Dig Your Grave

by Steven Cooper

Preston gives her a thoughtful nod. “They certainly weren’t quick transactions, and not out in the open,” he explains. “They take him into a private office, and he walks out about an hour and a half later with the cash.”

  “Don’t the banks have to report big transactions like that to the government?” Powell asks.

  Preston lets a smirk serve as his reply.

  But Mills prods further. “Does the video show what happens in the private room?”

  “No. We see him entering the bank, holding a briefcase, shaking hands, a short conversation, and then he’s led into a private room. Same basic routine at both banks,” Preston tells them. “I assume he would have security detail with him if the money had anything to do with Illumilife.”

  “Damn,” Powell says, “sounds like he was paying off some kind of ransom.”

  “Or blackmail,” Mills says. “Either way, I think it’s time to go pay our condolences to Greta Klink.”

  The guards wave them through the gates of Miracle Canyon. This is Preston’s first visit. He’s in the back seat. “Jesus Lou-ee-zus,” he cries when he sees the rambling estates. “This makes PV look like the slums.”

  They can’t park anywhere near the Klink property because the surrounding streets are lined with the cars of genuine well-wishers who have beaten the cops to the after-party. The day has warmed since the cemetery service. The three of them—Mills, Powell, and Preston—hike on foot to the widow’s front door. A butler-looking attendant greets them; he tells them Greta Klink is accepting visitors poolside.

  “We remember the way,” Mills tells him.

  Out back at the pool, the cops join a line of maybe twelve people paying their condolences to the widow. A longer line forms at the buffet. An even longer line than that waits eagerly for refills of champagne.

  At first her face registers unfamiliarity at the sight of Alex Mills. She narrows her eyes as if she knows him, not sure from where. He says, quietly, “Mrs. Klink, my colleagues and I would like to speak to you.”

  Then the bell goes off. “Oh, you! Oh, Detective!”

  “That’s right. Alex Mills.” He takes her hand. She withdraws it almost instantly.

  “I’m sure you can see I’m receiving guests right now,” she says.

  “We can wait,” Mills tells her.

  She shakes her head. “I just buried my husband this morning after two painful weeks, and you have the audacity to come to my house now. . . .”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says quietly, bending to where she sits. “But we thought you’d want to know about a possible lead in the case. . . .”

  “Of course, but there is the sanctity of mourning,” she reminds him.

  Yes, he observes, a very catered sanctity with an open bar, a string quartet, and hundreds roaming the estate taking selfies.

  “Ma’am,” he whispers to her as discreetly as possible, “your husband withdrew half a million dollars on the afternoon of his death. We think that might be relevant to the case.”

  The color plummets from her face. But she does her very best not to melt. She tightens her chin. Elongates her neck. “Our lawyer is here,” she whispers back. “He needs to hear this.”

  Greta Klink excuses herself from her guests, mutters something about checking with the caterer, and instructs a member of her staff to escort Mills and his crew to her office. It’s the same office with the perfect furniture and the charm of an ice cube.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?” the staff member asks them. It’s a different maid from their first visit.

  “No, thanks,” Mills says.

  “Feel free to take a seat,” she says as she leaves them.

  They don’t. They remain standing and wait in silence. A few minutes later a man enters the office, his hand already extended as he walks through the door. He’s the athletic, aggressive type—lean, fit, great hair, great tan, a Rolex, about fifty.

  “Chad Pace,” he says as he gives a hearty handshake all around. “Attorney for the Klink family.”

  Greta Klink drifts in behind him and all but swoons into the chair at her desk. “Please sit,” she says.

  “If you don’t mind,” Mills tells her, “we’ll stand.”

  “What can we do for you?” the attorney asks.

  “As we told Mrs. Klink, we have reviewed her husband’s banking records and have identified some questionable withdrawals on the day of his murder,” Mills replies.

  “So she tells me,” Pace says. “Again, I must ask, what can we do for you?”

  “All we need is for Mrs. Klink to answer some simple questions.”

  “Ask away,” the man says magnanimously, “but I reserve the right to counsel Mrs. Klink to refrain from answering any question that feels inappropriate.”

  Mills doesn’t give Pace the satisfaction of a response. Instead, he turns immediately to Greta and asks, “Do you have any idea why your husband would withdraw all that money in one afternoon?”

  “No.”

  “Did you discuss money matters with him?”

  “Of course.”

  She’s jittery, as if she’s jonesing for nicotine.

  “And he never indicated that he’d be withdrawing such a large sum on that Friday?”

  “No.”

  “Was he anxious about anything?” Mills asks.

  “I think I answered that question on your last visit,” she says with an edge of resentment.

  “I’m sorry,” Mills says. “But I’m asking again because news of this cash withdrawal could prompt some different memories of his state of mind.”

  Chad Pace bristles (a courtroom bristle no doubt perfected in law school—Mills has seen his wife make the exact same gesture). “I don’t understand the question,” he says.

  Mills nods studiously, pauses for effect, as he stares down Greta Klink, knowing whatever version of the truth he gets will be his burden to judge. “You know, blackmail, that sort of thing. Any reason someone would want to blackmail your husband?” he asks.

  “I would advise Mrs. Klink not to answer that question,” the attorney interjects.

  “Fine,” Mills says.

  Greta lifts her hand. “No, I’ll answer it,” she says. “I cannot think of any reason in the world why someone would want to blackmail my husband.”

  “Would he discuss something like that with you?” Powell asks.

  “Well, if he wouldn’t, how would I know?” the widow replies with a smug smile.

  “What about ransom or extortion?” Mills throws out there.

  Pace steps forward, almost gets between the widow’s desk and the standing cops. “I don’t like that question. Too much speculation. I’m going to advise Greta not to answer.”

  Greta looks at the detectives stone-faced, as if she has every intention of taking her lawyer’s advice this time.

  “Fine, then,” Mills says. “What was your husband’s net worth?”

  The woman replies with a gulp of laughter. “That’s so gauche I can’t even respond.”

  “We have other ways of finding out,” Mills tells her.

  “My client is not a suspect,” Pace says.

  Mills smiles, widely and purposefully. “She’s not a person of interest, but it would be in her best interest to cooperate.”

  The widow slaps her hands on the desktop. “Well, I can’t sit around and gab, folks. I have a flight to catch this evening. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to wrap up things with my other guests and get ready.”

  “Where are you headed?” Preston asks.

  “St. Bart’s,” she replies.

  “So much for the sanctity of mourning,” Mills says.

  “Hey, my client doesn’t have to listen to that,” the man with the Rolex says.

  Mills turns to him fully. “Well, listen to this. I can go before a judge within the hour and have her passport held so she can’t leave the country.”

  The lawyer laughs. “Good luck with that. You have no grounds.”

  “Half a million doll
ars is missing from her husband’s accounts,” Preston reminds them.

  Not a word. Instead, a pause that takes on all the awkwardness of silence in an echo chamber. Mills swears he can hear the hair implants sprouting from the lawyer’s head. A maid ducks into the office, takes in the deep freeze, then withdraws with fear lodged in her eyes. That fear, alone, seems to empower the widow, who now sits up erect and regal and looks at the detectives as if she has a family crest in each eye. “His net worth is sixty million dollars,” she says. “Half a million is a drop in the bucket, you see. I wouldn’t leave the country for half a million dollars.”

  “Still,” Mills says calmly, “it looks suspicious to us.”

  “Then I won’t go to St. Bart’s, goddamnit! I won’t go!” she shrieks. “Now get out of my house.”

  Mills folds his arms across his chest and rocks a bit on his heels. “Before we leave so abruptly, may we have a minute with your daughter Jordan?”

  Greta is steaming. It’s all over her face. “What the hell for?”

  “We’d like to ask her about the call she made to your husband before he left the office,” Mills explains.

  “She didn’t make the call,” Greta says.

  “And you know this how?” Mills asks.

  “I asked her.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell us?” Mills persists. “That seems odd. Any chance we can speak to your other children?”

  “This is not the time, not the place,” she says.

  “Are you suggesting that someone posing as your daughter made the call?”

  The woman bolts to her feet. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” she hisses. “And I’ll ask you one more time to get out of my house, Detective. Get the fuck out!”

  Mills assures the woman he’ll be in touch with any developments and offers a nod. Then, with his colleagues trailing him, he gets the fuck out.

  19

  On his drive into work, Gus places a call to Officer Johnson at the Paradise Valley Police Department. It’s been forty-eight hours since he showed the cop the note; he figures it can’t hurt to give a nudge. But nothing’s nudging this morning, not the parking lot of rush hour and not Officer Johnson. Johnson isn’t available. Gus leaves a message.

  He turns on the radio and listens to a breathy interview on NPR. Something about an effort in Kenya to remove wild elephants’ tusks to make the endangered animals less attractive to ivory poachers. Gus admires NPR, its rigorous reporting with depth and relevance (he’s very pro-elephant), but the satin-soft voices of the NPR announcers aren’t well suited for waking people up on their morning commutes. He finds some Billie Welch music on his playlist and listens. The first song is “When We Collide,” an aggressive, guitar-driven song about a love-hate relationship. It rocks, completely. Billie’s anger in the song always surprises Gus. He’s never seen her that angry. But her musical goodbye to her love-hate lover cuts deep like a knife. Every thrash of her guitar is a wound she leaves him. The tune gets stuck in his head. He can’t release it. He doesn’t want to be hearing her angry voice all morning, but he hears her angry voice all morning, through the MRI of Mrs. Sears’s lower lumbar, through the MRI of Mr. Reilly’s hip. He hears it when he drifts over to do an ultrasound of Louis Feldman’s abdomen. He hums it during lunch outside in the courtyard.

  The calls come after lunch. Gus can feel the phone vibrate several times between one and two o’clock. The only thing he sees on his screen is “UNKNOWN CALLER PARADISE VALLEY, AZ.” He assumes it’s Officer Johnson or someone from the Paradise Valley Police Department, but he has no choice but to let the calls go to voice mail. The calls persist, rapidly growing in frequency, increasingly distracting him. He loses his place during a mammogram. And again during Ethan and Mia Donaldson’s fetal ultrasound.

  Then, shortly after that near failure, he gets a text message: “Parker. PLEASE Respond. Officer Johnson.”

  With that Gus loses all focus on his work. He grabs another tech and asks him to cover for the next exam on the schedule. Then he steps outside and calls PV.

  “Thelan.”

  “I’m looking for Officer Johnson. This is Gus P—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Parker,” the cop snaps. “I’m the other officer who came out to Miss Welch’s house that day.”

  “I remember.”

  “Your phone working okay?”

  “Far as I can tell,” Gus replies.

  “’Cause, you know, we’ve been calling you all afternoon.”

  “I’m at work. In a medical setting, so I can’t answer my phone.”

  The man scoffs. “Whatever. I’m going to transfer you to Johnson now, but just so you know you don’t have to go running to Alex Mills if you’re freaking out.”

  “Just so you know, I’m not freaking out. And Alex Mills is a friend,” Gus replies. “And I live in Phoenix, not Paradise Valley. Are we clear?”

  “Hold on.”

  A few seconds later Johnson picks up the line and, instead of challenging Gus for not calling sooner, simply says, “You should probably come down to the station, and you should probably bring Ms. Welch.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “We did,” the officer says. “But we need to talk in person. I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

  “Just tell me, is Billie in any danger?”

  “Not at this very moment,” the man says, then clears his throat. “But I’d advise paying us a visit before we are talking a very real danger.”

  “I’ll come down there first, myself, without Billie,” Gus tells the officer. “But I won’t get off work ’til five thirty.”

  Johnson says that won’t be a problem, that he’ll be happy to wait.

  Stomach in knots, Gus arrives at the Paradise Valley police station at 6:05 p.m. Johnson escorts him to his office.

  “We have a suspect,” the cop says. “I reviewed the videotape from the security booth at Miss Welch’s community.” Johnson hands Gus a printout of a photo. “That’s a screenshot of the guy. It’s not great, but we know who he is.”

  “You do?”

  Johnson says he searched the department’s files for any crimes involving Billie Welch, and it turns out Billie had a stalker about twenty-five years ago and it wasn’t just a fan. The man was dangerous.

  “She was living here in PV, in a different house,” Johnson says. “This guy broke in and was waiting for her to come home. Instead the maid shows up and he handcuffs her to one of the ladders in the swimming pool. If she had moved a few inches, she might have drowned, at least that’s what the reports say. Miss Welch found her the next day, dehydrated from the sun and nearly unconscious. The guy was long gone. But he left Miss Welch a creepy note asking her to save a date for their wedding.”

  Gus can feel his eyes bulging from his skull. He tries to shake off the disbelief and says, “Billie’s never said a word about this.”

  “Like I said, it goes back twenty-five years,” Johnson reminds him. “Well before my time.”

  “I’m surprised she ever came back to live here.”

  “They caught the guy, Mr. Parker. The department investigated, and when they caught the guy they found evidence that he’d been following Miss Welch from city to city on one of her concert tours.”

  “Jesus,” Gus whispers. He tries to imagine this. Was it a strange figure lingering outside each concert venue? Was he a lurking shadow, or had he been watching inside? Had he been in the front row? Had he been staking out the hotels on the tour? Gus can’t conjure up any answers and realizes he’s drifted off because he sees the young officer staring at him patiently. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “No, I get it,” the cop says. “It’s kind of shocking.”

  “What’s his name? The stalker’s?” Gus asks.

  “Richard Knight,” Johnson replies. “The department did press charges, but they couldn’t really charge him with stalking. There really weren’t anti-stalking laws back then like there are now, but he was charged
with criminal trespass, breaking and entering, reckless endangerment, assault, kidnapping, and he was found guilty on all counts. Sent away for a long time because he had violated his probation on an earlier conviction for assaulting his wife. I pulled all the court documents if you want to see them.”

  “Obviously the man is out of jail now,” Gus says.

  “He got out of prison after fourteen years, violated his probation again, and went back in,” Johnson explains. “He’s only been out again for three months. Obviously he’s still in the area. Apparently, he’s still obsessed with Billie Welch. I think there’s a good chance we’ll find him.”

  “I hope so.”

  The cop leans forward and gently says, “In the meantime, both of you are probably in a good bit of danger. One of our detectives wants to talk to you.”

  Gus only now begins to wonder what kind of conversation he’s going to have with Billie. He closes his eyes for a second, just long enough to see a cord around his neck, his hands clawing at it as he’s trying to break free. Then he’s back, not sure whether that was a psychic vision or just a manifestation of pure human fear. A few seconds later the door opens and a man enters in street clothes, sporting a goatee and a pleasant face. He’s wearing a fancy watch and, in his right ear, a diamond stud. “Detective Obershan,” he says, extending a hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Parker.”

  “Gus will do.”

  “I’m sorry, Gus, that you’re having to deal with this creep, but he’s obviously still in the area and obviously not that bright, so I think it’s a good bet we’ll apprehend him,” the man says.

  “I don’t gamble.”

  Obershan sits at the corner of Johnson’s desk. “Then let’s cut to the chase,” he says. “Is your relationship with Billie Welch public?”

  Gus does alternating tilts of his head. “Kind of, I guess,” he replies. “I mean, we don’t keep it a secret. We go out in public. But I don’t think much has been written about us, except maybe in the tabloids.”

  “So, she hasn’t mentioned you in interviews, and you haven’t done any photo shoots together?”

  Gus laughs. “Uh, no, I don’t think anyone needs to see me. Billie’s a very private person. She doesn’t discuss her personal life all that much with reporters. She might have mentioned me once or twice in interviews, but that’s all.”