Triple Cross

Indeed, Greenbriar Storage turned out to be just a short detour off the most direct route to Lake Barcroft and the Allison family home. Edna Martinez, the fifty-something owner, was working in the office when we entered. She remembered Thomas Tull.

“I’m in two book clubs,” she said and cackled. “How could I not know him?”

“Did you hear he’s under arrest?” Sampson asked.

Ms. Martinez’s shock was complete. “Thomas Tull?”

“In connection with the Family Man murders,” I said. “We need to get into his storage unit, please.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“Do you have a fax number? We’ll get the warrant for his town house amended to add the storage unit.”

The owner of the facility became more helpful, giving us her fax number and telling us she’d call the woman who cut the locks off her units.

By the time we watched the amended warrant print out on her fax machine, a forty-something woman named Lenora Sands had arrived with a special carbide saw designed to cut the curved locks that Martinez demanded clients use on each unit.

Sands led us to unit 1204 E, a six-by-ten-foot space with a red roll-down door and a stout lock that the carbide tool cut like it was butter. It fell at our feet. Sands bent down to pick it up, but I stopped her.

“Could be evidence,” I said.

“Oh?” she said.

“You never know,” Sampson said, putting it into a bag.

The locksmith seemed interested in seeing what we found, but we politely asked her to leave while we did our work. “Of course,” she said and walked off.

I waited until she’d rounded the corner before squatting and rolling up the door. After taking a long look at the room, I turned to John and said, “I’ll go get her.”

Luckily, I caught up to Sands in the parking lot. “Lenora, have you ever cracked a safe?”

She closed one eye, said, “Make?”

“I think it said Liberty.”

“Helps. Tumbler?”

“Digital pad.”

She cocked her head in reappraisal. “That helps too.”

Sands climbed into her van and soon emerged with a small black carrying case that said liberty safe on it. “My husband and I are their certified techs in this area.”

“Good to know.”

“People forget their codes all the time,” the locksmith said.

We returned to the storage unit. Sampson had climbed over a couch, a kitchen table, and several chairs and was rummaging through boxes stacked on the far wall.

“Anything?”

“Lot of books and knickknacks.”

“Lenora says she can get us into the safe.”

“I’ll check the filing cabinets,” he said and climbed over a credenza to four filing cabinets along the rear wall of the unit.

Sands struggled but reached the black safe at the back and soon had a notebook computer plugged into the underside of the digital keypad. She gave the computer a series of commands, then looked up and around.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not getting a clear satellite signal through … oh, now it’s talking.”

“Who’s it talking to?”

“A security computer at Liberty, which should generate a onetime code to override the real combination. And you are law enforcement, which we click here.”

The locksmith hit Enter and looked at the safe expectantly. Several moments later, a light on the pad flashed green and heavy steel bars rolled back. Sands turned to us. “She’s all yours.”

“Leave us an invoice at the front counter,” I said. “And thanks.”

“It’s what I do,” the locksmith said, and she left.

I opened the safe door, revealing seven weapons. Three were bolt-action hunting rifles with Leica scopes. The other four were AR-style rifles with Aimpoint sights. Boxes of ammunition were stacked on the floor at the back.

I went through the top inner drawer and found various legal documents, including Tull’s will and the title and deed to his home on Moosehead Lake in Maine. There was a Glock nine-millimeter pistol in a holster in the second drawer. The third drawer was empty.

“Find what you were looking for?” Sampson asked.

Every person who’d died in the Family Man murders had been shot with a .40-caliber pistol.

“Not today,” I said, unable to hide my disappointment as I turned to face him.

“That’s okay. I did,” he said, grinning and holding a pen stuck through the trigger guard of a black pistol fitted with a suppressor. “Glock, forty cal. And it smells like it’s been fired recently.”

CHAPTER 82

THAT EVENING ALEX CAME home exhausted but happy that they’d all but nailed Tull to the wall. The poor guy had slept less than four hours in the past two days and went to bed after dinner so he could wake up early and be there when the writer was arraigned in the morning.

Bree had to be up early too to catch the train back to New York, but she wasn’t feeling tired and was uninterested in the movie Nana Mama, Ali, and Jannie were watching. She climbed up to Alex’s attic office with a pair of earphones.

After closing the door, Bree sat on the couch and listened to the recording she’d made the previous day in Ohio. At first, she heard only branches scraping her jacket and the wind blowing as she ducked through the back hedge of Theresa May Alcott’s estate and crossed the lawn.