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“Scott is a mystery,” Rae said. “We’re wondering if he might have walked out into the mountains and killed himself. Or let himself die. If he did, he might have left a note, or something. Maybe on a computer? Or a thumb drive? We don’t know.”
The interior smelled like carpet dust, and little else.
They began with a slow walk-through, looking for anything obvious. The house had three small bedrooms with a single bath, which didn’t appear to have been updated since the house was built. One of the bedrooms had been converted to an office, with a desk and a side table to hold a Canon printer. The printer was still there, as was a printer cable leading back to the desk, where it had apparently been plugged into a laptop, now missing.
The walk-through didn’t turn up anything. A short stairway in the kitchen led down to the tuck-under garage. Miranda dropped down the stairs, returned a minute later: “Empty garage, an emptyworkbench with a couple tools on a pegboard, plus two wall-mounted batteries for the solar. That’s about it.”
Lucas started working through the kitchen, while Rae and Packer did the bedrooms.
Scott’s bedroom had sweatshirts and a sweater, two pairs of heavy jeans and a pair of high-topped boots in the single closet, cold-weather clothing apparently not needed wherever Scott was going. A short shaky chest of drawers was empty, and when they pulled them out, they found nothing hidden under the drawers.
Lucas found pots and a cookie sheet, along with cheap plastic dishes, glasses, and stainless steel silverware, half of it still in a Target sack, in the kitchen cupboards, but nothing hidden. The under-sink wastebasket was empty, as was the refrigerator, including the freezer compartment.
The kitchen cabinets were hung on the walls, their tops a foot below the ceiling. He stood on the kitchen counter to look at the tops of the cabinets, and on one of them, found a twentieth-century pellet pistol grimy with dust. Nothing else of note.
The office had been cleared out, nothing there. The third bedroom apparently hadn’t been used for anything and had no furniture. The living room had an inexpensive collection of big-box-store furniture, a couch, two easy chairs, a couple of rickety end tables, a smallish television.
As they were pulling the cushions off the couches, Miranda got a call and had to go. “Got a fire. Set the locks and pull the doors shut when you leave,” he called, as he hurried out the front door.
They were done in an hour and a half. Lucas went down to the garage and looked it over—no mountain bike—and he, Rae, and Parkerwalked around the yard, which turned out to be nothing more than a yard. The three of them walked back around the house together, through the open garage door, and started up the stairs. Packer was trailing again, and as Lucas got to the top of the stairs, Packer called, “Why does a work bench have casters on it?”
Rae: “What?”
Packer, at the bottom of the stairs, said, “I’d think you’d want a work bench to be immobile.”
Lucas and Rae dropped back down the stairs. The work bench had begun life as a four-drawer chest of drawers, probably made in the first half of the twentieth century. It appeared to be sturdy, but not expensive, and had two or three coats of paint on the drawers and the sides. Two four-by-eight sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood, screwed together and painted brown, made a practical top.
The drawers were empty, but why the wheels?
Lucas gave the chest a shove, and it moved: a little stiff, but not too. He maneuvered it away from the pegboard on the wall behind it, where a half-dozen tools hung from brackets. “The tools…nobody ever used them,” Rae said, looking at a crescent wrench.
The pegboard went right to the floor behind the bench, which was odd.
Lucas grabbed one edge of the pegboard and pulled; it was solid. When he pulled the other edge, it opened like a door, on hinges hidden on the opposite side. Behind the pegboard was a regular door, which looked as though it had been there since the house was built, with both a tuck-under garageanda basement.
Lucas tried the doorknob. It turned, and Packer said, “Excuse me,” and shouldered past Lucas. He pushed the door open, and they peeredinside, catching reflections off glass. Packer stepped forward, fumbled for a light switch, found one, turned it on, then snapped, “Back up! Get out of here!”
He backed out of the room as Lucas and Rae hurried outside. Packer said, “It’s a lab. I need my gear. We’ll need photos, and we’ll need to seal it off best we can.”
Lucas muttered, “Holy shit,” and Rae said, “Maybe we ought to stand further back.”
“In the street,” Packer ordered. “I was inside, so stay away from me. Rae, get your stuff out of the truck, in case I need a vehicle. Leave the keys on the front seat.”
When Rae had her gear bag out of the SUV, Packer pulled his own bags out, unzipped the biggest one to reveal a group of plastic packages, which he began opening. He pulled on a white Tyvek-like suit that covered his entire body, including his feet.
A backpack held a compact air tank, and another bag a breathing apparatus, and yet another an iPhone. He put it all together, then said, “I’m going to the doorway, and I’ll make some photos. I’ll send them back to the fort. I won’t be going deep inside, and I should be okay, even if there’s some Marburg around. But we can’t take a chance. Stay away.”
When he had the respirator on, he went back to the garage and as Lucas and Rae watched, went through the hidden door and began making photos.
Rae: “Boy’s got some balls.”
Lucas: “Yes, he does. I didn’t see that.”
When he was done with the photography, Packer sent the photos to Fort Detrick and left the phone inside the basement. Then he stepped backwards out of the lab, into the garage, pulled the lab doorclosed, took some sticky tape from another of his plastic bags, and sealed the door.
Outside again, he shouted at Lucas and Rae, “That blue bag…it’s got a what looks like a fire extinguisher in it. There’s a long wand beside it that you have to screw in. Go get that and screw in the wand.”
Lucas did that, with Rae watching. When the two pieces were screwed together, Packer called, “You need to stand back twenty feet or so, pull the trigger on the tank, and hose me down.”
