attention span of a Chihuahua with ADHD. Knacker was able to focus, and hard work didn’t daunt him. If he could lighten up, develop a credible smile of some kind, and temper his gung-ho attitude with patience, he would be the perfect partner with whom to go killing.
A stoop light came on and a voice issued from the doorbell speaker. “What do you want?”
“Mr. Oxley? Mr. Charles Oxley?” Verbotski asked, raising his voice against the wind.
“Who wants to know?”
Holding his expertly forged badge and photo ID to the doorbell camera, Verbotski said, “Special Agent Lewis Erskine, FBI. We need to ask you a few questions.”
“Before the damn sun is even up?”
“We saw your lights were on.”
“What the hell questions? Questions about what?”
“There was a serious event at the Bookman residence earlier tonight.”
“Damn sirens all night, so a man can’t sleep. I don’t know a damn thing about what happened up there. I got enough damn problems of my own, what with the social security not paying me for fourteen months. Go away.”
Bradley Knacker looked as though he might shoot out the lock and break down the door.
Smiling, nodding, Verbotski said to the doorbell, “What problems with your social security, sir? Maybe we can help.”
“They stopped sending my check fourteen months ago, said I was dead. Do I sound dead to you?”
“It was your wife who died fourteen months ago.”
“How the hell do you know?”
Verbotski faked a convincing little laugh and shook his head and said, “We’re the FBI, sir. We know just about everything. We’re here to help.”
For a long moment, Charles Oxley said nothing. As a citizen of the modern state, he had uncountable reasons to understand that a slight excess of power rapidly became a lethal excess, that when an agent of the state insisted he had come to help, there was at least a 70 percent chance that he had come to punish or pillage. In the human heart, however, there was a perverse desire to surrender control to those who claimed a right to power and advertised their good intentions, to believe in something, even if the something was a hive lacking human order or a machine without a face. As Verbotski had known he would, Charles Oxley unlocked and opened the door, and welcomed them inside.
Oxley stood perhaps five feet six, a lean bantam rooster of a man. His face was dramatically seamed either by loss and hardship or by hard living, his nose a broken beak, his blue stare defiant.
In spite of his short stature, he might have been a successful scrapper in his day, never an easy target. But he was half a century older than Bradley Knacker and at least seventy pounds lighter, and one punch in the gut from the younger man all but lifted Oxley off his feet, sent him crashing backward into the wall.
Before Knacker could throw a punch or two into Oxley’s face, Verbotski said, “We don’t want blood all over the carpet if someone comes visiting and won’t go away and we absolutely have to open the door.”
Knacker grabbed the dazed and retching old man by the shoulders and steered him into the kitchen at the back of the house and shoved him into a chair at the breakfast table.
Verbotski found a door to a cellar, turned on the light, and went down to have a look around. There was an oil-fired furnace. An explosion and fire could be easily engineered.
When Verbotski returned to the kitchen, Knacker said, “He tells me there’s no children, and there’s no neighbor he’s friendly with.”
Adult children and neighbors were the most likely to drop in unannounced.
In a mudroom off the kitchen, Verbotski found a long woolen scarf hanging on a hook, but better yet were a few extension cords in a utility drawer. He took one of the extension cords into the kitchen and strangled Oxley to death.
Together, he and Knacker threw the body down the cellar steps. Verbotski turned off the light. Knacker closed the door.
The two of them went through the house, closing blinds and draperies where they weren’t already closed.
The two-car garage contained only a Ford Expedition. Verbotski drove the Escalade into the empty stall and closed the segmented door with a remote he found in Oxley’s vehicle.
By the time Verbotski came inside, Knacker was making coffee.
Because four men would be necessary to fulfill this contract, two of the additional principals in Atropos & Company would soon leave Reno in a black Suburban packed