Mindhunters 4 - Deadly Intent (6 page)

“Where do you want to enter?”

“Less noticeable if we go in the back.”

Snow-blowing guy already seemed more interested in them than he was in his task. Kell led the way around the attached garage, where they’d be out of sight of nosy neighbors. The most recent footprints in the deep snow were theirs. They’d taken a look through the windows and knocked on doors when they’d first arrived, with no more success than the officers had had.

“Is there an alarm system?” Macy asked as they headed up the stone steps.

“It doesn’t matter . . .” Travis started.

“Give me a few minutes. I think I can circumvent.” Kell opened his kit and withdrew his picks before shoving the bag in Macy’s arms.

“Circumvent?” Doubt dropped from her word.

“There’s no need for that, Burke.” Travis was stamping the snow off his boots. “We’ll set the alarm off once we’re in anyway. Just kick the damn door in.”

“That’s one solution. But it lacks finesse.” He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his pockets. Flexing his fingers, he squatted to peer into the state-of-the-art dead bolt. “Ah, six-pin double cylinder. An expensive one, too. Bet they told you it was pickproof, didn’t they? Idiots.” Pulling on a pair of rubber gloves from the kit, he selected the torque and rake tools and went to work.

“You believe this?” the agent muttered to Macy.

“Oddly . . . yes.”

He barely heard them. He was in that familiar zone, listening for pins to release as he delicately manipulated the picks.

“You’ll trip the alarm anyway, so what’s the use of us standing out here freezing our asses . . .” Travis’s words trailed off as Kell withdrew the tools and rose, turning the knob and pushing the door open. The agent looked at him, then at the door.

“What was that? Under thirty seconds, right?” Kell had forgotten to look at his watch before starting. “Did anyone time me?”

“What are you, six?” Macy jammed his kit against his chest with a bit more force than he thought necessary before stepping carefully over the threshold to the rug spread on the floor in front of the door. She glanced at the keypad mounted next to the doorjamb. The officer stationed out front could deal with the security company rep sent over to check on the silent alarm their entry would set off.

Travis muttered, “A drill would have been faster.”

“As it happens, I’m equally adept with a snap gun, but it doesn’t hold the same challenge.” He gestured for the agent to proceed through the door ahead of him while he tucked the picks inside his coat. Macy already had her boots off and shoe covers on her stocking feet. He followed suit, watching carefully to be sure the agent pulled on gloves and shoe covers. Raiker would have his ass if every effort wasn’t made to preserve evidence.

He swung the door shut behind him and just stood still for a moment, absorbing impressions. They were standing in a kitchen that hadn’t been modernized for a couple decades. There was an automatic coffeemaker tucked in the corner of the counter, the pot still a quarter full. A cell phone charger was plugged in next to it, minus the cell phone. A thermal stainless steel coffee tumbler sat next to the sink, along with a small insulated lunch cooler. Kell eyed the items but didn’t move toward them. Not then. Time enough to collect evidence, and he was willing to bet the coffee tumbler would be a prime depository for Hubbard’s DNA. First though, he wanted a thorough look around.

There was nothing else out of place in the area. “Does the security team take lunch to work?”

Travis was moving through the kitchen into the adjoining room. “The cooks I interviewed say they feed the indoor help. Everyone else is on their own.”

They stepped into a large family room, and it was immediately easy to guess the room was Hubbard’s priority. A huge-screen TV and bookcase took up most of one wall, with two leather recliners and a couple matching couches arranged around it. The kitchen had been nondescript, but there’d be something of the security guard’s personality here. This is where he’d relaxed after working all day. Entertained here, too, probably, if that was his thing.

The CBI agent was studying the TV. “I’ve got one almost like this, except a couple years older.”

“Yeah?” Kell picked up the remote and turned the power on. “A Sony? Samsung’s the brand to go with these days. The picture can’t be beat, even without HD.”

“Samsung, huh? I’d heard . . .”

“TVs? Really?”

Kell lifted a shoulder at Macy’s pointed comment and watched while the picture formed on the screen. “Just getting a feel for the place, Duchess. Taking our time. Being careful.” She was much too proper to snort, but the sound she made came suspiciously close. He checked the channel on the screen when it came on. ESPN. And the program menu showed the DVR set for times and channels featuring pro football. So the guy had a thing for high-tech TVs and football. Didn’t exactly make Hubbard unique. But it began to paint of picture of the absent guard that had so far been largely blank.

The other two had fanned out. Kell clicked off the TV and went toward the desk tucked in the corner with a computer sitting on it. “What’s the scope of the warrant?”

Travis pulled out the paperwork and surveyed it for a minute before giving a low whistle. “Rooms, contents, drawers, safes, electronic devices . . . anything deemed possible to hide a body or plans of the crime.”

“Nice.” Impressed, he booted up the computer. There was no such thing as a limitless warrant, but this one was exceedingly generous in its scope. Whether that was due to the CBI’s influence or Mulder’s wasn’t worth speculating. The computer’s welcome screen blinked at him, inviting him to enter a password. He muttered an obscenity. His magic with locks definitely didn’t extend to computers. “I don’t suppose you have some decent hacking skills?” he called to the agent, without much hope.

“We’ll take it in.” The man was squatted in front of the fireplace, looking inside it. Kell could have told him he was wasting his time. It was outfitted with a cheap gas insert, and Hubbard would have had to be a moron to consider trying to burn something in it. Given the crime the man was suspected of, stupid probably wasn’t an accurate adjective.

He riffled through the papers on the surface of the desk. Household bills. Fantasy football picks and strategy tips. His brows rose as he skimmed that sheet. With those selections, Hubbard would need all the tips he could get.

Macy returned from the adjoining dining room and went to the hallway closet. The phone on the desk had the message light blinking. Kell stabbed at the replay button, but there were just a handful of hang-ups.

“Must have just recorded his message and set the phone to go straight to voice mail after a couple rings,” he mused.

“It didn’t sound like voice mail,” Travis muttered. He was looking under the couch cushions and checking the pockets along the side.

Kell set the phone aside to be collected later and began pulling open the drawers on the desk, pulling out a few old receipts and some fast-food menus. Hubbard’s taste seemed to run to pizza and Malaysian. There were a couple bank account passbooks, one for checking and the other for savings. The guard had a balance of eighteen hundred and change in checking and nearly ten thousand in savings. He opened the next drawer and found a notepad, flipped through it. He looked up when Macy reentered the room. “Find anything?”

“No. Except that the man is exceptionally neat. The carpet’s been freshly vacuumed. I’m heading upstairs.”

The CBI agent veered in her direction so Kell trailed after them up the staircase. There were three bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. Two of the bedrooms were furnished but looked unused and as generic as the kitchen. The remaining bedroom had an unmade king-sized bed. Drawers were hanging out of the dresser. He strolled over to take a look. “So much for being a neat freak. Someone was in a hurry.” The remaining contents didn’t even leave the drawers half-f.

“Here, too.” Macy opened the closet doors wider and he saw the empty hangers inside. She crouched down to dig in the corners of the space, and her coat pulled up, revealing a very fine ass rounding out her black pants. Which was a purely objective observation, and not the reason he headed in her direction.

“A duffel bag is in here, but the marks on the carpet look like something heavier had sat next to it. A bigger suitcase maybe?” She rose and put her hands on her hips, eyeing the overhead shelf. It was filled with some cardboard boxes, but it was the mini filing cabinet in the opposite corner of the closet floor that caught his attention.

Kell squatted before it and tugged on the top drawer. Locked, but these things wouldn’t challenge an eight-year-old. He amused himself by pulling out the tools he’d placed in his coat pocket and picking it with his left hand before looking up to check on Macy’s progress. She was on tiptoe, stretching as far as her five-foot-five or so height would allow, which had her sweater under her unfastened coat creeping up to show a band of creamy skin on her abdomen. Because he was male, he sat back on his heels and watched, mentally calculating how much farther she’d have to stretch to show anything even more interesting.

Her gaze dropped, caught him staring. He grinned, unabashed. She settled back on her feet and glared at him, yanking at the hem of her sweater. “You ass.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d leveled the words at him, he recalled. And he had to admit, he got a kick out of the way she said them, all clipped and prissy, with that faint British accent she always denied. “Need some help there, Duchess?”

Ignoring him, she turned to the CBI agent, who was lifting the bed’s mattress for a look under it. “Dan. Can you reach this?”

Dan? Kell searched his memory, tried to recall if he’d heard the agent’s first name before. When had she? Mentally shrugging, he pulled open the cabinet drawers as the agent came over like a well-trained lapdog and fetched the boxes off the top shelf for her.

Both drawers of the file cabinet were stuffed full of the sort of things people put away for safekeeping and then promptly forgot about. Old bills and receipts, the warranty on the TV, which had run out several months earlier. The deed to the house, property tax stubs, and—his brows skimmed upward when he pulled out the next folder—a birth certificate.

“So where’s our guy plan to go after this if he leaves his birth certificate behind?”

Travi—
Dan
—was pawing through one of the boxes he’d retrieved. “Maybe somewhere he plans to use a new identity.”

“You have some known talent in the vicinity that dabble in that? New IDs?” He went back to the drawers. “ ’Cuz that’d give us an avenue to explore.” If they leaned on the lowlife hard enough, maybe they’d discover he had an idea where Hubbard was heading. But more important, they’d find out whether he’d supplied the man with a single set of false identification or two. One for a girl, too.

“Local cops will probably know better. We can check.” Travis started replacing items in the box he’d emptied. “This just looks like junk from high school. Yearbooks and stuff.” He shifted his attention to Macy. “What do you have?”

“Photo albums. Some loose old pictures.” She held up a handful. They’d seen the man’s photo in the employee file Mulder kept. A much more youthful Nick Hubbard grinned from a photo with an older woman, whom he had his arm around. “Some look like they date back to his childhood, others are more recent.”

He switched his attention to the bottom drawer. It appeared to be old tax information. Randomly drawing out a folder, he flipped through several years of Hubbard’s old returns without finding anything remarkable. Like a good American, the man filed regularly, reporting income that seemed in keeping with his current job and the one he’d held earlier for the prison. The thought abruptly dissipated when he found a record that differed significantly from the others.

Looking up, he asked, “You run across any old wedding pictures in there?”

Macy glanced over at him. “Hubbard was married? When? Is he still?”

“Not according to these files. The last time he filed jointly was eight years ago. His wife’s name was”—he squinted slightly at the man’s cramped writing—“Sophie Hubbard.”

Several moments went by as Macy flipped rapidly through the photos remaining in the box. She shook her head. “Nothing in here. Maybe there’s a wedding album in the stack Dan’s looking at.”

The agent made an amused sound. “Doubtful. What guy is going to hang on to old pictures of the woman who dumped him and probably took half of his belongings with her?”

“A sentimental one,” Macy suggested.

Kell’s mind was heading in a completely different direction. “We need to track her down. Where does she live? Maybe she’s heard from her ex lately. Could be he felt her out about the care and feeding of an eleven-year-old.”

“Or maybe she’s in on this thing with him somehow.” Travis looked quickly through the remaining albums before shaking his head. “No wedding pictures in here. Nothing of him with any woman except one who might be his mother.”

Kell went through the rest of the tax reports before going on to the next set of folders in the file. No doubt Raiker already knew about the man’s marital history. It would have been in the dossier Mulder collected on all prospective employees. He wondered then if the man kept the records of those prospective candidates he turned down for jobs. He made a mental note to mention it to Raiker. They’d naturally look at anyone Mulder had fired in the last few years, but they should look as carefully at the ones he’d never offered a job to in the first place. If Mulder was the target, rather than the girl herself, revenge might be a primary motivation for hatching this plot.

“That’s it for the boxes.” Travis eyed Kell. “You about done with the files?”

“Almost.” The last few folders contained the survey and property assessment for the house and meticulous records of maintenance on the man’s vehicle. The final one was thick and contained records of investments Hubbard had with a well-known company. Kell skimmed it quickly, finding little to quibble about in the man’s holdings. There was a fair balance between assets, if a little on the conservative side. His own investment counselor would approve. The most current record showed Hubbard’s portfolio worth around eighty thousand. He shoved them back inside the drawer and did a perfunctory search beneath and behind it. His fingers slowed when they came in contact with what felt like a plastic bag attached behind the metal backing of the drawer.