Body Broker

by Daniel M Ford

  They don’t make off-the-rack suits in my size. They just don’t. A 48 or 50 jacket will leave my shoulders comfortable and flap like a loose sail around my waist. And for some reason they think every guy with larger shoulders is going to have long legs. Let’s just say that on my budget, I don’t make a suit look as good as it ought to.

  Nevertheless, I was in the parking lot of the marina in my gray suit, robin’s-egg blue shirt, silver tie and matching pocket square, black shoes, black belt, looking like the world’s most overdressed hitchhiker.

  Soon enough a car slowed down. I suppressed a groan. Clark, you son of a bitch.

  It was a small gray Volvo, with bits of orange kit peeking out here and there, a loud exhaust, a spoiler, and some other dumb bullshit involved. Its owner could and would tell you all about the tires, the performance kit on the engine, and the color of the paint — probably Matte Phantom Mist, and he only chose that because he couldn’t get it in camo.

  The dumbest bullshit of all was behind the wheel. Brock Diamante, the newest hire and biggest pain in the ass in Dent-Clark investigations, straight out of the Army. High and tight haircut, a t-shirt with some kind of operator patch on the chest, cargo pants bloused over black combat boots. The back of the car was filled with pointless tactical gear, but at least it was boxed up. I wasn’t super thrilled with the Glock riding his right hip, but there sure wasn’t anything to do about it besides grin and bear it. It was a short drive to the main office.

  Music blared through the windows. Some awful combination of over-produced guitar and twanged vocals spat at high velocity.

  I popped open the passenger door and slid into the seat while he revved the engine. At least he kept his ride clean — if it had been almost any other employee picking me up, I’d have had a couple of weeks’ worth of Wawa wrappers and breakfast sandwich boxes to sweep aside in order to sit down.

  As I got in, he turned the music down to a barely eardrum-shattering level and handed over a steaming Wawa cup.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

  “Boss said I had to. Also said you’d want these.” He dropped a handful of yellow sweetener packets into my open palm. With practiced care, I eased the top off, ripped the packets open with my teeth two at a time, and dumped them in.

  “Don’t know why you need coffee that sweet,” he said with slight derision, nudging his music back up.

  “It’s the only sweet thing I consume,” I said through clenched teeth as I ripped open another. Once I had it all squared away, I pointedly turned the radio down.

  Brock glared at me but didn’t reach for the dial. “What you got against this stuff, man? Country Rap is…”

  “It’s cultural appropriation, first of all,” I said. “And it sounds like someone shitting in my ear.”

  “Sorry it ain’t have enough washtub bass and jug-blowing for ya,” he muttered.

  I let that pass, sipped the coffee. At least the kid had done that.

  “What you coming into the office for?” he ventured.

  “Boss said I had to,” I murmured.

  “I mean what are you working on?”

  “I know what you meant,” I said. “But I’m not entirely sure what I’m working on yet.”

  “Anything important?”

  “All cases are important, Brock.”

  “Well I’m tired of parking outside every Motel Hotsheets between here and Aberdeen on Route 40 trying to snap pictures of a husband looking for some strange. I figure if Clark is making you come into the office, it’s gotta be for something interesting.”

  “Wandering kid.”

  “That’s cop work.”

  “Kid is a relative term. He’s legally an adult but this is abnormal behavior, so a pal in the sheriff’s office referred the client to me.”

  Brock chewed on his lip a while. “You gonna need a partner or…”

  “No,” I said.

  “Man, why does the boss let you work alone? Nobody else gets to do that.”

  “Best ask him,” I said, taking another sip of my coffee. Whatever the Bullshit Volvo had under the hood, Brock definitely got a lot out of it. We were passing everything on 40. I glanced at the needle.

  “County sees you going 88, you’re paying a hefty fine.”

  “Not if I got a friend of the sheriff sitting next to me.”

  “Never met the sheriff,” I said.

  “Whatever.” He got sullen, turned his music back up, and I listened to rap about trucks and shotguns and blonde girls in overalls for the remainder of the ride.

  The offices of Dent-Clark are, on the outside, about as nondescript as you can imagine. Just another frontage in an office park near the Delaware state line, a discreet sign, unobtrusive cameras everywhere. Brock backed into a parking space with the requisite élan his generation seemed to find so important.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, stepping out of the car. He hustled into work with a little backwards wave at me. I took my time, buttoning my suit jacket, which necessitated sucking in my gut a little more than I would’ve liked to admit. I checked the fold of my square and stepped smartly in.

  Chapter 5

  Inside, Dent-Clark was everything the modern investigative professional could’ve wanted. Sure, it was a cube farm, but it was a cube farm with tech. More cloud computing power than any of us knew what to do with, latest generation Mac desktops, MacBook airs, iPads, and every third cube featuring a large touchscreen to which anybody in the nearby pod could send documents, photos, any pertinent info, so that colleagues could work together in a realm of perfect information sharing.

  I saw the heads of early-arrivers peeking up above cube walls staring at me. I refused to meet any of their gazes as I walked past each pod on my way to the management corridor. I was an oddity, an employee of the firm who was almost never in the office, and definitely never in a suit.

  I put on confident smile number two — not fully arrogant, hardly subdued — and walked on.

  Jason’s office door was half open, so I gave it a slight knock and slid in. A big man — bigger than me. Dressed well, like he was every day. French cuffs, cufflinks that matched the tie bar, silver with some kind of simple blue stone. White shirt, blue tie, braces, suit jacket on a hanger on a hook by the wall. Two monitors on his desk, a typewriter on a desk to the side because he wanted us to think he could be old school.

  There were two safes against the back wall, one for receipts, cash, valuables we might be holding onto. The other held company firearms. Jason rose to greet me, coming around his desk and extending a hand. His beard was shorter and better clipped than mine, and he wore his suit more naturally, even with suspenders. We shook hands.

  “Jack,” he said. “I should make you clean up and come in every day.”

  I grinned and kept shaking his hand. “If my appointment with the school is at 2:30, why am I here at eight in the morning?”

  “Because there’s other legwork to do. The father, an uncle. Work them, widen the circle, find the family friends.”

  “Father’s a problem. Not having a lot of luck pinning him down.”

  “Which is why you’re lucky you work for me,” said Jason. “Father is an executive vice president of something called ADI Holdings.”

  I felt a tinge of wounded pride. Maybe even something resembling professional disappointment. I muted it. “I spent a couple hours yesterday trying to find him, where he worked. Got nothing.”

  “How exactly did you use that time?”

  “Well, I traced out as much of the family as I could. Far as I can tell, the great-grandfather graduated from Farrington, invented some new way to bomb people, or to disperse lethal chemicals via artillery, or…”

  “Don’t need a history lesson.”

  “Look, the best I could do is find that there were two brothers, Oscar and Tom, and given what else I
knew about the family tree, both of them were probably loaded.”

  “Did you, at any point, ask the mother where her ex-husband worked?”

  Silence.

  “I did not.”

  “Let me take a crack at this.” Jason went back behind his desk and sat in his executive chair. I estimated it cost as much as all of the clothing I owned combined. “You didn’t want to appear insensitive, so you didn’t ask Ms. Kennelly this basic question when you talked to her. What’s more, because you’re you, you wanted to appear all-knowing, and come up with your list of contacts, build out the circle all on your lonesome.”

  “That, uh, is about right.”

  He tapped a few keys on the wireless keyboard before him, its keys glowing red. My phone buzzed in my shirt pocket.

  “There’s his contact info. Office is in Wilmington. My guess is you’re going to find a single bank of offices in a nondescript office park, a PO box, a couple of secretaries and a whole lot of executives who spend more time on the Acela and the golf course than they do in Delaware.”

  “So I’m going to Wilmington first.”

  “Sure are.”

  “If I disappear into the void of encroaching corporate hegemony, what’ll you do without me?”

  “Hire an investigator who is slightly less of a pain in the ass and comes into the office of his own volition.” Jason wandered over to the safe — the weapons safe — and began spinning one of the dials.

  “I’m not carrying a gun into a school,” I said.

  “The cars have lockboxes for them,” he said as the dial opened a panel. He pressed his thumb on it, and locking cylinders disengaged. “And you’re the one worried about encroaching corporate hegemony.”

  “And if I leave it in the car and park in the wrong spot, you just gave a tow-truck guy a company registered piece.”

  “If the tow truck guy can open the lockbox, he deserves to have it.”

  “Clark,” I said, digging my heels in. “I’m not carrying a firearm. Not today. This is normal walking around bullshit. Besides, I don’t know if our licenses are good in Delaware.”

  “There and PA and I’m working on Virginia,” he said. “You can have your way this time. But don’t come crying to me when somebody doesn’t take you seriously because you haven’t got this on your hip.” He slipped the pistol he’d been about to set on his desk back into the locker and removed something else. “Here.” He set down a different holstered weapon, the bright yellow plastic construction proclaiming its nonlethal punch.

  “Christ,” I said. “The X2? You know how many people those’ve killed?”

  “So long as you don’t paint any skulls on this one, I don’t care. Put it on.”

  I grumbled, but stepping down from a surely lethal firearm to an at least probably-not-lethal Taser was far as I was likely to get. I clipped it on to my belt, and arranged it so it sat on my right hip.

  “Anything else? Some body armor? Sniper rifle in the trunk? Maybe I can mount a Ma Deuce on the hood…”

  “Of a Nissan? Come on. The hood wouldn’t hold up to anything heavier than a BAR.”

  “Well I’ll see if I can find one at the next antique show. Am I leaving now?”

  “Nah. If he was some kind of hedge fund goon you could bet he’d be hard at his desk by eight a.m. But this smells like the kind of sinecure wealth minus ambition can land you. Not likely in the office till ten. Go outside, grab a workstation, start a file.”

  “Looping anyone in?”

  “Me and Diamante.”

  “Really? Diamante?”

  “I’m not asking you to take him with you. Just show him how a case file is built. He’s got a lot of gifts but he’s a little weak on investigational procedure.”

  “Fine, fine. We done?”

  “Yep. Got an hour. Start the clock.”

  I opened my phone and clicked on our billing and reportage app. The case was already listed. I opened it up, started a billing clock, selecting “Research and Coordination” as the activity, and went out to find an empty cube.

  Chapter 6

  I slid my coat around an office chair with a wire back, flicked the mouse of the desktop into wakefulness, and set about doing some work. We had some kind of software — I didn’t pay attention to what it was called, only how it worked — that made this kind of thing a breeze. A few clicks on drop-down menus and I had a “Case File — Kennelly, Gabriel” opened, with tags MISSING and DROP-OUT as well as geographical tags for ELKTON, WILMINGTON, FARRINGTON, and FURNACE BAY. I shared it to Clark and Diamante, giving editing powers only to the former. Then I started filling in contacts. We had places for all of it: immediate family, secondary family, classmates, coworkers, teachers. I filled in as much as I had, including phone numbers, addresses, brief descriptors, and so on. I put in the appointment I had at the school, my contact person there.

  I took another moment to ponder just what I might find at the school. Dour, sober, serious teachers, I had no doubt. Workmen and women of the classroom, building ponderous edifices of learning in the fragile and moldable minds of the cream of the tri-state area.

  Much as I might grumble about coming into the office, it felt good to do this kind of work. I might like to imagine that I’d crack every case brought to me by simply sitting on the deck of the Belle, whiskey in hand, and think my way clear to the solution. But more often than not it was this — laying out every piece of info you had, where your eyes and others could see it — that led where you needed to go.

  It was quick, easy work, but satisfying in its way, and it killed an hour before I had to get in a car and drive to Wilmington.

  I paused at the key rack at the front of the office. Company cars had company key-rings, and there were four available, three had Nissan keys, and one had a Ford key. The Mustang was free.

  But Jason had clearly said Nissan. I knew what I could push and how far; this would’ve been over that line.

  Five minutes later I was tooling up I-95 in a late model Sentra.

  Chapter 7

  I think that if there were a “Boring Highway, Suburban Division” contest, the stretch of I-95 from Cecil County on up to Wilmington, Delaware would win going away. Marshlands compete with nondescript roadside woods and the occasional industrial hellscape. The only brief relief is passing the Riverfront and the minor league baseball stadium. I like seeing a baseball stadium in a city; makes it feel more approachable.

  Pulling off onto Market Street in Wilmington was practically a relief. My phone was bleating at me that my destination was nearby, so I pulled into the nearest parking lot, took my ticket, nabbed the first spot, and got out. I started adjusting the Taser on my belt, then thought better of it entirely. I unlocked the car, slipped the damn thing off, and stuck it in the lockbox bolted into the frame under the dashboard, and straightened the line of my suit.

  I didn’t like carrying a weapon, not even a nonlethal one, and nothing about the job today should’ve required it. I hit the pavement.

  So far, my boss’ guess at what I was likely to find was spot-on but for one thing. The office wasn’t nondescript. It was in one of the tallest buildings downtown.

  I pulled out my phone and busied myself doing nothing while I stood just aside from the entrance. What I was really doing was looking up through my eyebrows at the layout. Looked like a security desk, with one guard sitting behind a bank of monitors. No detector.

  The guard did not impress me as possessing a righteous zeal for justice and peace. His belly strained the buttons of his gray uniform and he appeared absorbed in something on the desk, given the way the interior lights reflected off the dome of his head.

  Act like you belong somewhere and damn few people in this world will question it. Holding my phone forward like a very busy man of business doing business at his place of business in the early business morning — mimicking more or le
ss everything I hated in the world — I strolled through the doors with the fast-but-not-hasty gait of a man who is Important and Knows It.

  I glided right past the security desk. The fat guard didn’t even glance up from the game on his iPad.

  I glided to the nearest staircase. I’ve got a policy about elevators, which is to take them only if I’m going more than ten floors. I wasn’t. At least, not initially.

  I needed to find a directory, but pausing for the one in the lobby might have given the game away. So I paused as soon as I found the second floor, which had directory just in front of the elevator bank.

  ADI Holdings was listed as 100. Tenth floor.

  I hit the elevator button.

  Chapter 8

  Once on the floor, I used the front-facing camera on my phone to check my beard, hair, tie, suit. I buttoned the middle button of the jacket and opened the door to ADI Holdings.

  Small office. Big view. One desk front left, and large chair, small fine-boned woman behind it. She had short, dark blonde hair that was swept back away from her temples, a little bristly in the back and sides. It was a good look against her tanned skin. She wore a gray business suit over a simple black shirt, gold earrings, a small stud in her nose.

  I approached the desk, putting on Assured Smile #3.

  “Hi there.” I held out the card I’d slipped into my palm. “I’m here to talk to Mr. Kennelly.”

  She did not reach for the card, but did give me a smile I’d best describe as forced. It occurred to me that I’d be very interested in what a non-forced smile looked like on her. “Mr. Kennelly has no appointments today.” Her hands moved on her desk in a way I didn’t quite register as important.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t have an appointment, but it is very important that I speak to him. It’s about his son.”

  Something passed across her features when I said that. Regret, I thought, her mouth turning down. Her eyes widened a tad. They were large, brown, soft. I liked looking at them.