Tag Man (4 page)

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Dan asked.

Kunkle snorted at the phrasing. “For ten years, all you gave me was yups and nopes. I still can’t get used to you sounding like Richard Frigging Burton.”

“Who is both British and dead,” Dan responded, also smiling.

“You talk like this to anyone else?” Willy asked.

“My daughter,” Dan conceded, tapping his right temple, “myself, and sometimes people I don’t expect to meet again.”

Dan’s daughter, Sally, who was now about seventeen, was a precocious, pretty, very smart girl who, because of Dan’s marginal income, attended a prestigious boarding school in nearby Massachusetts on a full scholarship. Now that he was a father himself, Willy wasn’t sure if he wanted Emma to turn out quite so intelligent, or if he’d be scared of her should she do so. He sure as hell knew that he didn’t have Dan’s brains.

As if reading that very thought, the latter said, “I hear that congratulations are in order. How are mother and daughter doing?”

Normally, such questions were hot buttons for Willy. His privacy was paramount to him. But this was a man on whom he depended and who’d played him like a pro—clearly someone who could keep his mouth shut. He overcame instinct to answer levelly, “They’re fine. I’ve given up sleep altogether.”

Dan laughed softly. “I remember those days.”

Willy studied him. There had never been mention of a companion or wife in Dan’s life. He’d been questioned over the years by police, for one reason or another, but never to the point where they’d probed deeply into his affairs. On that basis, he remained an official enigma—a man who’d simply appeared one day, complete with child, as if dropped from another planet.

“How is the young inheritor?” Willy asked, taking a gentle return jab at Dan’s own privacy.

But the other man didn’t mind. Instead, his face softened. “Amazing, in a word. Despite being worlds apart from her classmates in origin and background, she’s more than holding her own. She seems custom-made for the place.”

“She boarding?” Willy asked, although already losing interest.

“Yes, but she comes home often.”

“Where’s home these days?”

“Oh, here and there. You know.”

What Willy knew was that he’d crossed the subliminal line between them.

He took it as a cue to proceed. “We alone?” he inquired, looking past his host into the half-lit restaurant beyond.

“Yes. The boss trusts me to close up,” Dan said vaguely, making Willy consider that they might well be standing in what Dan was calling home at the moment. The man moved compulsively around town, sometimes living alone, other times sharing a bed with some woman, often equipped with children of her own. He was a friend of many and a guest of quite a few.

Willy let it pass, his curiosity trumped by his need to keep an ally.

“You hear about the Tag Man?” he asked.

Dan removed a chair from a nearby tabletop and placed it on the floor for Willy’s use, setting another just like it directly opposite. They looked like two lingering shadows of the many diners who’d crowded the place earlier, when it had been full of light and noise. Now, in the pauses between them, they could hear the refrigerator cycling on and off under the bar against the far wall.

“I’d have to be fresh off the bus not to have heard of him,” Dan conceded, adding, “I don’t know who he is, though.”

“No rumors?” Willy pressed.

“What would there be?” Dan challenged him. “The guy doesn’t do anything. The papers say he breaks in and leaves a note. It’s not like he’s fencing jewelry or stealing underwear…” He studied Willy more closely before adding, “Unless you people are holding something back. What
is
he doing, Mr. Kunkle? You work for a major-crimes unit nowadays.”

Willy shook his head. “I’m just being nosy. This has nothing to do with me. It’s a local case.”

“So why the interest?”

Initially, Willy considered a routine denial—a cop’s instinct to slam the door on all questions. But he liked this enigmatic man, with his preference for the night and his interest in human nature. He appeared to have a code, a guiding principle that kept him level. With Willy’s past of violence, alcoholism, and relational chaos—of which his crippled arm was but the most obvious symbol—he needed to stay open to someone like Kravitz.

“Because I can’t make sense of it,” Willy admitted.

“It or him?”

Willy hesitated. “Both, I guess,” he said. “Why do you ask it like that?”

Kravitz considered his answer carefully. “They are distinct entities. The man—assuming it is a man—and his actions. We know a human being is breaking in and leaving notes. What we don’t know is what else he might be doing. So the ‘it’ part of the equation is a little elusive, if you get my point, kind of like a discussion about something that isn’t there.”

Willy stared at him. “I liked it better when all you did was grunt.”

Dan laughed. “No, you didn’t. I was just a snitch then. Now I’m a fellow soul. You have to care about me.”

“The fuck I do.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

Willy frowned. He hated this kind of exchange. He preferred things straightforward. And to leave the mental gymnastics to Joe. “I’m trying to find out what you know about the Tag Man, which is looking like shit.”

Dan nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t tell you about him, Mr. Kunkle, but if I were you, I’d lay bets that he’s up to more than leaving messages like Kilroy.”

“Like what?”

The answer was a shrug.

“Money?” Willy pursued.

Dan’s eyebrows rose. “I hadn’t heard that. Is that what you’re holding back?”

“Jesus,” Willy growled. “This is getting me nowhere. Tag Man is probably you, just to dick me around.”

Dan laughed. “Why bother? I seem to be doing that anyhow.”

“Seriously,” Willy asked, trying to justify the visit in some way. “Is there money being lifted? Is that what you’re hearing?”

Dan considered his companion philosophically. “That does raise an interesting question,” he mused. “What if this fellow is stealing something from all these people, but no one is reporting it? You’d have to wonder what that could be.”

Willy just watched him.

“Something to consider,” Dan continued. “How seriously are the police interviewing the victims?”

Willy realized it was a genuine question. “They have a decent enough guy on it,” he blurted, trusting that the compliment would never get back to Ron. But in fact, he wondered about Kravitz’s point. Back when he was working this very turf, he would have given little time to a crime with no real consequence—go through the motions, say all the right things, file reports with the brass. But that would be about it. He knew Klesczewski was more of a grind for procedure, and that he’d give even the stupidest case a thorough once-over, but nowadays he had an entire squad to run. Was he in fact digging that deeply?

As if to run the point home, Dan asked, “Is he really applying a microscope?”

Willy decided to grant Ron the benefit of the doubt. “That’s his style.”

Dan sat back, his body language dismissing the whole topic as a trifle. “Just a thought—to bring as much depth to the ‘it’ as to the ‘who,’ that we were discussing a minute ago.”

Willy nodded and stood up. “I’ll fly it by the locals. You tell me if you hear anything, okay?”

Dan joined him and escorted him back to the front door, unlocking it to let him out. “Of course, Mr. Kunkle. You’ve piqued my interest. I’ll ask around.”

*   *   *

Dan stood by the restaurant window and watched Willy walk down the sidewalk, cross the street, and vanish from sight. He sighed and pulled back into the darkened dining room, enjoying the solitude and quiet of a place designed for everything but.

He was interested in the interplay of opposites, which explained his attraction to Kunkle. If ever there was someone at odds with himself, Willy fit the bill. Dan sincerely hoped that the baby girl he and Sam had just brought into the world would only and forever be a reflection of Willy’s good side.

He suspected so, but he’d had enough education at the hands of people more emotionally stable than Willy to know it could play out one way or the other. He imagined that for Willy’s child, it would boil down to luck—and whatever weight Sammie Martens might bring to bear.

But he’d been blessed with his Sally, and he wasn’t vain enough to think that she’d wound up so well through any effort of his.

He stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around, double-checking his final tidying up. Satisfied, he switched off the last light, leaving only the one over the bar, and climbed the narrow staircase behind the door off the tiny stage at the back wall. It was a tight fit, even for him, and very steep, which he enjoyed for how it made him feel like a gopher heading into his hole.

Above, the stairs opened up into a single large room with a tall ceiling and a row of windows overlooking the Harmony parking lot behind the restaurant.

The room was painted with ghostly tendrils of light streaming in from the surrounding town. As always, Dan hesitated at the top step to take it in. It wasn’t rentable space, because of the restricted access and lack of a fire escape, but the owner let him stay here in exchange for Dan’s caretaking the place at night. It was one of Dan’s better finds, too—spacious, sparse, easy to clean, and with an alcove for Sally when she came to visit.

He crossed to the table he’d set up as a desk near one of the windows and sat down in a straight-backed chair, barely making a sound, as was his wont. He liked to pass through life unnoticed, even while taking note of all its workings.

Prompted by his conversation with Willy, he reached into a canvas bag he used solely to transport his stolen prizes—eventually fated to end up in a cabinet, safe and sound in folders, and indexed according to their homeowners’ last name—and extracted the wad of papers he’d removed from the Jordan residence.

He’d known the police were withholding evidence. That was standard practice. But he’d thought it amounted to his trademark of eating from every fridge. He’d assumed that whatever items he’d collected—pictures, letters, documents—had either not been missed or were deemed too embarrassing to have been reported lost in the first place.

Like Lloyd Jordan’s hidden love letter from Susan Rainier.

But Dan had stolen more than that. He hadn’t liked Lloyd, both for betraying his wife and from what he’d interpreted of the man’s personality. That’s why he’d grabbed a few of the hidden financial papers as well.

It wasn’t his habit to carefully read the documents he stole, in a contrary concession to people’s privacy. It usually didn’t seem that important after the thrill of breaking in.

But maybe this time deserved an exception.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dr. Eberhard Dziobek removed his glasses and placed them on the arm of his upholstered chair. Opposite him, Joe Gunther sat—slouched, tired, and morose—staring at some spot on the ancient oriental rug between them. They were in the therapist’s office at the Retreat, Brattleboro’s mental health facility, where Dziobek had been treating alcohol- and drug-dependent patients for decades. Dependence wasn’t Joe’s problem, of course. He was simply in mourning. But Eberhard liked him, and had offered to be a sounding board. Gunther had given enough of his time and talent to others to deserve a small kindness in return.

“In your rational mind, of course, you know that you shouldn’t be blaming yourself,” he suggested in his carefully phrased English.

Joe allowed for a thin smile. “Yeah. I saw that movie too. ‘It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault.’ That’s when the poor bastard breaks down, bursts into tears, and is instantly cured. Not a dry eye in the house.”

“You don’t believe me?” Dziobek’s voice was soft and gently modulated, his German accent almost a parody.

“I believe it on paper, but I’m not sure I give a damn. She’s dead, and she wouldn’t be if I hadn’t indirectly put her in harm’s way.”

“How did you do that?”

“You ever hear of a black cloud?” Joe asked him.

Dziobek shook his head.

“The cruder expression is shit magnet. I laughed when I first heard it, a thousand years ago when I was a rookie. It’s someone who, every time he comes on shift, attracts all the antiaircraft fire within a fifty-mile radius. If he’s in EMS, the ambulance rolls nonstop; a firefighter, half the town burns down; a cop, every bad call comes in during his shift; and on down the line.”

“And you are one of those?”

“I never complained,” Joe went on. “In those days, you didn’t want to be standing around, doing nothing. The job calls for type A personalities, and what better than to be running flat out when you’re on?” He added, “But it’s a young man’s game.”

Dziobek waited silently for him to reach his point.

Joe was still staring at the floor. “It’s also not really supposed to be dangerous. I mean, cops talk about the threat of violence all the time. It’s part of the mystique. TV shows dramatize it; movies deal with nothing else. But this is Vermont. We roll around the floor with a drunk or a pissed-off husband now and then, but the death toll among cops up here involves some screwup more often than machine-gun fire. One of us drowns during a rescue operation, or gets hit by a car by accident. It stands to reason, right? There just aren’t that many people up here.”

His eyebrows rose and he finally looked at his companion. Dziobek smiled and nodded. “Right. Of course.”

“But not me,” Joe said, beginning to get to his point. “Over the years, I’ve been knifed, shot at, nearly frozen, and pounded half to death too many times to count, and several people have died or come close just by standing nearby.”

“Like Lyn?” Eberhard asked, knowing that she’d been half a state away from Joe when her killer had opened up on Gail. The therapist couldn’t overlook the small detail that, according to Joe’s black-cloud theory, it was Gail who should have been sitting here, feeling guilty.

“Tell me what happened,” he said instead.

“How much do you know?” Joe asked.

The older man shrugged. “Not very much. I do not read the papers as I should, and I do not own a television. Silly, I know. I will tell you a confidence: When I go home at night, after my daughter Hannah has gone to bed, my wife and I prefer to read novels in complete silence. Maybe some quiet music.”