The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  “We’re not doing this, Dean.” He’d had leveraged himself into her story by holding those security camera pictures over her head, but that didn’t mean he was in charge. “The story isn’t about me or the Samaritans, remember?”

  “Then how about you tell me what’s going on?”

  June looked at Peter. He shrugged. It was up to her.

  “Well, let’s go over what we know. Two days ago, someone goes into the Public Market with an automatic rifle and robs a guy of his phone, which seems like overkill. Especially when he doesn’t even keep the phone.”

  June was using he deliberately, holding back the fact that Peter and Lewis had found the shooter’s apartment, even though they didn’t know Spark’s real name. They didn’t know much of anything, unfortunately.

  “He shoots up the place, but he doesn’t actually hit anyone. That’s lunchtime. After dinner that same day, someone breaks into my house and takes my notebooks and computer and phone.” No need to mention the video glasses, either.

  “What? Did you file a police report?”

  “Why bother? Anyway, yesterday, I’m riding my bike to the paper and Edgar nails me with the door of his van. When it becomes clear I won’t go with him voluntarily, he tries to grab me.”

  “Good lord. That’s why you asked if I’d gotten any weird feedback on that story,” Dean said. “You think someone wanted you to stop reporting on it. But why you and not me?” He sounded a little offended. Getting warned off a story was every investigative reporter’s dream. It was a clear sign you were onto something, even if you had no idea what. Like now.

  “I thought about that,” June said. “I think it’s because I saw the guy whose phone got taken at the market. I remembered his face, but not his name. Maybe he remembered mine. Or maybe he just saw my byline on your piece about the market shooting. But I also did some digging and figured out who he was, even though he’d basically disappeared. No credit cards, no driver’s license, no address. Pretty strange for a guy whose share of a tech company sale earned him half a billion dollars a decade ago. The only thing I found was an old phone number associated tangentially with his name. When I called, the receptionist kept hanging up on me.”

  She heard Dean’s pen scratching. “So what’s the guy’s name?”

  “Vincent Holloway. I think he’s the one who sent Edgar after me. I’ll share my notes file so you have everything. But I still have no idea what Holloway’s up to, or where he’s located.”

  “Why is he so worried about you finding him?”

  She thought of Oliver with his stillness and calm, and the agreement they’d made at her kitchen table. Despite everything, she trusted him. She also needed him. So she wasn’t happy about what she was going to do next.

  “We think Holloway stole some new technology.”

  Peter shook his head, mouth forming no, no.

  Dean jumped at it. “What kind of technology? What does it do? And stolen from whom? Where did you get this information?”

  June waited a moment, giving Dean time to imagine the enlarged scope of the story.

  She could hear the ambition in his voice. It sounded like hunger. “Shit, Dean, I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything. Not yet. Maybe never.”

  “June, we have an agreement, remember? I get the story and keep you and your large friends out of it. You need to tell me everything or the shit will really hit the fan.” So much for Weaponized Nice.

  Maybe it was his ambition talking, or maybe it was the fact that she now clearly had a boyfriend. Either way, it didn’t matter. She just needed him to keep his mouth shut for a few more days. The tech bit was the carrot. But she also had a stick.

  She smiled. “Step carefully, Dean. This is not a few state senators taking money from a mining company. This is the big time. People are dying. Dangerous men with guns know your name, and where you live. Are we clear?”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Other people are threatening you. People who have their own agendas. And don’t forget the man with the axe. He almost certainly knows who you are, too.”

  The phone went silent. They were on Teutonia now, passing the DMV and the Dollar Store, coming up on Hampton. She took another bite of muffin.

  Chewing, she said, “So you’re going to keep grinding on Holloway. And I’ll give you another name to run down. A possible alias for Holloway. Graham Brown. That’s the name on the credit card he used a few days ago to buy flowers for his married ex-girlfriend.” June wasn’t going to give him Spark. She was a wild card.

  “What am I, your research assistant? What are you doing this morning?”

  Was this the real Dean? If so, she’d dodged a bullet all those years ago. “Don’t be bitchy, Dean. Is this your story or not? Where’s your pride of ownership?” Then she threw him a bone. “But here’s something you’ll like. I’ll send you Holloway’s background check from a decade ago.” Oliver had just emailed it that morning, with his agency’s identifying information stripped out. “Break it down and figure out what avenues that opens up.”

  “Okay,” he said grudgingly. “I can do that.”

  “But you don’t share any of this with anyone, including your editor. Or I will personally shoot you twice in the ballsack. Got me?”

  She hung up. They were stopped at the light. Peter and Lewis were both staring at her.

  “What? We’re stuck with the guy, he might as well do some goddamn work, right?”

  48

  Metzger Machine was a modest midcentury office cube standing right up against the sidewalk, with shed-like additions larger than the original building grafted onto the sides and back. The windows had sturdy steel grates over them, in recognition of the area’s crime statistics, and June saw more than a few shuttered storefronts and derelict houses. Metzger Machine, on the other hand, had a nice new sign and a full employee parking lot.

  A young assistant buzzed them inside. The office space was utilitarian but clean, with flat carpet and fluorescent lights and gray repurposed cubicles dating from the nineties. This was a long way from Silicon Valley’s beanbag chairs and juice bars. But the computer screens were large and new and the engineers at the desks were busy with CAD drawings and phone calls.

  June had called ahead for an appointment with Marty Metzger, the managing partner. The assistant walked them back to a glass-enclosed conference room where a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and cardigan sweater stood staring out at the busy shop floor. He had the inward, sleepless look of a man sunk deep in his own grief. His arms were crossed tight across his chest and his eyes sagged like warm cheese.

  “I’d like to help,” he said, “but I don’t really have anything new that I haven’t already told your colleague. We could have done this all over the phone.”

  Then why, June wondered, had Metzger agreed to meet? Maybe he was just polite. Or maybe he wanted to answer a question he hadn’t been asked yet.

  June pulled out a chair and sat at the conference table, but didn’t take out her notebook. Lewis watched the office for a cheerful man with a sharp tool. Peter did the same for the shop floor. She didn’t have to tell them to keep their mouths shut.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said. “They were your cousins?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Also my partners. And my friends.”

  “What kind of work do you do here?” June knew that asking men about their business was a good way to get a conversation rolling.

  “Well, we were a machine shop for more than seventy years, building manufacturing equipment. My great-grandfather started it. But by the time my dad retired, most of that had gone overseas. We were on life support. David and Sam and I had the idea to reinvent ourselves by doing stuff China wasn’t set up to do.”

  “Interesting.” June had never been a straight business re
porter, but it would be hard to miss the story of the demise of American manufacturing. “Tell me more about that.”

  “We decided to specialize in rapid prototyping and custom jobs. We focused on engineering, problem-solving, and a high level of quality. As a part of that, we designed our own automation systems. Now a big part of our work is doing that for our customers, getting them into smart manufacturing.”

  June gestured at the people and machines on the other side of the glass. “Business looks good.”

  “Yeah,” Metzger said softly, gone inward again. “It was. I love this place.”

  “It must be hard losing your cousins,” she said. “Not just personally, but for the company, too.” She wasn’t sure what she was after. But she’d know it when she found it, or at least she hoped so.

  He just nodded. He still hadn’t sat down. He hadn’t really looked at any of them.

  “I hate to ask this,” she said, “but why do you think they were killed?”

  “I have no idea.” He turned his head, his voice suddenly sharp. “I already talked to the police about that. They said it was random. This isn’t a great part of town.”

  “But the way they were killed?” She wasn’t going to mention the machete or the dismemberment, not unless she had to. “That’s unusual, isn’t it. Not something that happens around here. Or anywhere, really.”

  He turned back to the glass and the activity on the other side. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The police are working on it. We hope they find the person who did it. We’ll all sleep better when they do.”

  Now she took out her notebook and flipped through the pages as if trying to find something. “The thing is, it happened in broad daylight. In a fenced parking lot. Whoever did it, he left their wallets and watches and phones, right? He left their car keys, and their cars. So what’s the motivation?”

  Metzger’s voice rose. “What are you asking? If I killed them? My cousins and friends? They were an integral part of my life and this company. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose.” He ran his hand down his face as if chasing the memory of tears.

  She didn’t think Marty Metzger was acting. The grief was real. But there was something else. She just didn’t know what it was.

  If she could see it, the police almost certainly had, too. Metzger was in the office when his partners were killed, so he wasn’t the one swinging the machete, but they’d have looked hard at him anyway. They’d have talked to the families and the employees, trying to find a reason related to the usual motives of sex, money, and power.

  In her early days as a police reporter, it hadn’t taken June long to learn that most murders weren’t mysteries, they were crimes of passion. The killers were usually someone known to the victim with a history of violent behavior, often drunk or high, sometimes caught with the weapon still on their person or under their mattress. They almost always had a reason, although it might be small, maybe nothing more than an insult. A true random killing was a rare event.

  Working a homicide, generally the police either made significant progress in the first twenty-four hours or not at all. The cops weren’t subtle. Given the fact that Marty Metzger was at the office, business as usual, they didn’t consider him a suspect. He’d be lawyered up or locked away, not talking to reporters.

  But here he was. Talking without saying anything.

  Clearly, June hadn’t found the right question yet.

  She thought about Spark’s electric bike. “Were you working on any special projects? Something unusual?”

  Metzger took a deep breath and let it out. “All our projects are special. They’re like our children. We take our work very seriously.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of which, with everything that’s happened, I really have a lot to do today. I’ll walk you out.” He opened the conference room door and waited for them to get the hint.

  There it was, the classic slip-and-slide. She might not have found the right question, but she’d found the right subject. And Metzger had changed his mind about talking.

  “How about any unusual clients?”

  He looked away again. “Oh, that’s all proprietary, I can’t discuss our clients. Or their projects. Really, it’s time for you to go. I have another appointment in a few minutes.”

  The police would have asked these same questions. If they’d seen this stonewall act, they’d have put Metzger in an interview room until they got an answer. But they hadn’t. Something had changed since the last time the police had talked to him.

  June had no idea what that might be. But she had information the police lacked.

  She pulled her laptop from her backpack and opened it on the conference table. “Mr. Metzger, let me show you something.”

  SketchCop was a facial composite software used by many police departments instead of sketch artists. June had gone through a SketchCop training session for a story several years before, and had kept the login and password. She’d spent an hour with the program last night while Peter slept. She was no artist, but she had a very good memory for faces.

  She turned the laptop so Metzger could see it. Holloway’s intense, deep-set eyes stared out from the screen. She was pleased with the egg-shaped head and its fleshy features. He really did look like a B-movie humanoid robot from the fifties.

  Metzger took a step back like he’d been punched in the chest. His grip faltered on the conference room door and the pneumatic closer pulled it shut.

  “I really can’t,” he whispered. “You saw what happened to David and Sam. He’ll kill my whole family.”

  But once Metzger started talking, he couldn’t stop.

  49

  Because Marty Metzger felt responsible for the whole thing.

  He was the one who’d found Holloway at that conference in Pittsburgh six years ago. He was the one who’d taken Holloway out for drinks and invited him to Milwaukee to see their state-of-the-art facility. He’d convinced Holloway to place his first order. It was all his fault.

  June already had her recorder on by the time the floodgates opened. Peter and Lewis stared through the conference room’s glass walls, keeping an eye on the office and the shop floor, but listening hard as Metzger’s confession spilled out.

  “All we did was prototyping for three or four years,” Metzger said. “Individual components at first. Articulated joints. Complex gearing systems. Nothing that actually fit together. We had no idea what they were for. We assumed that he had other shops building other pieces. He was very secretive. Everyone in the company signed a nondisclosure agreement. After his first visit, everything was done by encrypted email. Not even a phone call.”

  He sat at the conference table now, a thin, gray-haired engineer spilling his guts. June made sympathetic noises and took notes, letting the recorder get the details. Peter and Lewis stood out of Metzger’s line of sight so he wouldn’t have second thoughts.

  “Then he gave us a more complete assembly. Four of them, actually, with multiple joints, like the legs of an animal. Milled from aluminum and titanium. They were electronically powered and controlled, but we never saw the actual circuit boards. We got test boards and bench specs to make sure the assemblies did what they were supposed to do. When there were problems with his designs, we suggested improvements.” Metzger hung his head. “Well, mostly me, actually.” Another thing he felt responsible for.

  “He complained a lot about other fabricators. They couldn’t deliver on time, or he didn’t like the quality, or they couldn’t solve the problems. Holloway was a demanding customer. His emails sometimes read like rants, you know? But this is a demanding business. Some clients are a pain, but Holloway always paid top dollar, so we made it work. Eventually he gave us something new to build.”

  He held his hands out just past the width of his shoulders, showing the size. “Like a log that’s too big for your fireplace. With four sockets on the bottom that would fit th
e first components we’d made, so we were pretty sure it was some kind of quadruped. And another socket at the top, which we thought would be for a head. Like this was an electronic pet or something.”

  Metzger stared at the wall. “That’s what David and Sam thought it would be. The dog you wouldn’t have to walk or feed, that wouldn’t pee on the carpet when you had to work late. My idea was a companion for the elderly or infirm, something capable enough to take out the garbage and strong enough to lean on or help you up if you fell. There would be a giant market for that kind of thing, worldwide, especially with automated assembly.”

  June could see how it had been. Metzger and his partners excited to be on the cutting edge. Solving problems, making money, imagining their bright future.

  “If everything was going so well,” she asked, “why would he kill your partners?”

  “That’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about,” Metzger said. “We do a lot of prototyping for old-line companies. Harley and Rockwell are our biggest customers. But as Holloway started eating up more and more of our production time, Rockwell offered to buy twenty percent of our shop. We had a good relationship, but they wanted to make sure their projects would be our top priority.”

  Metzger shook his head. “Somehow, Holloway must have heard about it. I think he got nervous. We weren’t just prototyping for him, we’d built an automated assembly system. He had big plans, and he really needed us. He told me he wanted to buy a controlling interest. Basically for the same reason as Rockwell.”

  Metzger Machine was privately owned, June thought, so there would be no public disclosures. Holloway could stay in the shadows and do as he pleased.

  “He made a formal offer,” Metzger said. “A good one, with a higher valuation than Rockwell. The thing was, none of us wanted to give up control. This company has been in the family for four generations. I thought it was a good idea to sell some equity, maybe nonvoting shares. The money would let us grow. We could move into a bigger facility, improve our equipment, upgrade our capacity, make all our customers happy.” He looked at June plaintively. “Was that so wrong?”