by Diane Capri
***
Gaspar opened Roscoe’s glove box and rooted around. He found four packs of peanuts. The console storage compartment yielded chocolate peanut butter cups. He tossed a half share to Kim and dropped his own share in his pockets. They moved away together and stood under pecan tree canopies in the weedy side yard.
Gaspar poured half a peanut pack into his mouth. Kim ate slowly from her palm. She said, “I want a closer look at that mailbox. Something not right about it.”
Gaspar limped and she walked along the rutted two-track driveway. The quiet of the November country afternoon was punctuated only by nearby bugs and distant crows and scraping soles on gravel. Sunshine warmed the chill.
Gaspar said, “Five minutes on foot to reach the destroyed mailbox.”
“Less if you’re mad and chasing vandals.”
He asked, “Why are we here?”
“I want a private look at things. Hands on.”
He said, “It worries me that I’m beginning to understand you.”
“How’s that?”
“You talked to the boss, didn’t you? We’re working the Black homicide now, and Reacher’s involved. We need to find Sylvia. I can see it in your twitches.”
“Sylvia confessed to killing Harry, but the confession’s hinky. At least as to chronology. Roscoe knows that. And where’s the motive? Not spouse abuse, for sure. No evidence of any kind to support that.”
Gaspar reached into his pocket and pulled out a fragment of scorched paper. “I found this in the grass not far from the Chevy. There were pieces all over the place.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Kim said. She showed him identical burnt fragments from her own pocket. “They were hundred dollar bills.”
Gaspar examined them. “Ragged edges, fibers, rough texture. The real deal. But they’re old. Ben’s face is bigger on new ones.”
“Reacher blew up a Chevy full of cash? Doesn’t make much sense.”
They stopped at the end of the driveway, under a stand of trees all choked by kudzu, and looked at the battered mailbox. Kim swiped her palms together to dust off the peanut salt, and hooked her thumbs in her back pockets. She said, “What’s bugging me about this mailbox is the repeated pounding. Had to make a hell of a racket in all this quiet.”
“Who’s gonna complain? The locusts?”
“Destroying the box is a felony and Harry’s a cop, right? Slugger knows he’ll get prison time and big money fines if Harry catches him, so he makes sure Harry’s not home somehow. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Takes planning. Slugger’s going to a lot of trouble to piss Harry off and all he does is beat the mailbox. Why not burn the house down or at least trash the place?”
“What if they were cooking or dealing at the house, which is how they get a Chevy-full of hundred dollar bills? Slugger was a meth-head?”
“Crazy junky beats mailbox to hell?” Kim shook her head.
“Don’t like it?”
“Why didn’t Harry replace the box?”
“God, I’d hate to live inside your head, Cosette. Does everything bounce around in there like that?”
“Pretty much, la Mancha. It’s a curse.” She shrugged, mocking his favorite physical response.
“So what’s your best guess?”
“I think Sylvia destroyed the box and Harry didn’t care.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters. Why do we care about their mail? They didn’t.”
Kim said, “Exactly. They cared enough at one time to have the mailbox, though. So what changed? Their connection to the postal service was destroyed and neither Harry nor Sylvia fixed it for months, judging by the rust in those cracks. How do they get their mail?”
“Several options, I guess. P.O. Box. Forward to Harry’s office. Whatever.”
“Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night stays mail couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
He raised his eyebrow. “You were a mail carrier? You memorized the creed?”
“The postal service doesn’t have a creed,” she said, smiling for the first time since the Chevy exploded. “That was in a Kevin Costner movie. Man, you Chicanos are slow.”
Gaspar laughed out loud and the sound made her feel normal. Almost.
She said, “How about this? The mail is delivered come rain or come shine, but only if there’s a place to leave it. And people aren’t required to provide a box or accept delivery.”
He finished the thought. “So what mail was Sylvia avoiding? Maxed out credit card bills for her high-ticket fashion habit? Wouldn’t be the first woman to spend her husband into bankruptcy. Might explain why she killed him, too, if he found out.”
“Find the mail, find the answer.”
“And how do we do that, Mrs. Einstein?”
She heard helicopters in the distance, pressing her. “We’ve got to get moving, Cheech.” She’d taken a couple of steps along the driveway before she realized he wasn’t following. He’d stepped closer to the box, balanced on a mossy limestone rock, and was peering down into the muck. He said, “I keep telling you, Cheech is Mexican, not Cuban. God, you Germans are dumb.”
“We have to go,” she said. She tapped his arm. And regretted it immediately. The moss on the rock and his bad leg and his poor balance all came together and he slipped into the weedy ditch, on his butt, legs flailing, arms in the air.
“Oh, man,” he said, as the water soaked his trousers.
He looked embarrassed.
She shook her head in mock despair. “You’re hopeless, you know that? Quit screwing around down there. Hubba hubba. We’ve got to go.”
He reached up. “Help me out of here.”
Kim secured her footing. Saw a fat stick floating toward him over the tops of murky ripples. Driftwood, maybe.
Not driftwood.
Gaspar reached up, ready to grasp her wrist.
Kim pulled her Sig and aimed an inch from Gaspar’s heel.
He covered his ears a split second too late.
She fired once. A sound like thunder. Then again. And again, to be certain.
He jerked his right foot back and sat up straight and crossed himself rapidly.
He said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, are you out of your mind?”
The rattlesnake’s bloody head dangled from a still-wriggling body as big around as Gaspar’s ankle. Precisely three inches from where his right foot had been.
“Pray later,” she said. “That guy’s got friends and family nearby. We have to go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Margrave, Georgia
November 2
2:15 p.m.
Harry Black’s house was practically empty. Nothing that could be vacuumed, picked up or bagged remained. The mattress was gone and the linens were gone.
Harry Black’s body was gone.
But his blood was still there. It had oxidized to rusty clumps on the wall pine. Dresser drawers were open and empty. Limp curtains were gone from the frosted jalousie window. The miniscule bathroom and the bedroom closet had been stripped of their meager contents.
There were seven new additions.
Seven perfect round holes, each three inches in diameter, had been made in the pine paneling by a hole cutter saw to collect intact the seven bullets lodged there; two behind the bed and five underneath.
Kim paced the room, as if brisk movement guaranteed fast solutions. “Let’s see if we can figure out what was going on here and get the hell out while we still can, okay? You thought they might be cooking or dealing. Talk to me about that.”
Gaspar said, “It’s not a great theory. I was probably wrong. Bad as it was, this place was way too clean for a meth lab. And meth labs burn down. Average life expectancy is about a month.”
“Agreed,” Kim said. “Better idea?”
He shrugged, said nothing, leaned back, and watched.
Kim reache
d the room’s corner, turned, and paced the next wall. “Somebody killed Harry Black. We know that. Was it Sylvia?”
He nodded from his fixed position. “She admitted she shot him. I can see it. Pop a guy in the head twice while he’s sleeping. Not too risky. But cold. Sylvia was as calm as any killer I’ve ever seen.” His gaze sought comment; she nodded agreement. “I figure Reacher did the other five post-mortem to cover-up, make it look more like passion.”
“Possible.” She reached the opposite corner, and turned, and increased her speed. “The boss knows Harry’s dead, probably knows how and why. He dispatches us on a pretext? Reacher’s an excuse?”
Gaspar shrugged. “He knows Reacher’s here and involved. Wants to know what’s going on without revealing himself.”
Perhaps. “He knew we’d get here before Sylvia called in the homicide. How?”
He lifted his eyebrow, stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Too complicated.”
“We confront Roscoe about Reacher and she’s relieved to know he’s alive. Means she hasn’t seen him. She’s astonished when she receives the homicide call. So she’s not part of killing Harry.” She reached the next corner and turned to face him across the long diagonal divide. “Do you agree?”
“Maybe,” he said.
Kim said, “Sylvia, as you described it, was too hot for Harry and too hot for this place and had been for years. So why kill him now?”
“Beats me.”
“You’re really not helping, you know that?” She stopped pacing, and then started again. Gaspar approached the three TV tables, examined the recliners positioned at optimum viewing distance, stuffed his hand between the cushions, scanned the rough walls and barren floors.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking maybe hardcore porn. Big potential with a star as hot as Sylvia. Maybe the big screen was for checking the product. Do you see the TV remote?”
“Nothing here. I’ll check the bedroom.” She returned almost instantly. “No.”
There were loud helicopters in the air, coming and going from the cloverleaf. There were sirens in the distance. How much time did they have? She said, “Maybe forensics took the remote. They took everything else that wasn’t nailed down.”
Gaspar moved to the TV, felt around its edges. “No buttons.” He looked behind it. “Articulating wall mount.” He grasped the screen’s edges, and pulled it away from the pine paneling. A scissors-like mounting device allowed the entire television to extend three inches. He said, “Harry’s building skills sucked. Total hack job back here.”
After a minor struggle he disconnected the cables. He peered inside the hole in the wall. “Too dark to see anything.”
“Where’s the video source?” Kim asked.
“There isn’t one.”
Kim glanced at her watch. Forty-five minutes already gone and nothing accomplished but a dead snake.
“I’m working as fast as I can,” Gaspar said.
“Work faster.”
He examined the wall all the way from the front of the house to the bedroom. He checked the bathroom and the closet. He tapped the paneling every six inches.
“OK,” he said.
“OK what?”
“This wall is too wide.”
“Is it?”
“Internal walls are normally four to five inches, depending on the width of the paneling on the studs. This one’s at least twenty-four, maybe thirty.” He tapped the rough pine paneling here and there with his knuckles. “False wall. Runs the entire length of the living room. Maybe twenty-six feet, give or take.”
Kim said, “And I’ve used roomier port-a-johns than that bathroom.”
Gaspar nodded. “The hidden space runs through the bathroom, too. And the closet.” He stepped inside the tiny space. He tapped the walls with his knuckles and knocked with the flat of his hands. “It’s hollow back here. But there’s no access. No hinges or sliding doors. Not even a finger hole.”
Kim squeezed in beside him. Looked at the single shelf. It ran straight across the meager width of the space, maybe twenty-four inches below the ceiling. It was maybe fifteen inches deep. It was anchored to the back wall. There was a sturdy clothes bar solidly attached to its underside. The entire closet was constructed the same as the rest of the home’s interior. Pine paneling, uneven boards, unfinished gaps, poorly made joints between floor, ceiling, and walls.
She said, “I know this sounds dumb, but what if we yank the whole back wall of the closet out? Maybe by hauling on the bar?”
Gaspar looked at the ragged joints which should have been closed seams. “Be damned heavy. No way Sylvia could have done it alone.” He shrugged. “Worth trying, I guess.”
Kim stepped out of the way. Gaspar grabbed the bar with both hands. When he pulled, the back wall flexed. He grunted and pulled twice more before the paneling came away. He tilted the assembly to free it. He breathed hard and heaved the solid pine to one side.
There was a dark expanse behind the wide opening.
Kim felt for a light switch and didn’t find one. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, turned it on, and used its flashlight application to navigate the darkness.
About four feet ahead, a single bulb hung from a white, flat cord fixed to the ceiling. Two more bulbs hung at intervals deeper in the darkness. She approached, pulled each string, and turned the lights on.
She sneezed.
Behind her Gaspar said, “It would have been nice to find something more than dust.”
“We have,” Kim said. “There’s more here than dust.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The ceiling height in the secret space was the same as in the rest of the house, a standard eight feet. The width was narrow. The TV cables were stapled to the wall. Connectors hung free of whatever electronic devices had once fed the screen. A closet organizer held empty garment bags, padded hangers, and transparent boxes perfectly sized for Sylvia’s shoes. Hermes luggage had left dust-free squares on the floorboards.
There were four identical freestanding shelf units. Each was maybe five feet wide and six feet high and twelve inches deep. Each had six shelves set a foot apart, and provided seven stacking places, including the floor. On each flat plane rested two rows of six cardboard shoe boxes. Eighty four boxes on each unit.
Two empty spaces must have held the two empty boxes she’d seen the day before.
Kim counted twice to be certain before she slipped a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket, pulled them on, and lifted a few random lids. Dust clouded up her nostrils; she sneezed again. After ten tests, she simply lifted each stack from the bottom to confirm its emptiness, while Gaspar sneezed through the same process from the opposite end.
When they’d finished, Gaspar stepped back into the bedroom, stripped off his gloves and swiped the perspiration from his brow; red grime filled the crevices.
He said, “There’s only one thing Harry would have stored in those boxes.”
“That much cash from porn?”
Gaspar shrugged. “Twisted. Kids, maybe. Or animals. We’re in the countryside here. Regardless, we’ve got a solid motive that’ll nail Reacher.”
Kim blinked. Reacher? She asked, “You’re saying Joe and Jack Reacher were involved in some money making scheme together fifteen years ago? Joe’s dead but Jack carried on anyway with Harry and Sylvia?”
“Works for me,” Gaspar said. “Or Joe was legit back then so Jack killed him to avoid arrest. That works for me, too.”
Kim said, “So Reacher waits fifteen years? Comes back to collect his cash, and kills Harry, cleans up, and gets away, leaving Sylvia to take the heat. That’s how you figure it?”
“Something like that,” Gaspar said. “No legitimate way for Harry to accumulate that much money. You don't have to act like I'm stupid. It fits as well as anything you’ve come up with.”
They both heard the unmistakable sound of helicopter blades headed toward their way. Kim figured maybe five minutes to touchdown.
She pulled out her smart phone.
“What are you doing?” Gaspar asked.
“Covering our butts,” she said. She started the video and started dictating. “Tuesday, November 3, two thirty-five p.m. Harry and Sylvia Black’s home. Bedroom. FBI Special Agents Carlos Gaspar and Kim Otto entered the house through unlocked doors seeking evidence in support of a homicide and suspected terrorism investigation begun yesterday. Upon closer examination of the bedroom closet, we located the hidden storage compartment depicted here, containing 336 empty cardboard shoe boxes and a space sufficient to hold the two boxes collected from the crime scene previously by local officers.”
She paused and changed her shot. “Also present are eight empty garment bags containing sixteen satin padded hangers, and twelve empty plastic shoe boxes, all believed to have contained Sylvia Black’s fashion wardrobe.”
She taped the entire row of shelving units and opened several of the cardboard shoe boxes to reveal their empty interiors. “Based on remains observed and samples collected at the scene of a related car bomb incident this morning, it appears these boxes contained U.S. currency. In particular, $100 bills more than a decade old. Calculations based on standard FBI protocols for cash volume suggest each box held approximately $200,000. If so, more than $67,200,000 was hidden here.” She ended the video recording and took several still shots of the boxes.
Gaspar asked her, “Why didn’t you say something about Reacher?”
“We’re still under the radar on that. And besides, as we lawyers say, there’s no evidence to support your wild ass guesses.”
“You know I’m right though,” he said.
“What I can prove is the important thing, Zorro. You want to stick your neck in that trap, go right ahead. I’m waiting to see those bright blue eyes before I say Reacher is responsible.” She turned off her phone again. She ducked into the closet and collected one of Sylvia’s transparent shoe boxes, and one lid.
“Prints,” she said.
He nodded.
They snugged the panel back into place.
