Page 76 of The House of Cross

I got emotional and found myself praying for their safety. I reached into the bottom of John’s pack and came up with a little pink fob. Willow’s Jiobit fob.

That was strange. It was supposed to be in Willow’s backpack in DC.

I tucked that, Willow’s drawing, and the envelope for Sampson’s girlfriend in the chest pocket of my parka for safekeeping, then shut the car door. “You’ll have to have criminalists go through this vehicle.”

Tucker said, “I’ll call the state crime bureau. They can be on their way first thing tomorrow.”

Mahoney said, “What were you about to say about Alice Lake, Sheriff?”

“I was there,” he said. “First to respond to the Wheeler murders. I was a young green deputy with Blaine County’s sheriff’s department. Let’s get inside where it’s warm and I’ll tell you the whole thing.”

Mahoney climbed up front. I got in the back of the cruiser and shivered; Sheriff Tucker got in and turned the heat on full blast.

He described being on call almost forty years before and being dispatched to the Wheeler home on Alice Lake. The sons had found their parents murdered.

“It was a shitshow, top to bottom,” Tucker said. “I took one look and, I’ll admit it, I had to throw up.”

“Happens to everyone the first time,” I said. “Lot of blood?”

“Hell, whoever did it had to have been spattered head to toe with blood. But the Wheeler kids, the poor little bastards, were clean, and they were destroyed by the killings. One of them, Ryan, kept saying that he should not have kept his music playing all night, that if he or Sean had heard something from the boathouse, they could have called the police.”

“And Sean?”

“Kid was catatonic. Hardly able to say a word. Completely traumatized. Whatever happened to him?”

Mahoney said, “As we understand it, he had mental problemsafter the murders that his aunt tried to deal with. When he turned eighteen, he vanished with his inheritance.”

Tucker said, “And, what, you think Sean Wheeler became this character M?”

“We don’t know what to think, and the trail is thirty years old.”

“No leads whatsoever?”

“Just a possible name,” I said. “Ian Duncanson.”

I saw the sheriff blink and frown in his rearview mirror.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Is that possible?”

I said, “Out with it, Sheriff Tucker.”

“Let me make sure,” he said. He got on his radio and called his dispatcher. “This is Sheriff Tucker, Cat. Can you do me a favor and look up the name of the guy who disappeared hunting couple of months back? The guy from Boise.”

Cat came back a minute later. “Duncanson. Ian Duncanson.”

CHAPTER 56

THE DOOR OF THEoctagonal elevator closed on Bree and Sampson, and the elevator dropped for close to fifteen seconds before it slowed to a stop.

Sampson figured they were at least a hundred and fifty feet below the abandoned metal building. The door slid back with a whoosh, revealing a massive bald guy in his early forties and a fit woman with short sandy-blond hair who looked to be in her late thirties. They were about ten feet away in a hall with rock walls. Both held pistols loosely aimed at them.

“My name’s Lucas Bean,” the man said in a clipped British accent. “This is my colleague Katrina White.”

White said in a Slavic accent, “You should know that the elevator and the interior and exterior doors are all biometrically controlled. You cannot open them. If you’re going to ignore thatfact and be a problem, the restraints stay on. Will you be a problem, Chief Stone?”

Bree shook her head.

Bean looked at John. “What about you?”

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