Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (13 page)

“Got an address,” Frank told him, starting the engine. “Amazing what’s available at your local library. Course, it’s handy when you’re named Nancy Filson and not Jane Smith. But I can see why librarians are calling themselves information technologists nowadays. Makes them sound like the CIA, but they ain’t wrong.”

Neil wasn’t interested. “She live near here?”

“Yeah. South Winooski Ave. Just across town.” Frank leaned toward the dash and punched an address into the car’s GPS unit.

Neil checked his watch. “You think she’ll be there?”

Frank pulled into traffic. “Beats me. She didn’t show up at work, and the woman on the phone said she was supposed to. So, either she’s sick or she hit the road.”

“’Cause of us?”

Frank grinned. “I hope so. I like to think I’m a scary guy.”

“The other broad tipped her off—Corcoran?”

“That surprise you?” Frank asked, his eyes on the road. He always drove with two hands on the wheel, never broke the speed limit, always signaled his lane changes, and regularly checked that all his car lights functioned, even if it was a rental. He was not a man to make it easy for a patrol car to pull him over.

“I thought you told me she barely knew this one.”

“Everybody lies, Neil. Haven’t you heard that? All the cops know it. I’m not saying Corcoran necessarily called Filson, but it’s a small town, they work for the same college, and are in kind of the same discipline, more or less. Stands to reason they know each other. I’m betting old Sandy kept her cool about telling me how buddy-buddy she was with Nancy. Gutsier than I thought she was.”

Neil wasn’t so admiring. On his own, he would have returned to Corcoran’s house and exhibited his irritation. Not that it would have been necessary, since he wouldn’t have left her alive in the first place.

Still, Frank was the boss, and while he may have been the weirdest guy Neil had ever worked with, he was also the most successful and the most generous—not a bad combination in a line of work renowned for its generally poor benefits. Neil would put up with a difference in style for that.

Burlington is the largest city in the state, numbering roughly forty-two thousand people, and surrounded by a metro area containing a third of Vermont’s entire population. But it retains some aspects of a close-knit community, at least within its tree-shaded neighborhoods. South Winooski Avenue captured that mixed identity well, with dozens of homes looking straight out of a Rockwell painting, while located on a heavily traveled connector road between downtown and South Burlington’s commercial Route 7.

The worst of that traffic was understandably at the end of the business day, however, and it was far from that now. As a result, Frank took his time both scanning the numbers on the houses, and circling the block twice to analyze the lay of the land. Eventually, he found an available parking spot almost directly opposite Nancy Filson’s address.

Both men got out and looked around, flipping up their collars and lowering their hats. The snow had held off, but it was cold and gray, and the radio had warned of precipitation in the forecast. Their sunglasses were not against the sun.

Frank joined his partner on the sidewalk. “Might as well try the easy way first. You never know. Maybe she is home, sick.”

Neil merely nodded and started toward the entrance of an odd-looking, white-painted brick building. “Looks like the Alamo turned into a college dorm,” he appraised.

Frank laughed outright, surprised and impressed. “Very good, Neil. I like it.”

It was a three-story structure, seemingly designed by a committee of architecture historians, with four or five distinct and conflicting styles stuck to four ugly walls and crowned with a row of rounded crenellations.

“What floor?” Neil asked, in the lead and heading for a central doorway equipped with several mailboxes.

“First,” Frank answered, eyeing the windows ahead of them for movement. He saw none.

Thankfully for their purposes, the door opened without resistance onto a shared lobby and a staircase, allowing them to leave the exposed sidewalk. Unlocked doors were not a given in Vermont, but still surprisingly common.

There was only one oak door on the ground floor, labeled
FILSON.
Without hesitation, Frank rang the bell, which they heard faintly through the thick wood.

It was to no avail. After several attempts, Neil asked in a low voice, “Now what?”

“We break in,” Frank said simply. “Best way of finding her is to toss her stuff.”

“Not through that, we don’t,” Neil countered, indicating the door.

Frank agreed. “Wouldn’t want to anyhow. Too much noise and too much risk of being interrupted.” He looked around and followed the hallway beside the staircase to the back of the building. There, they found a rear entrance. He pushed it open and brought them into a rear alleyway lined with trash cans and shielded from view by shrubs and trees.

Frank looked up at the wall above them, again scanning the windows. But here, most were small and covered with pebbled glass, indicating a preponderance of bathrooms.

He nodded with satisfaction, walked over to the nearest window associated with the Filson apartment, checked to see if it was locked and, without pause, extracted a glass cutter from an inner pocket and expertly sliced four lines to form a box. He then donned a glove, punched at the window sharply, and saw a neat hole appear before them, accompanied by the barely audible tinkling of the glass breaking on the floor within.

They waited a full minute for a response from any quarter, at once calm and fully attentive, before Frank reached into the hole, flipped the window’s lock, and pushed the unit open to gain them access. They were inside the apartment in less than a minute.

The interior made a lie of the building’s bizarre outer shell, and encouraged Frank to think that perhaps the people responsible for its design had merely been more interested in the living spaces. Nancy Filson’s apartment—as Frank thought appropriate for a college professor—was open, airy, nicely furnished, and adorned with countless playful and attractive architectural details that made of the whole place a hidden jewel of a home.

As even Neil put it admiringly, “Holy crap. Not bad.”

Slipping on latex gloves, they started by checking that they were alone, and then, room by room, began their specialized archeological search.

Most people’s homes reflect their owner’s tastes, enthusiasms, personal habits, sexual orientation, living arrangements, and even background and education. In the choice of decorations, the equipping of kitchens, the cleanliness of bathrooms, and many other indices, people mark where they live with their personalities, their passions, and the things they choose not to have, like books or exercise equipment or music CDs. They also salt every room with their histories, from the arcane—such as cherished mementos whose meanings are obscure—to the obvious, such as address books and computers.

Frank and Neil were on the hunt for it all. They paid heed to everything in Nancy’s private environment, from the vibrator beside her bed to the family photos lining the hallway to the styles of clothing and shoes in her closet. They also noted what wasn’t there—the empty slot alongside two suitcases, the suspiciously clean rectangle on her desktop—the size of a computer base—and the way her nonbusiness attire had been picked from, leaving telling gaps behind.

To these two veteran searchers, all were signs of a hurried departure for a destination in which some element of rough or casual living played a part.

The next challenge became determining that destination, which they set about doing with the same perseverance. Files were gone through, the trash rifled, drawers checked for letters, postcards, and documents, and books opened for personal inscriptions. The phone’s memory was read for recent incoming calls. Even photographs were removed from their frames so the backs could be checked for legends.

By the end of it, two hours later, they sat down comfortably in their borrowed living room, still wearing gloves but enjoying a couple of microbrewery beers from the fridge, and compared notes.

“So, what I got,” Frank began, “is a middle-aged single woman with no kids, no boyfriend, and a life consisting of her job, her sports—which include swimming, sailing, hiking, skiing, and tennis—her friends, and a fondness for French cooking. Although from the pictures I’ve seen, she either doesn’t eat much or works it all off.”

“She was married once,” Neil said tersely.

Frank raised his eyebrows.

“Divorce papers,” Neil explained. “Other legal stuff, too. They stuck it out for six years.”

“Any mention of other property in that paperwork?” Frank asked.

“Like a weekend place? Nope.”

Frank pushed his lips out slightly, muttering, “That would be too easy.” He took a swig of beer and crossed his legs. “You think maybe she and the ex got along well enough that she’d camp out with him in a crisis?”

Neil smiled. “Beats me. Depends on how big a crisis we are.”

Frank nodded. “Good point. We have no idea, do we? Corcoran claimed to barely know the woman, although”—he leaned forward to hold up a photo—“here we have a picture of them, arm in arm. So, let’s say old Sandy called her right after we left and told her the Big Bad Wolf was comin’ around. What do you do as Nancy?”

“Me? I call the cops, just like Corcoran probably did.” Neil added, since he couldn’t resist, “Which is why I wanted to kill her.”

“Right,” Frank agreed dismissively, “but we don’t think Nancy did that, do we? We checked for surveillance before we parked out front. As a cop, wouldn’t you stake this out as the perfect place to nab us? I would.”

Neil remained silent this time, knowing better than to chime in. Frank was at it again.

“That being said,” Frank continued, “I think she’s playing ball with her friend, but only up to a point. She grabs her computer and work stuff, she takes a couple of days’ vacation from the office, and she lies low without making a big fuss about it.”

“And she keeps in touch with Corcoran by phone,” Neil threw in.

“Nice,” Frank agreed. “Which, if she does, lessens the probability that she’ll call the police, since she’s got Sandy doing that already, and it allows her to put the whole thing behind her faster.

“Because,” he emphasized, holding his finger up, “we don’t represent much of a threat to Nancy. This is Sandy’s deal, and while what she told Nancy is alarming, it’s not the end of the world. As far as Nancy’s concerned, we’re a disembodied threat. We’ll go away with time, like a bad dream.”

Neil disagreed, but as he often did in such cases, remained quiet, waiting.

“Okay,” Frank went on, as if his partner had concurred. “That then suggests a different possible scenario, more psychologically nuanced: Maybe Nancy has cut off communications with Sandy, making it appear as if she’s following her pal’s orders to disappear, but in fact because she thinks Sandy’s a pain and wants to put some distance between them. It’s a colder version, but—” And here he waved his hand to include their surroundings. “—I think we’ve discovered this woman is way stronger than her friend-who-lives-with-mom.”

He widened his eyes inquiringly at Neil, asking, “What d’ya think?”

Neil finished his beer and slipped the bottle into his pocket, so that it would leave the premises with him—along with his DNA. “What I think,” he replied, “is that half the time, I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying.”

Frank smiled, proud of the way he could use language. “No problem. Let me put it to you this way: You’re Nancy; you’re a little worried—at least, you don’t want to be stupid. You have some time off due from the job, along with a little homework you wouldn’t mind doing quietly in a corner, and you want to throw your friend Sandy a bone. Question is: Where is that quiet corner? Where do you go to drop out of sight but not deprive yourself of the daily comforts?”

Frank wasn’t expecting Neil to respond. He usually didn’t during these sessions. But Neil surprised him by bending over the scattered items on the coffee table between them and extracting a photograph that he’d removed from its frame earlier.

He held it up so that Frank could see a smiling couple posed before a handsome log cabin surrounded by trees. “You go visit Mums and Pops,” he said. He flipped it around and showed what was scrawled across its back, quoting, “‘We always have a room for our sweetheart, in our hearts and in our home.’”

Frank reached out for the picture and studied it and the handwritten sentiment. “I like it,” he said softly. “I like it a lot.” He replaced the photograph on the tabletop and looked at Neil. “Do we know where this room and these hearts might be?”

Neil smiled. “We do. They bought the place about a year ago, and mailed her directions. She had ’em filed under ‘Mums and Pops.’”

Frank raised his beer bottle to his colleague. “Here’s to the compulsively organized.”

“There is one thing, Frank,” Neil felt obliged to mention.

Frank was halfway to his feet, ready to wrap things up. “What’s that?”

“I know how crazy you are about playing Russian roulette, and how you don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to me, but don’t you think we ought to head out? I mean, you could be right about Filson not calling the cops, but Sandy sure as hell did. Why wouldn’t they be beatin’ feet here right now?”

Frank laughed, always cool under pressure. “I would be if I were them. Really wanna go? Okay, but let’s mess with their heads a little, and remove the more helpful items.”

Neil made a face as he also stood. Much as it was thrilling to watch Frank skip rope along the cliff top, the bitch was that the two of them were tied together—not so great if Frank went over the edge.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sam waited patiently by the car as Willy stood on the sidewalk, slowly scanning the neighborhood—cars, windows, doorways, trees. He did it almost every time they arrived anywhere. She didn’t fault him. It reflected his complicated history, and was further supported by the disability that he owed to a marksman’s bullet. Plus, she knew his caution protected her as well.