Let Us Prey

by Blake Banner

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. I am going to lock onto his AP—” She was typing again as she spoke. “—and capture his password hash. I’ll force him to reauthenticate by bumping him off his AP with a deauthenticate sent with the airoreplay-ng command…”

  “Airoreplaying?”

  “Uh-huh…” She wasn’t listening, but after a few moments, she smiled. “Okay, Stone, let’s go eat. It may take a few hours, but when we get back we will have his WPA2 password and we’ll be inside his network.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She had a big, stupid grin on her face as she climbed out of the car and raised her hand to hail a cab.

  “It means we can check every guest they’ve had for the past however many years they have been computerized.” A yellow cab had pulled up in front of her.

  “Oh…”

  I locked the Mustang and followed her into the cab.

  We ended up at the Osso Steakhouse—good seafood and large slabs of meat. It was about right for what we both needed. We worked our way through a couple of dishes of mussels with an ice-cold Chardonnay and then two medium-rare eight-ounce steaks with french fries and no damned salad. With that, we had a superb Convento San Francisco. We followed the steak with a cheese board, espresso, and Bushmills in a cognac glass, no ice. We didn’t talk much. We just ate and drank and smiled.

  Not bad for a Tuesday evening.

  It was a mild, pleasant evening, and only a mile to walk back, downhill along California Street. She walked with her hands in her pockets, staring at her boots. I enjoyed looking around at one of the prettiest cities in the world.

  “You know what’s doing my head in, Stone?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ll agree that everything we have found since we’ve been here has pointed in one clear direction.”

  “Probably. What is that direction?”

  “Tammy connected with G. Sanders, he made a proposition to her involving his multimillionaire friend, and she saw the opportunity of making a lot of money and winning her loser boyfriend back.”

  I pulled a face and nodded. “That is a fair summing up.”

  “What’s doing my head in is, how do we get from Californian multimillionaires to Sureños in the Bronx?”

  I sighed. “With any luck, Dehan, your computer is about to answer that question for us.”

  Ten minutes later, we climbed in the car, and Dehan opened up her laptop to check its progress. She grinned. “We’re in. Let’s get back to the hotel and see what we got.”

  SEVEN

  We brought the laptop to my room, and she sat cross-legged with it on my bed. She rattled at the keyboard, staring at the screen. “What you got in that minibar, Sensei? Take a girl out for a meal like that, you got to round it off somehow.”

  I found two whiskey miniatures and emptied them into two tooth mugs. I put one on the bedside table and sat next to her on the other side of the bed. She sipped, muttered, and rattled.

  “Okay, here is the list of guests for May and June 2015…”

  “It’s going to be the last week of May. By June 14, she was already dead in New York.”

  She nodded. She scrolled and she sipped again. After five minutes, she shook her head. “I have been through May five times, Stone.” She passed me the laptop and stood up. “You look. I’m going to have a shower.”

  She picked up her whiskey and walked into my bathroom. She left the door ajar, and I saw her jeans drop on the floor, followed by her shirt. I heard the water and got up to sit myself in the chair at the desk at the foot of the bed, where I could not see the bathroom door.

  I also scrolled through the list five times. There was no sign of G. Sanders. I stood, stared out the window at the lights of San Mateo, and sipped my drink. I considered the possibility that Shaw had got the name of the hotel wrong. But that wasn’t credible; he had read it straight off the screen. Which left only one explanation: the client had given Shaw a false name.

  Dehan stepped out of the bathroom. Her hair was wet and hanging loose, and she was buttoning up her shirt. She stared at me for a long moment.

  “He gave Shaw a false name.”

  I nodded. I walked to the screen and pointed. “I think it’s this guy right here.”

  She was watching me from the bathroom door. “Geronimo dos Santos, right?”

  I smiled at her. “You had the same thought.”

  “Pseudonyms. People always use either their own initials, or one up or one down.”

  “Can we get any more information on him?”

  “Oh yes. What do we want to know?”

  She sat at the computer.

  I said, “How did he pay?”

  She typed, then said, “Credit card. AMEX Black.”

  “When did he check in?”

  “May 24. Checked out June 5.”

  “We need some way to connect him with Tammy. Seems every step we take forward, we wind up in the same place. Let’s get some sleep, Dehan. We’ll brainstorm over breakfast.”

  “Yeah. I’m beat.” She stood and drained her tooth mug. I opened the door for her, and she stood staring me in the eye for a long time.

  I said, “What’s on your mind?” and was surprised to hear a catch in my throat. She made a fist and gave me a gentle punch on the chest.

  “G’night, Stone.”

  I took another whiskey from the minibar and lay on the bed staring at the laptop. I felt troubled and wasn’t sure why. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I got up and sat at the computer. We knew practically nothing about Tamara Gunthersen, so I decided to check what I could find in public records. It probably wouldn’t be any use, but you never knew what you were going to find when you started digging, and at the very least, it might get me to sleep.

  As it was, it woke me up. After half an hour of trawling through databases, I hit on something unexpected. I almost went and woke Dehan, but something held me back. Breakfast was soon enough.

  Tamara Gunthersen was not born Tamara Gunthersen; she was Tamara Polachova. Which meant she either changed her name for some reason, or, more likely, she was married. I trawled a little further and found that she had married in 2011, to one Peter Gunthersen of Page Street in Friendly Acres.

  And that really complicated things. Or maybe it made them more simple. I drained my glass, fell on the bed, and went to sleep.

  I was up and showered by six thirty and went to wake Dehan. She was already up, but her eyes looked tired. She said, “You sleep?” I made a “so-so” gesture with my head. She nodded. “Me too. What you want to do today? I was thinking about dos Santos.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s go get breakfast in Friendly Acres.”

  She followed me to the elevator. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a nice coffee shop that opens at six, right next door to the Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop.”

  She shrugged and nodded once, then spread her hands as we stepped into the elevator. I could imagine her father making exactly those gestures. She said, “Sure, why not? You should have said so.”

  “The Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop belongs to Peter Gunthersen. I thought maybe we could talk to him.”

  “You dreamed this? God spoke to you in a dream?”

  “I told you, I couldn’t sleep.”

  We stepped out of the elevator and crossed the lobby toward a parking lot that was bathed in the cool, dark blue light of dawn.

  “So Peter Gunthersen is who, her brother?”

  I offered her my most smug grin, which is pretty smug. “No, Little Grasshopper, her husband. And they were never divorced.”

  “Yeah, well done, Stone, because the case wasn’t complicated enough. It needed to get more complicated. Go you.”

  We turned right onto the Camino Real, headed toward Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood City. At that time of the morning, the road was practically deserted.

  “It may simplify things, Dehan.”

  “You don’t do this before
coffee, Stone. You do it after coffee.” I smiled and she was quiet for a bit. Then, she said, “So you’re thinking the gig was just a gig, but maybe there was a promise of more well-paid work. So she contacts loser Stephen and says, ‘let’s get back together, I’m going to be in the money,’ and goes to New York to see him. The Sureños were on the street because the Sureños are everywhere, but jealous hubby Peter bursts in on them. Punishes and kills Stephen, shoots his wife, and then, in remorse, takes her away with him.”

  I shrugged. “It has a certain simple elegance to it.”

  “It has. Let’s see how it stands up to coffee.”

  Peter Gunthersen’s auto repair shop had its own parking lot, which it shared with Katy’s Breakfast Bar. The sky had turned from dark blue to gray, and I was on my second coffee and croissant when Peter rolled onto the lot in his white Ford pickup. Dehan paid and we stepped out to greet him as he climbed out of the cab of his truck.

  “Good morning. Peter Gunthersen?”

  “Yuh, why? Who are you?”

  I showed him my badge. Dehan didn’t show him hers because she was still stuffing blueberry pie into her mouth and licking her fingers.

  “I’m Detective Stone, and this is my partner Detective Dehan, from the NYPD.”

  “New York?” He narrowed his eyes. “Little out of your territory, ain’t you?”

  “We wanted to ask you about your wife.”

  “Tasha? Why? What do you want with Tasha?”

  Dehan swallowed and frowned at the same time. “Tasha? Who’s Tasha?”

  He looked confused a moment, then his face cleared. “Oh, you mean… my wife, Tamara.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Who is Tasha?”

  “Natasha is my partner. We’ve lived together for over two years now. I just think of her as my wife.”

  “What about Tamara?”

  He puffed his cheeks and blew. “Can we go inside? I got a ton of work to do.”

  He unlocked the steel blind and rolled it up, walked in, and switched on the lights. Then he came back to us and rested his ass against a half-dismantled truck.

  “Look, to be honest, Tammy was real cute, I mean real cute. The kind of chick it’s hard not to fall in love with. But being blunt, she was a slut. She would sleep with anything in pants, or a skirt, if she thought it was going to get her where she wanted to be.”

  “And where was that?” It was Dehan.

  “Hollywood. That was the one thing that drove her in life: Hollywood. She was going to Hollywood, and nothing was going to stop her.”

  “So, you’re not a movie producer or a director… why’d she marry you?”

  He shrugged. “She was young. We were both real young. We talked about moving to L.A. I guess she thought I could help her get away from her parents and move south.”

  I asked him, “What happened?”

  “Her parents died in a car accident. She inherited the house and found this agent, Shaw. You spoken to him? Suddenly, she didn’t need me anymore. So she said she wanted a divorce.”

  I scratched my chin. “But you’re still married.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, it got complicated. I was crazy about her. I didn’t want a divorce. I wanted her to see sense and come back to me.” He gave a dry, bitter laugh. “Now I wish I had given her the damn thing. I ended up asking her for one, but she just disappeared. Anyway, back then, I really believed I could persuade her to stay with me. I was a damned asshole.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “So tell me about Stephen Springfellow.”

  You don’t often see pure hatred on a person’s face, but that was what I saw then in Peter Gunthersen’s expression.

  “That low-life motherfucker. What do you want to know about him?”

  Dehan said, “I’m just thinking about dates. We know she was involved with him 2012 through 2013. You were married at that time.”

  “Yeah, we were married, but I had moved out. She was stringing me along—maybe we’d get back together, she needed to straighten out her head and decide what she wanted, all that shit. Turns out all the while she’s living with that son of a bitch.”

  Dehan shook her head. “That’s got to hurt. You must have really hated the guy.”

  “He was fucking my wife—what do you think?”

  I changed the subject. “What do you know about Geronimo dos Santos?”

  He shrugged. “Not a lot. I know he employed her to do a gig at some fancy party. She reckoned it was going to make her rich. She called me. She was begging me to give her the divorce. She said she was getting married… She was going out east to New York to see Stephen.” He frowned. “Wait a minute… You guys are NYPD. What’s happened?”

  Dehan sucked her teeth. “Did you agree to the divorce?”

  “No, not straightaway. I was mad at her.”

  I sighed and scratched my chin, trying to fit the pieces together in my head. “Did you follow her out to New York?”

  “No. To be honest, I’d had enough of her. I was about ready to sign the papers, but I never heard from her again.” He looked from me to Dehan and back again. “I think it’s about time you told me why you’re asking me these questions.”

  I studied his face carefully. He looked worried. “On the night of June 14, 2015, Stephen Springfellow was murdered, and we think Tammy was murdered with him. Her body hasn’t been found yet.”

  His eyes flooded with tears. He crossed his arms and looked away at the gray dawn outside his garage.

  “Stupid bitch.” His voice broke as he said it. “Chasing fucking dreams, screwing around with every fucking dick who made her a promise. She had everything she would’ve needed right here at home.”

  He sniffed and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his overall. I watched him a moment, then repeated my question.

  “You didn’t follow her to New York?”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t kill her, Detective. I was conflicted and I was confused, but I had met Tasha by then and I had already started to heal. I’m just sad because it is such a fucking waste of a person who could’ve been real special.”

  I nodded. “Okay, thanks for your help, Peter.”

  He moved back into the shadows of his garage, and we climbed back into the Mustang.

  EIGHT

  I called Hank.

  “Hey, Stone, what can I do for you?”

  “We’re almost done, and we’ll be off your turf pretty soon. Just one thing you could do for me.”

  “Name it. Glad to help.”

  “Peter Gunthersen.” I gave him the address and particulars. “I’m just wondering if he has any priors. He was married to Tamara Gunthersen, formerly Polachova. Maybe there were some domestics. Also, did he, or does he, own a gun.”

  “You got it. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  I pulled onto Bay Road and headed back toward the Camino del Rey. I put the hood down, and the wind started whipping Dehan’s hair about. She reached behind her head, wound it up, and tied it in a knot.

  “You want to know what my gut says, Stone?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “My gut says we have been building up this case into a huge mystery, because we didn’t know about Peter. We had no motive, did we? That’s what we were looking for. Why did they kill him? Why did they take her body away? Motive. We had a murder with no motive, so we were running around like headless chickens looking for one. Now we have a motive. The oldest motive in the world.”

  “You think it’s a good old-fashioned case of jealousy.”

  “’S what my gut tells me. He followed her up to New York, found them together, tied Steve up at gunpoint, beat him up a bit, and made her watch. Then shot them both. It’s what you were suggesting before coffee. It stands up. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, except we have no proof.”

  “So if he owns a gun, or owned a gun, we check ballistics. We also need to check his credit card
records, see if he traveled to New York back in June 2015.”

  I nodded. “Yup. Meanwhile, I want to know more about this gig. Where was it? Whose party? What is the relationship between this Geronimo dos Santos and his host? Why, Dehan, why was he at such pains to provide him with this exotic gift, and why did he give Tammy’s agent a false name? Whether Peter is our killer or not, there is more to this gig than meets the eye.”

  I pulled onto the Camino del Rey and began to accelerate back toward San Mateo. Dehan was watching the low buildings slide by on the broad, tree-lined avenue in the morning sunlight. While she did that, she gently thumped the door with her fist.

  “I agree, but how are we going to do it?”

  “Maybe dos Santos came in his own car. But I’d say chances are even that he hired a limo once he was here, to take himself and/or Tammy to the party.”

  “True, but to check that we need his AMEX records. To get his AMEX records, we need a court order. To get the evidence for a court order, we need to check his AMEX records. Catch twenty-two.”

  I smiled. “But, Ritoo Glasshopper, hotels of the swank of the Hyatt Regency provide everything that the discerning gentleman might need, including limo hire services. If he hired a limo, chances are he did it through the hotel, whose records you so skillfully finagled.”

  She stared at me. I glanced at her and saw myself, duplicated, staring back at me from the lenses of her aviators. She said, “Why didn’t you think of that last night?”

  It was a good question. I shrugged. “I was tired and I’d had too much whiskey.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You disappoint me, Sensei.”

  By the time we pulled into the parking lot at the hotel, it was nine o’clock, the sun was rising over the sierras in the east, and I was ready for more coffee. I ordered some at reception to be sent up, and we rode the elevator back to my room.

  Dehan pulled up the file, and I pulled up a chair next to her. She typed and clicked for a while, and finally a screen came up with an itemized list and a column of numbers down the right-hand side.