Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (7 page)

They didn’t stop at the desk or pause on their way to the distant bank of elevators. They knew where they were going, even though they had never been here before. That was the whole point: to meet rarely and to do so in a new place—even a new state—every time.

They rode to the top floor. Frank gave that much to this particular client: He knew how to live.

The penthouse suites were in fact large apartments, so the room they were let into by a noncommunicative butler was a full-fledged lobby. Looking around, Neil let out a low whistle, which just further irritated Frank.

The butler gestured to them to follow him, which they did through a living room, past a bar and a small kitchen, and into a dark office lighted solely by a lamp on the corner of an expansive hardwood desk. Through the windows, they could see a panorama of the city’s lights—the Milky Way brought down to earth and spread out for display.

At the desk sat an older man in a suit, watching them. “Jonathan,” he demanded of the butler, who lingered in the doorway. “What the hell are you standing around for?”

“Will you be wanting coffee or anything else, sir?” was the bland reply, delivered with the slightest of bows.

The man shook his head with disgust. “I know to ask for something when I want it, for Christ’s sake.” He flicked his hand impatiently. “We’re fine. Leave.”

“Very good, sir.” The butler disappeared, closing the door behind him.

His employer pointed to two chairs across from the desk. “Sit.”

Frank nodded. “Senator,” he greeted the man, and took one of the chairs. Neil remained silent as he joined them.

“Tell me about the woman,” the senator ordered.

“She was a dead end,” Frank reported.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

Frank shook his head. “No. Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. She gave us nothing, and we tried everything we got.”

The older man held up a hand. “Spare me. Overlooking that you came highly recommended and are costing me a fortune you aren’t earning, what are you suggesting as your next step?”

Hoping that Neil would keep quiet, Frank said lightly, “We have a plan, but I thought you didn’t want details, unless that’s changed.”

“They only change if you feed me a line of bullshit.”

Frank sharpened his own tone a bit. “You asked us to find the lost ark. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be lost. We’re working our way up the line and we’re making progress. It’s not like this little project hasn’t cost us, too.”

“You are doing your best to reduce the population, from what I understand.”

“Senator—”

But the latter cut him off. “Yes, yes. I get it. Fine. All I want to hear is that you’re getting somewhere. I’m sure you’ll find a way to bill me for all your inconveniences. Listen to me, Niles. This is very time sensitive. Will you get the job done?”

“Yes,” Frank told him.

Neil remained silent.

The senator watched them without comment for a couple of ponderous seconds, and then dismissed them by looking away. “That’s all, then.”

The two men filed out, led by the impassive butler.

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

Joe turned off the table saw and sighted along the edge of the board he’d just cut. He’d added a woodworking shop to his small rented house, which itself was attached to the rear of an old Victorian residence on Green Street in Brattleboro. This was in large part to accommodate his late father’s tool collection, but also to give himself something to do outside work. He’d been married only once, briefly as a young man, and never had children. Now, a widower for decades, he had Beverly as a romantic partner, his squad as a surrogate family, his love of reading, and this shop to balance out the rest.

All in all, especially given some of the lumps he’d encountered reaching this stage, life could have been far worse. The only problem recently was that he’d run out of recipients for birdhouses and jewelry boxes, which had forced him to move on to picnic tables and lawn benches.

“That one ours?” a woman asked from the door between the house and the shop. Most people knew to simply enter his place and seek him out. Joe lacked the distrust of most cops, and usually left his door unlocked.

Joe glanced over to see Sammie Martens leaning against the doorjamb. The squad’s sole woman, and, like Willy, a cop who dated back to before the VBI’s existence—to when the three of them had worked as detectives for the Brattleboro PD—Sammie occupied a special place in Joe’s heart. Small, spare, and intense, she’d survived a dysfunctional childhood, fled to the military, joined law enforcement, and become a bull terrier on the job. She’d made of her boss a mentor, to the point where he’d once sensed that, if the cards were down, she would’ve taken any bullet heading his way.

But that field was now more crowded. She had fallen in love with Willy Kunkle—of all unlikely people—and had a daughter with him named Emma. To everyone’s surprise, most of all Sam’s, she and Willy had moved in together and begun to approach normalcy, albeit one fitting their own quirky needs. For Joe, that development had demanded tricky navigating. He’d come to see her as a surrogate daughter, almost. Much as he championed Willy to most detractors, Joe was still struggling with seeing him as a virtual son-in-law.

Joe held up the board. “Yup—one picnic table, in the making.”

“You know there’s no rush,” she said. “I heard there might be snow coming next week.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said. “But you won’t be getting this too soon anyhow. In the spring, guaranteed.” He propped the board against the table saw. “What brings you to the neighborhood? You want some coffee?”

She shook her head. “I’m on my way to pick up Emma at day care, but I’m early. I wanted to drop by and ask about the hoarder case. Willy said you had something cooking.”

“Not really. It’s a favor for Hillstrom. The guy was her cousin, and there’re a couple of odd details about it. I said I’d look into it.”

“Sounded like more than that.”

Joe laughed. “Got Willy’s nose twitching, did I? That’s cool. Drive him crazy.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said. “I have to live with it. He thinks you’re pulling a fast one—working under the radar.”

“He would. No,” Joe reassured her. “In fact, crack of dawn tomorrow, a crew is coming to clean out the property. Backhoes, Cats, Dumpsters, the works. Might take a couple of weeks or more.”

“Wow,” she said. “What’re you hoping to find?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “Although you always wonder. I’ll just be there for a while, keeping Hillstrom’s daughter company. She’s videotaping the whole thing for a thesis or something. Turns out Hillstrom’s the homeowner, so she just wants it back to sell.”

Ever the investigator, Sam referred to his earlier comment: “A couple of odd details?”

Joe came clean. “There’s something about how he was found that doesn’t quite fit—the position he was in, some of the marks on his body. It’s not enough to punch a case number, and the autopsy gave us nothing except accidental death, but I don’t see the harm in poking at it a bit.”

She nodded and half turned to go. “Okay. I was just curious. You want company tomorrow? I got a light load on my desk.”

He admired how she wasn’t letting this go. “Absolutely. I’ll be leaving the office just after eight.”

*   *   *

Sam and Joe arrived at Ben’s the following morning in the midst of a truck convoy, making Rachel’s diminutive, two-door Mini Cooper look like an imperiled eggshell.

Resembling an amphibious invasion, the flatbed trucks fanned out around the house, ready to unload the heavy equipment Joe had described earlier.

Joe, Sam, and Rachel met to one side to exchange introductions and avoid being run over by the men in hard hats who were scattering to their respective posts.

“You got all you need to start shooting?” Joe then asked the young woman.

Rachel pulled a surprisingly small camera from her bag.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“They make ’em smaller than that, boss,” Sammie said softly. Having taken an immediate shine to Rachel, she added, “I’d love to get my hands on one of those, especially the way Emma’s coming along.”

Joe shook his head. “Okay. Rachel, your mom told me the cleanout crew knows you’ll be lurking around.”

“I already signed the death and injury waiver they faxed me last night,” Rachel said cheerily. “All I need is a hard hat.” She turned to Sam and told her, “I bet I can get you a camera cheap. I got this through the school.”

For his part, Joe thought that a hard hat might be the one missing touch. Rachel was already dressed in a pair of oversized work boots and an insulated Carhartt jumpsuit with a T-shirt over the top of it, boasting,
I SHOOT PEOPLE,
and featuring the picture of a camera. That aspect of her made him think of an exuberant kid who’d wandered by accident onto a construction site.

With the ignition of several diesel engines, all conversation became challenging, so the three of them migrated to the foreman to receive hard hats and instructions on where not to stand. Rachel stepped away to film as the first of the crew began exposing the building’s interior by pulling down a wall while simultaneously driving props under the roofline to maintain the structure’s integrity.

In short order, they were confronting a second barricade comprised of Ben’s belongings, as shaggy and disheveled as the wall containing it had been bland and smooth.

“Jeez
!
” Sam shouted into Joe’s ear. “It’s creepy—like the inside of a body.”

“It is, in a way,” he replied.

They moved back as two Bobcats approached to wolf down large mouthfuls before twisting around to deposit them into a waiting truck. Rachel continued darting around, following the action.

Slowly, attended by men with bags and shovels, the Bobcats crept into the wound they’d created. Joe and Sam approached the ragged edge of the hole to watch the room before them gradually regain definition.

This wasn’t the same section that Joe had entered earlier, with the entrance tunnel leading to the large expanse of waist-high debris, but another one, more clotted and filled. The stacks reached virtually to the ceiling, and the Bobcats—in order to create more manageable divots—occasionally crashed into the piles to make them collapse like crumbling cliffs of shale, revealing more strata of paper beyond.

Joe was drawing just this comparison, when, with the abruptness of a magic show’s apparition, a newly exposed cross section revealed the curled-up body of a man encased about three feet up from the floor. He resembled an oversized beetle, snugly fitted into an elaborate casting.

Joe and Sam simultaneously sprang forward amid the moving machines and men.
“Whoa!”
Joe shouted.
“Stop your engines!”

But the operators didn’t need telling, nor did Rachel Reiling, who stood stock-still in shock, her camera running.

In the sudden, complete quiet, the two cops clambered across the broken field to where the body lay exposed in the slanting daylight.

“That explains the smell,” Sam said, noting the level of decomposition.

Joe was crouching down, trying to figure out the mechanics of the body’s peculiar positioning, which was suggestive of a burial.

“Yeah,” he replied. “It also makes this a whole new ball game.” He glanced up at his colleague and added, “Looks like we’re officially on duty.”

*   *   *

“Hold it,” Rachel said. “There. Back it up a couple of frames.”

Lester Spinney gave his computer key a few jabs.

In silence, they watched Ben Kendall move in reverse, concentrating on the background just under his left arm.

“There,” Rachel said again.

Lester froze the screen.

“See it?” she asked them.

Joe, Sam, and Willy pressed in to better see the image.

Joe tapped his finger on what appeared to be a small opening in the stack of boxes beside Ben. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“Maybe not, but he had at least a couple of them.”

“How tall was he?” Willy asked, seemingly at random.

“Ben? Not very,” Rachel said. Despite her youth and the squad room’s austere setting, Joe couldn’t not notice her maturity and poise in their midst.

“Five-eight,” Sammie said, having recently consulted the autopsy report.

“Why?” Lester asked without turning around.

“Small guy—small hole,” Willy replied. “Reminds me of the tunnel rats they had in Nam—crawling through the VC underground systems to see what they could find, like punji stakes, land mines, and grenades on the fly.”

“Ben Kendall was a photographer,” Joe reminded him.

“Everybody knew about the tunnels,” Willy shot back. “He would’ve, too.” He tapped Rachel on the shoulder. “Were his little rabbit holes booby-trapped?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He told me to never-ever go into one. I figured it was because they were dangerous.”

“That’s no lie,” Willy muttered, stepping back, his point made.

“This new dead guy was small, too,” Sammie said.

Joe looked at her. “We have anything on him yet?”

She answered, “The crime lab’ll be running his prints as soon they’re delivered from the ME’s office. Something’s bound to crop up.”

“Yeah,” Willy threw in, “unless Hillstrom finds nothing, the prints don’t hit, or whatever files there are have been eaten up by some stupid computer.”

“No, no,” Spinney said, reaching for his smartphone. “I told them to text me as soon as they got something. I bet it’s in already.”

Joe smiled to himself, seeing both men’s outlooks in a nutshell—Spinney: upbeat, positive, supportive, a happy family man; and Willy: downcast, pessimistic, sarcastic, and the suspicious member of a family he seemed to orbit more than inhabit.

“Yeah,” Spinney said, having scrolled to the proper screen. “Here it is, fresh off the presses: Tomasz Bajek. At least that’s what his driver’s license says. The ME’s office extracted it from his wallet, which was covered with yuck and shoved into his underpants, for some reason. The lab ran the name through NCIC and got nothing, but the license says he lived in Philadelphia.”

“That it?” Willy asked.

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