“I’m guessing that’s the preliminary proposition,” Alex says. “Aren’t you picking up any psychic vibes from this? I’d think you would.”
“Nothing. I’ve tried.”
“The postcard came here to your house, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, it’s really a Phoenix jurisdiction, but since you already went to PV with the other note, I think we should ask them to look at it all together,” Alex says. “I’ll make a call over there on your behalf. You said you spoke to an Officer Johnson?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take care of it, Gus.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Now, can you do something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Give me a sec,” Alex says as he goes to fetch his folder from the hallway. When he returns, he removes a photo, then hands it to Gus.
Gus lifts the photograph up, holds it in midair, and studies the image. As much as he tries, he can’t quite penetrate it. He turns to Alex, and their eyes meet saliently.
“The guy in the middle is an Arizona congressman,” Alex tells him.
“I don’t follow politics.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s an old photo. The two other faces that aren’t crossed out are the two victims, Klink and Schultz.”
“Hmm, they certainly all knew each other.”
Alex moves closer. “But that’s the thing. No one can confirm that. Two of them are dead, and no one else seems to know if these guys had any kind of relationship with each other beyond posing for these old reunion photos.”
Gus shakes his head. Then his chin trembles as if he’s bracing for a flood of tears. The tears are not his; he knows this. The tears are for a stranger by proxy. “No, Alex,” he says. “They knew each other well. Their relationship continued well beyond a reunion or two. I sense it was a quiet relationship.”
“Quiet?”
“Like they didn’t have much to say to each other in recent years. I don’t know. I sense they kept their distance. But they certainly knew each other.”
“I see tears in your eyes, man. What’s up with that?”
“I don’t know,” Gus replies. “But there’s profound sadness at the core of this X-ray.”
“X-ray?”
“Sorry. I mean photo.”
A cranky chorus of birds bursts out of nowhere. Gus and Alex shift their attention to the back window, where a small flock does a graceful arc and twist over the pool and then flies away. Gus hears a car approach the cul-de-sac out front, and he knows it’s Elsa. He can tell by her muffler—nothing obnoxious, just a minor rattle and snort. He can tell by the way she swerves into the neighbor’s driveway and by the tinny sound of economy when she opens and closes her door. And then everything goes quiet. He suspects it’s a proprietary silence, his alone. In that silence his attention is pulled back to the photo and he utters an instant, “Wow. The congressman . . .”
“What? What about him?” Alex begs.
“It’s him. He’s the source of the Spanish music I’ve been hearing.”
Alex laughs. “I love it. The congressman’s wife is a Spanish professor.”
“Oh,” Gus says and then sheepishly adds, “Really?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“No,” he says. “I just thought it would be more significant than that.”
“Maybe it is.”
Gus returns the photo to the folder and hands it back to Alex. “Interesting that I can get a vibe about that stupid picture but nothing, totally a blank slate, when it comes to the notes from my stalker.” He puts “stalker” in air quotes because it doesn’t seem real.
“Not yet anyway.”
“Though I did have visions about those words ‘Stay away from her’ before I actually got the note and the postcard,” Gus says. “So I guess I was onto something.”
“Hey, maybe you’re too close to it because, you know, it’s about you,” Alex suggests. “Maybe your own anxiety around it is blocking you. I’ve seen that happen to you before.”
“True.”
“I’m thinking you should have your friend Beatrice take a look. She’ll be more objective.”
The detective rises from the couch. Gus follows. “Not a bad idea,” Gus says. “Should have thought of it myself.”
“I gotta head out,” Alex tells him. “You working tomorrow morning?”
“No. Doing a half day,” Gus replies. “I won’t go in ’til one thirty.”
They drift to the front door.
“Can I invite you to a funeral?”
Gus laughs. “I guess. Whose?”
“The CEO. Davis Klink.”
“Absolutely,” Gus says, swinging open the door.
“Ten a.m.,” Alex tells him. “Garden of Peace Memorial Park. North Scottsdale. Look it up.”
“Will do.”
They do a brief shake, pat on the back, bro kind of thing. As the detective pulls out of the driveway, Gus spies Elsa’s car parked in the one across the street. And though he’s once again feeling haunted, Gus gives the car a big, affirmative smile, then heads back into the house where a bathroom is waiting to be disinfected.
The Garden of Peace Memorial Park rests in the shadows of the McDowell Mountains, not far from the home of Davis and Greta Klink. The cemetery backs right up to a soaring monolith, and it’s almost as if you can imagine God looking down from the peak, commanding a kind of biblical awe among both the living and the dead below. The temperature is mild. There’s a vague whirl of a breeze in the air. The sky could not be any bluer had Sherwin Williams had a stake in the morning forecast. In the dressiest show of fashion that Mills has ever seen from her, Powell is wearing a black blouse and black skirt. He’s wearing the male equivalent: a black shirt and black slacks. He texted Gus earlier and told him to wear the same. They’re waiting for him in the parking lot, just inside the arched gateway to the cemetery. Teeming bougainvillea climbs the arches and drapes the high white walls surrounding the lot. A steady chain of cars flows through the gateway in single file. A car full of kids rolls in, windows down, blasting rap music.
“I wish my badge worked here,” he tells Powell. “I’d fuck with them.”
“I’d join you,” she says.
“Must be friends of his kids.”
“Yeah,” she says. “No class.”
Mills recognizes the car coming in behind the rapping morons. It’s Gus in his SUV. Mills flags him over.
“Good morning,” the psychic says as he hops out. “Thanks for the wardrobe tip. Haven’t been to a funeral since my mom’s.”
“We’re not going to the funeral,” Mills tells him.
“We’re not?”
Mills can see the confusion pass across Gus’s face. “We’re going to act like visitors to a nearby gravesite. We’ve already located a spot, and we’ll scope out the Klink funeral from there,” he says.
“We’re in camouflage, so to speak,” Powell tells Gus. “And if you don’t mind me saying, I’m a bit surprised you needed wardrobe tips for a funeral.”
Gus offers her a dubious look, and then the expression on his face changes, or rather disappears. He becomes an ancient scroll without the words. His eyes darken as he looks the woman over. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fail the test.”
“What test?” she asks defensively.
“Someone is putting you to the test,” Gus says. “There’s a man who wants you to meet his family. Am I right?”
Powell looks to Mills with hesitation in her eyes. “I’m not sure I like this.”
“I can’t help it,” Gus tells her.
“Mills?” she begs.
“All right, come on, let’s get moving,” he says meekly, fully aware Gus has to do what Gus has to do. There’s no interrupting a moment like this.
“He thinks if you agree to meet his family, then you’re fully committed to him,” Gus says to Powell. “If he hasn’t told you that already, he will.”
“Okay. Thank you,”
she says, cutting him off and turning away.
“Don’t go,” Gus calls to her. “I mean, don’t go meet his family. You’re not ready for that commitment. Not with him.”
Powell keeps walking.
Mills turns to Gus. “Are we done for now?”
“Yes,” Gus replies. “Sorry about that.”
When Mills catches up to his colleague, she pulls him by his shirt and whispers in his ear. “That psychic dude is freaking me out. Is he in my head?”
“Not exactly. It’s more like he’s tuning into the energy around you. He means well. There’s never any malice.”
The Klink burial follows a private service at the family’s church. Mills estimates the graveside crowd at 120. There are ten rows of ten chairs. About twenty people are standing. Greta Klink clutches a bouquet of roses. Her daughters, Mills assumes, sit to one side, her stepson to the other. Two Italian cypresses, one at each side of the entrance and perfectly groomed, guard the mausoleum that will house Davis Klink’s body. From where Mills is standing with Powell and Gus, he can hear the pastor murmuring clichés in delicate but affirming tones.
“His achievements were massive, but so was his heart.”
The son shakes his head and smirks.
“He left a mark on the world, but the most important mark was the one he made at home.”
The daughters grab each other and shake. To the untrained eye the girls might seem to be writhing in tears. To Mills, they look like college airheads busting up over a twisted wad of toilet paper clinging to their professor’s shoe. Greta Klink jabs one of them with her elbow.
Mills and his crew are watching from the more modest gravesite of Robert Bell (1929–2016, Beloved Husband of Nancy) about seven plots south of the Klink shindig. He scans the horizon for any outlier, the lone individual who creeps in the background to pay respects to his own murderous deed. It happens frequently enough for Mills to be here, to be scanning, but all he sees in the distance are lonely graves with their lonely residents, speechless mausoleums and headstones hardened to their fate. His gaze goes deep into the crowd. He recognizes Shelly Newton, the Legal guy Peter Tribble, and the HR woman Claire White from Ireland. The rest must be standard relatives, generic friends, and the enemies who Klink kept close. Mills scopes all the eyes he can see for signs of satisfaction, malice, or revenge.
“What about the guy with the blue bow tie?” Powell asks, breaking momentarily from her unconvincing façade of grief and tears.
Mills shakes his head. “No, he’s just dressed like a douche.”
“I don’t like that chick in the big sunglasses,” Powell says, determined.
“There are a lot of chicks with big sunglasses,” Mills whispers.
“Well, I can’t exactly point,” his colleague says. “She’s got blond hair.”
“I’m counting about twenty blonds with sunglasses. It’s a popular look today.”
“Now you’re just messing with me.”
“Maybe.”
“Six rows back. Two in from the right,” Powell tells him.
Mills follows with his eyes. “Oh, her? What don’t you like about her?”
“I don’t know. I get a vibe.”
Mills turns to her. “A vibe? That’s why Gus is here. You stick to police work.”
She responds with a burst of mock sobs. “I am doing police work,” she cries. “The woman is wearing a scarf. I saw her adjust it, and when it slipped I could see a tattoo on her neck. This is not a tattoo-on-the-neck crowd.”
Mills studies the woman, sees the scarf around her neck, one of those very thin ascot types like the kind you see on flight attendants, but he can’t see the tattoo. “You’re probably right, Jan. But these days tattoos are everywhere.”
“I hear the Spanish music again,” Gus says suddenly.
“Seriously?” Mills asks him.
“Seriously.”
“I need you to concentrate on the words, Gus,” Mills says. “I know you don’t speak Spanish, but try to make out the words. Give me the words, and we can use a dictionary or something.”
“Or introduce him to Torento’s wife,” Powell interjects.
“That’s right,” Mills says. “Good catch.”
Gus ignores them.
“But there’s no sign of ‘Your Pal Al’ today,” she says. “I’d expect he’d be here if he and Klink were close friends.”
“He’s in Washington.”
“So what? Those guys in Congress look for any excuse to get out of work.”
Mills laughs. “I think his wife would have told us if he was coming back to Phoenix for the funeral.”
“All I’m saying is that Torento’s absence makes it less likely they were close friends and less likely he can tell us anything useful.”
“Unless he’s our killer.”
“He’s way taller than the guy in the Safeway video,” Powell says. “Plus, he has an alibi.”
“Certainly not airtight,” Mills says. “Now, if you don’t mind, could you do a little more grieving over poor Mr. Robert Bell here?”
She puts a hand to her heart, sways back and forth, and sniffles. But her grief is short-lived. “Oh, look,” she says suddenly. “Blondie’s scarf is loose again. She’s adjusting it. I can see part of the tattoo. Shit. I can’t make out the image from here. Shit, shit, shit.”
“I can’t either,” Mills says.
“She’s obviously trying to hide it,” Powell whispers.
Gus leans in. “I don’t want to tell you two how to do your work, but let me just suggest you pull out your phones and discreetly take a picture of the woman.”
“Damn it,” Powell says. “I was so overcome with grief I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I’ll do it,” Mills says, removing his phone from his pocket.
But the woman doesn’t adjust her scarf again, and Mills makes his disgust audible. Several minutes pass, and Gus says, “I think it was a butterfly.”
“Did you see it?” Mills asks.
“No,” Gus replies. “Just a hunch.”
The service ends without major fuss or, for that matter, outburst of emotion. Greta Klink did a fair share of weeping, but few others joined in on the sadness. The crowd flows out silently, orderly, an army of black, like lines of type receding from the fleeting pages of Davis Klink’s life. Mills searches the crowd for the woman with the scarf, but she might be that one guest who slipped out through the back. He doesn’t have enough of a hunch to go after her. She nervously adjusted her scarf. So what? The tattoo, alone, proves nothing, means nothing, and certainly doesn’t suggest she knows anything about Davis Klink’s demise.
“Let’s get out of here,” he tells the others.
As they turn to leave, Gus says, “Wait. Look there. . . .”
Gus points to the entrance of Klink’s mausoleum where Greta Klink is standing with the same young man Mills assumes to be her stepson. All the other mourners are gone. The man punches the air, narrowly missing Greta’s face. She flinches and scowls, her own fists clenched. Their words are no louder than the hisses of territorial snakes until the young man hollers, “You fucking gold digger,” and storms off.
Mills guides his crew away before the widow can see them.
18
They grabbed Japanese takeout on the way back to the station, and now Mills and Powell are eating lunch at his desk. Mills is plucking noodles and chicken from something called a Kyoto Bowl, which, he imagines, has nothing to do with Kyoto or any other city in Japan. But it’s tasty, MSG-free, and a nice break from Mexican.
“I’m taking Torento out of the killer column and putting him in the victim column,” Powell says as she stabs at her sushi.
The columns are figurative at the moment, but Mills gets what she means. “Because?”
“Because let’s assume he’s next.”
“Because?”
“C’mon, Alex, don’t be a dick.”
“Just because he’s in a random photograph with the two victims d
oesn’t mean he’s next,” Mills says. “Anyone could be next.”
“We have to start somewhere.”
“Here’s what I want. I want columns,” Mills tells her. “Go in the conference room after lunch with Preston and Myers and put our columns on the whiteboard. We’re overdue. Just map out the players, and we’ll make our lists. Victims, suspects, friends, family, lovers, liaisons, gold diggers, I don’t care.”
“Wow. You sound fucking enthused.”
“I’m frustrated,” he groans.
“But the food is good,” she says.
“The food is good.”
The food is almost gone when Preston comes barreling down the hallway and skids to a panting stop at the door, rattling the frame. Mills dabs the corners of his mouth with a napkin and says, “Hey, there, Ken, you need something?”
His face is the red siren of a heart attack. “This is huge,” he announces, catching his breath. “Probably our biggest lead yet.”
“Probably our only lead,” Powell says.
“Come in, shut the door,” Mills tells the man. Preston complies, takes a seat, and oozes not only manic excitement but also a kind of avuncular caring in his eyes. He’s a solid veteran of the force, a smart man, who has somehow become smarter and quieter over the years instead of more cynical and brash. Preston tells them he has now acquired most, not all, of Davis Klink’s banking records and that they offer a glimpse into what the CEO was doing in the hours after leaving his office and meeting his murderer.
“I don’t think he was going to meet his sick daughter,” Preston says. “On the Friday afternoon of his death, Klink withdrew half a million dollars in cash from two separate banks.”
He says nothing more for the space of about ten seconds to let that sink in.
It sinks in like a cruise ship hitting an iceberg.
Mills breaks the silence and says, “Do banks actually have that kind of cash on hand?”
“They do at the kind of banks Klink does business with,” Preston replies. “These banks cater to the ultra-wealthy. The records show the withdrawals. Videotape surveillance backs up Klink’s physical presence at both banks about two hours apart.”
“They just handed him over the money?” Powell asks.
Dig Your Grave Page 17
