Chapter 18
Manny and I drove to Washington, DC to see about a girl. Specifically, Emile Chambers’s daughter, Sophia Chambers, to ensure she wasn’t working in a coal mine or selling her body on a street corner. Neither of which was likely, because Sophia was eight.
Emile and Duane died when their daughter was one, approximately.
I didn’t know exactly because her vital records were secured by Maryland’s Department of Health and I had no contacts there, but enough public information was available to deduce that orphaned Sophia Cassie Chambers had been adopted by Theo Cardot, who had married a woman named Piper.
Sophia Chambers’s last name was now Cardot.
When I asked Manny why he insisted on coming along, he said, “The last trip, bad hombres were mean to you in jail. I do one thing well in life, and that’s why I’m here.”
“Deal with bad hombres?”
“And laugh when someone kicks you in the head. Two things.”
He told me every twenty minutes that he should drive so we could arrive by the end of the week.
He squirmed in the passenger seat like a tiger in a shrinking cage until I suggested that being a polite guest was a skill he didn’t possess, one that he could improve upon.
That got him thinking and he forced himself to relax and he even closed his eyes.
“You’re doing great,” I told him, on I-66.
“I’m an elite passenger,” he said, “and a ding-dong.”
“Yep.”
“Should Ronnie be here?”
“She had hearings today that she couldn’t squirm out from, and I think meeting Emile’s kid would be too much.”
“Shooting Duane Chamber’s wife,” said Manny, “is not something to lose sleep over. If half the things I heard are true.”
“It’s that Emile wasn’t holding a weapon. Ronnie tricked Emile into believing they were friends, and shot her in cold blood, so to speak. It eats at her,” I said.
Theo Cardot lived in Alexandria, Virginia, near the Virginia Theological Seminary campus.
Like many northern Virginia neighborhoods, theirs was a pocket of peace surrounded by mad interstates.
One could almost imagine it was a quaint hamlet in New Hampshire instead of twenty minutes outside the nation’s capital.
Lots of green grass and trees and sidewalks.
A white mail truck with Amazon boxes, the driver waving.
There’d be kids on bikes if they hadn’t been inside watching YouTube videos of kids on bikes.
We parked at Theo and Piper’s house and Manny said, “Theo went from broke Amish to baller?”
Their house was a modern Tudor-style home, humongous, with whitewashed brick and steep gables, set on an oversized lot.
New construction but trying to look old world to fit in with the prestigious Episcopal school.
Pale stone driveway, and a stately below-ground pool.
Though it was November, the pool wasn’t covered and steam rose from the adjacent hot tub visible in the side yard.
It might fetch three million on the market.
“We should arrest him,” said Manny.
“For?”
“You can’t get rich that quick. How’d he do it?”
“Little Sophia,” I said, “is not poverty stricken.”
“Unless she’s cleaning the place. You watched Sleeping Beauty? Her parents died and she’s a servant?”
“You mean Cinderella and yes,” I said. “Good point.”
He frowned at the house. “White Disney princesses look the same. Which is the Indian one?”
“Jasmine. But I think that was closer to the Middle East than India.”
“No, Pocahontas,” he said. “I liked that se?orita. She was an athlete.”
“Huh,” I said. “Still no diversity training at the Marshal’s Office?”
“They have the DEI seminars but they’re afraid to invite me. They know I’ll throw them off the roof. Besides, amigo, I was born diverse. What’d I say wrong about Pocahontas?”
“The biggest red flag is, you prefer her over Jasmine.” I opened the door and popped the trunk. “What the hell are we talking about. Be right back.”
“Which is the one with long blonde hair? Looks a little like Ronnie?”
I carried various disguises in the trunk, including magnetic stickers I could slap onto the side of the car.
One read SURVEYING, one read DELIVERY, one read TESTING.
Official identification placated people.
If they were suspicious of me, but they saw a label on the car which explained why I was hanging around, then they’d be satisfied and forget their suspicions.
I also carted around an orange hard hat, an orange vest, a clipboard, a name tag, an electronic theodolite, a big cardboard box like a delivery man might carry, and small charcoal canisters for radon detection.
Mackenzie August, master of disguise. I pinned on the name tag, which read Mark, and took the charcoal canisters.
I’d done this Radon Inspector ruse before, when I needed simple eyes-on-target verification. Like with the illegal GPS tracker on Buchanan’s car, any evidence I collected today would likely be inadmissible in front of a jury, but that wasn’t my goal.
Another warm November day in Virginia, temperatures in the sixties.
I rang the doorbell and waited and a woman opened it.
She was not as tall as me, but close. She didn’t weigh as much as me, but close.
She was pretty in the way female rugby players could be pretty.
She wore a sweatsuit and no shoes and her hair was back in a ponytail.
She also wore a headset, with one ear covered and a microphone that wrapped around to her mouth.
“Hi,” I said.
I wanted to continue with, We’re following up on radon reports and I have a box of charcoal testers, yours for free, if you like. Better safe than sorry. Is everyone feeling okay? Anyone wheezing? Do you have any kids?
But instead she did a jump and blurted, “Oh shit, ohmygod,” and she slammed the door. A wide heavy wooden door, probably walnut, and it thumped impressively.
“Hhm,” I said.
That was Piper Cardot. I recognized her from online photos, except the woman who’d slammed the door was one hundred pounds heavier than her photographs. Piper online was tall and healthy, but not obviously overweight, unlike the woman I’d just met.
I knocked on the door and called, “Everything okay?”
No answer.
Well. This didn’t make sense. But what else was new.
Maybe she’d been assaulted by a radon inspector?
The front walkway provided a view of the side yard and some of the pool area. Water pumps churned the pool’s surface, which was low and needed to be skimmed of leaves, and the hot tub churned and smelled like chlorine at a distance.
A man scampered into view. He moved on all fours like a dog and he had pinned an animal tail to his belt.
On his head he wore a hair band with furry ears.
He looked like a normal guy pretending to be a dog.
He crouched by the pool and knelt down to drink from it, then wiped his mouth and made an odd chirping noise.
He ran-galloped to one of the big trees and climbed it with the help of handholds to one of the lowest branches, where he sat and regarded me.
I remained on the front walkway, watching. Manny was leaning against the Honda with his hip, arms crossed. He tilted his face upward to the tree and the man-dog sitting in the branches. He shook his head and said, “White people.”
I recognized the White guy in the tree.
Theo Cardot. The son of Madeleine, and the adopted father of Sophia. He panted in the tree.
I made a sigh. “Ronnie’s not gonna love this.”