absent that, he was probably good for at least another twenty years.”

  “Luck of the draw.”

  “Bad luck,” amended Wainwright.

  “Yeah,” he said absently, staring off.

  She said, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m just wondering why such a healthy-looking family has so many physical and medical issues.”

  “Well, the asthma can be inherited.”

  “One of the daughters said it was her mother that had it, not the father.”

  “Right. Dabney’s lungs, nasal passages, and esophagus were clear. I didn’t detect any irritability of the lining in any of those places that would indicate any sort of asthma or other pulmonary issue.”

  “So that leaves his wife and all her meds.”

  “Look, this country is overly medicated, from kids to seniors. My mother took twenty-four pills a day for the last three years of her life, and she had friends who took even more. And it seems that every other kid today is on Ritalin or something like that. It’s ridiculous but it’s also true.”

  “I get that,” said Decker. “But it’s still bugging me. And I don’t have an abundance of leads on this.”
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  “So you might be grasping at straws?”

  “I might be. But I’d prefer to think that I’m closing in on finding the needle in the haystack.”

  CHAPTER

  70

  DECKER’S KNEES WERE ACHING. Partly from the rain. Partly from old football injuries.

  And partly from the fact that they were crammed up against the dashboard of Jamison’s clown car, with the steering wheel basically resting in his crotch.

  I really have to get my own damn ride.

  The windshield wipers slung the rain off and more immediately replaced it. With each rotation of the wipers, Decker’s mind seemed to swivel as well.

  His thoughts had centered on something that might be valuable.

  Cecilia Randall had spoken to them.

  Shortly thereafter, Cecilia Randall was murdered.

  They had spoken to the Dabneys. Shortly thereafter, they had almost been murdered.

  Was it cause and effect? If so, how?

  He cast his mind back to their discussions with the housekeeper.

  She had thought that Ellie Dabney had come from money. Turns out she hadn’t. So how did that explain the house purchase and Walter Dabney buying a Porsche while still working at the NSA as a low-level grunt? That could be explained by Dabney spying. Ellie Dabney had myriad health issues, miscarriages among them. Three of the daughters were tall and athletic-looking but were hampered by breathing problems. Samantha was missing toes, Amanda part of an arm. The Dabneys were wonderful people, Randall had told them, none better in her mind.

  And then someone had put a bullet in her head.

  Then he and Brown had talked to the Dabneys about the doll.

  They had found the other dolls with the same hidden compartments.

  They had left there, gone to dinner, come back to Brown’s, and very nearly been massacred by a team of killers with submachine guns.

  Again, cause and effect? And in both instances the cause perhaps had been conversations at the Dabney house.

  Is the place bugged?

  Maybe by whoever had ambushed Decker at Berkshire’s old house in the woods? And was the same force behind the hit team last night?

  And then there were the dolls. How exactly did they come into play? As Ellie had said in defense of her husband, Walter Dabney had not walked around with dolls. He presumably hadn’t carried any to his office, stuffed them with secrets, and then handed them off to a third party, only to retrieve them so they could be returned to his daughters. That hardly made sense. A man walking around with dolls would have been noticed. You couldn’t exactly walk into the NSA carrying a doll.

  But maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe that exchange was on the other end.

  Decker suddenly whipped the wheel around and pointed his car in a new direction.

  He parked across the street from Cecilia Randall’s home. The police had gone, but the door to her place was partially open. He got out of the car, hustled across the street as the rain pelted him, and knocked on the door.

  No one answered. He took out his gun, edged the door open, and peered inside.

  “FBI. Anybody here?”

  Again, there was no answer. But he heard the creak of floorboards and looked up.

  Someone was upstairs.

  He quietly made his way up the stairs and took a quick look around. There were only two rooms up here. And only one had a light on.

  He scuttled over to that door and was about to put his hand on the knob when it turned.

  He stepped back, his gun aimed at the door.

  The woman screamed when she saw him and dropped the box she was holding. “Oh my God, what do you want!” she yelled. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Decker dug into his pocket and pulled out his credentials. “I’m with the FBI. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The woman staggered sideways and gripped the doorjamb. “Oh, sweet Jesus, you nearly scared me to death.”

  Decker put his gun away and studied her.

  She was black, thin, and around forty, with short graying hair.

  “Who are you?” asked Decker.

  “I’m Rhonda Kaine.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “This is my mother’s house.”

  “Cecilia Randall was your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She looked down at the box. “I just came by to pick up some things. Don’t know what I’m going to do with this place. Sell it, I guess.”

  “Do you live in the area?”

  “Baltimore, so not that far.” She gazed up at him with a stern expression. “You people find out who did this?”

  “Not yet. But since you’re here, do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  “The police have already talked to me.”

  “My questions might be different.”

  “Look, as far as I know, Momma had no enemies. Nobody who’d want to hurt her. She worked hard, went to church, she raised me, and she was a good person. I think somebody came here to rob her. I’ve been begging her to get out of this neighborhood. This is the house where I grew up. The neighborhood was okay back then, but not now. There’re dudes around here who’ll kill you for a quarter.”

  “I don’t disagree, but I don’t think that’s what happened to her.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just said your mother worked hard for a living. She worked for the Dabneys, correct?”

  “That’s right. For well over thirty years.”

  “So you must have known them too.”

  “I did. When I was little I would go over there with her.”

  “So you knew the daughters?”

  “I’d play with them. I was a little older. Sometimes, I’d watch Jules or Samantha. When Natalie was a baby I’d change her diaper