AS A CIVIL ENGINEER, he occasionally did property searches to make sure that he wouldn’t be digging up somebody’s sewer line or fiber-optic cable. The day after Stokes had told him about the 1919 site, Dunn had gone to the Fauquier County courthouse. Stokes had mentioned that he’d been a renter, but had eventually been kicked out of his apartment and was temporarily living with his sister, Rachel, who owned an acreage around the town of The Plains.
He found a Rachel Stokes on a six-acre property in a rural area three miles north of The Plains, a small town not far from Warrenton. He cruised the place—an old flat-roofed cracker box with two pillars holding up a porch roof, all of it badly in need of paint. Another house sat a couple of hundred yards away, but the weather was still warm, verging on hot, and everybody would be using air conditioners, which made effective silencers.
He’d read that, anyway, or maybe had seen it on a TV show.
After spotting the Stokes property, he’d gone back to his job site, talked briefly to the general contractor’s foreman, and then he and his crew continued laying out a series of cul-de-sacs. After a long discussion of drainage issues in the afternoon, he left an hour early, went home to shower and get his guts up for killing Randy and Rachel Stokes.
He wouldn’t do it without regret. Randy would be a loss to no one, but Rachel might be a perfectly decent woman caught in a moment of political necessity. He’d always liked that name: Rachel, even though it sounded Jewish to his ear.
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS A SATURDAY, and he began moving from planning to action. He began by renting a car; he didn’t want his car anywhere near the Stokeses’ house. He cruised the house twice on Saturday, but never saw Randy Stokes’s car parked there. No matter: he wasn’t quite ready to kill. He noted that the road was most often empty.
On Sunday, he cruised the house twice more. Still no sign of Stokes’s car, and that began to worry him. Had Stokes taken off for parts unknown? At home Sunday night, he prepped the Ruger 9mm, making sure that it was mechanically perfect, that all possible prints and DNA were scrubbed off the cartridges. When he was satisfied, he smelled somewhat of gun oil, but... so what?
On Monday, he went to work, as usual. Stokes was there, leaning on his shovel. Dunn stayed away from him.
At home that afternoon, Dunn put on a long-sleeved overshirt, worn unbuttoned at the front, which would conceal the pistol tucked into the small of his back, under his belt, but would be loose enough to provide easy access to the gun. For the trip over to the Stokes place, he put the Ruger, in a fabric holster, under the front seat of his car.
When he was set, he checked the time: ten minutes after five. Way too early. Stokes was a regular, in the way only an addictcan be regular, at Chuck’s Wagon. He’d be there as soon as he got off work, and would stay as long as he had money, or until the bartender cut him off. That might be as late as eight o’clock.
A Walmart Supercenter and a Home Depot both had busy parking lots not far from Chuck’s Wagon, and after checking them out, he found a spot in the Home Depot lot from which he could see the bar’s driveway. He drove over to the bar to make sure that Stokes was there: and he was.
Encouraged by the way his plan was working, in his head, anyway, he drove back to the Home Depot and parked. And waited. Longer than he’d hoped. People came and went from the Home Depot, and as far as he could tell, nobody paid him any attention. Six o’clock. Six-thirty. He began to get cold feet. Killing two people? What was he thinking? He almost left then, headed back home to think about it some more.
He might have, if he hadn’t seen Stokes’s car pulling out of the parking lot...
—
HE FELL IN BEHIND STOKES, who drove too slow, the speed that experienced drunks drive when they know they’ve had a few too many. They threaded through Warrenton, then out Highway 17 to the turnoff at Old Tavern, across I-66, through The Plains and then out of town on Hopewell Road and finally to Rachel Stokes’s house, where Stokes pulled into the driveway.
As he did, Dunn honked his horn twice, then pulled into the driveway and half-climbed out of the rental car, tucking the gun in behind his belt, pulling the shirt over it. Stokes was out of his car, squinting into Dunn’s headlights.
Dunn called, “Randy—it’s Elias Dunn. I thought that was you. This where you live?”
Stokes called back, “Hey, El. Yeah. What are you doing out here?”
“Got a client over by that Antioch Church. Anyway, I saw you, thought I’d honk.”
Then, what Dunn had hoped for: “Hey, whyn’t you come in, have a beer? I’ll introduce you to my sister.”
“Well... I gotta get over... well, maybe one beer. That can’t hurt. It’s been a long day.”
—
THE EXTERIOR OF THE HOUSEwas in bad shape, but the interior was surprisingly habitable, neatly kept, homey, in a latter-day-hippie way. Bead curtains and fabric art. Rachel Stokes was apparently a quilter or a quilt collector, with a variety of quilts on the walls of the living room, all neatly displayed, hanging off one-inch dowel rods.
Rachel was in the back of the house, in the kitchen, when they walked through the front door, and Stokes called out to her, and asked, “You decent? I got a friend here...”
Rachel came out to look, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and seemed a little surprised when she saw a neat, well-groomed friend. She was dark-haired and short, early thirties, Dunn thought, a few pounds too heavy but pleasant-looking, with warm brown eyes. “I’m Rachel,” she said.
Dunn nodded and said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I saw Randy turning in here, just stopped to say hello. I’m an engineer, we’ve worked on a couple of jobs together.”
“An engineer? What kind?”
“Civil engineer, ma’am. I lay out roads and the curbs and the lots and drainage and so on. Randy and I are working on that new subdivision over by Gainesville.”
Stokes said, “I asked him to come on in for a beer.”
