A Tooth for a Tooth

by Ben Rehder

  But, out of pure caution, I sat in the van for five minutes and watched, just to be sure Damon Tate didn’t emerge from the restaurant to see what I’d been doing under his truck. Nope. All good.

  I opened the GPS app on my phone and created a custom setting. Now if Tate came within one hundred yards of our house in Tarrytown, I’d get a real-time alert.

  But I wasn’t done yet.

  As I opened the door to JMJ Construction at five o’clock, I realized it would be quite a twist if I found Brandi Sloan seated behind the reception desk, going about business as usual. But, no, it was Cindy, the woman who’d been filling in when I’d been here three days ago.

  “How was your pedicure?” she asked.

  It took me a second to remember what I’d said last time.

  “Not bad, but they charged me extra because I have cloven hooves,” I said.

  She laughed sharply and said, “You are so weird. But, like, in a good way.”

  A little flirtatious, but I have to admit it felt good, given my mood for the past day or so.

  I said, “Not to be a total downer, but any sign of Brandi?”

  Her smile slowly disappeared. “Actually, no, and we’re all pretty upset about it. The police told us to call if we hear anything from her at all.”

  “It’s a sad situation,” I said.

  I was taking a calculated risk being here in this office. What if Jankowski spotted me? On the other hand, so what if he did? What would he do? What could he do? He might not know that I knew the connection between him and the Tate brothers, so he would be forced to play it cool. Pretend that everything was fine. Even if Cindy happened to mention later that I’d been there, so what?

  “It sure is,” she said. Then she added, “Uh, are you here to see Mr. Jankowski? He’s in a meeting right now.”

  “Actually, I was just driving by and I just thought I’d stop to see if Brandi had been found.”

  “Aw, that’s very sweet of you. But I tell you what—if you’ll give me your phone number, I’ll call you if we hear anything.”

  “That would be outstanding,” I said.

  She slid a notepad across the desk and I jotted my number down.

  “Guard that with your life,” I said, sliding the pad back to her. “People would pay good money for that number.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Mostly women. I might auction it off to the highest bidder.”

  “You could retire early,” I said.

  It was harmless for me to flirt back, right?

  “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Or I might just keep it for myself.”

  Oops. Had I pushed it too far? I got back to the topic at hand by saying, “Well, I hope Brandi turns up real soon.”

  “If you had to guess,” Cindy said, her voice lowered, “what would you say happened to her? I mean, it just seems so…grim. Like we’re not going to be hearing any good news, that’s for sure.”

  I could tell Cindy was genuinely concerned and distressed.

  “I really wouldn’t even want to speculate,” I said. “And I’d say it’s way too early to give up hope. Just keep a positive thought until the police learn more.”

  That seemed to buoy her spirits, and I wondered if I was setting her up for disappointment later. Maybe.

  I gave her a wave and headed out the door to the central atrium of the building.

  Before I’d gone inside, I’d spotted Jankowski’s Land Rover SUV parked in a reserved spot near the entrance to the building. How convenient. And I knew that the view of that particular spot from the atrium was limited.

  I exited to the outside, descended the steps, and veered toward the SUV. I began tossing my keys a few inches in the air and catching them, just as casual as could be, until I was beside the SUV. Then—oops—I dropped the keys. Bent down to get them, and on my way up, I slapped a tracker under the rear passenger wheel well. It wasn’t as well hidden as the one on Damon Tate’s truck, but it would do for now.

  I walked to the van, fired it up, and took off.

  Now if Jankowski and Tate got together in person to make more plans against me or Lennox Armbruster, I’d know. Ain’t technology great?

  I decided it was time to call Ingrid Sloan—assuming it was the right phone number—and see what I could learn. A woman answered on the second ring.

  I said, “This is Tony with American Parcel Service trying to reach Ingrid Sloan.”

  “This is she.”

  Wow. Not only had I reached her, she was good with grammar.

  “We have a package for you, but we’ve been unsuccessful in delivering it,” I said. “We’ve left a couple of notices, so we’re wondering if the address is correct.”

  “What address do you have?” she asked.

  Smart. Better than giving out her address to some random dude on the phone.

  I read off her home address, which I’d found in the tax rolls, but I changed an 8 to a 3. She corrected me, and I said, “Sorry for the mix-up. At this point, we want to do everything we can to make up for the delay and the inconvenience, but I also see here that the package is going to require a signature, per the shipper’s instructions. So I just—”

  “Who is the shipper?” She sounded impatient, and who could blame her, under the circumstances?

  “Uh…Old West Mercantile,” I said.

  “Never heard of them,” she said.

  “Somebody might have sent something to you from them,” I said. “Maybe a gift.”

  “If they did, I’m going to chew their ass out, because this is a hassle.”

  I laughed. “Would you like to decline the delivery?”

  She let out a sigh. “No, that’s fine. Just, uh, when can you bring it?”

  “We will be happy to accommodate your schedule,” I said. “So whatever works. Really, anytime, including evenings.”

  “Can you deliver it to my business instead?”

  That told me she was still in Ruidoso, and possibly that she wanted to keep people away from her house.

  “Yes, ma’am, if that would work better for you. What’s that address?”

  28

  The next day and a half passed without any additional progress or news on the case. I had most of the puzzle put together, but I didn’t know what to do with it or where to go with it. Tell the cops? Neither Billy Chang nor Randy Wolfe, the APD investigators, had shared anything with me, so why should I share anything more with them?

  This case wasn’t the only topic for me to worry about.

  I’d told Mia about my appointment with the urologist, and I left the materials on the living room table for her to read. She’d seemed neither interested nor indifferent. This was a side of her I’d never experienced before, and that in itself was disquieting. What were we waiting for? Didn’t we need to talk about this and figure out what we were going to do?

  She was at the gym for a mid-morning workout when the doorbell rang. I checked the camera on the porch and saw a youngish gentleman waiting harmlessly, hands in pockets, for me to answer the door, so I did.

  He had a slight build and closely cropped red hair with a matching goatee.

  “Hi, I’m your neighbor right down the street,” he said. “Blane Benson?”

  Oh, right. Now I recognized him. We shook hands.

  “Hi, Blane,” I said. “I’m Roy Ballard.”

  “Right, and you replaced my mailbox last week?” he said.

  “Yep, that was me, and I hope the note made sense,” I said.

  “Well, yeah, I guess it did, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about that. First, I wanted to say thanks, I guess.”

  I guess?

  “Is there a problem with the mailbox?” I asked.

  “No, it’
s fine. It’s more with the situation that led to the mailbox being destroyed.”

  He seemed somewhat nervous.

  “What situation is that?” I asked.

  “What I mean is, we talked to the cop that night when she knocked on our door, but to be honest, we didn’t really understand what had happened. Or why. We just knew that somebody had driven over our mailbox and left the scene. Not exactly the crime of the century, right? But I started getting curious, and I read the police report from that night, and then you actually shot a man right outside your home, and that made me—well, I started doing some research about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yeah, and what you do for a living.”

  “I’m a legal videographer.”

  “I’d never heard of that profession before,” he said, “and it sounds so…I don’t know. Innocuous? Is that the right word?”

  Blane was beginning to annoy me.

  “I don’t know, Blane. You tell me.”

  “I’m not explaining why I’m here very well,” he said. “It’s just that, given what you do and the kind of people you bring into our neighborhood, I was just wondering if you might consider moving. You and your wife.”

  I almost laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “You want Mia and me to move out?” I said. “Her family has owned this place for nearly a hundred years.”

  “I’m not sure what that has to do with it.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Five months.”

  “Why don’t you move instead?”

  “Because I’m not the problem,” he said.

  “So you want us to move,” I said. “That’s the solution you propose?”

  “I don’t think it’s an unreasonable idea,” he said. “There are a lot of families in this neighborhood.”

  “There are a lot of families in most neighborhoods,” I said, feeling the heat rising in my cheeks and the back of my neck.

  “I’m not trying to agitate you,” Blane said. “I just feel that you present a certain danger to everyone else on the street. Do you disagree?”

  “I don’t even know where to start, Blane, to be honest. What if I was a cop or a judge or a prosecutor? The situation would be similar. Would you still ask me to move?”

  “You had to shoot a man,” Blane said. “What if you’d missed? Where might those bullets have gone? What about a ricochet? Have you not thought about these possibilities? And how do you know it won’t happen again?”

  Honestly, I didn’t have a good answer for his questions.

  “I’ll have to get back with you on that, Blane. Thanks for coming by.”

  When Mia came home from the gym, I didn’t say anything about his visit.

  Later that day, a client called with a new case—a fairly straightforward slip-and-fall accident—and we agreed that Mia would tackle it solo for the time being. She got right on it, too. After reviewing the file, she headed out in her Chevy Tahoe to put the subject under surveillance. Was it just my imagination, or was she looking for excuses to get out of the house lately?

  I sat down in the living room with a notepad on my lap.

  Some things I knew:

  Nathaniel Tate had not died and I assumed, at this point, he was going to survive.

  I had not heard from Randy Wolfe or anyone else at APD, so I also assumed there was a strong chance I was not going to be charged for the shooting, which was as it should be.

  Neither Damon Tate nor Joe Jankowski had driven anywhere near our house, and they had not gotten together in person—at least, not in the two vehicles carrying my GPS trackers. Likewise, neither of them had gone anywhere that seemed suspicious or out of place, unless you consider the Yellow Rose, a strip joint, out of place. Damon Tate had gone there a few hours after his late lunch at the Rusty Cannon.

  Blane Benson was weighing on my mind. Should he? Did he have a valid point? Or did he simply have a stick up his butt because his parents had named him Blane?

  I absentmindedly drew an elephant on the notepad, but it looked more like a deformed donkey.

  Lennox Armbruster had been released from the hospital, and although he had answered when I’d called yesterday, he still wasn’t interested in talking to the cops. His sister and nephew were fine.

  Brandi Sloan was still missing.

  Her mother, Lucinda Sloan, had accepted the friend request from my fake profile, Linda Patterson, yesterday. When I visited her timeline, I didn’t see any posts that I hadn’t been able to see previously, which meant she had never written a post about her daughter’s disappearance.

  I’d been thinking about Brandi a lot, and it had become crystal clear that she was the key to closing this case. She was in it up to her neck. She’d talked to Joe Jankowski about a body. If she knew about that, she probably knew every detail. Every player. Depending on the extent of her involvement—assuming she didn’t kill Brent Donovan herself—she could probably cop a plea and bring Jankowski and Damon Tate down, and possibly Nathaniel Tate, too. She wouldn’t skate totally, but she might be able to stop this fiasco from ruining the rest of her life.

  If she was still alive.

  The police would have gotten warrants for her cell phone and bank cards in order to monitor for any activity. If she or anyone else was out there using them, they would know that by now, and they would have most likely found that person. Hence nobody was using them. Had she planned ahead and stockpiled a bunch of cash before she took off? If so, why? Why had she run?

  I remembered that her Land Rover had been parked in the driveway when I’d parked on her street during the welfare check, so how had she left town? Airplane? Bus? Rental car? Gotten a ride from a friend? Simply walked away? Or been carried, lifeless, perhaps rolled in a tarp or squeezed into a large suitcase?

  I’m not a big believer in, like, cosmic alignment or the idea that there are no coincidences, but my phone rang right then with a call from Randy Wolfe.

  “I finally had a chance to interview Nathaniel Tate in the hospital, and I’d say you’re in the clear,” he said. “Figured you’d want to know.”

  “Let me guess…he gave conflicting stories, threw in some obvious lies, and somehow couldn’t remember a whole bunch of details. And the reason he was playing a recording of a catfight on his phone—well, that was just a prank, because that kind of thing is hysterical.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny any of that,” he said.

  “I’m surprised he agreed to an interview. Have you charged him?”

  “It’s coming.”

  “Attempted murder?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “That’s up to the prosecutor.”

  “I’m sure you can understand why I would be rightfully upset if it’s anything less than attempted murder, seeing as how he intentionally tried to lure me to a window while he waited with his gun drawn.”

  “You know how these things work,” he said.

  “Unfortunately, yeah, I do. Have you warned Damon Tate about the idea of, you know, trying to kill me for revenge?”

  “Not my job,” Wolfe said. “But I called him anyway. Left a message. He didn’t call me back.”

  “Thanks for trying,” I said. “Have you processed Brandi Sloan’s place?”

  Best to try to get as much out of him as I could before he was ready to end the call.

  “Can’t get a warrant. We have no evidence she’s been the victim of a crime or an accident, and nobody else has the legal right to let us search her house or her vehicle. Her name is the only one on the deed.”

  “When that deputy did a welfare check—”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I was watching. I see all, know all.”

  He didn’t
say anything, because he didn’t like my flippant attitude.

  So I said, “Okay, I encouraged the other receptionist at JMJ Construction to ask for a deputy to be sent over, and then I went over to watch. I was concerned about Brandi and I wanted to know if the deputy saw anything weird or out of place. I assume the answer is no.”

  “That is correct. Obviously. Which is one reason we can’t get a warrant.”

  “What about the parents?”

  “What about them?”

  “I’m betting they have a key to the place and are free to go inside if they want, and they already have.”

  “They do, and they went inside the same day as the welfare check. They didn’t see anything that concerned them. Same with the vehicle.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “any idea how she managed to afford a Land Rover on a receptionist’s salary?”

  “If I had access to any of her financial records, I might know the answer to that, but, again, can’t get a warrant.”

  Since he was sharing information with me, I was tempted to tell him everything I’d learned from Lennox Armbruster, but I resisted. Armbruster would deny all of it, and Wolfe would be left with nothing but my secondhand account. He wouldn’t be able to verify anything Armbruster had said. And, most important, it could put Armbruster’s nephew Jack in danger. Would Jankowski follow through on that threat? If he did, I’d never forgive myself.

  “You think something happened to her or she took off on her own?” I asked.

  “I’m not a fan of making wild guesses,” he said.

  Which was clever, because it was the same thing I’d said to him when he’d interviewed me about shooting Nathaniel Tate.

  “Awfully wise of you,” I said. “You’re aware she has a sister in New Mexico?”

  “Of course I am. I’ve talked to her a couple of times and she knows nothing about it.”

  “Or that’s what she says.”