"A very nice backyard, Senator. The woods, how far back do they go?"
"They're not that deep. The brick wall continues all the way around the property. There are two gates, one in the front and a smaller one in the back for the garbage people and repair people who come in on a narrow access road running alongside it."
A perfect place, Sherlock thought, drive right in, and pull out your gate key-oh, yes, whoever was behind this had a gate key-and set up this elaborate gaslight charade. She gave the senator's bedroom one last look. She realized now what he'd done. All the bareness, all the absence of any mementoes of their life, except for his wife's jewelry box, he'd simply moved everything out, and not replaced it with anything of himself. After three years, it was still too soon.
Sherlock and Savich stopped a moment on the wide front veranda of the colonial mansion and enjoyed the morning sun shining down on the colorful flowerbeds lining the front of the house. It was early September and the trees were still full and lush.
Sherlock asked him, "Sir, are you seeing anyone socially?"
He looked startled, and then she saw a tightening around his mouth. "Not really," he said, again looking at her hair. "Well, yes, occasionally, I see Janine Koffer, she's Lane Koffer's widow, you know, the former secretary of state? He died two years ago. Prostate cancer."
He slept with her, Savich thought, and it made sense. Washington, he'd learned over the years, was a very lonely place, despite the scores of young people bursting its seams with their undisciplined boundless energy, their still unfocused ambitions. If you were smart, you took your comfort where it wouldn't come back to bite you in the butt.
Savich and Sherlock shook Hoffman's hand. "Please do what you normally do, Senator," Savich said, "and remember, don't breathe a word of our coming tonight to anyone, Corliss Rydle, your cook, Mrs. Koffer, anyone."
"All right. When will you come tonight?"
Savich shook his hand. "I'd just as soon you didn't know any more than you do now, sir. But we'll be here."
6
"I saw it come from behind those oak trees," Sherlock said, pointing, "moving slowly, hesitantly, like it didn't know where it wanted to go. But look now, it's moving fast, in a straight line to the senator's bedroom window."
Savich said, "I'd hoped it would come down from the roof."
"Easier to yank up, you mean? For the instant vanishing act?"
"It seems the easiest way for human hands to control it." Savich raised his cell phone, zoomed in, and snapped several pictures of the apparition fast approaching the second-floor bedroom window. They watched it close in, then simply hang there a moment before it began moving about, billowing, then dancing up and down.
"You know it's got to be human hands, Dillon, given that enthusiastic performance," Sherlock whispered. "I'd say a standard-size pillowcase, like the senator said, a whole lot of thread count, very fine material, probably Italian."
"Let's go find how they're doing this," Savich said, took her hand, and turned into the woods. They stopped cold at odd huffing sounds from behind them, like someone trying to breathe, Savich thought, like the senator's dying wife trying to breathe. It seemed to be coming from the house. The senator had nailed the sound.
"There must be some wires, something." Sherlock adjusted her night-vision goggles. She always kept her feet planted on terra firma. "I'll bet you're thinking it's someone in the family, too, admit it. Family-it's depressing. Cursed money, it's behind too much bad in this world.
"I'm glad whoever's behind this believed it was just fine to perform tonight. I don't see a wire or anything, do you, Dillon?"
They stood quietly at the spot where the apparition had floated out of the woods, staring up, looking for a wire, anything. "Not yet," he whispered.
As she scanned the trees, she whispered back, "I wonder how the person responsible for this ghost performance plans to get the senator's money? Surely he or she doesn't expect the senator to die of fright or run screaming to an asylum, so they can pronounce him incompetent? And why would he flip out now if he hasn't already? Why keep it up? Sounds like a real long shot to me."
They combed through the oak and maple trees. No wire in sight.
"So it's a very fine wire, or could the whole thing be radio controlled? But it has to originate from somewhere, somewhere in sight," she said.
Savich opened the back gate that gave onto the small access road at the back of the property. When they'd left the senator's house that morning, they'd checked the area behind the property. They saw only the same two crushed empty beer cans, the same half-dozen cigarette butts.