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DESPITE HER BEST INTENTIONS, it was after sunset the following evening before Cassie found her way back to Sybil’s apartment. Time to put all this in the past, she told herself decisively as she got out of her car and crossed the street toward the Gold Coast high rise. Yeah right. She was so eager to put things behind her that she’d procrastinated until nightfall to avoid confronting the residue of her sister’s life again. And she didn’t even have the excuse of going to classes anymore. School was on hold indefinitely. There was still the tricky matter of deciding where to live. She would probably move out of the dorm and into Sybil’s place. Right now, that thought made her shudder. Not quite ready to deal with it yet.
She got off the elevator on the fourth floor and headed toward Sybil’s flat at the end of the hall. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the bottom of the door. There was light coming from inside. Had she forgotten to switch off the power the day before? Who knew? She shrugged and sorted through the keys on her ring. When she turned the lock, she thought she heard a click coming from inside. Cassie swung the door open wide. She stood on the threshold listening for a moment. The place was dark, completely still.
She walked across the room toward an end table to turn on the lamp. Something or someone slammed into her, shoving her sideways. She hit the wall, knocking the breath out of her lungs. As she scrambled to her feet, she caught a glimpse of a man fleeing through the open door. Cassie gasped. He was wearing a Stetson hat, and he was holding an object she remembered seeing the day before.
Before she could react, he was down the hall, through the fire exit door, and halfway to the ground floor.
“Hey, hey you! Stop!” She started to run toward the lighted hallway when she collided with another man. He shoved her back into the apartment. She didn’t think she recognized this one, but the place was still dark, so she couldn’t be sure.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Who are you?” she countered. “Where did you come from? What are you doing here?”
“No time for that now!” His voice was urgent. “What happened?”
“A... a man. He must have broken in. He... he was wearing a cowboy hat,” she stammered.
The stranger grabbed her by the arms and shook her to get her attention. “Now listen! This is important! Did he take anything?”
Cassie was having a hard time thinking clearly. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. “Yeah, I think...”
“What?” the man shook her again. “What was it?”
“It was a stone ruler. Five-sided. About a foot long with weird markings all over it.” She twisted away from his grasp. “That’s all I could see. Now, who—” Before she could get the rest of the question out, the man vanished.
She heard him shout back at her from down the hallway, “Call the police!” Then she heard the fire exit door slam and the sound of feet clattering down the emergency stairs.
Cassie was shaking from delayed shock. She collapsed on the couch and switched on the table lamp. Trying to get her eyes to focus, she looked around at the contents of the room. Everything was just as she’d left it the day before except for one thing. The stone ruler was gone. It had been stolen by the man from her nightmare.
She got up weakly and crossed over to a bombé chest that held a telephone. When she picked up the receiver to dial 911, she noticed an envelope underneath the base of the phone. It had been hand-addressed. All she could see was the initial letter C. Putting the receiver down, she slid the packet out from its hiding place. In Sybil’s script, the letters C-A-S-S-I-E were scrawled across the front. Her hands were trembling as she ripped the envelope open.
***
ERIK COULD HEAR FOOTSTEPS ahead of him at the bottom of the stairwell. He waited until the man had gotten to the ground floor before he moved forward. He didn’t want Cowboy to know he was being followed.
Once the exit door slammed shut, he raced forward. Outside he saw Cowboy climbing into a red pickup parked across the street from the high rise. It tore away from the curb, heading north. Erik noted the license plate number. Shouldn’t be too hard to follow. He jumped into his car and tailed the thief, careful to keep several vehicles between them. With all the early evening traffic on the roads, he didn’t think he’d been spotted. Cowboy got on the northbound expressway. He drove past the looming shadows of downtown high rises, past the suburban bedroom communities, past the overcrowded shopping malls, past the point where any expressway lights remained to illuminate the road. It was almost an hour before the pickup took a westbound exit that led to nothing but farm land. Erik knew it would be harder to keep from being noticed out in the middle of nowhere. He got behind a semi-trailer that was going in the same direction. Cowboy drove on for another half hour through pitch black countryside then turned right onto a side road marked with a yellow Dead End sign. Erik couldn’t follow him in there. It would be too obvious.
He pulled his car off to the shoulder and got out, hoping he wouldn’t find one of those “Do Not Park Here” stickers plastered on his windshield when he got back. He started walking. Fortunately, lights appeared in the distance almost immediately. The road turned out to be a very, very long driveway. The building at the end of it couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away. Erik kept to the shoulder, in the shadows.
The road ended in front of a pair of iron gates about ten feet high. Each of the gates was decorated with a capital letter P with an X through the middle of it. Erik didn’t know anyone with that monogram. He noticed a guard shack with security cameras mounted on either side of the gates and quickly ducked farther into the shadows. A ten-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the property. Company was clearly not welcome in this place.
He couldn’t be sure how long the fence was, but he could guess it stretched around several acres. Beyond the gate at the far end of the gravel drive, Erik could see Cowboy’s car. Somebody had been expecting his visit.
Erik headed for the trees that bordered the fence to the east where more of the layout was visible. He focused his attention on the house if you could call it that. The building was as big as a castle, or maybe “fortress” would be a better word. It looked as if it could withstand a siege. The design was squat and square with a flat roof, like a massive cinderblock. Towers flanked the front of the building on either end. Erik guessed there might be two on the back end as well. The fortress was studded with tall narrow windows recessed deep into the walls. Light glowed through drawn curtains making it impossible to tell how many people were inside. Floodlights bleached the limestone façade to a blinding whiteness.
Aside from the main building, Erik counted at least eight other structures around the perimeter—smaller replicas of the main house. Then he noticed an odd assortment of sheds, garages, and trailers that must have been used for storage. A compound. He smiled to himself. It had to be them. Nobody else would live like this. Now he knew for certain who had hired Cowboy to steal Sybil’s find. The only thing he still couldn’t figure out was why.