Lethal Expedition (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF Page B

too.”
    “Nothing happened?”
    “He got arrested for refusing to leave a senator’s office. After that he got worse. Robby said he started collecting diagrams of subway stations, sewer system maps, power plants.”
    “Was he planning some kind of attack?”
    “I wouldn’t have put it past him.”
    “But somebody would have picked up on a government scientist acting like that.”
    “You think? It took them, what, three years to get that anthrax scientist guy in D.C. And they
still
got the wrong man. Which they only figured out after he killed himself. You think they were having meetings about the fact that Kurt had some blueprints on his wall?”
    ***
    The two women walked to the door and stepped into blue evening. Only a few windows on the street glowed yellow. The streetlight in front of Ely’s house was out. A cat was whining, and Hallie caught a whiff of some rotting thing. She started to leave, then stopped and turned.
    “Maddy, if you don’t mind my asking, how did Robin die?”
    “I don’t mind. You’re a nice person, Hallie. She killed herself.”
    “What?”
    “That bastard drove her to it. Robin hung herself right here in the basement.”

8

    Returning from her meeting with Maddy Taylor, Hallie stepped into her house and stopped. It took her one second to identify the stink—excrement—and one more to spot its source. Somebody had defecated in the middle of her small living room.
    In the kitchen, drawers had been pulled out, their contents dumped. Her bedroom had been ransacked, too—dresser emptied, mattress turned over, jewelry box smashed, its contents scattered on the floor. Most of it was costume stuff, but two pieces were precious to her. One was her great-grandfather’s gold watch chain and fob. The other was the Distinguished Service Cross her father had won in Vietnam. The medal itself was bronze and of little value, but to her its worth was immeasurable.
    Rage hit. Shaking with it, she felt beneath her bedside table for the SIG Sauer 9mm pistol held in place there by spring clips. The magazine was full, and she kept a round chambered. Growing up on a farm, with a soldier father and two brothers, she had learned to shoot all kinds of guns, and to shoot them well.
    She searched all the other upstairs rooms but found only more disarray. She went through the kitchen and down into the basement. For a few moments she stood still, pistol hanging at her side, staring. From her father, Hallie had inherited a love of order, so pegboard covered the walls, and each wall was devoted to a single activity: climbing, diving, caving, paragliding. On one hung ice axes and crampons, ropes and harnesses. A twenty-five-pound box of climbers’ chalk, used to get better purchase on rock, sat in a corner. Another wall was festooned with technical diving gear, the third with specialized caving equipment, and the fourth with her paragliding wings and accessories. All told, there was $50,000 worth of sophisticated equipment here, but nothing appeared disturbed or missing. She looked over the small workbench where sherefurbished gear, but the tools and paint and spare parts were undisturbed. Her orange Petzl caving pack sat where she had left it, unopened and leaning against the workbench, after returning from the hospital.
    Cell phones didn’t work in her place, an old farmhouse in second-growth woods at the end of a dirt road twenty-five miles north of Washington. She used the landline kitchen phone to call 911. The dispatcher told her units were on the way and urged her to get out of the house immediately. She sat in the kitchen with her SIG until the sirens were close, then clipped it back in place and went to greet the officers. They found the point of entry quickly—a forced rear window—and helped make a list of stolen items: the watch fob and medal, an old desktop computer and printer she rarely used, her television set and audio system, and a pair of silver candlesticks.
    Wrapping up, one said to