by J. Bertrand
“Had there been any violence in the past?” I ask. “The man does collect weapons, you know that?”
His eyes narrow. “I wasn’t aware of that. But no, there’s never been anything like that with Dave. He’s very professional, very good at what he does. But he’s also a somewhat aggressive, somewhat unlikeable sort. His role here had evolved into too much of a front office position, whereas Dave’s more of an in-the-field type.”
If Bayard really is in Nigeria, the odds of him using his prized collectible bowie knife in an attempted double event over the weekend seem remote. But I still need to talk to the man. And I need to recollect why Nigeria is so fresh on my brain.
“Is there a number in Lagos where he can be reached?”
The lawyer reaches for the phone. Stops. “Can I be honest with you? Dave might still be in Nigeria, and he might have come home. We really have no way of knowing. For our kind of work, Lagos is pretty much the center of Africa. It’s very cosmopolitan and there are plenty of . . . opportunities. All I can tell you for certain is that the return ticket has him coming back next week, and that hasn’t been changed. Now, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t left Lagos. He may have worked something out with a competitor; he may have slunk home with his tail between his legs. He could be anywhere.”
“Be that as it may, I have to speak to the man. How can I contact him?”
“Hold on.” He picks up the phone and dials an internal extension, presumably the tight-lipped secretary’s. After a little back and forth, he writes something down on a pad and slides it across the desk.
“That’s Dave’s home address and phone. You can speak to his wife, and maybe she’ll know how to contact him. Then again, maybe not. My understanding is that it’s a troubled marriage.”
“This is his wife?” I say. “This is his address?”
Now I remember.
“Why? Is there something strange about that?”
The name he’s written on the pad reads KIM BAYARD. The address is around the corner from Dr. Joy Hill’s house in West U. The yards of the two houses are separated only by the privacy wall. When I did the neighborhood canvass, I spoke to this woman. It was she who sent me down the street to Emmet Mainz’s house.
And now her husband, who is either in Nigeria or not, turns out to be the purchaser of the knife used to kill both Simone Walker and Agnieszka Oliszewski? Which means the killer I’ve been looking for could be the next-door neighbor.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15 — 3:00 P.M.
Before I approach Bayard’s wife, before there’s any possibility that he’ll be tipped off to how close I am, I want to know everything about him: his background, his movements over the last two weeks, the extent and status of his knife collection.
I divide the task with Aguilar, who volunteers to camp out at Dearborn Gun and Blade until he can put together a list of local collectors and consignment sellers.
“Work your way through, and if Knife 29 changed hands, let me know.”
He heads to Dearborn’s shop, leaving me to phone ICE—Immigration & Customs Enforcement—with an urgent request to flag David Bayard’s passport and let me know whether he’s reentered the country. No doubt the information is available at the stroke of a key, but the helpful bureaucrat on the other end of the line insists on a proper request, after which he’ll get back to me with the information. Once I’ve jumped through that hoop, I’m left to hunt and peck my way through the online databases in search of Bayard.
Dave Bayard turned fifty-two this year. He’s lived in the West University house behind Dr. Hill’s for nineteen years, ever since his marriage to his second wife Kim. He has a son from a previous marriage, now a student at Texas A&M. His employment with Energy Solutions Group goes back to 2000, and before that he worked for Enron. Whatever financial stresses have assailed him recently, his credit record is superb.
In the past ten years he’s been arrested twice for assault. Police arrived at the house in early 2002 after a 9-1-1 call from the son. Bayard, intoxicated, had manhandled his wife, who chose not to press charges. A second incident fourteen months later ended the same way. In that report, Bayard apparently told the responding officers he was undergoing therapy related to anger issues. After that, he either cleaned up his act or his son grew tired of ratting him out. The criminal record goes silent.
Several media pieces online refer to Bayard, citations in Offshore and Pipeline & Gas, all from the late ’90s, and a column-length profile in another energy sector publication that has since folded. Clicking through the links, I discover a Chronicle piece from a decade ago in which Bayard is quoted on the subject of Donald Fauk’s murder conviction.
This is unthinkable, he says. For a generation of mavericks who looked up to Donald as an icon, his fall from grace comes as a real blow.
I stare at the words on the screen.
Simone Walker’s killer used a knife sold to Bayard. Her killer also arranged the scene to bear an uncanny resemblance to Nicole Fauk’s. And now Bayard turns out to have regarded Donald Fauk as an icon? This has to be the man I’m after.
“Detective?”
I glance over my shoulder at the beaming smile of my non-sworn researcher, who clutches a sheaf of paper in her red-nailed hand.
“Your phone records,” she says, handing them over. “The one I highlighted is the call you’re after. It’s a Dallas number.”
“Whose?”
“Jack Hill.” She smiles wider. “That’s Dr. Joy Hill’s ex-husband.”
I snatch the phone handset and start dialing the number. As it rings, I mouth the word thanks. She gazes down on me with satisfaction, then floats away.
“Angie’s dead? Are you being serious?”
“I’m sorry to break the news like this, Mr. Hill.”
“And you’re investigating . . .” He sounds disoriented, baffled. “I’m gonna need a second to process this. She was so . . . young.”
“When I spoke to your wife—excuse me, your ex-wife—she said Agnieszka made a phone call while she was at the site of Simone’s murder. According to the phone records, she called you. Could you tell me what that conversation was about, Mr. Hill?”
“I . . . You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t, I can’t quite get my head around it. She’s gone? What happened exactly? Was it the same person who killed the new girl?”
“Sir, if you’ll please answer my question. Tell me about your phone call with Agnieszka.”
“All right,” he says. “If it was Joy that put you in the picture, then I assume you’re aware that I had a special relationship with Angie. That didn’t last long. You sound like an older fella, so maybe you can relate when I tell you . . . a man can hardly say no when someone so young, so breathtaking wants to be with him. But I could tell what she was looking for was a daddy, not a boyfriend, and if I’d wanted to be a daddy, well . . . you see what I mean.”
“So the affair was brief, but you kept in touch?”
“Oh, sure. Angie needed a lot of help sorting her life out. The immigration stuff, getting on her feet. She wanted to be a clothing designer, and I helped her out with that, too. Financially. She reminded me a lot of Joy, to be honest. Very sophisticated as far as academic matters go, but without much skill for real life. Women like that—it’s almost like for their minds to keep growing, their hearts have to remain fourteen forever.”
“Why did she call you Sunday? As far as I can tell, you’re the last person to speak to her alive.”
I hold back the fact that his ex-wife overheard part of the conversation. If he attributes similar words to Oliszewski, then I’ll have independent confirmation. If he doesn’t, I’ll know how to press him.
“Someone told her about the new girl getting herself killed, so Angie was in a state. She was a little angry with me, because there’d been some trouble back when we were both living in the house. The way I’d settled things didn’t sit right with her. Bad as it sounds, Angie held me a bit responsible.”
“Why would she do
that?”
“Angie felt . . .” A sigh, like the air being let out of a balloon. “She believed she was being watched. When I put in that pool, all I was shooting for was to increase the property value. Joy doesn’t swim and frankly my only use for it was to dress up the backyard for when we were entertaining. Angie, though, she lived out there. Her family back in Poland wasn’t well off, and to her a swimming pool was decadent luxury. She was convinced one of the neighbors was peeping on her.”
The hair on the back of my neck goes electric.
“I figured she was exaggerating. Maybe she’d seen somebody through the fence and drawn the wrong conclusion, movement in a window or whatever. If you’ve seen the yard—of course you have—it’s pretty private. But she insisted somebody was watching her from an attic window next-door.”
“At which house?”
“The Bayards’ house.”
Bingo.
“You said she didn’t like your solution. What was it?”
He chuckles. “I called a landscaper and had some new trees put in. I mean, the yard was practically a jungle as it was, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“Did you confront Dave Bayard?”
He pauses. “No, I don’t guess I did. Naturally I was aware of his issues. His boy had called the police on him before, and that wife of his had the brittle smile of an abused woman. She made an effort to keep it a secret, though. Out of fear, pride, whatever. To be honest with you, I didn’t relish the thought of getting involved in all that. What was I gonna do, show up on the man’s doorstep and accuse him?”
“You took the practical approach,” I say, trying to reassure him. “If the problem is somebody looking through the window, obstruct the view and the problem’s solved.”
“Exactly. The maximum result with the minimum headache. Angie didn’t see that, though. She wanted pistols at dawn. But once you get entangled in the lives of your neighbors, there’s no going back.” A grim laugh. “If I had known how soon I’d be moving out, maybe I would have played things differently. Probably not.”
“So when she called you Saturday, what was she angry about? You said she blamed you.”
“Maybe not blame, but . . . the trees were gone. She hadn’t been back, so she didn’t know. The idiot who planted them sunk ’em in the ground without taking the bags off, so the roots were all netted up and couldn’t take hold. They just withered up. Joy complained about it to me—by that time I was out of there—and I told her to call the man and get them replaced. Instead I think she had them hauled off and got the money back. So Angie was mad because the trees weren’t there. Her peeping Tom would’ve had a clear view of the new girl, she said, and that’s probably why she was dead . . .” His voice trails off. “She really was angry. She’d trusted me to take care of it, and in her view I’d failed her.”
“She was a fool to believe in you,” I say.
“What?”
“She told you that?”
“Yes,” he says. “ ‘I was foolish to trust you,’ words to that effect.”
Close enough.
“The thing is,” he says, “Angie’s view of Dave Senior might have been colored by David Junior.”
“By who?”
“The son. David Bayard Jr. The kid’s pretty sharp, a professional student, and he and his dad are like fire and water. She met David in the neighborhood and he told her all kinds of stories about his dad, which just fueled her suspicions.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Just stupid nonsense.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“He claimed his father used to beat him. With his stepmother looking on. He said that his father had threatened to kill him, and that Bayard actually had killed someone over in Africa. Stuff like that.”
“And you dismissed it?”
“Of course I dismissed it. Bayard might drink a little too much and slap his wife around—I’m saying might, because I have no idea—but the man had a high-powered job, two sets of golf clubs, and a pretty good recipe for throat-scorching chili. I never had kids, but I can imagine situations where you’d have to threaten a teenage boy within an inch of his life—not to mention, David Junior . . . he was just trying to get into her pants, that’s all.”
“He had a thing for Agnieszka?”
“Who wouldn’t? If you’d met her, Detective, trust me: you’d want to impress her, too. She was the kind of girl who makes you want to come off better than you really are.”
His voice goes soft, and I can tell he’s picturing her in his mind, remembering what it was like to be in her presence.
“If you’re serious about Dave Bayard as a suspect,” he says, “you should talk to the son. The wife will keep the family secrets, but David will spill his guts just to even the score.”
The way he makes the pronouncement, I can tell Jack Hill never felt the back of a father’s hand, or stood by helpless as others did. No sympathy for a victim of abuse, or the impact such abuse can have on personality. If the son is dead set against the father, perhaps there are reasons other than spite. Perhaps he knows the true nature of the man who spawned him and has chosen in his own weak way to fight.
If Dave Bayard killed Simone before winging it to Africa, only to have his trip cut short by the termination, he could have returned in time to see Agnieszka out at the pool. Even though Hill never confronted him, it’s a good bet he realized she had spotted him watching her. Which meant she could pass his name along to police. Is that why he had to kill her? Finding my card on her nightstand, he might have assumed she’d already done the damage. So he’d paid a rushed visit to my place, only to lose his prized knife.
There’s just one problem. The emails. If Bayard was in Lagos, how did he manage to send an email from outside Dr. Hill’s house? Until I hear back from ICE, I really can’t say.
Candace Walker calls to tell me she’s obtained a release and scheduled her daughter’s funeral for tomorrow. The desolation in her voice touches me. The sound of a woman who never anticipated having to bury her own child.
“I thought you might want to be there,” she says.
“I’ll do my best,” I say. “There have been some developments in the case, though, that could prevent me.”
“Developments? I thought Jason was released.”
“He’s not our chief suspect, ma’am. As a matter of fact, we’ve pretty much ruled him out since his hospitalization.”
“His what?”
I realize she hasn’t heard of Jason Young’s head injuries—but then, how would she? The lead investigator on her daughter’s case hasn’t kept her very well informed. As I stumble through an explanation, I make a mental note to follow up on Young’s condition. For all I know, he could be dead. So much has happened since my Saturday night visit to the emergency room: my visits to Huntsville and New Orleans, the fresh homicide, the attack on Charlotte, the connection to David Bayard. The case has moved so quickly, so fast, despite my sense that time ebbs along slower than ever. I need to sleep.
“So he’s in the hospital?” she asks, struggling to take in the news. “And you’re certain he didn’t hurt her?”
“The last I heard he was out of surgery, but he hasn’t regained consciousness. And I’m fairly confident he was not involved in your daughter’s death.”
“Should I . . . should I wait, then? For the funeral? He’d want to be there.”
“I’m not sure what to tell you, ma’am. I believe his injuries were quite serious. From what I gather, he might never wake up.”
“All right, then. I just want to do whatever’s right.”
“Of course.” I listen to the sound of her breathing. “Candace, tell me something. Did Simone ever say anything about being watched? Did she think someone might be observing her, a peeping Tom or something like that?”
“Not that she ever told me. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right? Unless something comes up, I’ll mak
e a point of being there. And I will keep you informed if we have any developments.”
Saying so makes me feel better, but Candace Walker gives no sign of being reassured by the words. She rings off with the same uncertain tone she had at the beginning. Lost in a world of the familiar where nothing makes sense anymore. I’ve been there. I know.
With some help from the computer I track down an address and telephone number for David Bayard Jr., who has an apartment in College Station, about ninety miles northwest of Houston. I leave a message for him to call me, giving him my cell number. If the semester at the University of Houston, where Dr. Hill teaches, is winding down, then A&M is probably in the same situation, meaning David Jr. might already be back in Houston for the Christmas break. I’d like to get his story before approaching his stepmother or his father.
Aguilar calls in from Dearborn’s with an interesting tidbit.
“I got a list of everything Bayard tried to move through the consignment dealer,” he says, “and the dealer told me why the collection was being liquidated. According to him, Bayard’s wife put her foot down. She wanted all the knives out of the house, or she’d walk. That was his story, anyway.”
“From what I’m hearing about the wife, I don’t see her issuing ultimatums. Any sign of Knife 29 on the list?”
“Nope. The dealer said he’d remember one of the bowies. March, these things sell for over two grand, you realize that? For a knife?”
I thank him for the effort and promise to return the favor sometime.
Glancing at the clock, I see it’s past six. Apart from my early morning field trips to Dearborn’s and the offices of ESG, I’ve spent the better part of the day in the office. Easing out of my chair, I shake the numbness from my legs. I could clock out, head home, and go straight to bed. Eight hours of sleep would do me a world of good right now, and I’ve pushed the ball far enough forward that I could steal them without guilt.
