All Mortal Flesh (24 page)

The radio splash from Harlene, saying the chief had called in—up! Because he had been assaulted and his vehicle stolen—down! And that he needed a crime scene team for this house no one had ever heard of.

He got out of his car and thunked the door shut. In a matter of seconds, the chief appeared, limping across the enclosed front porch to let Mark in.

“Chief! Oh, man, am I glad to see you!” Mark glanced involuntarily over his shoulder. “Investigator Jensen is on her way. She’s really pissed.” He stepped onto the chilly porch and took a closer look at the man holding the door for him. A bruise was purpling down the side of his face, and his jeans were smeared with dirt.

“You look like hell,” Mark said.

“Yeah, but you should see the other guy.” The chief let the flimsy door drop into place and led Mark into the living room.

“What’s going on?” The living room was the definition of ordinary. It could have been his mother-in-law’s, albeit with fewer embroidered doohickeys lying around. And more computers. Way more computers. “Three desktops?” he said. “They got kids or something?”

The chief shook his head, then winced at the movement. “A witness places that Honda Civic”—he pointed toward the partially visible driveway—“at my house on Sunday afternoon. The day Linda was killed. The woman it’s registered to has no record, but when I came here to check things out, the guy she’s been living with for the past four months, according to the neighbors, jumped me. Knocked me down the stairs, stole my wife’s—my station wagon, and disappeared.”

Mark whistled. “You find anything here?”

“I haven’t had a chance to check out the upstairs yet. I got back from the accident scene right before you arrived. I want you to bust into those computers. Find out why Audrey Keane and her steroidal boyfriend need three of ’em. Somehow, I doubt they’re making their livings as Web site designers.”

“Will do.” Mark unzipped his parka and slung it over the back of the kitchen chair doing desk duty in front of the computer table. One computer was already running, its otherwise blank screen requiring a password to get any further. He rebooted it, starting it up in safe mode, and set about convincing the machine he was an administrator. The chief’s footsteps thumped about over his head.

“Mark! Get up here!”

He shoved away from the table and sprinted up the stairs. “In here, the back bedroom,” the chief said. He sounded strangely shaky.

The back bedroom was obviously used for storage. The double bed was heaped high with dresses in dry cleaner’s plastic; old magazines and worn-down shoes were piled atop cardboard boxes with WINTER SWEATERS and SUMMER PANTS scrawled on the sides in black marker. The chief was standing beside a girlish dresser whose top was cluttered with bowls and boxes of cheap jewelry. The lowest drawer was open.

“I was looking for something identifying the guy who jumped me.”

Mark stared. The chief had obviously rummaged through the colorful shirts and scarves stuffed in the drawer. Swaths of silky material fell from the edges, where he had pulled them away to reveal two snub-nosed Saturday night specials, a sap, and a large, wicked knife. Mark had seen the knife before. At yesterday’s meeting with the medical examiner. “It’s a K-Bar,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t touch it, did you?”

“No. I hit one of the guns with the edge of my hand. That’s when I took the rest of the clothing out.”

Mark felt a fierce smile fighting its way free on his face. He tried to stifle it. The chief certainly wouldn’t be smiling, not staring at the weapon that killed his wife. But all Mark could envision was Investigator Jensen’s face, when she saw how wrong she had been about the chief. Sure, it meant he was wrong, too, about Reverend Fergusson, but that he could live with.

Yeah, he could certainly live with that.

“We’d better leave this intact for the CS unit,” the chief said. “You have the chance to develop anything on those computers?”

“C’mon downstairs,” Mark said. “I’m about to get into the first one. If they’re networked together, I’ll be able to access them all.”

Seated back at the rickety computer table, he finished reassigning himself as administrator. “I’m in,” he said to the chief, who was slowly and methodically examining each of the two dozen photos hanging above the couch.

“Whaddya see?”

“I’m going to run a search function to find all the files created or modified in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Can you do that for any date?”

“Sure.”

“Look for any action on Sunday.”

“Okay.” While the search was running, Mark clicked on the Internet connection. He called up the history to see what the computer’s users had been up to online.

The chief leaned over his shoulder. “Anything of interest?”

“Lots of foreign sites.” Mark pointed to the entries with .de and .ch designations. “These Chinese ones might be some sort of spam harvesting or robot scraping sites.”

The chief stabbed a finger toward the screen. “What about this?”

“Northcountrylist.com?”

“My wife has that bookmarked on her computer.”

Mark clicked through. The Web site sprang up instantly. Whoever used these computers wasn’t fooling around when it came to access speed. “Looks like a help-wanted and swap site,” he said.

“I know. When I checked it out, I searched for Linda. Didn’t find anything. See if you find anything for Audrey Keane.”

Mark typed in her name. In seconds, it popped up. “Here she is.” He followed the hyperlink. “She’s advertising her services as a pet sitter. Huh?” He glanced around the living room, devoid of any sign that an animal lived in the house. “You’d think a pet sitter’d have a dog or a cat or something.”

“Oh, my God,” Russ said. “The cat.”

As soon as he said it, Mark understood. “Mrs. Van Alstyne got a cat. After you moved out.”

The chief stood up, his eyes distant, following a cloud of maybes and might-have-beens. “Linda hired the Keane woman to take care of the cat.”

“Was Mrs. Van Alstyne planning on going away?”

“Not that she told her sister. Or her friend Meg. Of course, she wasn’t used to clearing her schedule with them. Time was, if anyone was looking for her, I’d be able to tell them where she was.” He fell silent for a moment. “Maybe she thought her date with Mr. Wonderful might really go somewhere. Or maybe she had a trade show in New York she forgot to tell me about.”

“Her car was in your barn, though.”

“Maybe she changed her mind. Came home unexpectedly and surprised the pet sitter and her boyfriend doing… what? What can you do if people give you their keys and have you come over to feed and water Fluffy and Spot?”

“What couldn’t you do? Back a truck up to the front door and clean the house out while the family’s on vacation.”

“But the victims’d twig to that right away. First thing you’d think of when reporting a theft to the cops would be the stranger with a key. Besides, there hasn’t been a rash of burglaries in this area.”

Mark called up the search results.

“Hey,” the chief complained as Audrey Keane’s page winked out of view.

Mark opened one of the files, then another. Strings of numbers, interspersed with random letters. Clusters of letters. He counted a few. Fourteen. Ten. Fifteen. Twelve. Just about the right size, he figured, for first name, last name, and middle initial. Followed by twenty-five or forty-one or fifty-seven numbers. Some were much, much longer. None of them had fewer than nine. Nine. “What always has nine digits?” he asked the chief.

“Zip Code Plus. Bank routing codes. Social Security.”

Social Security numbers. The keys to the kingdom. “Identity theft,” Mark breathed.

“Say again.” The chief, who had been twitching around waiting for Audrey Keane’s page to reappear, leaned over Mark’s shoulder.

“I think they’re stealing identities. Names, dates, Social Security numbers…” He pointed to where a long string of numbers trailed after a cluster of letters. “I bet these are credit card numbers. Maybe even passports.”

“But those aren’t names.”

“It’s been encoded. With what looks like a cheap program. Maybe some freeware they downloaded off the Net. A good decryption program will break this in fifteen seconds.” He looked up at the chief. “I’m just guessing, based on what we’ve found so far. But I’d lay money I’m right.”

The chief nodded, his eyes alight. “It makes sense. The Keane woman hires out as a pet sitter. While she’s in the house, either she or her boyfriend goes through the old credit card bills, the tax returns—”

“She could take things like birth and marriage certificates, make copies, and then put ’em back.”

“The vacationing pet owners come home, everything’s in order, nothing missing, Fido and Precious fat and happy—Keane takes damn good care of those animals, I’ll bet.” He straightened. “It fits perfectly.” He glanced around the house. “The neighbors said she’s lived here two or three years. If she was pulling this scam off all that time, I think she’d be living a little higher on the hog, don’t you?”

Mark nodded.

“My guess is, the job started out as legit. Then her boyfriend arrives, after a year or two of her living alone. What does that suggest to you?”

“He was doing time.”

“Uh-huh. I bet he’s got a record for fraud as long as my arm.” He stalked to the window and glared out at the road. “When the hell is that crime scene technician getting here? The sooner we lift his fingerprints, the sooner we get his name off the d-base.”

As if in response to the chief’s complaint, an MKPD squad car crested the ridge, followed by an unmarked and the NYSP mobile crime lab. Noble Ent-whistle, in the cruiser, pulled ahead, letting the unmarked and the CS van squeeze into the last of the driveway. Noble parked his car opposite, lights on in warning.

Emiley Jensen and Lyle MacAuley emerged from the unmarked. It was a toss-up which of them looked less happy. The investigator’s teeth were gritted, as if she had torn off a hunk of nasty and now was going to have to give it a good chew. The deputy chief’s chin was jutting out and locked in place, as if he had something so enormous lodged in his craw he had to keep his jaws clamped to prevent it spilling out.

The chief vanished through the front door. Mark scooted the chair over to work on the next computer in line. He could hear the chief limp across the porch floor, the squeak of springs as he opened the door.

“Chief Van Alstyne!” Investigator Jensen’s voice cut through wall and glass like a blowtorch through butter. “You’re under arrest! Officer Entwhistle, cuff him.”

Russ ignored the woman crunching up the walk toward him. Instead, he focused on the state police technician, who was pulling equipment out of the rear of the van. “Hey! Sergeant Morin! You got a computer uplink in there?”

“Sure,” Morin shouted back. “Can’t guarantee it’ll pick up a signal out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Did you hear me?” Jensen demanded. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.”

Russ glanced at her. “Don’t rush the gate, Investigator. There’s no way you’ve gotten Ryswick to sign off on a warrant this soon.” He turned to Morin again. “I need you to run some fingerprints for me right away. The perp who stole my car’s just moved up into the prime suspect slot for our homicide.” He could say “our homicide.” It put a welcome distance between his heart and his brain.

“You’re the prime suspect in the murder of Linda Van Alstyne,” Jensen said. She barreled through the porch door, followed by Lyle, who lifted one bushy eyebrow and tilted his head in query.
What’s going on
?

Russ looked away. “Come on into the living room,” he said to Jensen. “I’ll fill you in on what Mark and I have found out.”

“Resisting arrest,” Jensen said.

“I’m not resisting anything.” He stood out of the way so Noble, holding up the other end of Sergeant Morin’s box of tricks, could back through the door. “Just as soon as Noble here comes at me with his cuffs, I’ll surrender gracefully.”

Noble shot him a worried look.

“You want fingerprints?” Morin asked. “Best place is usually the bathroom.”

“Upstairs.” Russ caught at Morin’s parka sleeve before the technician could turn. “In the second bedroom back, you’ll see a dresser on the other side of the bed. There are two automatics and a K-Bar knife in the bottom drawer.”

If they hadn’t been paying attention to him before, they were now. “Let me bring you up to date,” he said to the room, as Morin clomped up the stairs. He outlined Quinn Tracey’s statement about the car and how Lyle had run the plates for him. Jensen shot MacAuley a dirty look but didn’t interrupt as Russ described what he was now thinking of as the chain of crime: his breaking and entering followed by assault and grand theft auto. He conveyed the information he had gotten from the McAlistairs and told how he had uncovered the weapons. By the time Sergeant Morin thudded back down the stairs with his fingerprints and disappeared into his van, Mark was explaining his identity theft theory. Then he and Russ pieced together the possible events leading up to Linda’s murder.

Noble looked impressed. Lyle, the rat bastard, was nodding.

“Your wife hadn’t told anyone she was planning to be away?” Jensen asked.

“No, but that—”

“Do you have any evidence she hired this Keane woman? A check, maybe, or a record of a phone call?”

“We’ll have to look at the phone records and the bank statements again, now we know what to look at.”

“So you’re basing the entire connection between the pet sitter and the victim on the fact that your wife got a cat?”

“Quinn Tracey positively ID’d Keane’s Civic!” He expected her to treat him as a suspect. He didn’t expect her to blow off credible evidence pointing to another. He took a breath.

“A minor whom you questioned without the permission or presence of his parents.”

“I’m sure he’ll be willing to testify again. On the record.”

“I’m sure he would be. If you want him to.”

Now he really was mad. “What the hell are you implying? That I’m some sort of small-town Machiavelli who can co-opt anyone I come in contact with?”