Pre-emptive.
Absolutely pre-emptive, I thought, looking out the train window into the darkness. By enfolding Amanda tightly into their campaign, the Wades hoped I’d stop investigating and threatening it.
I couldn’t imagine what it was that the Wades thought I knew. Worse, I couldn’t guess why they’d had Jenny and her cameraman beaten. Jenny said the footage they’d gotten from the one camera showed nothing sinister.
I got home at eleven o’clock that night; still early enough to sit at my computer to see what the satellites saw of the woods across from the Wade estate. Waiting for the picture to come up, I half-remembered an ancient prophecy that foresaw a rain of locusts hurtling down upon the earth. I wondered if the spirit, if not the specifics, of that prophecy might soon come to pass, though I imagined it might not be locusts, or even satellites, that would darken the skies, but rather swarms of drones with video cameras, set loose by drooling, pimpled peepers to crash into one another, tall buildings and airplanes. Then it would be no ordinary pestilence raining down on some dark day but rather harder hails of plastic, solder, microchips and people.
The woods across from Wade’s estate looked ordinary enough, just acres of trees and nothing else. I dragged the cursor back across the road, to the wide house, broad lawns and circular driveway, all encircled by the tall wrought-iron fence that ran along the road, tucked back along the sides, and crossed to meet at the rear of the house. From there, the ground sloped sharply down to the road that ran along the shore of Lake Michigan. Like the woods across the road in front, the woods in back were thick with trees.
A long green rectangle stood out stark down that slope, about fifty yards up from the back road. It was devoid of trees but dense with low vegetation, like a carefully tended garden plot, except that no garden could function in such thick woods. A faint pair of parallel ruts, probably only recognizable from the air, ran from the road up the fifty yards to the plot.
That rectangle, so far down from the house, and those ruts up to it made no sense. And though the night wasn’t young, my worries were thick. It would be hours before I could sleep. I grabbed my pea coat and headed out the door.
There was little traffic. It took less than forty minutes to get to Winnetka and the back road that ran along the lake. I pulled off to the side a few hundred feet before where I guessed the Wade estate would begin.
A quarter moon lit the sky, enough to see. I walked along the road and soon came to a rusted chain-link fence that marked the back of the Wade property. I stopped several times to look up through the trees, almost bare now of leaves, and finally I saw a house at the top of the slope, ablaze with lights. The Wades were pulling late nights, undoubtedly double and triple checking every last effort to ensure a flawless victory.
Strangely, I saw no guards nor heard dogs. I saw no motion-sensor security lights being tripped by animals running through the back woods. There seemed to be no security beyond the wrought-iron fence at the back of the house.
There was a break in the fence fifty yards down. The ruts I’d spotted in the satellite picture ran up through it. They were tire tracks, cut deeper into the soft ground than I’d imagined from looking at the photo. There was no fresh vegetation growing up along them; they’d been freshly tramped down by a vehicle.
I followed the tracks slowly up into the woods, tensed that with every step I might set off a security light. None came, and that brought a new certainty. The Wades wanted their house guarded at the front but not at the back, because they used a vehicle they kept back in those woods.
The rectangle I’d spotted on the satellite photo confirmed it. It wasn’t a flat spot of ground as it had appeared from high up but a structure sunk deep into the hillside. Weeds grew, or had been planted, on its dirt roof. Only the front was exposed – two unpainted old doors hinged at the sides, weathered to almost the same brown as the trees surrounding them. Several small tree limbs had been leaned against them to further camouflage the structure.
I pushed the limbs off the rightmost door and turned the wood latch. The door opened noiselessly. Its hinges were kept well oiled.
I stepped in and immediately hit my knee against the rear bumper of a white SUV. I pulled the door closed behind me and switched on the pinpoint flashlight I’d brought. I’d seen that vehicle before. It was the Ford Explorer I’d chased before Sergeant Bohler had pulled me over.
The sunken building ran deep into the hill. Samuel Wade, Sr must have used it to store the whiskey he took off boats before transferring it to his construction trucks for delivery.
I eased along the side of the Explorer and came to another vehicle parked in front of it. It was an older Cadillac Eldorado convertible, filthy with dirt silting down from the slatted wood ceiling. Its top was down and a folded wheelchair stuck up from the back seat.
I recognized the car. Theresa and Timothy Wade had been photographed in it at a polo match, the month after Theresa graduated from Northwestern.
I shined my light onto the front seat. Like everything else on the old Cadillac, its cream-colored leather seats were filthy with dirt.
I ran the light forward to a crushed right front fender. The Cadillac was old, built when Detroit iron meant solid steel, but this car had suffered an impact hard enough to push its front headlamp back a full two feet. Yet the car had remained drivable enough to get it up the hill and into the hidden garage.
Beyond the Cadillac, a small workbench was mounted against the slats of the rear wall. Hand tools lay on top of the bench, an old-fashioned brace-and-bit drill, two saws and what looked like boxes of long screws. Dozens of short, cut ends of pine lay on the dirt floor around the bench. They were trimmings, the ends of planks, and all were the same eight-inch width.
I shined my light around one last time. There was nothing else to see. I went out, shut the door and stopped to look up the hill, to be sure of the line of sight. No camera of Jenny’s from across the street could have captured the sunken garage I’d just searched. And I’d seen nothing inside that, at first glance, appeared troublesome.
Yet my gut told me I’d just seen something significant.
I hurried the few yards down the hill to where I’d parked the Jeep.
Even though I was alone, it was only after I’d gotten a solid mile from the Wade estate that I dared to speak to myself.
‘I just got lucky,’ I said. ‘I think.’