In Too Deep

33

Spaulding Properties was housed in a quaint, weathered commercial building on the main street of Willow Creek. The "Closed" sign showed in the window. Fallon walked past the entrance without pausing, as though he were headed to the drugstore on the corner.

When he reached the narrow strip of muddy grass that separated the premises of the real estate business from the restaurant next door, he turned quickly and went around to the back door of Spaulding Properties.

The rear door was locked, but that did not come as a surprise. Fallon reached inside his jacket and removed one of the electronic lock picks that he handed out like candy to J&J agents. It took less than three seconds to open the door. Whatever secrets Sylvia Tremont was hiding, she was not concealing them inside the office.

The back room of Spaulding Properties was remarkably uncluttered. There were no reams of paper, no stacks of printed brochures or any business machines. It had taken less than two minutes on the computer to discover that Norma Spaulding had not closed a sale in the four weeks that the office had been open.

He moved into the main room. The lack of sales had not stopped a few desperate homeowners from listing their properties with Spaulding Properties. Unappealing photos of a handful of aged cabins and the old Zander mansion adorned the wall.

He disregarded the mansion because, although it was no longer an active crime scene, it had become a grisly attraction for tourists and thrill seekers. It would not make a good place to hold Isabella and Walker.

He slipped into his other senses and studied the half-dozen featured listings with the cold-blooded logic of a killer. Swiftly he calculated distances from Walker's house, the degree of geographical isolation offered by the various properties and the proximity to the two locations in the area that provided the kind of powerful, reliable currents required to drag two bodies out to sea and make sure that the evidence disappeared.

Tremont would not use the Point, he concluded. It was too close to Scargill Cove. There was a serious risk that someone in town would see her and her companion, even in the midst of a storm. That left the second location, the blowhole site. The surf was violent there, and the currents were extreme. In the summer it was a popular tourist attraction. There was a convenient turnout.

In the end, one cabin stood out as the obvious choice. Certainty whispered through him.

He yanked the listing sheet off the wall and headed for the door. Although he was ninety-nine-point-two percent sure of his calculations, there was a small, but very real, possibility that he was wrong. He had to cover all the bases. Isabella's life was at stake. He opened his phone.

Henry answered halfway through the first ring.

"Six possible locations where she might be keeping Isabella and Walker," Fallon said. "I'm taking one. I'll read you the list of the other five properties. They're all empty cabins along the bluffs. You and the others check them. No one goes alone, understood?"

"Guns?" Henry asked.

"Oh, yeah," Fallon said. "Take guns. And the dogs. They know Isabella. If she's in one of those cabins, they'll tell you."

"Those dogs love Isabella. They'll rip out the throat of anyone who tries to hurt her."