Son of a Gun (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 2)

by Ed Markham

  “She said she only smokes in the kitchen, but the whole place smells like an ashtray,” David said. “She tried to bee line it back here when we came in, and since we started questioning her, she’s done her best to look anywhere except down at this floor.”

  Together, they moved the table aside while two members of the search unit cleared away the chairs. As they worked, David could still hear Gloria Ganther moaning in the TV room.

  When the furniture was out of the way, he watched as one of his men grabbed the edge of the rug and pulled it aside.

  Chapter 58

  BENEATH THE AREA rug, David could see that someone had cut away a coffee-table-sized square of the cheap linoleum, exposing the wood planks below. He and his father kneeled and examined the bare section.

  “Look,” Martin said, pointing at the nail heads in several of the boards. Some were much brighter—much newer—than others.

  David nodded and stood up. He walked out of the kitchen, tailed by Hunt and another man Hunt called Honcho. The three returned a minute later carrying pry bars and hammers they’d collected from the search vans. David and Martin stood aside as Hunt and Honcho hammered the edges of the pry bars beneath the floorboards and levered them loose.

  As they lifted away the boards, David could see brown earth at the base of the crawl space below.

  “Grieg,” Hunt called to one of his men as he and Honcho removed the boards. “Get a shovel.”

  Grieg left the kitchen and returned a minute later carrying the tool. He stepped down into the newly exposed hole, tapped at the dirt with the tip of the shovel, and then started to dig.

  After ten minutes, Honcho helped Grieg out of the hole and took his place. The digging continued.

  When the hole was nearly four feet deep, Honcho stopped digging. He looked down for a moment, motionless, blocking the view of the men above.

  “What is it?” Hunt called down.

  Honcho stood frozen for a moment, and then he turned and handed the shovel up to David. He bent down and began to work with his hands, wiping away soil at the base of the hole. A second later he leaned back, revealing his discovery.

  Looking down into the hole below, David could clearly make out a pale swatch of bone.

  Chapter 59

  The setting sun had narrowed to a thin strip of yellow on the horizon as David looked out of the ninth-story window of the FBI’s Philadelphia field office. At his back, Martin sat at a square table with Ian Ganther’s journals spread out before him.

  Both men were listening to the female voice speaking from the room’s triangular conference phone.

  “We’ve identified the remains as human,” the voice said.

  David turned away from the window and looked at his father, shaking his head from side to side as if to say “No shit.” Speaking to the conference phone, he asked, “What can you tell us about them, Lynn?”

  “Thoracic and pelvic structure indicates an adult male,” the forensic pathologist said.

  “An adult?” he said, surprised. “You’re sure?” He looked at his father. They’d both assumed—though neither had said it out loud—that the body would turn out to be Christopher Ganther’s.

  “Am I sure?” Lynn asked, bristling.

  “We had reason to believe the remains would belong to a child,” he said. “Any chance of an ID?”

  “That may be tough. Deterioration of the teeth tells me someone cleaned these bones with something—boiled them in bleach, if I had to guess.”

  Martin scowled.

  “That would have kept the remains from stinking up the neighborhood,” Lynn continued, “and it’s going to make identification a lot more difficult.”

  “Can you give me any estimates on body size?” David asked.

  “Based on one femur we’ve found, I’d put him somewhere between five-six and five-eight, and not very heavy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s all so far.”

  David thanked her and ended the call. He took a seat across the table from his father and reached for one of the journals.

  Along with Gloria Ganther, the two had returned to the Philadelphia field office an hour earlier. They’d tried and failed to draw from her information about the bones. The only words she’d spoken were, “I want a lawyer. I know I got a right to one.”

  David had also heard back from Phil Ganther. The man had seemed discomfited by the news of his brother’s death, but not overly remorseful.

  “Well, that’s uh . . . I’m sorry to hear that,” Phil had said. He’d coughed a few times, and then added, “You know I wasn’t too close with Jimmy. I’m not real sure what to say right now except I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he’s found some peace finally.”

  David didn’t tell Phil Ganther about his former sister-in-law’s arrest, or about the remains they’d discovered beneath her kitchen. He’d thought about it, but decided he wanted to speak with Phil in person.

  “We’ll stop by his place tomorrow morning, assuming we haven’t tracked down Ian before then,” David had said to his father after hanging up with Phil Ganther.

  “You think he’s involved?” Martin had asked.

  He’d shrugged. “Every Ganther we check out ends up being tied to this thing somehow.” He’d paused to glance at the clock on the wall. “It’s been three days since Carson disappeared. Time’s running short.”

  Now he and his father flipped through the pages of Ian’s journals. The first one David picked up appeared to have been written when Ian was a young boy—probably only twelve or thirteen years old. He’d obviously been a bright child.

  The first journal entry began, “I have no father and no friends, and everyone hates me.”

  Most of what David read had to do with Ian’s feelings of alienation at school—of not fitting in with other kids, and of constantly agonizing over the things he said or the ways he acted. He scolded himself viciously for his failed attempts at camaraderie.

  David read: Kerry McMichaels loves the Phillies, so I watched the game last night just so I could talk to him about it in social studies today. I thought all morning about how I could bring it up, and when we took our seats before class, I said to Kerry, Didn’t Wes Chamberlain have a great game last night? I realized right away how dumb this sounded, and Kerry didn’t even answer me. He just looked at me for a second and then started laughing. Why am I so fucking stupid?

  He related this to his father, and Martin sat back at the table, holding another of the journals in his hands. He said, “What I’m reading in this one sounds like it was written a few years later. High school probably. He talks about having a revelation—about discovering that he didn’t have to be himself. He writes about learning to hide his real personality and to copy the traits of the popular people around him. Sounds like he had a real talent for it—for mimicking others and getting them to accept him.”

  David watched his father flip through the journal until he found the passage he was looking for. Martin read out loud, “All along I’d been trying to make them like me, to make them like Ian Ganther. But Ian Ganther is a loser. A nobody with no friends and nothing to offer. But I don’t have to be him. I can be anyone I want to be. Ian Ganther can be anyone I make him. When I’m around Craig Gerard, I’m Craig Gerard. When I’m around Bobby Pintore, I’m Bobby Pintore. And they like me now. Everyone likes themself, so how can they not like me? And I’m good at it too, at being other people. And it’s fun for me. I’ve never felt so accepted. I wish I hadn’t wasted all those years trying to make them like a nobody. I hated that person, so how could I expect anyone else to like him?”

  Martin set the journal down. “He talks about making this discovery in a drama class, which he was required to take. At first he says he was terrified at the prospect of being on a stage in front of other people. But he ended up loving it.” Martin paused and his brow furrowed. “There’s an undercurrent of real hate here. His efforts to ingratiate himself don’t work on everyone, and the kids who reject
him or see through his bullshit . . . his anger is pretty extreme. He talks about stabbing them and cutting them up. He also writes a lot about his father, speculating about why James would do the things he’d done.” Martin shook his head. “Apparently Gloria Ganther had no problem informing Ian that his father was a drug dealer and probably a child murderer. Ian seems pretty curious about what could drive his dad to do these things.”

  David shuffled through the journals, and found that one of them included dates. He turned to an entry headed October 9th, 2007.

  “This journal is more recent,” he said. He read the entry quietly, and then handed it to his father. “Read through this section,” he said.

  Martin read and, after a time, looked up at David. “This would have been the year before his wife was killed,” he said.

  David nodded. The journal passage outlined Ian’s frustration with his own son’s inability to fit in at school.

  He said to his father, “Ian seems disappointed with Christopher for showing the same social failings he showed at that age.” He reached across the table and took the journal back. He flipped the page and read out loud, “I try to explain to Chris how easy it is to make friends, to make other kids like you. But he doesn’t understand. He’s making the same mistakes I made at that age, and like me, I know he’s always going to regret it. Another lost childhood. Jess gets angry with me when I try to help him, but that’s only because she doesn’t understand. She was never isolated the way I was, the way Chris is now. Sometimes I just want to take him away from all the strife and heartache I know this will cause him.”

  Martin shook his head. “Great parenting. Aren’t you glad I left you the hell alone when you were a pup?”

  David read more of the journal. “There are a few entries here after Jessica’s death. He’s obviously upset, and he seems sorry for his son but also resentful of Chris’s sorrow. Quote, ‘Chris is lost. His mother is gone, and he’s ruined for it. He blames me because I can’t fix things for him, and he doesn’t understand I’m as broken as he is. I look at him, and it’s like seeing a reflection of myself, of all my old weakness and sadness. And I know he sees that same weakness in me. I watch him approach others his age at the park and in his soccer league, and they reject him. Happy and secure, they reject his blackness, his injury and his brokenness. I want to save him from all this. No one will ever understand or accept him until he learns to disguise himself, but that takes effort and practice.’ ”

  David set down the journal and stood up from the table. He repeated the line, “I want to save him from all this.” He paced in front of the room’s windows. “Let’s go through our victims again—how they differ from James Ganther’s.”

  Martin reached for his notebook and flipped back in it. “Similar demographics—white adolescents between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Laid out in similar fashion except for the masks.”

  “Which covered the bruises,” David said. “Hiding the abuse.”

  He leaned on the table, laying his palms flat on its smooth surface. “From what James Ganther told us, his crimes were really meant to hurt the parents—the people he believed had sent him to Vietnam to kill innocent children. He took pretty good care of the kids right up until he shot them.”

  Martin nodded.

  “But the new murders—the real aggression is directed at the victims, not at their parents.” David paused, turning this over in his head. “James painted white masks on the faces of the soldiers to show how they were all alike—how they were demons, as he called them. But now our killer is putting those masks on the victims—on the children—as though they’re the demons.”

  He pushed back from the table and crossed his arms. “Ian writes about hating his peers for rejecting him, and then later for rejecting his son. Maybe he sees this as retribution?”

  Martin nodded. “Remember what I told you about copycats? It’s not a tribute. The original act just plants the seed. The imitator follows through in his own way for his own reasons.”

  Both men were silent for a time.

  Finally Martin sat back from the table and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker. He looked from his notebook to David and said, “What do you think really happened to Christopher Ganther?”

  “I don’t know,” David said, shaking his head. “And who’s the adult buried under Gloria Ganther’s kitchen?”

  Chapter 60

  IT WAS EVENING now. Carson was sure of that.

  It had been hours since Josh had left the basement, and Carson hadn’t heard the footsteps on the floor above him since an hour earlier when he’d heard the distant sound of a door opening and closing. He was almost certain the man wasn’t home, and he’d already resigned himself to another night without dinner. If the man were going to send down food, he would have done it already.

  He was almost thankful to go hungry. Another meal might have meant more time with Josh, and Carson’s loneliness had not returned with his appetite; the other boy was really bothering him now, and he preferred to be alone. And besides, he had work to do.

  He started with the couch. Pulling off the cushions, Carson had hoped he might find a collapsible bed inside. He knew that was unlikely or there would have been no need for the mattress on the floor, but he wanted to be sure.

  His suspicions were confirmed. Nothing.

  He replaced the cushions and moved on to the TV stand and bookshelf. He was hoping one of them might have a removable section slim enough to wedge into the panel gap in the bathroom, but the bookshelves themselves were too wide, and the TV stand was too well made to disassemble without smashing it to pieces. Even if he could have taken it apart, he didn’t think any of its components would do the job.

  Stepping back from the TV, he looked around the room until his eyes fell on the air hockey table. He walked to it and ran his hands over the metal bar that wrapped over the playing surface and held the electronic scoreboard in place two feet above the top of the table. Close examination revealed that the bar was composed of two elbow-shaped pieces of pipe, both of which tapered at the ends where they screwed into the side of the table and the scoreboard. Carson looked at the flattened ends of the pipes and felt a rush of excitement. They were perfect.

  He examined the screws holding the pipes in place. They were large and flat, and required what he’d always thought of as a “minus symbol” screwdriver, even though his dad called it a “flat head.” He tried to twist each of the screws with his fingers, pushing and turning until he was sure he would cut himself. None of them would budge.

  He turned away from the air hockey table and looked around the room. His eyes stopped on the stack of video games by the television set. Kneeling beside them, he picked up one of the games and looked inside the opening at its base. He saw a thin strip of microchip, which he’d watched Josh blow on and run his fingers across when the game failed to start properly.

  “This trick usually works,” the other boy had said. “Just need to clean off the dust.”

  Carson read the name of the game in his hand: “Sunset Riders.”

  No, he thought. We play this one too much.

  Rifling through the stack, he found a game near the bottom that he and Josh had never played. He didn’t think the other boy would notice if the game went missing.

  Wedging his fingers into the crevice at the game’s base, Carson pulled apart with all his strength. Nothing happened. He pulled again, and this time he heard the plastic of the case straining against the pressure. Then the game burst open, and Carson lost his grip on both halves of the plastic casing. They flew away from him in either direction, and the microchip inside landed on the floor a few feet in front of him. He picked it up and tested its strength with his hands, hoping it was strong and inflexible. It was.

  Walking back to the air hockey table, he bent at the waist and slipped the narrowest edge of the microchip into one of the screw slots. He choked down on the chip with his fingers, trying to grip as much of it as he could to keep it
from snapping. Then he tried turning it. He could feel tension in the plastic, but the screw wouldn’t budge. He twisted a little harder, and the plastic at the end of the microchip broke away.

  “Ughh,” Carson said, dropping his head in dejection. He stood with his hands on his knees for a few seconds, and then he walked to the other side of the table. He hoped he might have better luck with the screw on that side.

  He paused to cast a quick glance up the stairs to his right. For a second, he was sure he would see the man with the beard and the mask standing there, watching him. But he saw nothing. Still, it frightened him to be in sight of the door.

  Turning the microchip lengthwise, he slipped its wide end into the screw and again choked down with his fingers. He knew right away that this was a stronger grip, and he twisted carefully, taking care to increase the torque gradually. He felt something give way, and at first he thought he’d broken the microchip again. But then he realized the screw had turned. He reset the microchip in the screw, and now it turned more easily.

  Carson had to suppress the urge to shout in triumph. He worked the screw all the way out, and the metal pipe promptly slid down the side of the air hockey table, producing a loud screeching noise.

  Carson’s stomach leapt into his throat. He looked up at the basement door, and stood motionless, listening, for a full minute. He heard nothing. Eventually, his breathing began to slow.

  He climbed up onto the air hockey table and sat down with his legs extended under the scoreboard, which was now tilted down toward the side of the table where the pipe was hanging loose. He tried to slip the wide end of the microchip into the second screw slot, but it wouldn’t fit. The edges of the scoreboard protruded slightly, and required a narrower tool.

  Carson scrunched up his mouth and tried one of the narrow ends of the microchip—the one that wasn’t already chipped. It fit between the edges of the scoreboard, but he worried it would snap again. He held his breath, and tried to turn the screw. To his surprise, it loosened easily.