a military green. “Blue one day, green a week later. An ugly Army green,” she said.
“And he hasn’t been around?”
She pointed to the next door down the hall: “I live right there. The walls are about an inch thick. I’m standing in the kitchen, I can hear every word from his TV.”
“Worse than that,” the man said. “We heard him fart one time.”
The woman: “That’s true. Anyway, we think we did.”
“We did,” the guy said. “He also boils cabbage. You can smell it right through the walls. Which explains the farts.”
They didn’t know about his political affiliations: “We don’t talk.” They had the idea that he might have had something to do with a commercial sign manufacturer, from T-shirts they’d seen him wearing.
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED AWAY, a thrill crawling up between his shoulder blades. Whoever the killer was, he hadn’t expected him to be home. And he thought he knew where he might be going. Sandberg was now at the top of his personal list. He called Chase, told her to pound on the Sandberg material from the IRS. “He looks real to me,” Lucas said. “I think he’s a candidate.”
* * *
—
DUNN’S HOUSE WAS IN WARRENTON, half an hour west of Manassas, Lucas tracking his way in with his nav app. The place was impeccable, the lawn perfectly green, perfectly cut, the house a perfectly efficient pale yellow cuboid with white trim. No sign of a car, but then, it was midday and Dunn might be shopping or at a park or whatever. An engineer, Bacon thought.
He rang the doorbell, got no answer, peeked through the door window and saw an interior as impeccably neat as the lawn.
The nearest house was thirty yards away, with a red minivan parked in the driveway. Lucas went that way. When he knocked, an elderly man came to the door, peered out, opened the door and asked, “Can I help you?”
An elderly woman was doing something at a dining room table at the back of the house, and called, “Who is it, Tommy?”
Lucas identified himself and the woman came to listen. They’d lived next to Dunn for seven years, said that he was quiet, standoffish but friendly enough, divorced, a civil engineer. “I guess he works all over the place,” the man said. “I don’t think he has a regular employer, he’s freelance.”
“Right now he’s working on a job down in Gainesville, that new development. I saw his truck down there and I thought I saw him, too,” the woman said.
“Have you see him around today?” Lucas asked.
“Not today, but we haven’t been around much today, we’re helping our daughter move,” the man said.
The Gainesville job site would be on his way back to Washington, the woman said: “It’s right off the highway, but . . . today’s Sunday. There won’t be anybody working.”
Lucas thanked them, took a last look at the Dunn house, and headed back east toward Washington. Had Dunn skipped? Had Sandberg skipped? Maybe they were out on the river, rowing their boats. He spotted the new Gainesville development, raw dirt and idle heavy equipment sitting around, doing nothing on a cool Sunday afternoon. Then he saw a man get into a trailer . . .
What the hell, he had a minute. Lucas pulled over, made a U-turn and went back to a turnoff into the development. The trailer was battered-looking, like every construction trailer Lucas had ever seen. He knocked on the door and a man shouted, “Who is it?”
* * *
—
THE MAN’S NAME WAS SPENCER MONROE and he was a foreman on the job site who’d come in to look at grading plans.
“He wouldn’t be working today. I got no idea what he does on weekends,” Monroe said of Elias Dunn.
Monroe was a large red-faced man sitting behind a metal desk with an illegal paper spike stacked with spiked papers. A bright yellow hard hat was hung on a rack behind him. “He put in a full day on Friday. Why are you looking for him?”
“We want to talk to him about