Tag Man (24 page)

Of course, there was also the unexpected irony—was Willy witnessing an ongoing shift here, where he was becoming more centered, while Joe was drifting free?

They replaced everything where they’d found it and walked to the office door.

“I’d hate to be Dan right now,” Willy said with uncharacteristic sympathy, possibly influenced by his musing. “Between us looking to throw him in jail and a bunch of crooks hoping to kill him. He’s got to be wondering how what he stole can save his butt.”

*   *   *

In fact, Dan had more immediate concerns. “Make sure you got everything,” he urged Sally.

“I got it, Dad.” She sighed, stepping back into the small front yard with what little she’d bothered even to bring into their new home in the woods. “What’re you going to do about the Land Rover?”

“I’ll call the owner and let him know where to get it. He knew it might end up like this, where he’d have to scrounge around a little to find it.”

She looked at the surrounding trees, trying to imagine how far they might be from anywhere civilized. “And we’re going to get out of here how?”

He gave her a broad smile. “Oh, we’re not done with the car quite yet. One last short trip, with the assumption that we’re being followed.”

She shook her head and headed for the vehicle. “That is so not cool.”

He interrupted what he was doing to stop her and place his hands gently on her shoulders. “I am really sorry for all this, for what I’ve gotten you into.”

She placed her hands on top of his. “Dad. You are totally crazy and you’ve given me an upbringing that would’ve lost you custody of me if anybody had been paying attention. But it’s worked—I love you, I have learned from you, I am better because of you, and that’s just going to keep going. Who cares if it means the occasional psychopath will try to take us both out, right?”

He kissed her cheek solemnly, ignoring the one-liner. “I love you, too, sweetheart.”

*   *   *

Lester Spinney was waiting for the whole group as they stepped back out into the Jordan driveway. He held up his cell phone. “Got a call I thought you’d like to hear about in person,” he told them.

Joe made sure the big front door had closed behind them. “We get a break?”

“More of a monkey wrench. We have another body, about forty minutes north of here.”

“Dan?” Willy asked, concerned.

Lester gave him a surprised look. “No. It’s an old guy named Norman Myers.”

They all stared at him, waiting for details.

“He was found dead near Perkinsville, in the woods. The thing is, when the detective interviewed his daughter, who lives with him, she said that she’d given directions on how to find him to two people. They fit Dan and Sally Kravitz to a T.”

Joe turned to J.P. and Ron. “Thanks for your help here, gents. It looks like the rest of us are heading north.”

*   *   *

The local medical examiner was not pleased. “We
are
going to send him up for an autopsy,” she said, “if he hasn’t decomposed by then.”

Joe’s mouth fell open as Willy burst out laughing. “I like that. Why haven’t we met before?”

The woman in question smiled and shook hands, saying, “Lisa Westfall. Sorry—seemed like a good line.”

Willy was still laughing as he crouched beside the man lying facedown on the ground. It was true, of course, all joking aside—they had asked the team processing Norm Myers to freeze the scene until they got there, which had stretched the whole procedure out by two more hours. They deserved a couple of barbs.

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” Joe explained to Westfall. “We’re thinking this may be related to another case we’re working on. Sort of made it important to take a look.”

Westfall patted his shoulder, unaffected. “Totally relaxed. My husband tells me I should get paid for busting people’s chops. It’s an instinct.” She bowed slightly. “Take your time, Joe. My body is your body.”

Joe crouched down beside Willy, who was laughing again. They were on Hawks Mountain, not far from the open fields extending out from the base of the slope. Norm’s body was pointing downhill, as if he’d been returning from a hike. “What do we have?” Joe asked.

Willy became thoughtful. “Well, you know what they say—every scene’s a murder till proven otherwise. I gotta say, though, I’m not so sure this one isn’t.”

“Based on what?”

“Gut, mostly,” he admitted. “You got a few choices in a deal like this: sudden heart attack, where the guy slows down and crumps; a violent attack, where the evidence of foul play afterwards stares you in the face; or something in between, where you just sense that something’s wrong.”

“And that’s where you are,” Joe suggested.

Willy looked over his shoulder. “Lisa?”

Westfall raised her eyebrows. “What’s up?”

“Anything about all this strike you one way or the other?”

“You mean natural versus not?” She pulled on her earlobe and conceded, “There’s nothing that says not, but it’s particularly neat and tidy, even for a natural. The way he’s perfectly stretched out, arms by his sides, legs straight out. I’m not saying it wasn’t a massive coronary—and those can drop you like a steer in a meat plant—but it almost looks staged.”

“Anyone get hold of this guy’s doc yet?” Joe asked.

The Vermont State Police detective who’d responded initially stepped forward. “I did. He was fit as a fiddle. Took no meds, had no problems. The doc said no way would he sign the death certificate. This was a complete surprise, despite his age.”

“Why was he out here?” Joe asked.

“Annual pilgrimage,” the cop said simply. “Kind of a ritual with him, dating back decades, like an anniversary.”

“And what did the daughter say about the people who came looking for him?”

“Perfect description of the two you’re after. That’s why I called. But they gave her different names and fed her a line about being from Claremont and working on some bogus water-line project. They said they needed to ask him what he knew about the old apartment complex he built over there years ago.”

“And she just sent them after her old man? On that?” Willy asked incredulously.

The detective smiled. “She gave ’em a map.”

Willy glanced at his boss. “That should be an easy interview.”

Joe rose from crouching beside the body. “Yeah.” He looked at Lester, who’d accompanied them here. “I’m going to take Willy to meet the daughter and then probably head over to Claremont to find out more about this apartment building. Let’s stay on the safe side with all this and treat it like a homicide.” He addressed the detective. “There been much scene contamination?”

The man shook his head. “I had the kid who found him describe what he did and where he walked; same with the first trooper who responded. I’ve kept a lid on who did whatever since. I can write all that up in a report for whoever comes next. That going to be the crime lab?”

Joe pursed his lips for a second before saying, “Yeah. They’re not going to like it, given the lack of clear evidence. But I want to do this by the numbers. I think Willy’s right. Something funny happened here.”

*   *   *

Dan’s voice was mournful as he pulled the Land Rover over to the side of the road, just within sight of Peggy Harrison’s modest home on Kendrick’s Corner Road.

“Damn.”

“What?” Sally asked, turning around and looking out the rear window, thinking that he’d seen someone following them.

“That car.” He pointed ahead.

She swiveled forward in her seat and squinted into the distance. There was a nondescript sedan parked in Peggy’s driveway.

“Cops,” Dan said tersely.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. They stand out almost as much as marked cruisers. Besides, you can see the extra antenna from here.”

He put the vehicle into Reverse and began backing up. “I guess we won’t be asking Norm any details about Paul Hauser,” he said grimly. “Or anything else.”

“You mean he’s dead?” Sally asked, startled.

“I wouldn’t be surprised, the way things’re going. But I’m not going to drive up there and ask.” He hesitated before adding, “Time for us to pull the vanishing act of a lifetime.”

She slid down in her seat slightly, for the first time beginning to grapple with the size of the threat pursuing them.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lloyd Jordan sat in his darkened office with his hands resting on the arms of his chair, his legs crossed casually, in the same feigned calm that he’d used back in the bad old days, when his life had sometimes felt as if he were riding a bicycle along the edge of a cliff—thrilling, but perilous.

This time, however, the thrill was missing.

He had wondered about being summoned to Boston, the meaningless interview with a cop who had so little knowledge of him and so little enthusiasm for the questions he’d been posing. The man had even glanced at his watch once, as if maintaining a schedule. In all his years of being interviewed by the police, that was the first time Lloyd had ever seen one of them check the time.

It had felt like a tell at the time—that twitch or giveaway gesture one gambler inadvertently gives to an observant opponent. But why? Lloyd wasn’t in any game that he knew. He’d left the city confused and uncomfortable.

Until he’d returned home.

His gaze returned to the closed-circuit monitor sticking out of his desk like a half-buried headstone. There was no bank of small, square screens representing the cameras around the house, however. The shimmering image was of an operations time log, and it told Lloyd that someone had been viewing the contents of this system while he’d been in Boston.

The police, according to his idiot arm-candy wife.

Fucking bimbo.

Now they knew at least part of what he knew—that someone had rifled his desk and stolen some of its contents.

But what else?

Had they made an identification, as he’d finally been able to? Had they tied that half-wit Leo Metelica to a contract to take out Dan Kravitz? Had they then gone back a step and somehow drawn a connection between Metelica and Lloyd? Wouldn’t they have arrested him by now if they had?

Apparently, they’d made some discoveries about him. But—just as clearly—they were also still fishing.

So, what did they know?

He looked down at his right hand and found it clenched into a fist. Deliberately, he opened it up and flattened it, draping his fingers over the edge of the chair’s arm, almost as if they belonged to someone else.

Gotta get back into the swing of things, he thought—reacquire the smell for blood he’d once regarded as his most valued asset.

He pulled his attention away from the screen’s unnatural radiance and glanced about the opulent room. When they’d moved in here, he’d taken enormous pride in this extravagance in particular. He had seen it as the prize of his labor, the reward for a hardscrabble life filled with violence and human filth. He’d swum against the sewer’s current, all the way back to the rich folks’ palace.

Now he felt it had merely made him soft and vulnerable. He’d been deceived by the mythology of it just as surely as he’d been betrayed by the human bauble now lying in his bed upstairs—crying and bruised from the slapping around he’d meted out.

It was time to get his muscle tone back, call in some favors, and get just a fragment of his old operation up and running again.

And it was time to go after Dan Kravitz himself.

*   *   *

“Undetermined?” Joe said into the phone, trying to keep the frustration from his voice.

One of his oldest and most cherished friends, Medical Examiner Beverly Hillstrom, was on the other end of the line.

“For the time being. We’ll have to wait for the toxicology results, as always, so it isn’t my final finding, which will most likely be ‘natural,’ but I’m just warning you of what to expect, Joe. I uncovered nothing in this case which leads me to believe that Mr. Myers died of anything other than having overly exerted an ancient anatomy.”

“No conveniently broken neck or knife you might’ve missed?” he asked jokingly.

Hillstrom, however, for all their years of collaboration, was not a kidder. Her voice remained straightforward and serious. “He was a borderline healthy male, given his age, with an aversion to doctors and medicines. His organs were old and not in prime shape, albeit perfectly functional. There is such a thing as a truly natural death, in layman’s terms, where the body simply fails for no apparent reason, basically as a result of a series of coincidental and minor mishaps. I cannot say that this wasn’t such a case. To use your own terminology, I found no smoking gun. If someone murdered him, they were either very lucky or very good.”

“How so, ‘very lucky’?” Joe asked.

“They may have done something to him that left no trace, or at least left nothing behind for me to discover—the medical equivalent of leaping out from behind a door and scaring someone to death. Even someone without an acute heart condition might die of fright, as melodramatic as that sounds.

“But,” she cautioned, and he could almost see her finger in the air, “I am not suggesting any such thing, since you supplied me with no context. Have you uncovered anything at the scene suggesting even the presence of another human being?”

Joe had the crime lab report on his desk, as a painful reminder. “No,” he told her. “It’s a popular trail—too much traffic to tell one way or the other if he was alone.”

“Well,” she said sorrowfully, registering his disappointment, “I’ll probably be calling it a natural, then, as I suggested, and listing the cause either as presbycardia or ‘old heart.’ It’s not used often, but I like it for this.”

“All right, Beverly,” he conceded. “Thanks for the update. Take care of yourself.”

Joe replaced the phone and looked across the VBI office at his entire team, Sammie included, who had once again found a babysitter.

“Dead end?” Willy asked with a smirk, pun intended.

Lester groaned quietly.

“Afraid so,” Joe conceded. “She’ll most likely be ruling it natural.”

“We’ve worked around that before,” Sammie lobbied. “We don’t necessarily need a finding of homicide to make a case. We still got Dan crawling around Lloyd’s place, stealing his stuff, and planting his stupid Tag Man Post-it. And we got Metelica targeting Dan on Lloyd’s orders before getting killed himself, clearly by Dan and probably in self-defense.”