Authors: Thomas Perry
As she watched him on the tour she reflected that he was better looking than he had
been before. She thought it might be because he had confidence tonight. He knew he
had impressed her with the restaurant, and when he was here on his home ground he
seemed masterful. He stood straighter and spoke with an ease that even made its way
into his voice.
He stopped in the living room in front of a section of white wall and said, “Something
from the bar?” He pressed a spot and a section of the white surface slid upward to
reveal a granite bar with a sink, cabinets where glasses of various shapes and sizes
were displayed, and rows of liquor bottles. He reached for a short, round bottle and
said, “This is a really nice cognac. Perfect for sipping while we complete the tour.”
“None for me,” she said. “I’ve already had more wine than I ever drink. That will
just put me to sleep.”
“You’re probably right,” he said. “And I’m going to be driving, so I’d better skip
it too. A soft drink then.” He opened a cabinet that had no glass in front, and revealed
that it was a small refrigerator. “Ginger ale?”
“Is it diet?”
He took out a can and looked at it. “It says it is.” He popped it and poured a glass
for her and another for himself. He left the bar open and led her onward. There was
an office in the place where she had guessed it must be, big and neat with a desk
that showed a reflection, and a big sliding glass door to the Japanese garden. They
passed three bedroom suites, all of them perfectly furnished and untouched. “There’s
another one with Japanese watercolors that overlooks the garden,” he said, “and two
others I made into a den and a pool room.”
That was the last thing that she heard him say before she became aware of the sun.
It wasn’t shining directly on her, or making her hot. Its light just invaded her sleep
until she was forced to open her eyes. She stared at the scene in front of her, trying
to make sense of it. Nothing seemed all right. Where was the yellow color of her bedroom
wall? And her dresser was missing. It should be right here, where she could see it
when she was lying in bed on her left side, like this. She rolled and sat up.
She had moved too fast. Her head felt tender and bloated, not quite a headache but
not normal either. She looked at the room and realized she had seen this room before,
but couldn’t quite place it. She exerted greater effort and realized she must be in
Daniel Crane’s bedroom. She was in his bed, naked. And now she admitted to herself
that she could feel that she’d had sex. How could she have done that?
She tried to bring the answer out of her memory, but her mind was sluggish, like a
heavy thing that she wasn’t strong enough to move. She would push it, and it seemed
to be going in the right direction, returning to the dinner, the view of the deep
chasm with the river at the bottom, the ride. She remembered coming into the house,
some vague flashes of rooms, although in no particular order. She recalled that she
had felt the effect of the wine, but that had just been a buzz. She hadn’t had the
spins or even felt dizzy. And then she brought back the secret bar in the wall and
the cognac. Had she had too much of that? She couldn’t remember.
Chelsea thought harder. She felt bad, frightened by the idea that she couldn’t remember.
The word
rape
floated to the surface of her mind. Had Dan Crane drugged her? She got up from the
bed and looked down at her body, then stood in front of the full-length mirror. There
were no marks or scratches. But would there be? This was terrible. She panicked. She
wanted to run.
She whirled, looking for her clothes. There, on the chair. Her underwear was on top,
and under it, her dress—not tossed carelessly, but laid over the back of the chair
to keep it from being wrinkled. She sucked in a breath. That was the way she would
have left her clothes. When she had undressed in front of a man before, she had found
she liked to face away from him. It made her less self-conscious and aware that he
would be staring at her, and she knew that her back and bottom were pretty. She came
closer and noticed the shoes. She would have stepped out of them while she was facing
away from the man and left them exactly that way, with the toes pointed toward the
chair. If a man had taken them off, he would have left them with the toes pointed
outward, away from the chair. She looked at the clothes again. No matter who had taken
them off her, the dress would have been first, and the underwear last, on top. But
if he had put her dress there, would he have done it exactly the way she did? It seemed
impossible. She must have done it herself. She must have done this, decided on her
own to have sex with Daniel Crane.
Where was he? She realized that in the past five seconds she had begun to smell coffee.
She picked up her clothes and hurried into the bathroom, shut the door, and locked
it.
She turned on the shower and let it run. The water was already hot. Of course he would
have one of those water heater systems that circulated hot water all the time. She
stepped into the stream, letting the hot water wash over her. She scrubbed herself
hard, soaping up and rinsing the lather off over and over, trying to feel clean but
not feeling satisfied. She kept thinking that the water would wake her up and clear
her mind, but she didn’t feel any effect.
She still didn’t remember anything that had gone on during the second half of her
tour of the house. She must have been so completely drunk that she’d paid no attention
to anything that he had said, and her eyes must have been closing half the time and
unfocused the rest, so her subconscious mind had simply not bothered to retain the
fragmentary information. How horrible and humiliating to have been so drunk. But if
she had been so drunk, why had he had sex with her? Couldn’t he tell? Had she even
been conscious?
She had to think about this carefully. Accusing somebody of a crime as serious as
rape was a big deal. The evidence she had found so far was that she didn’t remember
being with him, but that didn’t mean rape. She hadn’t been handled roughly, or there
would be marks on her, and there weren’t any. Her clothes had been laid out the way
she would have left them.
Chelsea worked hard, and reconstructed what she could of the sequence of her thoughts
from last night. She had been thinking about Dan, and his house, and his tastes, and
how much better he had looked in his own place. She had been gazing at him through
wine goggles. How did she get in his bed? She was pretty sure she must have invited
herself. Maybe when they visited this bedroom suite on the grand tour.
She turned off the water in the shower and took one of the oversized thick, soft towels
from the rack. As she dried herself, she looked around. The master bathroom was a
bit larger than her bedroom at the house where she’d lived with Nick, and it was covered
floor to ceiling in beautiful marble, with two sinks that looked like ceramic bowls.
The shower was big enough for six people, with four dish-size shower heads on the
ceiling and others spraying from the walls. Everything matched and looked as though
it had been hand polished a moment ago.
Dan had a lot of money, and he was generous with it, and good at thinking of tasteful
ways of spending it. She searched further in her memory. Had she gone to bed with
him because she was attracted to his money? No, she decided. What might have happened
was that he was a trusted friend, she was grateful for the good time he had given
her, and the wine had swept away her restraint and inhibitions. She had observed that
when a person was drunk he did what he’d wanted to do all along. But he went further
than he would at other times, didn’t wait, or consider, or speak quietly, or think
about consequences.
With that word a horrible thought came to her, but she pushed it away. She had not
been careful last night, but she definitely wasn’t pregnant. She had not made any
plans to ever have sex with anyone after Nick had died, but she had not stopped taking
her pills. She hadn’t made any changes to any part of her life, because change would
have taken energy and thought, and she’d been too busy grieving.
She supposed that wasn’t entirely true. Without knowing it, she must have been thinking
about Dan Crane. She used Dan’s hair dryer and the brush from her purse to dry and
brush her hair, dressed in the clothes from last night, and looked in the mirror.
The damage was done. She had thrown herself at Dan Crane. Now she would have to carry
herself as well as she could and see if there was anything in that relationship to
salvage, or if she had to break it off and refuse to see him ever again. She put on
her makeup, taking special care to get it exactly right.
She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the bedroom. On the table by the window
were a tray with a coffee pitcher and a small glass of orange juice, and a couple
of small pastries on a plate. But beside them, dwarfing the tray, was a glass vase
with a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. How had he gone to a florist already? She
looked around for a clock, but there was none, so she took her cell phone out of her
purse. Ten fifteen. Of course. He hadn’t gone, he had simply made a phone call and
they’d been delivered. She saw there was a little envelope. She plucked it out of
the flowers, opened it, her chest feeling hollow with dread, and read the card.
“Good morning, Chelsea. I hope you’ll join me for breakfast at Semel’s.” Not so bad.
No gushing, and no humiliating references to the sex. She put the note in her purse
and prepared for the next challenge. She would have to see him and talk to him. She
stepped out of the bedroom.
He was sitting on the bench in the Japanese garden drinking coffee and reading the
newspaper. There was Dan Crane under glass, still unaware of her watching. He was
hers to study, like a rare specimen sitting motionless in a terrarium. He looked slim
but strong, and the way the sunlight filtered through the overhead bough of a pine
tree and fell on his head and shoulders made him seem contemplative, sensitive.
She decided that when the time came, she would have to go out with him again. Next
time she would avoid alcohol and keep her eyes wide open. After that she would figure
out what she had done to herself—something bad, or something good. She walked to the
sliding glass door and opened it.
16
I
t was late—nearly morning—and Jane lay in a clump of maple saplings near the back
of the large plot of weedy land around the small old farmhouse near Avon. The only
sounds were the breezes rustling the leaves of the tall maples that shaded her thicket.
She had spent the night making visits to some places she’d thought might help her
understand Jimmy Sanders’s problem.
When she left Slawicky’s, she had driven to the bar in Akron where Jimmy and Nick
Bauermeister had fought. She had stayed outside to watch the door and the parking
lot for a couple of hours to get a sense of what sort of place it was and what its
patrons were like. Both the bar and its customers had seemed pretty ordinary. It was
just a typical Western New York place that drew a steady stream of locals who drank
beer and sat around talking. There was no band, no pickup scene, no bouncers, nobody
hanging around the lot outside. When it was very late she had driven to this small
farmhouse, the address of the victim and the scene of his death.
When Jane arrived, she had parked in the lot of a closed gas station and walked the
rest of the way. The house was set far back from the road in the middle of an expanse
that had once been a farmer’s field, so it would have been risky to bring a car. Instead
she moved across the field in her black clothes, hip-deep in brush and weeds, no more
visible than a shadow, and then stopped at the back of the house. She’d looked in
the windows, one by one, and found that nobody was inside. Nick Bauermeister’s girlfriend,
Chelsea Schnell, had left a few dim lights burning—a table lamp in the bedroom beside
her undisturbed bed, another in the living room, and a small fluorescent over the
stove in the kitchen.
The house was still fully furnished, so Chelsea hadn’t moved out yet. Jane went around
to the front of the house and stepped up on the porch to examine the windows. It didn’t
take long to find the one the bullet had passed through into Nick Bauermeister. The
outer frame of it had been spackled to fill nail holes where a piece of plywood must
have been nailed to cover the window until it had been replaced. She looked closer
and saw the glazing compound around the edges of the big pane was fresh and white.
She could see that the wall of the living room across from her looked different, probably
a new coat of paint that didn’t quite match the color of the rest, so that must have
been the place where the bullet and blood spatter had ended up.
Jane left the porch and went around the house looking for the best way in. At the
side was an old-fashioned cellar entrance, a concrete frame covered by a pair of wooden
doors at a thirty-degree angle from the house to the ground. There were a hasp and
padlock to keep it closed, but Jane took out her pocketknife and removed the screws
holding the hasp. She went down the steps, avoiding a rattrap on the fourth step,
then closed the doors and waited for her eyes to adjust to seeing in the moonlight
that the small cobwebbed cellar windows admitted. Then Jane carefully headed for the
wooden steps leading upstairs into the kitchen, watching her feet to keep from stepping
on anything in the near darkness.
The kitchen was small and neat, without much space for clutter or adornment. She opened
the refrigerator door to verify that the girlfriend was still living here, and saw
women’s food—yogurt, carrot sticks, celery sticks, a lot of vegetables in one drawer,
boxes of vegetarian burgers and breakfast sausages in another, and premade diet meals
in the freezer.
Jane moved through the house, not looking for anything, but looking at everything.
The newspapers had said the girl was twenty-three, but none had carried a picture
of her. In the bedroom Jane found framed photographs on the low woman’s dresser. One
was a blond, blue-eyed girl about the right age with a woman about forty-five to fifty
who resembled her. Jane studied the photograph, then moved to the next one.
This time the girl was with a young man. He was more than a foot taller than she was,
and broad shouldered with a small head. The word that came into Jane’s mind was “lout.”
He was beefy, but the arm muscles showing were not defined. He had a quarter inch
of blond hair, small, pale close-set eyes, and a smile that was crooked, as though
the smile was about to become a smirk. The eyes had an opaque quality that Jane had
seen in people who weren’t very bright but prided themselves on their cunning.
Nicholas Bauermeister had not been a very attractive man, but Jane was aware that
there were certain young women who found his type very male, and therefore, appealing.
Jane had never been one of them, but so far there was no indication that Bauermeister
had ever done anything that would have made his murder deserved or even likely.
Jane looked in the closet at Chelsea’s clothes. She was a size four. She didn’t have
bad taste, but the clothes were inexpensive, mostly from discount chains. She had
a collection of sneakers and flip-flops, all well-worn, and three pairs of high heels
that she hadn’t worn much, and some bad-weather boots. There was another bedroom that
had an old, swaybacked bed with a clean cover, and a closet full of male clothes.
Nick’s clothes were big—size thirteen boots and sneakers, double-X shirts, and jeans
with a thirty-five-inch inseam. He had a few pairs of cargo shorts, but no sport coats
or dress shoes.
Jane worked as efficiently as she could, touching little, moving nothing, and searching
a whole room before going on to the next. She found that Chelsea kept a shoebox filled
with the upper parts of bills she had paid and other business mail. One piece was
a set of bank statements dated two weeks ago. Since banks predated everything, these
had probably just arrived. Chelsea had just under two thousand dollars in her checking
account, and a bit under five thousand in a savings account. Nick had about nine thousand
in checking, and no savings.
In a drawer near the kitchen door Jane found a flashlight. She turned it on and went
down the steps to the basement. It took only a few minutes of searching to find the
first surprise, a large battered toolbox under a workbench. She opened it and found
a black cloth bag with handles like a satchel. Inside were an eighteen-inch crowbar,
a center hole punch, a pair of wire cutters, long-handled bolt cutters, a headband
with a light on it, a small bright LED flashlight, a couple of hacksaw blades with
tape wrapped around one end to form a handle, and a piece of sheet metal cut with
a hook on the end to make a slim-jim for opening a car door lock. The last object
in the box was a small white cloth bag. Jane touched it and recognized the feel. She
opened it and found a pair of thin leather gloves, a pullover ski mask, and a Glock
19 pistol. Jane ejected the magazine, found it was loaded, and pushed it back in.
Nicholas Bauermeister had been a thief.
Jane returned the objects to the cloth bag, and then the toolbox, and put the box
back under the bench. How had the police missed Bauermeister’s burglary kit? They
had come to the house in response to Chelsea’s call that he had been murdered, and
that made the whole house a crime scene, not just the living room and the field in
front of the house. It was true that they hadn’t come to investigate the victim, but
when police had control of a victim’s house they usually tried to figure out who he
had been and what could have brought him the kind of enemies who shot people to death.
Jane supposed that the local police in this peaceful rural area had very little experience
with homicides.
Jane searched harder now, examining every part of the basement for anything else that
might be hidden. She checked the oil furnace, then tugged on the aluminum air ducts
to see if one made a suspicious rattle or had a joint that came apart easily. That
was one of her favorite hiding places in the old house where she had grown up. Nothing.
She used the flashlight to take a panoramic view of the basement. There were the standard
sewer pipes, a water heater and copper pipes, the work bench, the washer and dryer,
a couple of stationary tubs. There was an old refrigerator in the corner. She opened
it, found about a case of Molson’s Golden, and a few diet colas. She lifted each to
be sure none was heavier or lighter than the others. She opened the freezer, but found
it empty.
In another corner of the basement were a snow blower and a double stack of twenty-five
pound bags of rock salt. Nick Bauermeister had undoubtedly used the salt to melt ice
on the steps and the blower to clear the long driveway in the winter. As she moved
the flashlight beam again she noticed something and brought it back. The top two bags
and the bottom two bags were identical, but the two in the middle seemed thinner.
She came closer, removed the top two bags, and examined the middle pair. As soon as
she touched the first bag she knew she had something. The seam of the bag facing the
wall was just folded over. The two bags had been opened from the bottom. She opened
the first bag and felt inside, then pulled out a clear plastic Ziploc bag. Inside
were a ring with a diamond of at least three carats, five pairs of stud earrings with
colored stones, and a woman’s Cartier tank watch with a sapphire on the stem. The
next bag had three men’s watches—two Rolexes and a Tag Heuer. There were a few other
bags that held only one or two items—a spectacular cocktail ring, a necklace, or a
pin. She laid them out and took pictures with her phone’s camera, and then put them
back in the salt bag. The next salt bag had some odd things—about twenty gold coins
in the small cardboard coin holders with plastic windows that collectors used, and
a fancy pocketknife with a handle of inlaid opal, onyx, and coral. There was a set
of heavy gold cuff links and tie tack with blue stones she guessed were lapis lazuli.
She photographed these too and returned them to the salt bag.
She tried to interpret what she had just found. What it looked like to her was not
the proceeds of one burglary. The trove seemed to be small, choice items from a number
of burglaries. But a professional burglar wouldn’t hold on to a cache of distinctive
traceable jewelry for very long. If the pieces were insured, then the insurance company
would have pictures. A pro would want to move the jewels quickly, usually to a fence
who would break them up, reset them, and melt the original settings down. The fence
would at least sell them in another part of the country. Burglars didn’t want to build
up collections of stolen jewelry. What they wanted was cash.
Bauermeister’s hoard brought to mind one of the hazards of holding on to loot. It
made the burglar a potential robbery victim. But the one who had killed Bauermeister
hadn’t come after the jewels. He had simply shot him and left without ever coming
inside. Maybe Bauermeister had been working with a partner, or even a crew, and had
gotten into the habit of pocketing an especially valuable item now and again. That
might make a colleague kill him. It was true that nobody had come for these hidden
jewels, but if there were a colleague Bauermeister had cheated, maybe he didn’t know
about these items. Maybe he had caught Bauermeister stealing something else.
Theories kept occurring to Jane as she searched the basement, but she couldn’t find
evidence to make her settle on one theory, and she found nothing else. It was very
late, and she had been in the house too long. She went up the steps to the kitchen
and returned the flashlight to its drawer, then went through the darkened basement
to the cellar door, climbed out, and closed the doors. She put the hasp and padlock
back, then reinserted the screws and tightened them with her pocketknife.
She stepped to the garage and opened the door. There were two vehicles inside, a small
old Mazda and a newer black Dodge pickup. Jane did a quick search of the Mazda and
found little except the sorts of things Chelsea might be expected to have left—gum,
hairbrush, bottled water, hand lotion, sunscreen, pens, receipts, a yoga mat. Chelsea
was apparently a woman who used her car as a big purse. There was nothing in it to
tell Jane anything about Nick Bauermeister.
The pickup was next. The flatbed was empty; the glove compartment held only the manual,
registration, insurance receipt, and a pocketknife. On the floor was a bar for locking
the steering wheel that had its key in it. She popped the hood and searched for hiding
places, looked beneath the truck and under the seats, but found nothing.
She searched the garage, but found nothing else that was of interest. There could
be more, she thought. But then she realized where it might be, if there was anything.
Nick Bauermeister had worked at a storage facility.
Jane left the garage, closed the door, and made her way across the dark field and
along the road to the gas station to retrieve her car. She got in and drove along
Telephone Road, then stopped after a mile, checked her printed sheets to be sure she
had remembered the address correctly, and went on.
When she reached Box Farm Personal Storage it was after 4:00
am
. As she drove by she studied the complex. A seven-foot chain link fence with four
strands of barbed wire strung along the top enclosed it. Inside were four long, low
buildings, each consisting of nothing but a double row of storage bays, one after
another. There was also a two-story building, which seemed to have smaller storage
bays on the ground floor and an office with big windows on the second floor. In one
of them she could see a man sitting at a desk. She caught a glimpse of a row of television
monitors on the wall above him. That meant there were security cameras mounted on
the eaves of the buildings or on the light poles above the parking lot.
She passed without stopping. When she reached the outskirts of the town of Akron she
found an empty carport in a large apartment complex, parked her car inside, and went
to sleep.
At six the sun woke her, and she drove to the business section, where she found a
diner that seemed to have the right number of customers. She took a booth near the
back, sat where she could face the rear wall, and ate breakfast while she thought
about what she had seen during the night. At seven she drove back past Chelsea Schnell’s
small farmhouse. As Jane drove past she saw that the same lights were on in the windows,
and nothing else had changed, so she drove another half mile and parked her car off
the road. She walked back and stationed herself in a thicket of saplings beneath the
tall maples at the rear of the field behind the house.