Over Tumbled Graves (31 page)

At 6
P.M
., halfway into his second-to-last shift as a Spokane police officer, Alan Dupree sat in his car by the river, using a radar gun to gauge the speed of seagulls. They were hard to measure individually, but a few times he managed to get a good reading. One swooping gull cruised along at eighteen miles per hour. Another beat its wings and coasted into a headwind to slow down for a landing, and Dupree watched the red digital readout decrease to two, the gull hovering in the air for a moment and then settling onto the surface of the river. Flying at two miles per hour! Amazing. People made some easy things so hard.

He nodded politely to people walking by his car and they made faces that seemed like appropriate reactions to a uniformed police officer measuring the speed of flying birds. This was the best day he could remember in some time; he wasn’t defined by the fact that he was a police officer or the fact that his marriage was dying. Today he was just Alan, and Alan was curious about the speed of seagulls. He’d never thought of the job as the problem between him and Debbie, not really, and he hated guys who
blamed their careers or their friends or anything else for being a shitty husband. But now, when he could so easily imagine
not being
a police officer, the job seemed all-consuming and he was surprised that he and Debbie had made it as long as they had.

Life in the park was winding down; bored with flying, the gulls settled one by one on the concrete steps above the river, waiting for someone to begin tossing bread so they could resume their life’s work, stealing from the park’s ducks. Dupree looked around for other things to gauge. A duck swam by at two miles per hour, a kid on Rollerblades went by at seven, and finally Dupree started his car.

The dispatcher asked if he could swing by a prowler call on the lower South Hill. They were having trouble getting officers there because of two traffic accidents. Dupree drove along the freeway and got off at the Altamont exit, where he would drive through one of the worst neighborhoods in the city to get to one of the best.

The tired houses and dead lawns at the base of the South Hill reminded him of an old theory. The theory of yard relativity. He believed you could tell a criminal by the amount of yardwork he did. He’d first come up with the theory in neighborhoods like this one, responding to a thousand fights and drug deals and domestics, and after a time it dawned on him that he was almost never called to houses with well-kept yards. This wasn’t an economic or racial thing. It was a pure yardwork thing, the basic theory being that criminals don’t have the patience for yardwork. That’s what crime is, he believed—a lack of patience. Want to get rich quick? Get laid without all the work? Want to get rid of your business partner without the trouble of suing him or paying him off? That’s the difference between criminals and real people. Patience.

And in better neighborhoods? Dupree’s car moved up Altamont, climbing the South Hill to South Altamont Boulevard, the change in income even more drastic than the elevation. The theory applied here too. There were probably white-collar criminals up here, and Dupree would have bet they hired lawn services rather than trim the roses on the porch themselves. Like those guys responsible for the failure of banks: They probably all had
gardeners. Yardwork is a time for reflection, for engaging the subconscious, a time when guilty people can’t escape themselves.

Like all good theories, this one might even lead to practical application, assuming he could find some causal relationship between lawn care and crime. Maybe they should force drug dealers to mow their lawns. Turn prisons into groundskeeping companies.

Dupree drove along South Altamont Boulevard, the big, old houses tracing the bluff that overlooked the city. The dispatcher informed him that another car was clearing an accident and would be en route to the prowler call shortly. Dupree parked and climbed out of his car. The house was three stories, a century old, white with pillars. It would cost four times as much as the house he and Debbie had scrimped and saved to afford. Fifteen blocks away and here he was in a different universe.

An old woman with gardening shears was standing in the driveway next door, pointing to the open front door of the white house.

“I saw some lights being switched on in there, and then I saw the door was open,” the woman said. “John and Edith are at the lake. That’s why I called.”

Dupree looked at her manicured rose bushes. “You did the right thing.”

Of course he should wait for backup before going into a house where a prowler had been reported, but Dupree didn’t think anyone was inside, and these last two days on the job, he was damned if he wasn’t going to trust his judgment. He turned off his radio, stuck his head in the door, and yelled into the open foyer: “Any criminals here?”

When no one answered, Dupree went straight to the small security panel; the burglar had snipped the line and taken the battery out of the wall monitor. Dupree went into the bathroom and saw the window the burglar had used, the small window above the shower. This guy was a pro.

It made him nostalgic to think there were still professional burglars out there. In his mind they’d busted all the pros years earlier and all that was left was kids looking to get high, without the patience and intelligence it took to become a real burglar, who went around stealing bikes from garages and rifling through
cars. But this guy knew what he was doing, and for the first time Dupree felt a tug of regret over retiring.

Not that he had anything to stay around for. He was forty-eight. He had his twenty in, and six more for good measure—or self-punishment. Most of the guys he’d broken in with had retired or were retiring or were on disability, and now they were playing golf or working as security guards or private detectives, which meant running errands for the sleazy defense attorneys they’d complained about all those years.

Dupree hoped that retiring would keep him from bitching about the continued erosion of the world he’d known. He didn’t want to finish up like some old, crotchety fart who couldn’t pull his own weight. He remembered when he’d started, how the old-timers still groused about having to read Miranda rights, about women in patrol cars, about waiting for a photographer to arrive at the crime scene before they started fucking with things. He was surprised by his own reluctance to change, his inability to recognize that Spivey might know a more advanced approach to homicide investigation. Most of all, he was surprised to realize how quickly he’d gotten so old.

But the idea that an old-fashioned burglar was out there made him feel vital again. Needed. He thought about some of the old crooks, guys you’d pull over with complete burglary kits in their cars, guys who would get out of jail and single-handedly spike the burglary statistics, guys the detectives spoke about with some measure of respect, the way a pitcher admires a great hitter. The great burglars came from a few families, and there was a time you could just say the name “Gillick” or “Falco” and any cop would nod in grudging admiration.

But as Dupree moved from room to room, his flashlight beam fell on an undisturbed landscape—no drawers thrown open or cords yanked from walls, none of the signs of a first-rate burglary, or even a pothead break-in for that matter. At the end of the house he came to a room with tucked walls and theater seats and a big-screen TV. The thief hadn’t even taken the TV. Or the stereo. The VCR was still there. It was strange. He made his way upstairs and found a bedroom, and on the dresser, a picture of the dignified, silver-haired couple who lived there, along with pictures of their three
grown children wearing skicoats and posing on a mountain somewhere.

Dupree held up the picture. Money. People who had it were happier and better-looking. He didn’t care what anyone said. He hardly ever responded to rapes or murders or child molestations in neighborhoods like this. The root of all evil? My ass. From what he’d seen, methamphetamine was the root of all evil. That and booze.

Next to the photograph on the dresser was an unlocked jewelry box. Dupree opened it and could see right away that it hadn’t been disturbed, and that’s when he knew for certain this wasn’t a burglary. Jewelry is the first thing you steal—easy to carry, hard to trace, quick to fence. The neighbor had said the couple was away on vacation. Had she mentioned their names? John and something. He couldn’t remember. Dupree looked around for something with their names on it, but didn’t see anything.

Someone was banging around downstairs, and a minute later, he heard Teague’s voice. “Sarge? You up there?”

Dupree walked out of the bedroom and paused at the top of the curved staircase. Teague stood in the entryway, his hands on his sizable hips. Dupree was glad to see Teague. After thinking about the cranky old-timers he’d broken in with, this doughy black kid with his Elvis Costello glasses might be the only cop down there who measured up to those old guys.

“Hey, Teague. How’s it going?”

“I’ve been calling you on the radio, Sarge. Why’d you go all dark on me?”

Dupree looked down at the small microphone on his shoulder. “Yeah, the radio is too noisy. I can’t concentrate when it’s on.”

Teague smiled. “You’d have busted me to Boy Scout for walking alone into a house with my radio off. On a prowler call? Shit.”

“Yeah,” Dupree said, “it’s not a good idea.”

Teague just stared at him. “If you’re building a case to get emotional disability payments, you can stop now. I’ll testify.”

Dupree smiled. “That’d be open and shut, huh?”

Teague looked around the house. “Nice digs. What’ve we got?”

“A burglar with attention deficit disorder? He breaks in like a pro, then leaves without stealing anything. Woman’s got a couple of diamond earrings up there bigger than my nuts.”

“That’s amazing,” Teague said. “You must have some tiny little nuts.”

“Yeah, but I got six of ’em.”

Dupree came down the stairs and grabbed some mail from a table in the foyer. He flipped through the letters. They were addressed to John and Edith Landers. One was addressed to Landers’ Cove. Dupree stared at the letter, his mind scrambling to cover the distance between what should have been two unrelated points, but which seemed to have some fine connection, a filament that you would never even see until it began to burn.

“What is it?”

Dupree looked up at Teague, who had the same look of concern that was on his face when he first arrived at the house. “Nothing. I’m just…” He looked down at the letter in his hand. Landers’ Cove. “Did you bring your phone?”

“In the car.”

“I need you to call Chris Spivey at the task force. Tell him to get up here. Don’t fuck with the dispatcher either, just call him.”

Teague looked excited. “Why, what is it?”

“I’m not sure,” Dupree said. “But tell him it’s urgent.”

When he didn’t elaborate further, Teague trudged out to his car to make the phone call. Dupree set the mail back on the table and walked through the living room, one of those pristine living rooms in which no actual
living
appears to have taken place, filled with hard-backed furniture and no TV. It was surprising there was no red velvet rope across the doorway. Beyond that room was an oak door, left standing open, that he hadn’t noticed before. Dupree walked into the doorway of a small office, the walls covered with books and file cabinets, and in the center an oak desk that matched the door. This room had been turned upside down, and Dupree felt the same way he had when he’d come across the murdered hooker—that he should back away and wait for the evidence techs to tell him what he’d found. But the desk drew him in.

On top of it was an architect’s model of Landers’ Cove and the faux ski mountain they were building. Dupree crouched so that his eyes were at the same level as the Styrofoam model. He looked down at the tiny reproduction of Sprague Avenue and reached out with his forefinger to touch a miniature snowmobile in the lot of
Landers’ Mountain. The model covered the entire surface of the desk and represented a six-block section of the East Sprague neighborhood. Dupree couldn’t believe the businesses that were represented on this model. Where the hourly-rate motel now stood on the real Sprague Avenue, this model had an upscale grocery store. The new electronics store across the street from Landers’ Cove was flanked on either side by an Old Navy store and a restaurant whose sign read, “BIG RESTAURANT, tba.” According to the architect, the Happy Stork, Dupree’s favorite dive bar, was slated to become a parking garage.

“Huh,” he said, and straightened up, rubbing the back of his head. He moved away from the model to consider the desk. The locks on the drawers had all been broken and files were strewn across the floor. Dupree bent over and began reading the files without touching them. There were deeds and legal papers and contracts and contractors’ estimates, and the idea that some of this might mean something filled Dupree with the unmistakable adrenaline of the job, the naive belief that the world could be known.

He stepped back and made a mental note of which files appeared to have interested the burglar. Most were just tossed aside but a couple of folders were open on a short cabinet. In one folder, labeled “Security Expenses,” Dupree found a pile of receipts from Kevin Verloc’s All-Safe Security Company. Dupree pulled out the most recent receipts: two thousand dollars for new fencing in February; a four-thousand-dollar video surveillance system in March; and just last month a bill marked “Miscellaneous” in the amount of two hundred and forty dollars.

The other open file contained a contract of some kind. Dupree pulled his gloves on and flipped the contract to its first page. The contract was between Landers’ Cove Inc. and the All-Safe Security Company. He flipped back to the page left open by the burglar.