__________
Natalie and I sat in the truck and watched Leroy speed away, a cloud of dust hovering over the road behind him. I pulled the card out of my pocket and asked Natalie if her phone had GPS. She punched in the address Leroy had given me. After seeing it on the map, I knew where it was. I started the truck and pulled away from the Conrad house.
We were at the intersection locals call the Y, stopped at the light, when Natalie’s phone rang.
“It’s Susan,” she said before answering. The conversation was short, and she mostly listened. When she disconnected a moment later and dropped the phone back in her bag, she turned to me. “Susan is cooking dinner. You’re invited.”
I looked at my watch. It was almost five.
“What time?”
“Six. They called my brother, too, but he wasn’t sure he could get away.”
Even if he could, I wasn’t sure he’d want to. Although, Ellmann is a better person than that. That’s something I’d do, tell someone I didn’t want to see that I had to work so I wouldn’t have to spend time with him or her. I decided this isn’t Ellmann’s style and that he would show up if he could get the time.
Ian Dawson lived in the subdivision on the south side of Drake, west of Shields, across from the Steele’s shopping center. Those of us who have been here a while call it the “Steele’s shopping center” because Steele’s Market used to be in it. Steele’s had actually closed several years ago and now the building is mostly empty, but since there isn’t a new store to replace the “Steele’s” part, we’ll probably keep the name until there is.
I found the address then jotted down plate numbers before getting out of the truck. Natalie followed me.
“Why do you write all that down?” she asked.
I explained my reasoning.
She seemed satisfied, because she didn’t say anything else.
I rang the bell, and we waited. Two minutes stretched into three, and I wasn’t sure anyone was home. With the way the afternoon sun was shinning on the house, it was difficult to determine if any lights were on inside. I was just getting ready to take Natalie and leave when finally the door did open.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you Ian Dawson?”
He was in his thirties, average height, average weight, with blonde hair and brown eyes. He was barefoot, wearing khaki cargo shorts and a t-shirt.
“That depends,” he said. “Who’s asking?”
I handed him a card and introduced myself.
“I’m looking for a woman named Danielle Dillon,” I said. “Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
I dug out Dillon’s photo and handed it to him. “What about her? Know her?”
He glanced down at the photo then gave me a dark stare. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, anger rising in him. “What the hell kind of game are you playing?”
“So you do know this woman,” I said.
“Fuck you!” he cried, raising his hand and pointing to the street. “Get the hell off my property!”
I could see his anger was masking his true feeling: hurt.
He stepped back in the house and started to shut the door.
“Whoa, whoa, wait, Ian, wait,” I said. “Please hear me out. Believe me when I say I understand a lot of what you’re going through, and I didn’t come here to bring it all up again. I promise that’s not what I want. I just need to ask you about the woman in the photo.”
His face was still angry and guarded, but he hadn’t shut the door in my face, either. It is these little victories in life that I like to celebrate.
“Who is this woman to you, sir?” I asked, holding up the photo again.
He softened then stepped forward again, taking the photo from me slowly, reverently, studying it closely.
“Where’d you get this photo?” he asked. I could hear he was forcing the words out around a lump in his throat.
“Her police file.”
“Why is she all … bruised?” He sniffed back a sob.
“She was involved in a physical altercation. She got in several good blows of her own, but she didn’t walk away untouched.”
“When was this? Who did this to her? I never heard about this.”
“That photo was taken in April of this year.”
His head snapped up, and he stared at me, his eyes wide, glistening with tears, disbelieving.
Suddenly he looked pale, and I thought he might have stopped breathing.
“Let’s go in and sit down,” I said.
I went inside, took him by the arm, and steered him to the sofa in the living room. He fell onto the cushion absently, tears running down his cheeks. My heart broke looking at him.
“Hey, Natalie, will you get a glass of water, please?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
She left and returned a few minutes later with a glass of ice water. I pushed it into Dawson’s hand and helped him take several drinks. After a while, he seemed to come around again.
“Who?” he whispered, pointing to the photo. “Who … did that to her?”
“A man named Jeremiah Vandreen.”
“Vandreen?” he asked, looking up at me.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Yes. My nephew Rusty is in foster care. The court placed him with the Vandreens. Jerry’s in the hospital,” he added, looking back down at the photo.
“I know.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I put him there.”
This earned me another look from Natalie.
Dawson looked up. “The social worker called to tell me I won’t be able to see Rusty for a while because Marci and the kids are in a safe house right now. She said they just found out Jerry was … hurting her and the kids.” It was hard for him to say the words.
“He won’t be hurting anyone else.”
He sobbed, holding a hand over his face.
“That bastard was hurting Rusty?” He shook his head. “I didn’t know.” The tears fell again.
After a few more minutes, he seemed to get himself together again. Sniffing, he wiped at his eyes.
“I’ve been in court for the last ten months trying to get custody of Rusty. Mitch and Melissa, they never put together any kind of will or anything, so they didn’t make me Rusty’s guardian if something happened to them.” He sniffed again. “But at our age, we just don’t think anything is going to happen to us—certainly not … that.”
There was another round of tears. I waited him out patiently. When he was ready, he went on.
“Rusty isn’t Mitch’s son. That’s why the courts wouldn’t place him with me. I’ve had to get a lawyer and spend thousands in fees trying to get him back. He should be with me, he should be with family, not … child abusers like Jerry Vandreen!”
“This woman,” I said softly, pointing to the photo he still held. “She’s Melissa Conrad, isn’t she?”
He pinched his eyes closed, and a stream of tears leaked out.
“Yes.”
This made a lot of things make sense. Not everything, not by a long shot, and maybe it only served to further confuse the bigger picture, but some part of the mess was suddenly ordered.
“How could this have been taken in April?” he asked, sniffing and wiping at his eyes again. “I was at her funeral. I’ve been to her grave. How is this possible?”
“How did they identify Melissa’s body?” I asked as gently as possible.
“Her sister, Heather. We were both there. They asked us who was willing to do it. I had to … see … my brother … that way. I didn’t want Heather to have to see it, but I just coul— … couldn’t look at her, too.”
He was paler now than I’d ever seen a living person, and I thought for sure he’d pass out. Or throw up. Maybe both.
Fortunately, he did neither.
“What’s Heather’s last name?”
“Neuman.”
“Where can I find her?”
>
He gave me her phone number and looked for her address.
“I know I have it written down somewhere,” he said as he sat at the desk in his office, shuffling through papers.
“Do you remember the street?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. She lives with her boyfriend in some big place on the south side of town.”
There were a lot of big places on the south side of town.
“What’s her boyfriend’s name?” I asked.
“Andrew,” he said. “Andrew Dyer.”
I thought I knew which big place he was talking about.
“This place, is it three stories, with a four-car garage, lake, and waterslide?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking up at me. “You know it?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
17
I drove Natalie back to Ellmann’s, and we went inside. Vince was helping Susan in the kitchen, and Courtney was in the living room with her feet on the coffee table, watching TV and texting. I thought about the four of them with free reign over the rest of the house. I made a mental note to call Amy and have her girls come give the house a good top-to-bottom cleaning once the Ellmanns were all on airplanes back to wherever. See, Ellmann’s one of those guys who is pretty neat and takes really good care of his stuff. And it was more than obvious his family had made themselves at home.
Natalie gave minimal greetings to her dad and Susan then ducked into the office. I asked if there was anything I could do to help and was told no. Susan set me up in a chair at the bar, with a plate of fruit and cheese in front of me, then chatted to me while she and Vince worked. Vince intermittently stared darkly at me while pretending I didn’t exist.
I noticed the two of them seemed to work well together, able to do so without really talking, like they were in tune with one another. Susan asked me questions about what Natalie and I’d been doing all day. I skipped over the part about visiting old crime scenes and digging into double homicides and instead focused on the happy parts. Really the only happy parts were the art collections Natalie got to see, but this worked out fine, because this seemed to really interest her.
“We saw a Russian egg,” I said. “It was crafted specially for the wife of the last czar of Russia.”
“Oh, my gosh, I’m sure it was beautiful,” Susan said.
“Yeah, it was pretty neat,” I said. “I thought the Indian jade carvings were pretty cool, too.”
“Carvings?”
I told her about them while I munched on some grapes. I’d always imagined this was how normal families worked—moms and dads together in the kitchen making dinner while the kids sat at the counter eating snacks and telling them about their day. For a minute, I was a little bit sad my life had never looked like this, but I was glad to know I had imagined right, because I used to do this with my brother. I’d set him at the table with milk and a snack and listen to him talk while I made him dinner. My whole goal growing up had been to make sure my brother’s life was as normal as possible. At least I’d gotten this part right.
“They sound incredible,” she said.
“Yeah, they were. There’s a statue that goes with them. It was stolen, though.”
“By whom?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sure whoever it was stolen from is missing it.”
“The McKinnons seem to really miss their painting, so that’s probably true.”
“And this has something to do with the woman you’re looking for?”
I shrugged again. “I think so, but I’m not sure.”
Natalie said she heard the sculpture was in the same private collection as the last two carvings. The carvings were in Dunn’s private collection. Dunn denied ever owning the sculpture. If it had been stolen from him, wouldn’t he be upset, like the McKinnons were? I wasn’t sure Dunn had been upset. But I did think he’d been hiding something. Was it possible he had the sculpture? Perhaps it hadn’t really been stolen and that rumor was just a rumor.
Natalie said the painting had probably been stolen for a specific buyer. I wondered if the Burbanks’ Aphrodite statue had also been a commissioned theft. If so, maybe that type of thing was common to all art thefts, including statues and sculptures. That begged the question, “Are art thieves specialized?” Or, would the same thief steal, say, a painting, a statue, and a sculpture? I excused myself and went to the office, where I asked Natalie this question.
“A thief is a thief,” she said from the desk chair as I settled on the sofa. “They may have knowledge more specific to one area, like paintings, but stealing is stealing.”
This left me thinking the person who had stolen the McKinnons’ painting, the Burbanks’ statue, and the jade sculpture was the same person. I was afraid that person was Danielle Dillon.
Maybe I was getting off track. My job was to find Danielle Dillon. I’d started out doing that and discovered the Conrads’ murder. This was relevant because Mitchell Conrad’s brother just told me Danielle Dillon was Melissa Conrad, who was supposed to be dead. I also think it has been her staying in the basement apartment of the Conrad house. In hunting around town for Dillon, I’d traced her back to three other residences, all of which had valuable art stolen (I was still sure something had been stolen from Dunn). But all of this art business didn’t necessarily get me any closer to Dillon now.
Eric Dunn wasn’t telling all he knew. Todd Lindgren and his BFF Lyle Young weren’t either. Now that I was thinking about it, I remembered Lindgren and Young had both been arrested for theft ten years ago. Young, under disguise of an alias, was suspected of being involved in a diamond theft from the British Museum. Lindgren worked for the Burbanks, who had something stolen. Young told me Andrew Dyer was an associate of his who sometimes stayed at his house. Ian Dawson, Mitchell Conrad’s brother, told me Heather Neuman, Melissa Conrad’s sister, was dating a guy named Andrew Dyer and lived with him in a house that sounds a hell of a lot like Young’s.
And I couldn’t forget the Cadillac, registered to the name Aaron Shelton, a suspected alias, that kept following me around, or the fact that Ellmann was worried about me working this case. When I went to see him at the police station earlier, he’d met me in the lobby instead of letting me up to his office. He was also very tight-lipped about the case he was working when I asked questions. He already told me the Conrad case was connected to his because the method of torture was similar. That meant his case and mine were connected.
Following that bit of logic, I thought about the other aspects of Ellmann’s case that I was aware of. Aside from the Conrads, I knew about Caroline Marks. Ellmann said she hadn’t been tortured, but her death was somehow connected to the others. I also knew Grandma Porter had been murdered. Ellmann had been unwilling to say any more than that. Given the rest of what I knew, I decided to operate for the time being under the assumption that her case was connected to his other cases. Then one blaring fact hit me.
Grandma Porter had been murdered in her kitchen. I’d seen that kitchen. It didn’t look totally dissimilar from the Conrads’ kitchen, and they had likewise been murdered. The Conrads had been tortured. It wasn’t a huge leap to think Grandma Porter had also been tortured. If that was true, that would go a long way in explaining what had Ellmann so worried.
Something was tickling the back of my brain, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach it. I felt like there was something else, some other piece that would fit together if I could just see it.
“You look constipated.”
I was still sitting on the sofa in Ellmann’s office. Natalie was sitting in the chair at the desk. She was staring at me like people stare at the animals in the zoo.
“That’s my thinking face,” I said.
“It looks like thinking hurts you.”
It does sometimes. I was disappointed to learn this is obvious.
My brain was still working over the bits and pieces I had, trying to make them fit together.
“Why did you think the carvi
ngs and the sculpture were in the same private collection? Where did you hear that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know; it’s just one of those things people in the art world hear. Some of that stuff is just rumors, you know, wishful thinking, bad information, intentional misdirection. But usually it’s accurate. People in the art community aren’t really very secretive about their collections, at least not usually. Obviously those who have stolen pieces are very secretive. But the point is, we tend to know. Think of it like a big, extended family. Maybe we haven’t met all our cousins, but we keep up on what their kids are doing.”
“Dunn is the private collector with the carvings. He says he’s never even seen the sculpture in person. What do you make of that?”
“It’s hard to say in this instance, because the sculpture was stolen out of India ten years ago. The person who has it now, even if he didn’t steal it, is in possession of a stolen piece, and I can’t believe there is any way he wouldn’t know that. That being the case, that person would be very quiet about having it. I would think this sort of situation is a thief’s dream, stealing something from someone who can’t report it stolen because he shouldn’t have had it in the first place.”
“So you’re saying it’s possible Dunn did have the sculpture, that it was stolen, and the reason he’s lying about it is because he doesn’t want to admit having had it to begin with.”
“Right.”
Well, Dunn is a lawyer. He would know well to avoid self-incrimination. It seemed to me, though, that a lawyer having a stolen sculpture in the first place was a risky move. It’s pretty much an agreed-upon fact that lawyers are scum, but they are still a part of the criminal justice system and have a responsibility to uphold the law. Possessing a stolen sculpture seems pretty black and white, not the sort of crime they could talk their way out of. Why risk it? Was the sculpture so important?
“If he didn’t have it,” Natalie went on, “I’d guess he’s tried to get his hands on it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He has an incredible collection of very unique, very rare pieces, like the Russian egg. Especially with having those two carvings, I could see him trying to put them together.”
Catherine Nelson - Zoe Grey 02 - The Trouble with Theft Page 21
