Chasing the Dime (2002)

by Michael Connelly

  What if I pass out? What if I am found here?

  Pierce shook it off, reached for the top of the freezer and pulled himself up. He fought for his balance and to hold back the nausea creeping into his stomach. He pulled himself across the freezer and hugged it, putting his cheek down on the cold white top. He breathed in deeply and after a few moments it all passed and his mind was clear. He stood up straight and stepped back from the freezer. He studied it, listened to its quiet hum. He knew it was time for more AE work. Analyze and evaluate. When the unknown or unexpected came up in the lab you stopped and went into AE mode. What do you see?

  What do you know? What does it mean?

  Pierce was standing there, looking at a freezer sitting in the middle of a storage room that he —according to the office records —had rented. The freezer contained the body of a woman he had never met before but for whose death he would certainly now be blamed.

  What Pierce knew was that he had been carefully and convincingly set up. Wentz was behind it, or at least part of it. What he didn't know was why.

  He decided not to be distracted by the why. Not yet. He needed more information to get to that. Instead, he decided on more AE. If he could disassemble the setup and study all the moving parts, then it might give him a chance at figuring out why and who was behind it.

  Pacing in the small space in front of the freezer, he began with the things that had led him to discover the setup. The scramble card and the padlock keys. They had been hidden, or at least camouflaged. Had it been meant for him to find them? After stopping his pacing and contemplating this for a long moment, he decided no. It had been luck that he had noticed that his car had been entered. A plan of this magnitude and complication could not rely on such luck.

  So he now concluded that he had an edge. He knew what he was not supposed to know.

  He knew about the body and the freezer and the storage unit. He knew the location of the trap before it had been sprung.

  Next question. What if he had not found the scramble card and had not been led to the body? He considered this. Langwiser had warned him of an impending police search.

  Surely, Renner and his fellow searchers would leave no stone unturned. They would find the scramble card and be led to the storage space. They would check his key ring for keys to the padlocks and they would find the body. End of story. Pierce would be left to defend himself against a seemingly perfect frame.

  He felt his scalp grow warm as he realized how narrowly he had escaped that —if only for the time being. And in the same moment he felt a full understanding of how complete and careful the setup had been. It was reliant on the police investigation. It relied on Renner making the moves he was making.

  It also relied on Pierce. And as he came to understand this he felt the sweat start to bead in his hair. He grew hot beneath his shirt. He needed air-conditioning. The confusion and sorrow that had gripped him —maybe even the awe in which he viewed the careful plan —were now turning to anger, being forged into steel-point rage.

  He now understood that the setup —his setup —had counted on his own moves. Every one of them. The setup was reliant on his own history and the likelihood of his moves based on that history. Like chemicals on a silicon wafer, elements that could be relied upon to act in a predictable manner, to bond in expected patterns.

  He stepped forward and opened the freezer again. He had to. He needed to look again so the shock of it all would hit him in the face like cold water. He had to move. He had to act in an unpredictable pattern. He needed a plan and needed a clear head to come up with it.

  The body obviously hadn't moved. Pierce held the top of the freezer open with one hand and clasped the other over his mouth. In her final repose Lilly Quinlan seemed tiny. Like a child. He tried to remember the height and weight dimensions she so dutifully advertised on her web page but it seemed so long since the day he first read it that he couldn't remember.

  He shifted his own weight on his feet and the movement changed the light from overhead into the freezer. A glint from her hair caught his eye and he bent down into the box.

  With his free hand Pierce attempted to pull back the hair from her face. It was frozen and individual strands broke as he moved them. He uncovered her upturned ear and there attached to the lobe was an earring. A silver cup holding a drop of amber with a silver feather below. He turned his hand so that the amber caught more of the light leaking into the box. It was then that he could see it. A tiny bug of some kind frozen in the amber, long ago drawn to sweetness and sustenance but caught in one of nature's deadly traps.

  Pierce thought about that bug's fate and knew what he had to do. He, too, had to hide her.

  Hide Lilly. Move her. Keep her from discovery. From Renner. From everyone.

  A sigh escaped through his mouth as he considered this. The moment was surreal, even bizarre. He was contemplating how to hide a frozen body, how to hide it in such a way as to hold no immediate connection to him. It was a task fraught with impossibility.

  He quickly closed and relocked the freezer, as if it were a measure that would stop its contents from ever coming out and haunting him.

  But the simple action broke the inertia in his mind. He started thinking.

  He knew he had to move the freezer. No choice. Renner was coming. It was possible that he would find the storage unit even without the clues of keys and scramble card.

  Whoever had set this up could just make an anonymous call. He could count on nothing.

  He had to move her. If Renner found the freezer, then everything ended. Amedeo Tech, Proteus, his life, everything. He would be a bug in amber after that.

  Pierce leaned down and placed his hands on the front corners of the freezer. He applied pressure to see if it was movable. The freezer slid the last remaining six inches to the rear wall of the storage unit without much resistance. It had rollers. It was movable. The question now was, movable to where?

  A quick fix was needed, something that at a minimum would work safely in the short run while he figured out a plan for the long run. He left the storage unit and moved quickly down the corridor, his eyes sweeping back and forth from door to door as he searched for an unlocked, unrented unit.

  He passed by the elevator and was halfway down the other wing before he found a door with no lock through the hasp. The door was marked 307. The light on the card reader to the right of the door glowed neither green nor red. The alarm appeared to be inactive, probably left so until the unit was rented. Pierce reached down, flipped the hasp and pulled up the door. The space was dark. No alarm sounded. He found and flipped on the light switch and saw that the space was identical to the unit rented under his own name.

  He checked the rear wall and saw the electric socket.

  He ran down the corridor back to unit 331. He moved behind the freezer and yanked out the plug. He heard the hum of the freezer's electric heart go silent. He threw the cord over the top of the appliance and then leaned his weight into it. The freezer rolled toward the hallway with relative ease. In a few seconds he had it out of the storage room and into the corridor.

  The freezer's rollers were set in line, designed to make it convenient to move the appliance backwards and forward in tight spaces, and to provide access for service.

  Pierce had to bend down and put his full strength into pushing it into the turn into the hallway. The rollers scraped loudly on the floor. Once he had it pointed in the right direction, he pushed harder and got the heavy box moving with momentum. He wasn't quite halfway to unit 307 when he heard the sound of the elevator moving. He dropped into a crouch to put more power into his pushing. But it seemed that no matter how much strength he expended, he could not pick up speed. The rollers were small and not built for speed.

  Pierce crossed in front of the elevator just as the humming from the shaft silenced. He turned his face away and kept pushing, listening for the door of one of the cars to open.

  It didn't happen. The elevator had apparently stopped on another
floor. He blew out his breath in relief and exhaustion. And just as he got to the open door of unit 307 the stairwell door at the end of the hallway nearest him banged open and a man stepped into the hallway. Pierce jumped and nearly cursed out loud.

  The man, wearing painter's whites, his hair and skin flecked with white paint, approached. He seemed winded by his climb up the stairs.

  "You the one holding up the elevator?" he asked good-naturedly.

  "No," Pierce said, too defensively. "I've been up here."

  "Just asking. You need a hand with that?"

  "No, I'm fine. I'm just . . ."

  The painter ignored his response and came up next to Pierce. He put his hands on the back of the freezer and nodded toward the open door of the storage room.

  "In there?"

  "Yeah. Thanks."

  Together they pushed and the freezer moved quickly into the turn and then into the storage room.

  "There," the painter said, seemingly winded again. He then stuck out his right hand.

  "Frank Aiello."

  Pierce shook his hand. Aiello's left hand went into the pocket of his shirt and came out with a business card. He handed it to Pierce.

  "You need any work, give me a call."

  "Okay."

  The painter looked down at the freezer, seemingly noticing for the first time what it was he had helped move into the storage area.

  "That thing's a bear. What do you have in there, a frozen body?"

  Pierce faked a small guffaw and shook his head, keeping his chin down the whole time.

  "Actually, it's empty. I'm just storing it."

  Aiello reached over and flicked the padlock on the freezer.

  "Making sure nobody steals the air in there, huh?"

  "No, I . . . it's just that with the way kids get into things, I've always kept it locked."

  "Probably a good idea."

  Pierce had turned and the light was on his face. The painter noticed the stitch zipper running down his nose.

  "That looks like it hurt."

  Pierce nodded.

  "It's a long story."

  "Not the kind I want to hear. Remember what I said."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You need a painter, you call."

  "Oh. Yeah. I've got your card."

  He nodded and watched as Aiello walked out of the room, his footsteps moving down the hallway. Pierce thought about the comment about a body being in the freezer. Was it a lucky guess, or was Aiello not what he appeared to be?

  Pierce heard a set of keys jangling out in the hallway and then the metallic snap of a lock.

  It was followed by the screeching of an overhead door being lifted. He guessed that Aiello might be getting equipment from his storage space. He waited and after a few minutes he heard the door being pulled down and closed. Soon the hum of the elevator followed. Aiello was going to take it down instead of the stairs.

  As soon as he was sure he was alone on the floor again he plugged the freezer in and waited until he heard the compressor begin working.

  He then pulled his shirt out of his pants and used the tail to wipe every surface on the freezer and electrical cord that he could have conceivably touched. When he was sure he had covered his tracks he backed out of the space and pulled the door down. He locked it with the padlock from the other unit and wiped the lock and door with his shirttail.

  As he moved away from the unit and toward the elevator alcove a terrible guilt and fear swept over him. He knew that this was because he had been operating for the last half hour on instincts and adrenaline. He hadn't been thinking out his moves as much as just making them. Now the adrenaline tank's needle was on empty and there was nothing left but his thoughts to contend with.

  He knew he was far from harm's way. Moving the freezer was like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. He needed to know what was happening to him and why. He needed to come up with a plan that would save his life.

  33

  The immediate urge was to curl up on the floor in the same position as the body in the freezer, but Pierce knew that to collapse under the pressure of the moment would be to ensure his demise. He unlocked the door and went into his apartment, shaking with fear and anger and the true knowledge that he was the only one he could rely on to find his way out of this dark tunnel. He promised himself that he would rise up off the floor. And he would get up fighting.

  As if to underscore this avowal, he balled a fist and took a swing at the five-day-old standing lamp Monica Purl had ordered and then positioned next to the couch. His punch sent it crashing into the wall, where its delicate beige shade collapsed and the bulb shattered. The lamp slid down the wall to the floor like a punch-drunk boxer.

  "There, goddamnit!"

  He sat down on the couch but then immediately stood up. All his pistons were firing. He had just moved and hidden a body —a murder victim. Somehow sitting down seemed like the least wise thing to do.

  Yet he knew he had to. He had to sit down and look at this. He had to think like a scientist, not a detective. Detectives move on a linear plane. They move from clue to clue and then put together the picture. But sometimes the clues added up to the wrong picture.

  Pierce was a scientist. He knew he had to go with what had always worked for him. He had to approach this the way he had approached and solved the question of the car search.

  From the bottom. Find the logic gateways, the places where the wires crossed. Take apart the frame and study the design, the architecture. Throw out linear thinking and approach the subject from all new angles. Look at the subject matter and then turn it and look at it again. Grind it down to a powder and look at it under the glass. Life was an experiment conducted under uncontrolled conditions. It was one long chemical reaction that was as unpredictable as it was vibrant. But this setup was different. It had occurred under controlled circumstances. The reactions were predicted and expected. In that he knew was the key. That meant it was something that could be taken apart.

  He sat back down and from his backpack he pulled his notebook. He was ready to write, ready to attack. The first object of his scrutiny was Wentz. A man he did not know and had never met before the day he was assaulted. A man that in the initial view was the linchpin of the frame. The question was, Why would Wentz choose Pierce to hang a murder on?

  After a few minutes of turning it and grinding it and looking at it from opposite angles, Pierce came to some basic case logic.

  Conclusion 1: Wentz had not chosen Pierce. There was no logical connection or link that would allow for this. While animosities existed now, the two men had never met before the setup was already in play. Pierce was sure of it. And so this conclusion led in turn to the supposition that Pierce therefore had to have been chosen for Wentz by someone other than Wentz.

  Conclusion 2: There was a third party in the setup. Wentz and the muscle man he called Six-Eight were only tools. They were cogs in the wheels of the setup. Someone else's hand was behind this.

  The third party.

  Now Pierce considered this. What did the third party need to build the frame? The setup was complex and relied on Pierce's predictable movements in a fluid environment. He knew that under controlled circumstances the movement of molecules could be relied upon. What about himself? He turned the question and looked at it again. He then came to a basic realization about himself and the third party.

  Conclusion 3: Isabelle. His sister. The setup was orchestrated by a third party with knowledge of his personal history, which led to an understanding of how he would most likely react under certain controlled circumstances. The customer phone calls to Lilly were the inciting element of the experiment. The third party understood how Pierce would likely react, that he would investigate and pursue. That he would chase his sister's ghost. Therefore, the third party knew about his ghosts. The third party knew about Isabelle.

  Conclusion 4: The wrong number was the right number. He had not been randomly assigned Lilly Quinlan's old number. It was intentio
nal. It was part of the setup.

  Conclusion 5: Monica Purl. She was part of it. She had set up his phone service. She had to have specifically requested the phone number that would trip the chase.

  Pierce got up and started pacing. This last conclusion changed everything. If the setup was tied to Monica, then it was tied to Amedeo. It meant the frame was part of a conspiracy of a higher order. It wasn't about hanging a murder on Pierce. It was about something else. In this respect Lilly Quinlan was like Wentz. A tool in the setup, a cog in the wheel. Her murder was simply a way to get to Pierce.

  Putting the horror of this aside for the moment, he sat back down and considered the most basic question. The one for which the answer would explain all. Why?

  Why was Pierce the target of the frame? What did they want?