Chapter 24
Magda woke just before noon. The men were making their breakfast right down the hall from the den. Men banged pans down on the burners and set stacks of plates on tables too loudly, and while their voices began as whispers, about once a minute one of them would forget and raise his voice.
She got up and climbed the stairs to one of the bedrooms, took a shower, washed and dried her hair, dressed, and went back downstairs.
She saw they had saved a chair for her, then decided it was probably the one Maxim had left vacant.
She cooked herself some eggs and bacon and sat down to eat while the men were clearing their dishes.
She said, “Today I want to go through the house carefully. Now that Brian Finlay is gone, we don’t have to worry that he’ll wonder why I’m searching my own house.
You’re looking for anything interesting, but especially anything that points to another address.
I think she may have another place to live.
It might be two blocks from here or two hundred miles.
It doesn’t matter if it’s her place or someone else’s place. She’s not here, but she’s somewhere.”
Dmitri, Daniil, and Mikhail appeared to agree that this was a wise plan, but it might be that they were anxious to be doing something, and didn’t much care what it was. Over the next few hours, she was pleased to see them working, searching, up on their feet and moving.
It was late afternoon before Mikhail approached her in the first-floor bedroom.
She had pushed the bed aside and was on her knees, moving from one floorboard to the next, using a knife to try prying up each one, hoping to find one that could be lifted to reveal a cache of documents or something else that would provide a lead.
She heard him and turned to look up. She kept her eyes on him and waited.
He said, “That house—the next one over—have you seen anybody coming or going?”
She stood and looked out the window where he was pointing. “I don’t think so. Have you asked the others?”
“Yes. Nobody else has seen anyone either. At first I didn’t wonder about it because the lights would go on downstairs in the early evening, and then they’d go off and then the upstairs ones went on at around eleven and off around eleven twenty.
But that never changed, and the curtains in the windows never moved. ”
Magda said, “Go take a look.”
“Yes,” Mikhail said. “I will.”
He left, and then she watched through the upper window as he made the short walk to the back of the other house. He crouched beside it, bending and leaning to put his eye to the corner of a window to peer at the inside through a spot the curtain didn’t quite cover.
When a light beyond a curtain came on, she saw him give a startled jerk and then recover. It made her smile. He turned and looked up at her window and nodded. She walked to the stairs, hurried to the kitchen door, and went to join him.
He said, “There are no signs or stickers for an alarm system. I saw a plug-in timer for the pole lamp in the living room, but I haven’t seen an alarm keypad.”
“Can you pick the back door lock?” she asked.
“Yes. But I can’t be sure the door won’t have a deadbolt set from the inside.”
“There may be one without a deadbolt set. If not, you can kick the door in.”
He climbed the steps to the door, knelt in front of it, stuck his tension wrench into the keyhole, used his pick to rake the pins into line, turned the cylinder, and pushed. The door opened, and Magda walked past him into the house. He followed her and closed the door.
The house was structurally similar to the house where they’d been waiting to catch Jane, but there were differences that mattered to Magda.
There was clutter—AARP and Field & Stream magazines addressed to Jacob Reinert on a table beside an easy chair that tipped back to semi-recline, a buffet counter with a tray, a bottle half full of brown liquor next to a clutch of crystal glasses, a big television screen on the opposite wall with a few fingerprints on its black surface.
They went deeper into the house. There was another envelope on a table in the small room across the hall from the dining room.
Magda saw that the letter was not addressed to anybody named Reinert.
It was addressed to Ms. Jane Whitefield, from the Cornell University Alumni Association.
“He has to be the one who keeps her mail for her when it gets delivered,” she said.
“This is probably an old address.” She looked among the magazines for anything else.
Then she said, “Keep looking, the same as we did next door. Don’t ignore anything.
Everything that tells us something we didn’t know will help.
But don’t leave any fingerprints.” She turned and started to go back toward the kitchen.
“Are you leaving?”
“Just for a minute. I’m going to get the others over here.”
Mikhail heard her go out and close the kitchen door. That was when he noticed the address book on the bookshelf. He opened it at W.