The Biz's apartment¶
The Biz's apartment is Dick "The Biz" Baxter's dust-covered Washington, D.C. apartment, which Andrew, Huell and Kurt search in The Radford Horrors to find out what happened to him; it hides gold, cash, cocaine, a cipher book and a bug-out briefcase.
| Type | Location (apartment) |
| Aliases | None |
| Region | Washington, D.C. |
| Resident | Dick "The Biz" Baxter |
| First appearance | Radford Horrors 01 |
Description¶
The apartment is in a complex with a front office. The mail slot is jammed and a post-office notice is stuck on the door. Inside are dust and cobwebs, a tape-patched brown leather recliner, a TV left on Animal Planet, a heater running, an ashtray of old butts, war memoirs, technical manuals, shelves of hard-boiled detective novels, Russian novels and books on Russian politics. The refrigerator holds rotten meat, and the phone is disconnected. There is no body (Radford Horrors 01).
Notable places within¶
- The desk: spam mail the Biz kept, including sweepstakes and jelly-of-the-month clubs.
- The loose floorboard under the rug: the Biz's full share of the gold (about two-thirds of the original find), roughly $8,000 to $9,000 in Ziplocs and rubber bands, and his cocaine.
- The heat vent under the bed: stripped screws mark it; inside is a bug-out briefcase with a few hundred US dollars, a much larger sum in Swiss francs, a cheap revolver, a change of clothes and a Swiss passport with the Biz's photo under the name Noah Mueller.
(All from Radford Horrors 01.)
The gold under the floorboard disagrees with the epilogue of Roulet Estate 03, in which the other agents bury the Biz's share in a park near his home and leave him a cryptic message.
History of events there¶
Andrew Howard, newly back from New York, picks up Huell from his squalid apartment, because Diane has called and cannot reach the Biz, who left the hospital months before. At the Biz's building, the front-office staff say, "Oh, thank God, the police are finally here about Baxter. Is he dead?" and half the room looks disappointed, and Huell guesses they have a betting pool on whether he is dead. Andrew's aura gets the manager to hand over the emergency key without ID (Radford Horrors 01).
Andrew's Investigate a Mystery roll (12) finds that a discount Playboy subscription began days before the Biz vanished, showing he planned to stay, and that a copy of Moby-Dick has its first few hundred pages removed. The discarded pages in the wastebasket have circled and underlined words, and a chart of numbers and arrows sits in the back; see the Moby-Dick book cipher. Unopened FBI mail shows the Biz was granted a six-month personal leave for a "family emergency" but never signed the follow-up paperwork (Radford Horrors 01).
Andrew privately asks Huell whether the Biz could be a double agent; Huell answers, "I didn't notice when you got replaced with an alien." Andrew phones Kurt, who arrives in the family minivan to the smell of "four-month-old ham." Kurt reassembles the torn pages and goes through the spam, finding bills for classified ads the Biz placed in the Washington City Paper, the Washington Informer and the Georgetown Current. The circled words read "instructions to cause soon submarine lost near" (order unknown, set incomplete). Kurt's Investigate a Mystery roll (11) finds the bug-out briefcase and he concludes the Biz meant to return, was corresponding with a third party and was intercepted. Diane is asked to narrow the disappearance window, pull international flights and check on missing submarines; she knows only of those lost at Marblehead (Radford Horrors 01).
Meanwhile in Moscow
The episode intercuts the search with the Biz's own scenes: he is a captive in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, held since January (Radford Horrors 01). The searchers do not know this.