I’m not particularly afraid of the dark, or spiders, or rats, or slimy mold, or… But if you put them all together, maybe I’m just a little scared.
11:00 a.m.
As soon as the bank opened, Cinnamon drove me down and I got a safe deposit box. I deposited all the jewelry, then had Cinnamon drive me to the office. I don’t like entering the office in disguise, but with Cinnamon guarding the front door, I closed and locked mine and opened the vault.
I still remember the first time Dag opened the vault in my presence. I knew we had servers someplace, but I had always thought they were off-site. Dag punched numbers in on his television remote control and a wall beside his desk slid open revealing a room bigger than my reception area/office. It’s temperature controlled with a dozen high-power servers, hard drives, laptops, and a safe. I know it sounds like overkill to have a safe inside a vault, but when you are keeping a million dollars on-site, you get thankful for a little extra protection. No, it’s not cash. It was a thank you and retainer from Simon after I hauled Angel and him out of Croatia. One hundred $10,000 cash cards. Of course, there was other important stuff in here. A letter that I promised to keep for a woman in Finland as surety for her good behavior. Dag’s laptop. The account information on my Swiss bank accounts. A handgun. And now, the key to a bank safe deposit box that had a potentially priceless piece of jewelry in it.
It would have been nice if Georgia had put the jewelry in a safe deposit box and only put the key in ice cubes, but her method worked, I guess.
One last thing I did before I left was set up a search routine on the backups of Georgia’s hard drives. I didn’t really want to watch every one of her sex tapes. But I did want to know where she posted them and when and how much she was paid. I figured if I could at least automate some indexing on the six drives that would help.
Then we went back to the house and I faced up to my squeamishness.
4:00 p.m.
There were no bodies or body parts. For that I am eternally grateful. But the experience was unpleasant all the same. We opened the cellar doors and armed with flashlights and dressed in sweatshirts and latex gloves, I led the way down into the low-ceilinged basement. I’m not sure you can actually call this a basement. It’s more like a deep crawlspace that only extends under the kitchen. By the looks of it, at sometime in the distant past it was used as a fruit cellar for canned goods. The looks were a series of canning jars, covered with layers of dirt, but full of unidentifiable foodstuffs. They all had paper labels on them and each label was pretty much unreadable. The one thing I managed to read when I wiped one off was “1958.” This was seriously old stuff. Since no one else had ever seen fit to clean the place out, I was certainly not going to volunteer.
Cinnamon screamed.
I spun around, ready to defend us against… I didn’t know what. She was cowering at the foot of the stairs frantically waving cobwebs away from her hair with one hand while she pointed with the other. I pointed my flashlight over into that corner and a rat jumped up from the floor to the top of the low wall that marked the beginning of real crawl space. In a minute it was lost in the darkness under the house.
“I’m sorry,” Cinnamon whined. “It just went over my foot from under the stairs and I thought something was… attacking me.”
“Something is,” I said calmly and reached to flick an enormous black spider out of her hair.
“Can we go now?”
“Yes. No. Wait.” Next to where the rat scampered up the wall was the first shiny object I’d seen down here. Apparently someone had done some electrical work on the house in the past few months, because the fuse box looked new. Looking at it, something didn’t seem right. The white wire that came out of the bottom of the box looped up behind the rafter and disappeared. I nearly slipped on the slimy floor when I leaned over to see where it went to.
It didn’t.
It just ended and was tacked up out of sight from the door. I opened the fuse box and instead of a row of breakers, I saw a plastic freezer bag with an envelope in it. I took this out, held it in my latex covered fingers, and turned to Cinnamon.
“Now we can go.”
7:00 p.m.
Of course, by the time we found the key, the bank was closed since this is Saturday. I had Cinnamon drive me back to the office and I put it in the safe in the vault. Then the big question was whether or not to go back to the house. Tom called, but I ignored the call. I’m just not ready to face him yet, and it would take me hours to get ready. On the other hand, when Deonn called and offered to pick me up to go to the bar, I decided to have a go at it. I want to spot who was spiking my drink and get a good look at the people who are there. I had Cinnamon drop me off at the house and then park in a place where she could see the door and the lights. I’ll call her in a couple of hours to pick me up, or she’ll call me if something is happening in the house.
Before Deonn gets here, I’m scanning the index of files on the six hard drives. It’s time to start breaking some of Georgia’s on-line accounts.
11:30 p.m.
Okay. We’ve had enough slime for the day. Cinnamon picked me up at the bar at 10:00 and we came straight to the airport hotel to shower and get me out of this awful makeup. I thought the basement was bad. Yuck.
So Deonn picked me up and I rode quietly to The Circle with him. He has a mellow, smooth voice that you could listen to for hours. It’s mesmerizing. Every so often I had to remind myself that he was one of my chief suspects. He could be so nice, reassuring, and calm. He blew it though when he asked if I’d found his car keys.
“I didn’t know you’d lost them,” I said. “Are you using a spare set?”
“Oh, not this old junker,” he said. “My Mercedes is parked in Georgia’s garage. She didn’t have a car, so she let me park it in her garage for the winter. She has the keys in there somewhere. It’s no real hurry. I don’t want to drive it in the kind of sloppy stuff we’ve been having here the past month or so. But I figure you have to empty out everything and I should take my care somewhere else as soon as the keys surface.”
“Did you tell me about this before?” I asked.
“Oh yes, last weekend. We had quite the chat. Glad to see you are all recovered. Better stick to soda tonight.” He was still pretending that I’d been drinking last weekend. WTF? Well, maybe he doesn’t know I know I was drugged. I’ll have that car towed to an impound lot if it’s his. We’ll see how good he is at getting it out.
“I don’t remember much from last weekend,” I said truthfully enough. If I hadn’t typed notes in the middle of it, I wouldn’t have any idea what happened. “But you are right, it’s just soda for me tonight.” Soda served in a can or bottle that I personally open, I muttered to myself.
When we got to the bar I sat at a table with what I assumed were a lot of the same people I met last week. Now I knew something different about them, though. We made small talk and each one of them asked about some article of clothing, jewelry, or other bit. I get the feeling these women and maybe the men, too, are all in the same business. I memorized their names and faces this time: Dolly, Marcie, Jenni, and Abby. Each of them had been caught on my recordings on Wednesday. Every one of them had been hunting for something in Georgia’s things. And joining in the search was my “date” for the night, Deonn.
The first time he touched me, I got up and left. I went to the ladies room, sent an SOS to Cinnamon and walked straight out and into her car five minutes later. I was sure of it. Deonn was their pimp.
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