Flat Spin (34 page)

She handed me the copy of her husband’s suicide note. In steady block print it said, “I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

“Robbie would’ve never shot himself, not in a million years,” Emma said. “Our daughter’s having a baby. She’s due any day. Robbie was gonna be a grandpa. You should’ve seen him. He was so excited. Them aliens, the grays, they was the ones who made him do it. The police can deny it all they want, but I got the proof.”

She handed me an envelope from the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division. Inside was Robbie Emerson’s driver’s license.

“This came in the mail the week after he died,” she said.

The photo on Emerson’s license made him look older than his fifty-seven years. He had thinning hair and a straggly beard flecked with gray and stared listlessly into the camera, like some shellshocked veteran resigned to his fate. He looked to me like a man who could’ve easily put a pistol to his skull and squeezed one off.

“Look at the date on the license,” Emma said. “He goes and renews his license two days before his birthday, then, five days later, you’re telling me he drives into the desert and shoots himself? Who in their right mind renews their driver’s license, then five days later does that?”

She showed me a prescription bottle with Emerson’s name on it—Prozac, the same anti-depressant Savannah dropped like candy toward the end of our marriage. Savannah always said she needed happy pills because her career wasn’t going well, but I always wondered if it was because of me.

“Look at the date on the bottle,” Emma said. “He refills the prescription and three days later, he kills himself? Gimme a break. It makes no sense. None of it.”

“I’m sorry, Emma.”

She stared at the photo on his driver’s license for a long time, caressing it with her thumb. Then she got up from the table and hurried unsteadily into the bathroom, slamming a hollow core door behind her that did little to mask the sounds of her retching into the toilet.

I leafed through one of the file jackets piled on the table. The folder was crammed with newspaper clippings detailing alien abductions. Other similar file jackets held clippings about cattle mutilations, crop circles, and, inexplicably, singer Wayne Newton. There were files for insurance claim forms, warranties and receipts, and annual tax returns. There was also a file thick with copies of cashier’s checks made out to Emma Emerson, each in the $1,000–$5,000 range and dating as far back as 2003—the same year Robbie Emerson joined Alpha. All of the checks had been issued by Massio Trust, Ltd.—the same Massio Trust whose banking clients included members of the Russian mafia and the father of Eugen Dragomir, my one and only student pilot.

It’s a small world
, I thought,
but not that small.

Emma emerged from the bathroom wiping her mouth with a washcloth. She looked wan.

“Who was Robbie working for when he died, Emma?”

“Home Depot. Part-time. Why do you wanna know that?”

I held up one of the cashier’s checks. She tried to snatch it away.

“You got no right looking in my personal files! Who the hell do you think you are?”

“He parlayed his security clearance into a little income on the side, selling innocent tips here and there to certain interested foreign parties. What kinds of weapons we used. Basic tactics. He figured, ‘Where’s the harm in it? It’s information they probably know already.’ Only he couldn’t deposit dirty money under his real name, so he had the checks made out to you. That way, if anybody ever asked him during a polygraph, ‘Have you ever accepted illicit funds from any foreign parties?’ he could say no and the needles wouldn’t budge.”

“My Robbie served his country. He was a hero. He would never do something like that.
Ever
.” Her carotids were pounding like jackhammers.

“You’re lying, Emma. I can see it in your neck.”

She covered her throat with her hand to cloak her throbbing arteries. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“All I want is the truth, Emma. Same as you.”

She winced almost imperceptibly and licked her lips. The truth, Emma conceded, was that she didn’t know where all the money came from. Her husband never said. Checks would arrive every month or so—a thousand bucks here, two thousand there—and she would dutifully deposit them. She had her suspicions that perhaps he was involved in some peripheral way with the alien technology transfer cover-up, she said, but she was never certain.

“He came home very upset the day before he died. I asked him if something had happened at work. He said he’d got in an argument with somebody, but he wouldn’t tell me who, or what it was about.”

“You mentioned Russians.”

Emma sat back down at the table and stared mournfully at her hands.

“Is that who came to see Robbie that day, Emma? A Russian?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Robbie called Echevarria, to warn him about ‘some Russians.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I was cooking bacon. The TV was on. Robbie was on the phone.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“They said he was already depressed, taking pills, whatever. Robbie was never like that, arguing with people. He was never the same after they made him retire—all that crap about him being in that bar with that European woman and supposedly telling her things—but I know he didn’t kill himself. And not you or anybody else on this earth can ever tell me otherwise.”

She sat down once more at the table and keened mournfully.

You seem to have this effect on a lot of women, Logan
, I thought to myself.

I rested my hand on her shoulder. “For the sake of the entire human race,” I said, trying to make her feel better, “I only hope the grays were not involved.”

Emma looked up at me appreciatively, her eyes glistening.

“I’m not off my rocker.”

“No one said you were, Emma.”

A
fter Robbie Emerson’s widow dropped me back at Savannah’s car, I drove to the Home Depot where he’d worked. The manager looked like Babe Ruth in an orange apron. He was at the service desk, on the phone, trying to placate an irate woman who’d accidentally dropped a ninety-pound bag of dry cement mix on her foot and was now threatening to sue. I waited until he hung up.

“Hell hath no fury,” the manager said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

I told him my name, said I was looking into Emerson’s death, and asked whether it might be possible to see store surveillance tape taken the day before Emerson died.

“You guys already went through all the tape. I thought you said there was nothing there.”

“I’m not a detective. I just play one on TV.”

The manager looked at me funny. “Come again?”

“Mr. Emerson and I served together in the same unit. I’m just trying to find out what happened to him.”

“Look,” the manager said, “I’m ex-infantry myself. Desert Storm. But unless you’ve got a court order, or you’re the police, I can’t help you. Corporate policy. I’m sorry.”

“Desert Storm? I was over myself.”

“Is that right? Who were you with?”

“Air Force. I flew A-10s.”

“Hog driver, huh?”

“Shake and bake, baby.”

“You guys saved our bacon more than once, that’s for sure.”

“Good times,” I said.

The manager looked away wistfully as the trace of some distant memory crossed his face. He was quiet for a long moment. “You know,” he said finally, “I never really got a chance to thank you guys properly.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s Ted, by the way.”

T
he surveillance tape, shot by a video camera hanging from the corrugated aluminum ceiling, was grainy and without audio. Still, Robbie Emerson’s likeness was unmistakable. No wonder he went by “Herman Munster” during field operations. Anybody that grodylooking, you can spot with a satellite. He was wearing his Home Depot apron, arguing animatedly in the plumbing department with a lanky customer who stood with his back to the camera. The customer wore jeans, a plain green T-shirt, a black or possibly blue baseball cap, and sunglasses. He carried in his right hand a red plastic case about two-and-a-half feet long. The word, “Milwaukee,” was printed on the side of the case.

“Looks like a Sawzall,” I said.

“Fifteen amp Super Sawzall,” Ted said. “One of our better sellers. You can cut through a two-by-six like butter with one of those bad boys.”

“Or cut off somebody’s hands.”

“You are one strange dude,” the manager said.

“It’s been said of me before.”

Inside the Home Depot’s darkened security office, the store’s security director¸ a squat, bespectacled retired postal inspector named Skaggs, reclined in a well-worn swivel chair while monitoring a wall of eleven camera monitors, each of which shifted its view automatically every ten seconds, covering every aisle as well as the store’s parking lot and loading docks.

The heated discussion between Emerson and the faceless customer played out silently on a twelfth monitor. Ten seconds of video on a repetitive loop. I moved in closer for a better look.

“Play it again.”

Skaggs replayed the clip. And again. The man carrying the Sawzall case never showed his face to the camera.

“Nobody heard what they were arguing about?” I asked.

“None of our associates,” Ted said. “We talked to everybody who was on-shift at the time.”

“What about any customers?”

“Nobody heard anything so far as we were able to determine,” Skaggs said.

“What about when the guy goes to pay for the saw?” I said. “You must’ve gotten a better shot of his face then.”

Skaggs spooled up another video clip. “The camera covering those registers, unfortunately, was down that afternoon for maintenance. This was as good a picture as we could get.”

The second clip, also shot from on high, captured the man with the Sawzall swiping a credit card at a self-service check-out stand, but the on-screen resolution was no better than the first clip. With his baseball cap pulled low and wraparound sunglasses, the man’s face was impossible to make out.

“He paid with plastic,” I said. “You can ID him that way.”

Ted looked chagrined. “Yeah, well, unfortunately, we had a problem with that, too. American Express reported the card stolen out of California about an hour after we processed the transaction.”

Scottsdale police, he said, had reviewed the videotape and concluded that the faceless crook who bought the Sawzall probably had little, if anything, to do with Emerson’s decision to kill himself the following day.

“That guy might’ve set Robbie off for whatever reason,” Ted said, “but Robbie was always wound up pretty tight anyway, always about two seconds from going off on somebody for something. I mean, if anybody was unhappy with his life and was gonna, you know, do himself in, it was him. The cops said that’s what all the evidence pointed to and that’s good enough for me. I don’t want to sound cruel or anything but, really, the only reason I hired him was because he’d been a grunt, like me. I probably was gonna have to let him go anyway given his attitude.”

“Mighty considerate, him saving you the trouble.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. Robbie Emerson was far from perfect. He made his share of mistakes. But the man did earn a Silver Star defending his country. He deserved better than a six-word goodbye note and a bullet in his brain.”

I stalked out of the security office, which was in the back of the store, and through the paint department, making for the main entrance. Ted hustled to catch up.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”

“Forget it.”

“That crack you made,” he said, “about cutting somebody’s hands off. I’m just curious. What was that all about?”

“Me flapping my gums.”

The image of Gennady Bondarenko’s charred carcass flashed through my head. According to the coroner, Bondarenko’s hands appeared to have been removed by a power tool equipped with a reciprocating blade. Like a Sawzall. Robbie Emerson had shot himself soon after arguing with a man who’d purchased such a saw. According to his widow, Emerson had called Arlo Echevarria the night before he died to warn him that someone was out to get him. Echevarria and Bondarenko had been murdered with the same handgun. I was never a whiz at higher math, but I needed no algebraic equation to figure a possible common denominator in the deaths of all three men: