by Rex Burns
That kind of waiting makes for long days, and it was with relief that as the return migration of evening began to peak he headed back to the office. He’d be back later this evening. Maybe those drapes would open enough to show her walking without the brace. Maybe she’d put on her dancing shoes and trip the light fantastic down the sidewalk. She was attractive in a dark and intense way, and Kirk had seen a blond man visit the address occasionally. Woman does not live by neck brace alone. But how long it would be before she slipped up, Kirk couldn’t say. Still, that possibility—like an angler’s faith in a fish’s hunger—was what made surveillance bearable.
Chris, too, had found the day a long one despite the extra janitorial work caused whenever a large shipment of components came in. Visser hadn’t called last night, and today neither Visser nor Johnny Atencio said a word to him. In fact, they avoided him. If they saw him coming, they headed suddenly in another direction down a warehouse aisle. It was puzzling— especially Johnny, who had seemed like a nice enough guy and who enjoyed telling Chris about his amateur boxing career. Chris stripped off his sweaty wool socks and padded barefoot to his bathroom to splash cool water across his face. He was due to make his daily report in fifteen minutes and he’d ask Devlin about it. He was half undressed for a shower when a knock rattled his door.
Through the peephole, he saw Scotty Martin on the landing, half smiling at the little fisheye of glass. Surprised to see the man at his door, Chris quickly unlatched the security chain. This was it—the contact.
He started to say hello to Martin when a large figure, as big as Devlin, moved quickly from the wall to the doorway. It was a face Chris thought he recognized—maybe the one in the car the other night. Up close, the face was chiseled with hard lines around the eyes and mouth, and it was dark with heavy tan. Chris looked at Scotty half hidden behind the big man’s shoulder. Scotty looked back at him with distant, expressionless eyes. It was the same look Chris had seen on cowboys at branding time when they threw a calf and, hooked castrating knife clutched in a fist, approached the bawling and helpless animal.
CHAPTER 8
AN ACCIDENT SOMEWHERE up near the Mousetrap had turned the rush hour Valley Highway into a miles-long parking lot. Devlin and the Subaru, caught between exits, crept and braked while the cheery babble of a radio talk-show host kept telling commuters how bad the traffic jam was. By the time he could pull off the interstate and work his way along crowded side streets through downtown, the hour for Chris’s report was long past. He finally reached the office and dialed the young man’s home number, but there was no answer.
It didn’t mean anything—Chris often called in from wherever he happened to be. And maybe what he had to say, he hadn’t wanted to leave on the office’s telephone answerer. Kirk walked from his office over to Larimer Square for an early dinner while Josephina’s Restaurant was still uncrowded, then came back half expecting something on the answerer. But there was nothing. He settled down to the paperwork that had piled up, bringing expense sheets up to date, answering correspondence that required reply, filing those letters that didn’t. Sometime later, he turned on the desk lamp and tried Chris’s home number again. Still no answer, and Kirk felt a twinge of irritation: Chris was over two hours late in making his report. Kirk called the telephone answerer at his own home, but a playback of messages held nothing. He was finishing up the last routine office chores and a cup of coffee when Bunch came dragging in. His afternoon had been spent wandering around Humphries’ half acre, and then the three of them went out to dinner. Humphries and wife enjoyed a menu that unfolded stiffly to four large pages of ornate hand-letteringhand lettering and had a flocked maroon cover with a gold tassel. Bunch ate McDonald’s in the Bronco.
“Humphries swore he heard something in the bushes next to the house after I left last night, so I made a tour around the place.”
“Any sign of a prowler?”
“Hell no. Nothing anywhere. The ground was soft too in a lot of places. My guess is it was a skunk or raccoon.” He yawned widely. “Christ, I’m still tired from yesterday.”
Humphries was beginning to sound like the kind of case Kirk and Associates tried to avoid—one whose demands interfered with what they should be doing in industrial security. If there had been enough to do in industrial security. “We might have to bring somebody in temporarily.”
“Something heating up with Advantage?”
Devlin told him about Visser’s request for another meeting. Bunch sipped at his steaming cup while he thought about it. “Why would he want to talk with us so soon?”
It wasn’t expected. Normally there would be delays for conferences and blustering, time spent to check out the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses before war councils were held and decisions made. “Maybe they believed me when I gave them three days,” said Devlin.
“And maybe they didn’t. What’s the latest from Chris?”
“I haven’t heard from him today.”
“He didn’t report in?”
“Not yet. I tried getting him earlier, but no answer.”
Bunch drained his cup. “Maybe we better go by.”
It was almost nine by the time Bunch’s Bronco found a slot along the curb a block from Chris’s apartment building. A stately red stone mansion in Queen Anne style, it had been sliced into half a dozen living units. Tenants and guests had to sniff out their parking on streets lined with the cars of other lodgers. Two blocks to the north, Colfax Avenue glittered with a steady rush of traffic. To the south, the street fell away downhill to offer a distant glimpse of quiet residential blocks that stretched to Governor’s Park. This late in the evening, the September air tingled with a hint of coming winter, and yellowing leaves covered the sidewalks and crackled underfoot with a sound that promised cozy warmth around the fireplace.
A short walk led to the front door, which was flanked by panels of varicolored beveled glass. Chris’s apartment was on the second floor, front, and the wide stairs creaked with age and perhaps indignation as the two large men climbed through the musty smell of an ancient carpet.
“Why’s the kid live in a dump like this?” asked Bunch.
“You want me to say it’s because I don’t pay him enough, right?”
“Hey, you don’t have to tell me.”
“He also thinks it’s better cover.”
Besides, it wasn’t that bad a place. The carved dark wood was still unscarred and impressive, and the leaded glass shades over the bulbs and chandeliers showed that the owner cared about the property. It was old and worn but clean, and the compartmentalization had been done right, so the house was a quiet one. Even the music, turned up loudly somewhere, was muffled and dim in the hallway, and the outside street sounds faded into silence. It was less like an apartment house than the large private home it had once been, and here in the common area of atrium and stairwell, Devlin felt a sense of hushed intrusion. As they reached the second floor the music grew louder. It came from behind the heavy door of Chris’s apartment, and they could feel more than hear the weighty thump of a bass speaker tremble the banister rail.
Bunch rapped his knuckles on the dark wood and they waited.
The heavy rock beat dimly against the other side of the thick door.
“Try again,” said Kirk. “Maybe he didn’t hear us over that noise.”
Bunch did, louder this time. Then he turned the knob. “Uh oh.” It was unlocked.
Easing the door open, Bunch peered first through the crack at the door’s hinge and then down the wall to the right. He stepped in cautiously. “Chris? Hey, Chris?”
Devlin slipped past Bunch into the living room with its small tiled fireplace. A lamp burned on an end table beside a worn sofa. The doors leading out of the room were closed. Against the wall, the stack of sound components—amplifier, turntable, CD player, tuner, and even a twin-reel tape deck—glowed with digital signals, and the large speakers thudded heavily in the small room. Kirk turned it off and in the sudden silence his voice see
med loud. “Chris? You here?”
The alcove that served as a kitchen was empty too. A light in the stove hood showed only the small gas range and a half- size refrigerator facing the sink. Devlin pressed open the door leading to the dark bathroom. The only sound was the steady tink of a slow drip into the stained washbasin. Bunch opened the door to the bedroom. Wadded covers looked for a moment like a man lying still, but the bed was vacant.
“Any idea where he went, Dev?”
“No.” The irritation Kirk had felt was turning into worry.
“Dev.”
He looked. Bunch pointed to the floor. From beneath the closet door a small, dark stain had swelled on the pale floorboards and spilled into a crack to run an inch or two before clotting.
Bunch opened the closet door.
The clothes bar had been cleared by jamming the clothes and coat hangers to one end. A white bag—a large laundry sack, lumpy and soggy with blood—hung heavily. The closet floor and a half dozen street and tennis shoes were thick with pooled blood. Its odor, a faint mustiness like an exhaled, stale breath, floated through the open door.
“Lift the bag, Bunch. I’ll cut him down.”
“You can’t do that, Dev. It’s a crime scene. Homicide’ll want it untouched.”
“Lift the goddamned bag!”
He did, grasping it at the top. Kirk sawed with a pocketknife at the cotton rope lashed around the closet bar.
“Leave the knots tied, Dev. That’s evidence.”
The canvas bag settled heavily onto the shoes and floor. Kirk sliced an opening through the cloth. Chris’s face—what was left of it—was tilted up open-eyed. Beneath the handkerchief wadded and tied over his mouth with a torn shirtsleeve, Devlin could see the effort to scream frozen in the stiffened flesh of his cheeks. The dead eyes, still bloodshot from pain, stared at him and through him and into some agony that he could only imagine. Chris’s arms, tied in front where he could see them, ended in ragged cuts of flesh where the hands had been severed from the wrists. Farther down, in a darkness caused by blood and the shadows of tightly bound and folded legs, Kirk saw the glimmer of drained and curled fingers. Somewhere behind him, he heard Bunch calling the police.
The final paperwork was finished around three in the morning. Kirk inked his initials at the bottom of each page of his statement, along with those of the homicide investigator who witnessed the signing. Bunch, who had been treated with a bit less suspicion because he was an ex-cop, waited in a separate office and visited with a couple old buddies who were now in Vice and Narcotics. And who didn’t hide their belief that the murder was drug-related. “It looks like a revenge thing, Bunch.” Dave Miller propped a shoe on the corner of his desk and stretched. “Do you know if the victim was dealing? Maybe ripped somebody off?”
The preliminary investigation was being wrapped up by Sergeant Kiefer, who was irritated because he thought Bunch and Devlin weren’t telling him all they knew about the motives for Newman’s death. And he was right. They had talked it over quickly before the police arrived to separate them and prevent them from talking things over. They knew who was behind the murder, if not who did it, and they didn’t want cops getting their hands on the suspects yet. Visser’s remark about pulling back a stump had been demonstrated. They also knew Visser would have an airtight alibi in case his name did get handed to the police. So both Bunch and Devlin decided to stay in the game as players—especially with the stakes upped in blood. They owed Chris that much. They told Kiefer a lot of the truth but not all of it; they kept their mouths shut about Visser. Yes, the victim was working for Kirk and Associates. Yes, the death could be related to the case, but Kirk didn’t think so. It was a routine investigation of a small-time industrial security problem, the same one Devlin had asked Officer Lewellen for information about two days ago. Give Lewellen a call, ask him. No, Devlin had no idea who might have done it, but if anything turned up, yes, he’d call immediately. He’d appreciate the same favor from Kiefer.
Then, once more, he’d described how he and Bunch happened to drop by to talk over the case with Chris and how they found his body hanging in the sack and cut him down.
“You knew that was a crime scene, Kirk. You shouldn’t have cut him down.”
“I didn’t know at the time he was dead. I wasn’t going to leave him hanging there if he was alive.” He wasn’t going to leave Chris there if he was dead, either, but Kiefer didn’t need to know about that. The cop was already tired and short on patience and unhappy with the gaps in Kirk’s and Bunch’s stories.
The detective rubbed ink-stained fingers into the loose dark skin beneath his eyes. “All right, all right. Put it down in a statement. Use your own words and initial the bottom of each page. Here, use this desk over here.”
The cause of death may have been something other than loss of blood, but the autopsy would determine that for certain. When the forensics people had carefully peeled away the wet canvas from the cramped and bound body, Kiefer looked at Chris’s face and shook his head. He said something about torture. The cut wounds on Chris’s chest and stomach and the blisters of burned flesh on armpits and genitals testified to what he went through before he died. Devlin was sure he’d told Visser’s people who he really was and what Kirk and Associates was up to. Devlin was sure he himself would have told anybody anything. But that hadn’t been enough. To make the message clear, they cut off his hands while he watched and stuffed him into a bag to finish dying. The forensics team said the bathroom had been recently and thoroughly scrubbed, and their guess was that the torture and butchering had taken place in the old claw- footed bathtub. The only fingerprints they found on the apartment’s likely surfaces were Bunch’s and Devlin’s. The absence of Chris’s prints indicated that the killers had wiped the place down just before they left. Kiefer would tell Devlin or Bunch all about the rest of it when the autopsy was completed sometime tomorrow.
“You finished yet, Dev?” Bunch, showing the weariness of the hour and his anguish, leaned through the doorway.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
Kiefer looked up from his pile of reports and diagrams. “If you gentlemen do come up with something, you will tell me immediately, right?”
“Right.” Bunch nodded. “Have you called Newman’s family?”
“We haven’t. The sheriff’s office over in Mineral County— they’ll handle it. Unless you want to.”
Kirk had never met Chris’s parents. He only knew that the young man was raised on a ranch near Creede and had left the mountains for Denver to find some excitement. But Devlin had their address on the employment form—next of kin—and their telephone number for emergencies. “Any idea when the sheriff will give notification?”
Kiefer shrugged. “First thing this morning, probably.”
“Let him do it, then. They’ll need their rest.” And Kirk had a lot to do in the next couple hours.
Bunch was silent until they were in the Bronco. He glanced at Devlin’s face and had a pretty good idea what was going through his mind, because he was thinking the same thing. “You sleepy, Dev?”
“Hell no.”
The empty streets with their flashing yellow traffic lights had the hardness that comes when the dust of the day’s business hasn’t yet been stirred, and the cold, high air holds a breath of moisture. Soon it would congeal as dew, but right now it was still in the atmosphere and sharpened the nip of the predawn chill.
“We can’t let this slide, Dev.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“You think Visser’s all snug in his bed?”
“I think we go find out.”
One of the basics of Secret Service training is to move fast and decisively—to use the element of surprise if you are attacking, to take it away by quick, almost reflexive response if you are attacked. Visser might have learned that Chris was a detective rather than a mob representative. But Dev’s guess was that the man didn’t know how much they knew about the three scumbags. And Kirk al
so guessed that Visser shared the arrogance of so many murderers—an arrogance that not only judged the life of others worthless but also made them believe they were invulnerable to those they scorned.
Bunch groped under the dash for the strap holster that held the .357 Python with its box of Super Vel cartridges. He had filled its quick-load cylinders with an assortment of slugs—ball, cupped, hollow, Teflon-coated. It provided a variety of solutions to different problems that might come up. So far, all the jobs with the magnum had been on the firing range. He asked Devlin to unscrew the Hutson pistol scope from the weapon. “You armed?”
Kirk shook his head. He owned the standard-issue .38 special with two-inch barrel and hooded hammer. But he seldom carried it since he left the Service. The tiny .32 Seecamp that he preferred was at home in a desk drawer with its ankle holster.
