However Many More

by Bo Thunboe

  A last furious stab of April’s thumbs was followed by a whoosh as the text shot off. She stuffed the phone in the pocket of her hoodie and stood. Lynn tried to smile, but whatever made it to her face caused April to flinch as she slipped inside.

  “Let’s talk in the kitchen,” Lynn said. She followed April down the hall and through the swinging door. Lynn wiped her eyes and pulled her shoulders back.

  April stopped at the table with a hand on the back of a chair. “What is it, Mom?”

  Lynn turned two chairs to face each other, sat down in one, and patted the other. “Sit.”

  April plopped into the chair. “Mom… you’re scaring me. Why was Mr. Houser here?”

  “It’s your dad, honey. He’s…” Lynn bit back a sob and squeezed her hands into fists, nails digging into her palms. “He’s dead.”

  “What?” April pushed back in her chair, the legs squeaking against the floor. “What happened to him? Mom? What happened?”

  Lynn grabbed her daughter’s hands and held tight. “It doesn’t matter, honey. He’s dead. That’s all.”

  “Of course it matters! I’m not a little kid anymore. Tell me what happened. He’s my dad!” Her beautiful face twisted with grief, and her eyes welled with tears.

  Lynn squeezed her eyes shut. April was right. She deserved to know, and no matter how much Lynn wanted to protect her, the truth would be out there somewhere. She needed to hear it now, from her mom. “Someone killed him.”

  April broke into sobs.

  Lynn knelt in front of her chair and held her, stroking her hair, repeating over and over that it would be all right. Hoping the words didn’t sound as empty as they felt.

  A knock sounded on the back door. April pulled away and wiped her sleeve across her face. “I don’t want to get it.”

  “I know, honey.” Lynn grabbed a paper napkin from the table and wiped her eyes as she went to the back door. She stood on her tiptoes and looked through the little window. It was Judy, Coogan’s wife. One of the few who had never taken sides in the divorce.

  Lynn opened the door, and without a word Judy stepped forward, wrapped her arms around Lynn, and squeezed her tight.

  “Lynn, I’m so sorry about Henry. He was such a good man.” Judy stepped back, spotted April, and walked over and gave her an equally big hug.

  Lynn bit her lip, wanting to scream, Get out! She wanted to be alone with April to… what, she didn’t know. To cry. And to get mad. And to cry some more. This wasn’t about Judy. Or Jake. Or Coogan. Or any of the rest of them.

  Shit. Everybody was going to know. Jake had told Coogan, who had told Judy, and the news would go around until everyone knew what had happened to Lynn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake drove back toward Henry’s house, the streetlights flicking on as the first day of his investigation bled away.

  He’d made some progress.

  He’d found a possible motive: the killer had been looking for something in Henry’s house. Something small enough to fit on a bookshelf or in a cabinet.

  He’d notified Henry’s next of kin, though not directly. April was Henry’s only blood relation, but letting her mom give her the news had been the right thing to do. Jake would talk with April in the morning.

  He’d also ruled out a person of obvious, statistical interest. Lynn’s emotional response to Henry’s death had confirmed what Jake had already thought. Clearly she hadn’t been involved in killing Henry.

  Jake cut through the Centennial Beach parking lot, past the baseball field where his team had won the city championship when he was nine, then down the long narrow lot that fronted the length of Riverside Park. When he was a kid this had been the city’s yard waste dump. Now it was a beautiful park with picnic pavilions and brick walkways and an elaborate playground. All empty in the fall chill, with night dropping fast. Here in the flats along the river it was already almost full dark, other than the luminous blobs of the widely spaced light poles in the parking lot.

  Jake slowed at a gap in the row of bushes separating the parking lot from the houses along Jackson. That gap led to the barn on the back of Henry’s property. A uniformed officer stood there now, talking with an old man in a thick wool coat with a watch cap pushed up his forehead. The old man had bushy gray eyebrows and a dark birthmark along his jaw. Binoculars hung on a strap around his neck.

  Jake angled his car toward them, and the officer waved him forward. As he pulled the car up to the gap, the officer finished with the old man, who ambled off.

  Jake rolled down his window and held up his badge.

  “Good evening, Detective Houser.” The officer pointed across the patchy back lawn to Henry’s house. “Officer Grady has the crime scene log at the front door.”

  “I’m headed that way.” Jake looked at the old man, now walking down the parking lot, then back to the officer. “You’re Bantam, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please—Detective or Houser. I’m not a boss.”

  Bantam nodded.

  “Any problems down here?” Jake asked.

  “A reporter tried to sneak in, but I caught him and sent him away.” He checked his watch. “That was forty-three minutes ago. And some kids on bikes.”

  Jake didn’t like the press and was glad Bantam had run the reporter off. “Anyone go in the barn?”

  “No, s—Detective.”

  “Did you write up the reporter and that old man? I need them for the murder book.” As lead investigator, Jake documented the entire investigation in the murder book. “Names and addresses and phone numbers and the what and why and when. You know the drill.”

  Bantam nodded, and his gaze stabbed toward the parking lot. He licked his lips and pulled out his notebook. “The old guy’s name was Titus Cole.”

  “Get it all, Officer.”

  “I will, Detective.”

  Jake pulled his car through the gap and parked on the gravel area in front of the barn. The back yard was secluded, the bushes along the back and thick pine trees along both lot lines shielding it from view. The yard light was on, a large dim bulb on a high pole. Jake got out of the car and started toward the house. The air was thick with the muddy scent off the river. He stopped for a moment by the fire pit ringed with wood benches. This was where he’d last seen Henry alive. Standing on top of that log, leading a crowd of Weston Central alumni through the school’s fight song. Henry was the only one who ever remembered all the words.

  Behind him, Bantam yelled for the old man to “Hang on a sec!”

  Jake pulled his blazer tight against the creeping cold. Someone upwind was burning leaves, the smoke invisible in the dark but dense enough to tickle the back of his throat with its ashy taste. He climbed the low hill toward the front of the house, the effort pushing his heart rate up more than it should. He found two vehicles parked in the front yard—Callie Diggs’s cruiser and Fanning’s forensics van. The coroner’s van was gone, and with it Henry. Thank God, he thought and let out a big breath. He wouldn’t have to see his dead friend again.

  Until the funeral.

  He pulled in a couple of long breaths, slowing his pulse down, and took a long look around. The mini-mansion to the west loomed over the yard behind a lattice of bare branches that clattered together in the wind. Brueder, the woman who had called 911, lived there. Two mini-mansions to the east had only small windows facing this way, so they probably hadn’t seen anything. Callie would pull it out of them if they had.

  Jake joined Grady on the front stoop. “Is Detective Diggs still on the canvass?”

  “Yes, Detective.”

  “Fanning still inside?”

  “Yes.” Grady checked the log, then his watch. “But Deputy Coroner Chen left twenty-six minutes ago with Mr. Fox’s remains.”

  Jake put on a fresh set of booties and a pair of gloves, then shoved extra pair of gloves i
n his pocket in case the first pair filled with sweat.

  Inside, Fanning stood from where he’d been crouching by the bookshelves displaying the outhouse souvenirs. He waved a hand over the room. “I agree with you that someone searched the place.”

  “Prints?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Meaning?” Jake appreciated Fanning’s terse style, but wished he would save it for the courtroom.

  “No prints where there are signs of a search, but plenty of them elsewhere.”

  “Because the killer wore gloves,” Jake suggested.

  “Or wiped down what he touched.”

  Which meant print analysis would be a bust. But it still had to be done, every print collected and compared to the prints expected to be here—Henry’s and April’s and even Jake’s.

  “I’m going to look through the dining room and back office if you guys are done with them,” Jake said.

  “We are. Go ahead.”

  Though Henry was gone, his blood was still on the dining room floor: a half-moon where his head had lain and a long streak where the map had been pulled away, probably when they removed Henry’s body. Jake avoided the blood as he examined the things on the table.

  The maps were early plats of Weston, with Henry’s penciled notations where he had located outhouse pits. Jake was familiar with the maps from Henry’s book and found nothing unusual among them. As he pulled the chair out to sit down, he noticed it was an Aeron, a high-end office chair that probably cost around a thousand dollars. Spending that kind of money on a chair wasn’t Henry’s style. Maybe it had been a gift from a satisfied customer who didn’t need it anymore.

  Jake sat down on the springy mesh fabric, and his knee bumped something under the table. A wastebasket. He pulled it into the open and examined the contents. He found pages from a manuscript marked up with heavy edits. The header listed the title as Privy to History; it looked to be a sequel to Henry’s outhouse book. Nothing else caught Jake’s eye, and he pushed the can back under the table.

  The laptop had been processed for fingerprints and was coated in a dusting of print powder. Jake jiggled his finger on the track pad, and the screen lit up to show Henry’s desktop. No password protection. A whir as the internal fan kicked on.

  He opened the word processing program and clicked the file tab to bring up the last few documents Henry had opened. They were all revised drafts of his new book, each labeled as PTH with the date.

  Jake opened the web browser next. Henry’s bookmarks were organized into folders, each labeled with some area of Henry’s interests in local history and writing. Nothing jumped out as unusual. Henry’s browser history showed no activity before the first of the month—apparently Henry cleared the history every month—and none of the activity that was still there raised any flags.

  Jake went to the office at the back of the house. Cold air moved across the floor at ankle level, stirring a flier lying on the worn wood. Jake spotted a space heater in the corner and flipped the switch. It wound itself up to a soft purr, and soon warm air smelling of burnt dust wafted from the machine.

  Henry conducted his handyman business from an old metal desk crammed with a desktop computer, monitor, and printer. The chair in front of it had several duct tape patches on the seat and felt lumpy when Jake sat down. He swiveled around to size the job ahead of him. A pair of three-drawer lateral file cabinets spanned the inside wall, with a long row of manuals for household appliances across their tops. The left cabinet was marked Personal, the right one Business.

  He started on the left.

  The top drawer was nearly empty, the few files inside holding bills and credit card statements. The other two drawers contained nearly six feet of paper on Henry’s divorce and resulting child support saga. Jake read enough to confirm Coogan handled everything, and decided to save time and wait for Coogan’s report.

  The business files proved more interesting, starting with a stack of old appointment calendars for the handyman business. Jake flipped through them and found that a decline in business in November was typical, although none of the old calendars contained as much blank space as this year’s did.

  Jake also found files covering the business side of Henry’s outhouse book. Henry had even saved a thick file of rejection letters from when he shopped the book around before landing a publisher almost two years after he started. It was another year after that before the book came out, and it looked like Henry had made almost thirty thousand dollars since then. A thin file contained the contract on Henry’s new book. Jake glanced through it, then looked closer. There were several deadlines for different stages in the book’s production, and it looked like Henry had missed the final delivery date. Henry had never mentioned missing a deadline.

  In the bottom drawer Jake found manila folders bunched at either end. Every file had a number penciled on its tab, but the folders to the left were also marked Closed and had a dollar amount in red or black on the tab.

  Jake flipped through a few of the folders. Henry had apparently started a new business buying the contents of abandoned storage units. Each file covered the purchase of a single unit. When Henry bought a unit he received a bill of sale from the storage facility, granting him title to the locker’s contents and showing what he’d paid for it. Henry then went through the contents, making notes on a yellow legal pad about what the unit contained and what he planned to do with each item: sell, dump, or recondition. Many files had printouts of Craigslist ads Henry had posted to sell “classic” and “antique” furniture and “collectable toys.” The stuff in the basement.

  Henry had kept precise figures on each unit, including reconditioning expenses, disposal fees, and sales revenue. He had hit a couple of lockers full of office furniture that made good money: probably the source of the Aeron chair. He’d sold any soft goods—clothes, bedding, drapes—to a resale shop in Kirwin. Most files contained a receipt from the Paget County Dump.

  The dollar figures on the closed tabs appeared to show the final net result of each unit purchase—black for profit and red for a loss—but as Jake flipped through a few more files, it looked like the figures on the tabs were only about half of what the accounting inside the folders would indicate. Was Henry cooking his books? If so, he had saved the records that proved it. Henry wasn’t that dumb—or dishonest—so the math meant something else.

  As Jake returned the files to the drawer, he noticed that the last file in the closed group didn’t have a dollar figure on the tab. He pulled it out. Something else had been written on the tab but was later erased. He turned the folder in the light and found indentations in the shape of two stars. He rubbed his thumb over them and wondered what the stars meant and why they were erased. Was the file reused? None of the others had been.

  He opened the file and found the expected bill of sale from the storage facility, with two extra copies clipped to it. Why would Henry need more than one copy of the bill of sale? Jake fanned through them and found a pink page interleaved.

  It was a receipt from Paget County Coins for $2,312 for something described as “Ag 100 OZ 999 GWU.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jake stared at the receipt for a full minute. None of the other files he looked at had a receipt like this one. Maybe Henry had misfiled it. It was dated June ninth; the bill of sale for the storage unit said May eighth. Behind the clipped papers he found the usual yellow sheet in Henry’s scrawl. The only items described were “27 boxes of books” and “soft goods.”

  But there was no accounting.

  Everything about the file was a bit off: filed with the closed files but not marked closed, no dollar amount on the tab, two stars erased from the tab, no accounting, and multiple copies of the bill of sale from the storage facility.

  And the odd receipt.

  Something about it tugged on the thread of a memory, but Jake couldn’t quite pull it up.

  He wo
ke up Henry’s business computer and confirmed it wasn’t protected by a password either, then called Erin. When she didn’t answer, he left a message asking her to have the department’s forensic accountant come out ASAP and have him pay particular attention to the storage unit business. He explained where the files were and that the computer was not protected by a password.

  He turned off the space heater, took the coin shop receipt into the dining room, and made a copy of it using Henry’s scanner.

  As he left Henry’s house he thrummed with energy. The receipt meant something, and the answer it held was just a few minutes away.

  * * *

  Conner moved with the flood of commuters out of the train car and onto the platform. He hitched up his jeans, settled his backpack on his shoulders, and joined the throng heading west. Night had fallen and bugs sputtered about in the bright glare of the overhead lights. The platform crossed above Washington Street before ending at the parking lot for the Paget County Children’s Museum, where dozens of cars waited for the train’s passengers.

  Conner threaded his way through the jumbled minivans and SUVs, then headed south along Washington Street. As he walked, he pulled out his phone and looked at April’s text message again. He still couldn’t believe it: Cop is here and I overheard him tell my mom—NOT ME—that my dad’s been MURDERED! He’s my dad. She divorced him!!!

  The text had literarily knocked the breath out of him. He couldn’t imagine someone killing Mr. Fox. He was one of the nicest guys Conner had ever met. Always happy. Always interested. Always doing something.

  Conner had googled “Weston murder” several times during the train ride, but nothing came up. He reopened the Google app now, renewed the search, and got a single hit. A brief article from the Chicago Tribune, but it didn’t have the victim’s name and said nothing about how he was killed. But still, seeing it right there on his phone… Damn!

  He leaned into the cold wind blowing down Washington Street, then cut down Franklin, the ache he felt for April growing as he got closer. He stopped on the sidewalk in front of her house, the wind whipping against him and lifting a swirl of leaves to clatter against the storm door. Mrs. Fox was not going to be happy to see him. She never was.