by Bo Thunboe
For now, he’d furnished the big room with two card tables—one by the fridge to hold the microwave and coffeemaker, the other in the corner for eating and working—and a low table under the front window for his old college stereo. He took off his blazer and hung it over a chair at the work table, then grabbed a beer from the fridge and stood by the front window, staring out at his new neighborhood but seeing none of it. His thoughts were on Henry. He’d been a great friend, always—
A knock on the front door. He flipped on the outside light. A petite blond stood there, holding a foil-wrapped plate. Erin. He opened the door.
She stepped inside, holding up the plate. “I managed to save a slab of lasagna from the twins. Thought you could use it.”
The tangy tomato aroma made Jake’s mouth water. “Were they okay with that?” The twins were in tenth grade and famous, even among their peers, for their eating abilities.
She shrugged, her green eyes twinkling. “They can stand to miss a third helping once in a while.” She looked around for a place to put the plate down, and settled on the work table.
“Can I get you a beer?” Jake asked.
“Sure.”
He got her the beer, and they sat together at the table. Jake’s gun dug into his gut, so he pulled the holster off his belt and set it on the table.
Erin’s gaze dropped to the gun, then came back up to his face. She smiled softly. “I know you… aren’t a talker, Jake. But if you want to…”
“How are you?” Jake asked.
“I’m… shocked, like everyone I guess. Even working in law enforcement and knowing how random crime can be, I just can’t believe it happened to someone like Henry. He was so…” Erin balled her hands into fists and pounded them gently on the table. “I just want to do something. You know?”
“There are a couple things you can do for me.”
“Name them,” she said.
“How about the forensic accountant?”
“He’ll be at Henry’s first thing.”
“I’d like you to take a hard look at the guy who owns Paget County Coins, Mark Griffin. And at his business. Has property crimes busted him for anything? Does he get sued a lot? Like that.”
“How’s he connected?”
Jake explained the receipt he’d found and the conversation he’d had with Griffin. The two of them then fell quiet, each lost in their own thoughts. Erin nursed her beer. Then suddenly Jake remembered something he’d known since high school. Erin hated beer.
“Sorry about the beer. I don’t have any Pinot Grigio on hand.”
Erin shrugged, then stood. “I should get home. Be sure to eat that lasagna.”
“You know I will.”
They hugged, a long tight embrace of old friends. Then she was gone.
And Jake was alone.
Again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jake leaned back in his chair and sipped his beer. An image flashed through his mind: the bright red arc of Henry’s blood drawn into the paper next to his head.
He squeezed his eyes shut and focused his thoughts on the case.
Henry’s murder had to be about the silver bar. The child support saga and Lynn’s money troubles were ordinary by comparison. Most murder was ordinary, but most murder victims hadn’t sold a silver bar they’d kept secret from their closest friends.
He finished the beer and considered having another two or twelve of them. But tomorrow was going to be a big day. He’d get Dr. Franklin’s autopsy report and the forensic accountant’s report on Henry’s records, and he’d find out what April knew about the silver. He’d get the results of Callie’s follow-up canvass on the truck, dig into the Cowboy, and talk to Lynn about the most recent child support petition she’d filed.
He stared at his beer bottle, picking at the label. He and Henry had enjoyed a lot of beer together over the years, starting with a stash they found hidden in Burlington Woods when they were in junior high. The three of them—Coogan was there too—made the most of their find.
Before he knew it, Jake had his phone out and was calling Coog. He felt like he had to share this memory with someone. And he couldn’t share it with Henry—never again.
Coogan laughed when Jake explained why he’d called. “It was Lowenbrau!” he said.
“You sure?”
“Would I forget my first beer?”
The two men reminisced for a while about those days—Coogan remembered a lot more details than Jake did—before going silent.
“I still can’t believe it,” Coogan said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll find the guy.”
“I will.” Jake was sure of that. What he wasn’t sure of was what would happen when the justice system took over. It was a garble of politics and prejudice all the way from the politically sensitive state’s attorney and his rubber-stamp grand jury to the elected judge and the everyman jury. Anything could happen in that miasma.
“Hang on,” Coogan said. “Judy wants to talk to you.”
A shuffling sound, then Judy’s voice came on the line. “Hey, Jake.”
“Hey, Judy. How was Lynn?”
“Really torn up.” Judy’s tone was heavy. Somber. “And I feel bad, because I found myself judging her for it. She divorced Henry so long ago. And last time I saw her she was so mad at him. All worked up about college tuition.”
“Northwestern?”
“I think so.” Judy sighed. “But don’t try to interrogate me.”
“Judy…” Jake struggled for a softer explanation, but she beat him to it.
“I watch enough cop shows to know the ex is always a suspect.” Judy exhaled loudly through her nose like she did when she was mad at him for keeping Coogan out late. “But I’m not your informant.”
“She’s not a suspect, just a person of interest.”
“Just!”
He’d made it worse. “Your cop shows are right,” he said. “Statistics and procedure require me to look at her. But it’s a formality. The more I know, the faster I can strike her from my list.”
Judy was silent for a few seconds. Then: “Well, you know how Lynn can get going worrying about herself. She was wondering about insurance and Henry’s will. April cut her off—several times. But you know, Lynn never let go of April’s hand. I went there to comfort her, but she had April and… it’s their grief. I guess it’s normal to want to hold on to it before sharing it.”
Jake had seen it many times during his career. He’d even experienced it himself when Mary was killed. It had taken him a while before he could let other people in. “Well, I’m glad you went over there. Now she knows she has someone to talk to when she’s ready.”
After talking with Coogan and Judy—sharing grief with them—Jake’s mood was lighter, but he was still too wired to sleep, and despite the aroma of that lasagna, he wasn’t ready to eat either. So he changed into jeans and a T-shirt, put on his work boots, and went down to the basement. When you lived in a house during a remodel, there was always something to do. And the basement alone had provided far more work than Jake had anticipated.
The original owner had finished half the basement off as a rec room, complete with a fireplace, walnut paneling, and Berber carpet. But after the man died the place had deteriorated badly. His wife had lived into her nineties and apparently never went into the basement. Water had seeped in, and mold and rot had ravaged the carpet and paneling. Jake had had no choice but to gut it.
Before he was halfway done with that, a freak storm flooded the basement while he was in Arizona visiting his dad. Jake heard about the storm and called Henry to check on the house. Sure enough, thanks to a failed sump pump, the entire basement level was knee-deep in water. Henry drained it and replaced the sump pump before Jack even got home. That was the kind of friend Henry was.
Since then, Jake had
been busy pulling out everything that wasn’t structural or part of a house system. All he had left to remove now was the fireplace: a giant, fieldstone-faced, concrete block structure set right in the middle of the basement. Now felt like the perfect time to pull out the sledgehammer and burn off some energy.
He pulled on a pair of leather gloves and safety glasses, swung his arms a few times to loosen up, then got to work. It took a few blows to find a rhythm, but soon pieces of stone and concrete block were shooting off in all directions. The impacts from the eight-pound sledge vibrated up his arms and into his shoulders. He changed his point of attack every few strokes and rested every twenty, counting them out with grunted breath. His ears rang with the loud strikes, and soon his hearing dulled so he could no longer hear the continuous hum of the dehumidifier. Even his own gasps faded. Masonry dust hung in the air and stuck to his sweaty skin and to his teeth. But he kept at it, resting when he needed to, spitting out the grit, shoveling the rubble to the side, until every stone and block was separated from the others. It was a substantial pile. Tons—literally.
Sometimes it just felt good to destroy something.
And now he was ready for that lasagna.
He showered, put on some sweats, then cut a big square from Erin’s lasagna and stuck it in the microwave. While it heated, he checked his phone. He had a missed call from Doc Franklin. He called him back.
“Jake, I found something.” The doc’s voice was quick and breathy.
“Tell me.”
“I agree with DC Chen that a single blow killed Mr. Fox. I believe it came from a heavy piece of silver. Probably five pounds or more. I found a piece of it embedded in his skull.”
Silver. “How do you know it was heavy?” Jake trapped the phone against his shoulder with his cheek, pulled his notebook out of his blazer pocket, and did some quick math. A hundred-ounce silver bar weighed about six pounds.
“By the damage. The dynamic energy needed to do the damage we see to Mr. Fox’s skull would take a light object moving impossibly fast, or a slower object of more mass.”
“Doc, I’m not following.”
“Dynamic energy is a formula: one-half mass times velocity squared. I can calculate the dynamic energy needed to do this damage based on the characteristics of Mr. Fox’s skull. Then it’s simply a matter of playing with some numbers to see what the possibilities are to achieve that energy. Either a super-fast object or a slower object of large mass. Also, the angle of the wound tells us it was an overhead blow. I understand the ceiling there is normal height, so the blow was probably delivered by a person swinging the object in an arc. Fast-moving objects travel in straight lines.”
Jake still didn’t entirely follow all of that, but he cut to the chase. “Could a six-pound silver bar do this damage?”
“Yeah, that’s heavy enough, and yes, I do believe the weapon was an ingot of some kind. Most ‘silver’ objects—candlesticks, jewelry—are actually sterling silver, which is about eight percent copper. Pure silver is too soft for most functional uses. But this silver in Mr. Fox’s scalp is ninety-nine point nine percent pure, and was poured into a form as a lump. I can see the folds under the microscope. That strongly suggests an ingot.”
“Doc, thanks for working late to help me out.”
“Erin told me he was a friend of yours. Let me know what else I can do.”
After the call Jake sat down at the table with the lasagna. Talking about what had killed Henry had destroyed his appetite but he shoveled it in anyway; he would need the fuel for tomorrow. If the murder weapon was a silver bar, then Henry had found more than just the one he’d sold to Griffin. But how many more? At over two thousand dollars each, a pile of them would add up to real money very quickly. Did Griffin know about the other bars? He hadn’t volunteered anything, and Jake hadn’t known to ask him. Maybe he’d decided he could make more money by stealing the bars rather than buying them.
The owner of Paget County Coins would definitely get some hard questions tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jake woke suddenly, his eyes snapping open to find the room bathed in the soft light of approaching dawn. The distant hum of traffic along Washington Street was the only sound. He threw off the sheet and sat up, the draft from the ceiling fan chilling his sweat-drenched body. He knew from the sweat and the fog in his brain that what had woken him wasn’t outside, or even in the room. It was in his head.
Royce Fletcher. The name burned him with shame.
He swung his feet off the bed, then bent over with his elbows on his knees, his back and shoulders protesting after the work he’d done in the basement last night. He plodded into the bathroom, sweaty feet sticking to the floor, flicked on the light, splashed cold water on his face, then stared at himself in the mirror, water dripping off his nose.
His thoughts went back to that night twelve years before.
Everyone had agreed it was a good shooting.
It was his second case as lead detective, and he was convinced the burglary of an electronics warehouse had required inside information. He and his partner, Lee Hilleman, were working their way through finding and interviewing the warehouse’s former employees. Royce Fletcher was one of those former employees, and when Jake showed his badge in the man’s apartment doorway, Fletcher bolted, pushing past Jake and knocking Hilleman down.
Jake gave chase. Hilleman screamed behind him that he was okay and to get the bastard.
Jake burst out the building’s front door in time to see Fletcher duck down the opposite alley. Jake followed, dodging garbage cans and pallets until he cornered Fletcher behind a string of retail stores off Halsted. He pulled his gun, and Fletcher turned to face him with a revolver in his hand.
Jake’s memory was clear up to this point. After that, it got fuzzy. But a surveillance camera had recorded the encounter, and Jake watched that recording at least a hundred times with his union rep before the mandatory Officer Involved Shooting hearing. The rep pulled apart every frame to explore what could have been happening—not an easy task, given the lousy camera angle and the lack of sound. By the time Jake testified, he honestly wasn’t sure what he actually remembered and what was merely one of the possibilities the rep had planted in his head. Had Fletcher pointed his gun at Jake or just held it out? Had Fletcher emitted an unintelligible scream when cornered, as Hilleman had testified, or had he yelled that he surrendered? Had Jake shot the man because he feared for his own life, or because of the anger burning inside him since his wife’s death?
Jake hadn’t found answers to those questions in twelve years, and he certainly wouldn’t find them today.
He splashed more cold water on his face, then toweled off. He felt a hard knot of pain in his lower back, and arched to try and release it, but instead his deltoids joined in. Maybe he was getting too old to swing a sledgehammer.
As he worked through a series of stretches on the bedroom rug, thoughts of Henry’s murder flooded him with fresh sadness. Lynn and April would be yearning for even one moment of normalcy this morning. Jake had been in the same dark place in the days and weeks after his wife’s murder. But eventually their grief would settle—as his had—to a kind of dullness that allowed a return to almost-normal life.
Until something triggered a memory and it all flooded back in.
For now, all he could do for Henry’s family was to find the person who had taken Henry from them.
Over a bowl of cereal, Jake entered his notes into the murder book, an online tool where all relevant information was entered and available to other contributors and department decision-makers. Erin had already started a book on Henry’s murder with the basics, and Jake added what he had learned. Building the book was a great opportunity to give everything a fresh look. He liked working on it in the morning to let whatever wiggled through his subconscious during the night come to the surface. This morning he didn’t have any great insights, but
the work organized his thoughts.
He got dressed, grabbed his equipment, and headed out.
* * *
At this early hour the VFW’s bar wasn’t open yet, so there was little traffic on Jackson. Jake maneuvered the tight left into Redhawk Court and rolled slowly toward Henry’s house, gravel crunching under his tires. A hard wind swirled leaves around a tired minivan parked in front of the house. A patrol car guarded the front door, and Officer Grady popped out of it as Jake parked.
“Accountant’s the only one inside,” Grady said, noting Jake’s arrival in his book. “FIC Fanning and his team left last night at 8:46 p.m. They finished everything except the barn, which is sealed. Coming back for that today. So long as you don’t go in the barn, you don’t need gloves or booties.”
“Thanks, Grady. I’ll stick with the accountant.”
Inside, the house was so still it felt like it had already forgotten Henry. Even the citrus air freshener had faded so much it barely scented the air. Jake kept his eyes off the blood on the dining room floor, his pulse fluttering as he stepped over the spot. He found the department’s forensic accountant, Ryan Beck, hunched at the computer in the back office, his jacket wrapped tight against the chill coming through the thin walls.
“Anything yet?”
Beck jerked in his chair, then held out his hands. “Frostbite.”
Jake turned on the space heater, stretched its cord across the floor, and set the unit a few feet behind Beck’s chair.
“Thanks. Didn’t notice that.”
“What’ve you turned up?” Jake bent to look at what Beck had on Henry’s computer. Spreadsheets were windowed across it.
“Well, nothing funky. That’s for sure.” Ryan stroked his goatee, then gestured to the filing cabinets and computer. “Mr. Fox’s records are really well organized and detailed. Even without the tax returns I can see in his divorce files where he made his money and where he spent it. The mandatory financial disclosures are super comprehensive.”
