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“I forget,” Letty said. “Maybe Francisco something something.”
“Not exactly Chartres, hum?”
“No, but there’ve probably been more miracles there, than at Chartres,” Letty said. “Lots of miracles, in New Mexico.”
Hawkins said, “I hope. We may need one.”
—
In Santa Fe,Lucas told the two cops that Catton’s house should be isolated until a special team working at a Los Alamos site could come and check the place out.
“So how grim is this situation, the bug you’re looking at? Some kind of germ warfare thing?” Wiggs asked.
Lucas: “We didn’t say it was a bug.”
Wiggs: “Gimme a break. The way you guys are acting? It’s either radiation or a bug, and you said it wasn’t radiation and I don’t see any Geiger counters. I’ll keep my mouth shut, but what are we talking about?”
Rae looked at Lucas, who shrugged, and then at the cops, and said, “Keep your mouths shut, okay? It’s bad, but we think it’s confined right now. I don’t even think it’s here. The woman in there was shot, not diseased.”
Martinez: “I’ll buy that. We’ll do what you say: isolate the place. But we need to be talking to this Los Alamos team, we need to find out when they’ll get here.”
“We’ll have them call,” Lucas said. “It’ll be soon, I think.”
—
As they walkedback outside, Rae looked to her left, down the slope toward the lower level, and said, “Shed.” A garden shed sat at the side of the yard, still on the upper level, encircled by lilac bushes, where it had been out of sight from the lower-level wall where they’d been waiting. “We should stick our heads in there.”
“We gotta hurry,” Lucas said.
They went to the shed, opened the door, and found a variety of garden implements. A stack of metal stakes lay on the floor, with small signs attached. The signs were face down. Lucas turned one and found a security alarm warning.
“Ah, goddamnit.” He looked back at the house. “Probably a silent alarm. If it goes to this security service, and then a cell, they’ll know we’ve been here. It’s a trip wire. Didn’t see a camera.”
“Nothing we can do about it,” Rae said. “Call it in, let’s get on the way to Taos.”
They walked back to the house and Lucas looked at the doorway for a camera; nothing there. Then he looked at a phone pole outside the surrounding wall, and there it was, pointed down at them.
“They could even be looking at us,” he told Rae. And as he looked up at the camera, he gave it the finger and said, “Hello there, motherfuckers.”
Rae: “Keep moving.”
Back in the SUV, Lucas called Greet, and she said that one of her researchers would call the security service and find out what kind of alarm system the house had. “Maybe they canceled the service.”
“If they did, it wasn’t long ago,” Lucas said. “The dirt on the stakes was fresh. And if the security service goes to a cell phone, get the number.”
“One way or the other, we’re on it,” Greet said.
9
Scott and his crew were scattered all over hell and gone when Clarice Catton got the alarm on her phone. She punched in a password and got a camera image of two men standing in her yard. The front door was open, and they were peering into the house without getting too close. The two men looked like cops, but were in plain clothes, so they could have been investigators from anywhere.
“They’re onto me. They’re going to find Jane’s body,” Catton said to Rose Turney, staring at her phone in horror. “If they do, if they’ve done any research at all, they’ll find out about the ski valley house.”
Turney: “Whose body?”
“Never mind.” Catton had forgotten that nobody knew about Jane except her and Scott. “We’ve got to evacuate, we’ve got to hurry. I’ve got to call Lionel.”
She got Scott on the phone, told him about the men in her house, and the open door. “They’re some kind of investigators…we’ve got to get out of there. We’ve got to evacuate. There are all kinds of state records with my name on that property.”
