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“Or we sneak,” Cooper said. She tapped the computer screen, where a set of old abandoned railroad tracks ran behind the houses on Field Avenue, with a heavy screen of trees between the tracks and the houses. “That’s the second possibility. We both go in along the tracks, in the trees. We cut across Hess’s back lawn and crack the back door.”
“How do we do that?” Melton asked.
Cooper frowned. “I don’t know... tools, I guess. A claw hammer or a screwdriver. I’ve got those. I might even have a crowbar. We’ll look at YouTube.”
“What about masks?”
“Same thing the killer used here,” Cooper said. “Covid masks,stocking caps to cover our hair, maybe reading glasses from the drugstore. Dark clothes.”
“We need to go past there a few times, both in daylight and at night,” Melton said. “What if there are street people back there?”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Cooper said. She brushed hair out of her eyes. “If there are two of us, and we have a hammer and a screwdriver...”
“Maybe the gun? With the silencer?” Melton suggested.
“Probably not. We wouldn’t want to shoot a neighbor who spotted us, somebody innocent. And it’s loud. I shot it both with the silencer and without it, and the silencer is quieter, but it’s very loud. Still sounds like a gunshot.”
Melton had been leaning over toward the computer. Now she stood up, shook out her back. “We’re getting close to doing this. It’s getting scary.”
“Don’t back out, please,” Cooper said.
“I won’t—but I’ll be scared. Breaking into somebody’s house? That’s sort of worse than shooting him. I can see us doing that. Knock on the door, he answers, we get inside, saying we want to talk, and bang! He’s dead. Walk back out, drive away. Three minutes. If we break in to search the place, we have to stay a while. If we get caught... that’s the end of the whole thing. And it’s the end of our jobs. We’ll be ruined.”
Cooper leaned back in her chair. “I’ve been meaning to say something about this, but I was afraid you’d be offended. So if I could say something...”
“Go ahead.”
“All my assets... I’ve got something like two hundred milliondollars, total. A hundred and fifty million liquid. If we got caught breaking in, we could tell everybody we only did it because we know he killed my family. We might lose our jobs, but we wouldn’t go to prison. If that happened... I can give away something more than ten million with no immediate tax consequences for either of us. I will do that. I would give you ten million dollars. You wouldn’t need your job.”
“I’m not doing this for your money,” Melton said.
“I know that. Of course, you aren’t,” Cooper answered. “But you shouldn’t be financially ruined because you’re doing this, and you won’t be.”
“If we kill him...”
“That’s entirely different,” Cooper said. “If we get caught doing that,really caught, the money won’t keep us out of prison.”
Melton shrugged. “We’re doing it, so we should try not to get caught. And hey, Maggie: about the money. Thank you.”
Cooper: “When do we do it?”
Melton scratched her neck, thinking, then said, “Quick. Right away. Davenport and Flowers are too smart. They know that you have somebody in mind. I’ll scout the train tracks early tomorrow before I go to work. And you should do that before you go to the university. And maybe after you get back. Look to see if there are street people back there. If there’s anyone around. We need to know who could see us. Where we can park the car. We need Fatima to take the baby. But let’s do it. Get it underway before we chicken out.”
“This calls for YouTube again,” Cooper said. “How to break into a house. Bet there are a dozen tutorials.”
19
Virgil’s eyelids seemed to be stuck shut with some kind of sleep glue, nasty to think about, but he pried them open and looked around the hotel room. There was one bright line of sunlight slicing between the blackout curtains, and directly across where his eyes had been. He rolled over, picked up his phone: seven-fifteen. He punched the Favorites tab and called Frankie.
“Everybody’s just fine, except they desperately miss you—the kids, the dog, the horses,” Frankie said. “I personally don’t care; I’ve been chatting with Olaf.”
Olaf was the rural, but louche, postal carrier; he was good-looking, and knew it, and may have delivered more than mail along his rural route, but Virgil wasn’t worried. Frankie had dealt with louche, and louche had come in second.
“I’m yawning,” he said. “Listen, I’m hoping to get out of here thisafternoon, depending on what happens. Lucas can do all the running around. If the FBI bites on this whole search-warrant thing, I might have to stick around for a while, but I’ll try to be home before dark.”
“You should take everybody out to eat,” Frankie said.
“Red Lobster?”
