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“Thing looks so rotten I’m afraid my foot will go right through the door,” Lucas said, taking a step back to get a better kick at it.
Martinez, who was standing well back, with Wiggs, said, “You know, sometimes…”
Lucas kicked the door and rebounded, saying, “Ow, ow, ow…”
Martinez: “As I was saying, sometimes these old carved doors on richie-rich houses are cut-down door faces, glued on the actual door, which is a big piece of oak. Or steel. Like this one.”
“Glad you told me before I broke my knee,” Lucas said, limping around in a circle.
Wiggs said, “Let me get my door opener.”
Lucas said, shaking out his leg, “That hurt all the way up to my neck.”
“Throw some dirt on it and quit bitching,” Rae said.
Wiggs came back with a ram and handed it to Lucas. “Try this.”
The ram was three feet long with two circular handles on top, and probably weighed forty pounds. “Why would you have this in your car?” Lucas asked.
“About ninety percent of the people in Santa Fe are old,” Wiggs said. “They fall in the shower or they have a heart attack, and they’ve got their cell phones but they can’t get to the door to unlock it.”
Lucas nodded: “Okay. Well…”
He took a long step and powered the ram into the door next to the knob, and the door broke, but didn’t open; a second swing knocked it open. Martinez and Wiggs had stepped back, and Wiggs said, “We’ll leave the ram with you. Yell if you need help.”
—
Lucas and Raestepped carefully inside, and Rae said, ‘This makes me nervous as shit. This might be the scariest entry I’ve ever made.”
Lucas: “Think about all your entries and tell me it’s still the scariest.”
A few seconds later, she said, “Okay, I thought about it, and yeah, this is the scariest. How do you shoot a germ? How do you dodge one?”
They moved slowly down the entry hall toward an arch with a lighted window on the other side of it. Before they got there, another hallway intersected, going both left and right. Right would lead toward the back to the house, where the spent shells were.
They went left and found a big bedroom with a king-sized bed and an en suite bathroom, smelling of body wash and perfume. On the other side of the hall was another bathroom, much smaller, a powder room that smelled of an herb candle. At the end of the hall, they foundan office with an antique two-sided partners’ desk, an office chair for each, and a closed laptop on one side of the desk.
The walls were covered with photos of two women together, and apparently for much of their lifetimes. There was also a framed, hand-painted Gaia poster on one wall, and on another, what Rae thought was an original, framed Toulouse-Lautrec poster of a nude woman pulling up a stocking.
Rae knew about art. She put her nose two inches from the poster and said, “Somebody’s got serious money.”
“Let’s clear the rest of the place,” said Lucas, who wasn’t much interested in art or other people’s money.
They went back to the entry hall, toward the lighted window, and found a French château-look kitchen that felt old but cleverly hid modern ovens and a refrigerator, a microwave, and coffee-making equipment behind antiqued doors. Back out of the kitchen, to the intersecting hallway, they went toward the front of the house and found a dining room, with a side hall back to the kitchen, and a balcony conversation area that looked over the library and the spent .223 shells.
A two-foot-square oil painting hung in the conversation area, and Rae took a look and said, “My God. It’s an O’Keeffe.”
“What’s that?”
“Georgia O’Keeffe, you illiterate boob. That’s probably two million bucks hanging there.”
“Okay.” Lucas was looking down at the shells. “I think we’re safe up here,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Possibly,” Rae said. “But we gotta go down.”
They took the steps to the lower level, eased up to the rug stain and Rae said, “Yeah, it’s blood. It’s on the floor, too. Old, dry.”
“Don’t get close,” Lucas said. “Things dry fast here.”
