Triple Cross

I said, “Go straight to the cruiser behind us and give your contact information to the officer there. Sorry to have interrupted your run.”

He nodded uncertainly. The terrier was still growling. “Thank you. What’s going on?”

“Just checking a suspicious person seen in the area.”

Boulter looked at our guns, nodded again, and turned.

“Hey,” Sampson said. “What’s the name of your bakery?”

“Sunrise,” he said. “We’re in the book.”

“Go home, Mr. Boulter,” I said and turned back toward the Allisons’ house.

Boulter broke into a jog. As we started up the driveway, I glanced back, saw the silhouette of him and his dog stopping to talk to the officer blocking the road.

“I say we go inside before the uniforms,” Sampson said.

It was somewhat against protocol, but we feared for the Allisons. If the killer had managed to shut down power or communications from the safe room, he could have gotten inside. He could be executing them now or getting ready to.

“Dispatch, do we know the location of the safe room?” I asked.

“Center of the basement, behind the back wall of the wine cellar.”

We went to the front door. I tried the knob.

Locked.

We moved fast around the house and found a screened-in side porch. A large piece of screen had been cut and folded down.

“Here we go,” I whispered, crawling through on my hands and knees.

The porch had sliding glass doors. One was ajar.

CHAPTER 74

THERE’S ALWAYS A SPLIT second of stiffness, of hesitation, before you go through a door seeking someone who’s likely to try to kill you.

But then years of training take hold, and the shoulders relax and the mind focuses into an almost hyperalertness, attuned to any movement or sound. Sampson went into the house first, with me hard on his heels and covering our six.

We both turned on Maglite flashlights and held them in our left fists, our pistols braced on top across the backs of our hands. John stepped into a great room that ran the width of the house. We went toward the kitchen, clearing behind the sofas and the floor-length curtains.

We did not have a diagram of the house and were forced to bumble through, trying the lights unsuccessfully after we’d cleared the great room and entered the kitchen. We went to the first door off the kitchen, looking for the staircase to the basement. Sampson slipped up to the right edge of the door frame. He pinned his spine to the wall, gun ready. I pulled the door open.

The pantry. One of two doors at the rear of the kitchen revealed the laundry. When I opened the third door, we saw carpeted stairs dropping into darkness.

Easing down, guns still braced, we dissected every shadow with the powerful flashlights until we reached the floor of a massive basement. There was a small movie theater on the left and a larger game room on the right.

Beyond them, in the center of the basement was a stone wall the height of the room and about twenty feet long. Hallways ran off into the dark on both sides of the wall, which wept, water trickling down the stones into a narrow cache for the fountain.

“I’m guessing the wine cellar’s behind that wall.”

“Left or right hallway?”

I shone my light to the right over the cream-colored carpet, seeing where it was compressed from use and noticing a red-wine stain.

Around the right corner of the rock wall, we found a heavy whitewashed oak door with a wrought-iron thumb latch. Once again, we operated as if we were in the middle of an intense training session.

The door creaked when I pulled it, revealing a two-door wrought-iron gate with the letter A crafted into its face. Beyond it was a terra-cotta tile floor, a tasting table with two chairs, and four walls filled top to bottom with wine bottles.

There had to have been four thousand bottles there, maybe more. But no one was in the wine cellar that we could see, and there was no apparent exit.

Sampson drew up the rod holding the gate into the floor and pushed it open as it made a protesting creak. “This is Detective Sampson of MPD. Mr. Allison? Can you hear me? If you can, please come out.”

I stepped in after John and we stood there, listening to the sounds of our breathing and nothing else for several long moments. Then we heard the distinct sounds of steel bars being thrown. A section of the back wall of the wine cellar swung slowly out about twenty degrees and threw flickering soft light into the wine cellar.

Before we saw anyone, we heard a young boy cry, “You were right, Dad! It worked perfect! He had no idea.”

“I want to sleep, Mama,” a little girl said, coming out from behind the secret door. She was no more than four, with curly blond hair; she was dressed in jammies, holding a blanket, and sucking her thumb.

Seeing us, she turned back against the thigh of the tall, pretty woman in a flannel nightshirt and robe. She sighed and then smiled at us. “Thank you, Detectives. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life. Is he still here?”