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“You go by yourself,” Lucas said. “We’ll wait until he can’t see you, and then we’ll follow you.”
She looked from Lucas to Virgil, nodded, and walked out of the room, carrying the vacuum, stopped to retract the power cord, then disappeared into the opposite side of the house.
Lucas said, “His tools. We’re looking for a hammer.”
“And maybe a shovel,” Virgil said.
—
They walked pastHeath, still on his phone, and the circle of agents, into the other side of the house, after the housekeeper; Howahkan broke off to follow them. The woman was stuffing the vacuum into a closet in the kitchen, and she gave them a come-along hand signal and they followed her down a hallway and through a door into the garage.
Howahkan: “What are we looking for?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said. “At least, I think it will be nothing.” He turned to the woman and said, “We need to find Mr. Heath’s hammers.”
She said, “There are two...” and led them to an old-fashioned wooden work bench at the back of the garage. There, she pulled open a drawer that showed a neat arrangement of hand tools—screwdrivers, pliers, a socket wrench set, three crescent wrenches, aset of Allen wrenches, and one hammer, a short-handled sledge of the kind that might be used to drive stakes into the ground.
The woman made a puzzled face and said, “Should be two. The other one, right here.”
She touched a space inside the drawer that might once have held a hammer.
Howahkan: “Ah. Nothing it is.”
Virgil looked at the woman. “Could it be somewhere else?”
She shook her head. “Mr. Heath, he doesn’t use tools. I saw it here last week when I came to get a screwdriver.”
Lucas: “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Howahkan said, “I’ll get somebody to put her on the record.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. He bent over the small woman with another smile: “Where does Mr. Heath keep his shovels?”
“Over here.” She pointed to the side of the garage. They walked around the nose of Heath’s Mercedes, to where three shovels and a spading fork, all old, were racked between two-by-four studs in the wall. “All here,” she said.
Virgil and Howahkan knelt by the shovels. Two had bowl-shaped blades, one long-handled, the other short-handled with a grip. The blades on both were dry and lightly crusted with garage dust and dirt. The third, a spade with a short handle and square blade, was clean.
“No dust,” Howahkan said. “It’s been washed, and not long ago.”
The three men looked at the woman, who said, “Not me. I didn’t shovel since last spring, in the flower garden. Also raked.”
Howahkan took out his iPhone, turned on the flashlight. The blade of the spade was welded to a triangular steel socket that held the end of the handle. Tipping the light from one side to the other,he said, “Okay. He got the blade clean, but there’s dirt along the seam of the weld. It doesn’t look entirely dry. I gotta get one of the technicians in here to bundle this up.”
To Virgil, he said, “That’s a nice catch. With a little more education and good hard training, you could be an FBI intern, if only you were better-looking.”
“He’d need different clothes,” Lucas said.
“That’s true.”
The woman looked at them and asked, “What?”
—
Back inside thehouse, Virgil told Heath, “You left some dirt on the spade. That could hang you. Federal offense, you could get the needle.”
As the words came out of his mouth, Heath’s attorney, Jon Radcliffe, showed up, pointed a finger at Virgil and said, “Stop talking to my client.”
