door.
“Where did he take her?” I said.
“The guy’s got eyes on the back of his head,” he whispered. “I can’t say nothing.”
“What do you mean, eyes on the back of his head?”
But then the door came open, and a squat, hulking man in a gray suit with a gleaming bald head stared in.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” came the rumbling voice of Gordon Snyder.
43.
“Hello, Spike,” I said.
“What’s your game, Heller?” Snyder said. “Trying to coach the witness? Or buy his silence?”
Before I could reply, a loud voice came from behind him: “No one is allowed to talk to my client! I made that eminently clear on the phone.”
Someone shoved his way past Snyder into the interview room: a large, elegant man, probably six foot two, broad shoulders. He had long gray hair almost to his shirt collar, deep-set eyes, and acne-gouged cheeks. He was wearing a dark nailhead suit and a burgundy foulard tie and an air of imperious authority. The fabric of his bespoke suit draped snugly along his broad shoulders.
The legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, of course. “Remove this person at once,” he said, his English impeccable, with barely a trace of an accent. “You may not question this man. And if there is any recording equipment in here, it must be switched off at once. My discussions with my client must be absolutely privileged.”
“Understood, Mr. Barboza,” Snyder said. His eyes flashed with fury at me, and he leveled a stubby finger, then swiveled it smoothly toward the doorway like a magician wielding a wand.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said.
44.
A dog was barking in the yard.
Dragomir’s first thought was of hunters. It wasn’t hunting season, but that didn’t deter some people. He’d posted NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs every fifty feet in the wooded part of the property, but not everyone could read, or chose to.
Hunters meant intruders, and intruders meant scrutiny.
People in rural areas were always getting involved in their neighbors’ business. Especially a stranger who showed up one day with no introduction.
Are you the new owner? Are you an Alderson?
What’s with the Caterpillar backhoe loader out back? Are you doing construction? All by yourself, no crew? Really? Huh. Whatcha building?
He’d bought all the equipment with cash. The backhoe came from a farm supply store in Biddeford, the air compressor from the Home Depot in Plaistow.
The casket he’d picked out at a wholesale casket company in Dover. He’d said something about the family burial plot, double deep, his sadly departed uncle the first one in. At a depth of twelve feet, he’d explained, he wanted to make absolute certain it was crushproof.
The sturdiest one they had was sixteen-gauge carbon steel, painted Triton Gray, in the Generous Dimensions line. Americans were increasingly obese, so oversized caskets were strong sellers, and he’d had to settle for a floor model.
Groundwater seepage was always a problem, even in the most well-made caskets, which might cause the girl to drown slowly, before they were done with her, and that wouldn’t do either. Fortunately, the model he’d purchased was equipped with a water-resistant gasket. You turned a crank at the end of the box to seal it tight. A steel bar rolled across the top to lock it down. All of this was standard equipment, as if grave robbers were still a problem in the twenty-first century.
The refitting was quick work, the sort of mechanical job he’d always enjoyed. Using a cobalt drill bit he drilled a hole through the carbon steel at the end where the girl’s head would be. There he welded a quarter-inch brass connector plug in place and attached it to a crushproof hose that ran several hundred feet to the air compressor on the porch. Air would flow in here every time the air compressor went on, which was a couple of minutes each hour, night and day, since it was on a timer switch. He trenched the hose into the ground along with the Ethernet cable.
At the other end of the casket he cut a much larger opening with a hole saw. There he welded the brass bushing to attach a four-inch exhaust line. Now the gray PVC pipe stuck out of the ground in the middle of the dirt field like a solitary sapling. Its end curved down like an umbrella handle. It was the sort of thing used at a landfill to vent the methane gas that built up underground.
So the girl would get a steady supply of fresh air,