They Thought He was Safe

by P. D. Workman

  Philippe smiled a little. “You want to know if he would have killed Jose?”

  “I want to know what you think.”

  “No. Not Nando. He is my mother’s brother. If he found out about Jose and me, he would probably kick Jose out and call my mother. He is supposed to be looking after me. Making sure I don’t get myself in trouble.”

  “You don’t think he would have blown up and attacked Jose? It’s possible, you know, if he thought that Jose was taking advantage of you and that he had let your mother down. He could have blown his top.”

  “No. Nando, he talks tough, but he is not physical. He does not get violent. He uses words and his brain, not his hands.”

  Zachary nodded, but jotted the thought down anyway. If it turned out that Jose’s disappearance wasn’t related to other men in the community disappearing, it was possible that it was a one-off. Manslaughter when Nando discovered that one of the men he trusted had interfered with the nephew he was supposed to be protecting.

  “I have the information about where he worked,” Zachary said, “but I need you to tell me about the other places he went, whether he went with you or on his own or with others. I can ask Pat too, but I think you probably were closer to Jose and will be able to give me more information.”

  Philippe nodded. He was obviously reluctant to pass the information on, but he seemed resigned to it.

  “I won’t mention you when I talk to them,” Zachary promised.

  Philippe listed a few of the places that he and Jose had gone and Zachary wrote them down. He closed his notepad, and when he slid it back into his pocket, he pulled out a business card.

  “Please call me once you have contacted your friend about the disappearances. I’d like to talk to him tonight if I can. It may already be too late… but I don’t want to be accused of taking my time when someone might have been in danger. I think the chances that he is still alive are pretty slim, but I have to act like he is and time is of the essence.”

  Philippe agreed. He took the business card from Zachary and studied it. Zachary stood up, leaving plenty of money on the table. More than was needed for the pizza and the tip. He felt bad for Jose’s young friend.

  Zachary stopped, his hand on the back of his chair after he pushed it in. “Uh… one more question. Were you aware whether Jose was seeing anyone else?”

  “Yes,” Philippe admitted. “We were not exclusive. We both saw other people.”

  “Anyone who might have been jealous about Jose seeing someone else?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hang around with any of his other… friends.”

  “Did he ever complain about domestic violence? Anyone who had hit him or choked him? Anyone he didn’t want to have anything to do with anymore?”

  Philippe shook his head. Then Zachary could see that he was reconsidering. Philippe looked at him, frowning.

  “Choked him…” he repeated.

  Zachary waited for him to process the memory. Philippe thumped his fingers on the table. “One day… he had bruises on his neck and he was hurt… his ribs…”

  “Did he say where he got the bruises?”

  “No. I asked, but he said it was nothing, not to worry about it. I kept asking him… and he said it was just rough play.” Philippe shrugged, not meeting Zachary’s eyes. “So I let it go.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A couple of weeks ago, maybe a month.”

  “Not too long ago. It’s worth looking into. Do you know anyone else he was seeing? Or anything about them?”

  “We didn’t really share that… we didn’t want to hurt each other…”

  “If you think of anyone, let me know. Even if it’s just someone you got a vibe from… you know, you had the feeling that maybe they had met before or gone out sometime.”

  Philippe nodded. “Okay. I don’t think so… but I’ll think about it.”

  “Thanks. Put me in contact with your friend as soon as you can. I’ll check out his work next, but that probably won’t take long. We need to keep this moving as fast as we can.”

  Chapter Eight

  Z

  achary reached A.L. Landscaping and looked around. It was mostly just a front office with a receptionist on hand to deal with the public. There was storage space in back for materials and equipment, but it wasn’t the type of place that had a storefront. The receptionist was white, apparently not an illegal immigrant. When Zachary came into the office, she raised her brows like she thought he had walked into the wrong place.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Art McDonald.”

  She looked surprised. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I’ll wait if he’s got someone else with him.”

  “Mr. McDonald doesn’t see anyone without an appointment.”

  “Does he have any time this afternoon?”

  She looked sour at this. She looked at her computer screen and considered her answer. “What is this concerning?”

  “I’m looking into the disappearance of one of his workers.”

  Her eyes flicked over to him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “One of his workers has gone missing. I’m a private investigator looking into it. We may have a situation on our hands.”

  Her hands left the keyboard and she stared at him. “A situation? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sure you want to keep everything quiet, but we may be dealing with… a serial killer.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm. “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, I don’t mean to scare you, but we really do need to address this immediately. I realize that he was an illegal immigrant, but I’m not here about immigration or your business practices. I’m here about a man’s disappearance, maybe a whole series of deaths.”

  She looked unsure of what to do. Zachary tried to look impressive. She glanced toward another office, trying to decide whether to interrupt her boss, which was obviously something she wouldn’t have normally done. After a few more minutes of hesitation, she stood up. “Please wait here,” she instructed. She smoothed out her skirt, gave it a little tug down, and went into one of the other offices. Zachary listened, but couldn’t hear her voice as she went to McDonald to explain the problem to him. In a few minutes, they were both back.

  McDonald was a large man. Tall, florid red cheeks, too heavy around the middle. He looked strong, but also like he spent most of his day sitting around.

  “What is this nonsense?” he demanded.

  The receptionist looked around her front office as if there might be someone to overhear him, and that he should not be talking so loudly, but of course there was no one else there and he was the boss, so she couldn’t exactly kick him out or tell him to tone it down.

  Zachary offered a businesslike hand to shake and produced his business card for McDonald. “Zachary Goldman. Thank you for seeing me.”

  McDonald stammered something out that wasn’t quite “I didn’t agree to see you,” but tried to be something more gracious. Then he returned to his previous line. “That is this nonsense about a serial killer? Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I know that this is inconvenient for you, but if we’re going to be able to prevent others from being killed, we need to find this guy. We need to identify him and get him off the streets so that he can’t keep killing.”

  McDonald gave a distracted nod. He looked at his receptionist and then back toward his office. “I suppose you’d better come with me.”

  Zachary followed him back to his office. A tiny space, plain beige with few pictures or decorations. Lots of filing cabinets and loose papers. It looked more like an accountant’s office than what Zachary would expect a landscaper’s office to look. But he was a business owner, not the guy who was actually mowing lawns and designing flower borders.

  “I really don’t know what this is about, Mr. Goldman.” He needed to look at the business card to prompt himse
lf with Zachary’s name. “But I can assure you that there is no connection between my business and any serial killer.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t allow anything like that to go on!”

  As if he thought that he would have any control over it.

  “No, of course not. I’m certainly not accusing you of anything. This is just the latest development in a long chain of murders that has been going on for years. I’m not accusing you or anybody that you have hired. I’m sure this all went on completely outside of company time. But since the latest victim was one of your employees, I really do need to follow up with you and see if there is anything that we can find that might be helpful in our investigation.”

  McDonald sat down heavily behind his desk and motioned for Zachary to have a seat. Except that the chairs on the other side of his desk were all covered with papers. Zachary looked at them, trying to decide whether to shift one of the piles of paper somewhere else, then elected to stay standing. It gave him a psychological position of power over McDonald.

  “I really do appreciate you taking the time to help me,” Zachary said. Even though McDonald had agreed to nothing of the kind. “I’m sure you must know how hard it is to track down any information about illegals. You deal with them every day, so you must understand what it’s like.”

  McDonald didn’t take the bait. He just shook his head. “Who is it you’re talking about here?”

  “This is about Jose Flores.”

  McDonald’s eyes flickered in recognition. “I already told the police; I don’t know what happened to him. He just disappeared, didn’t come in one day.”

  “But you didn’t find anything suspicious about that behavior?”

  “No. Why would I? These people come and go, they don’t give any notice. They just leave you in the lurch. I have no idea where he was going or why.”

  “That puts you in a position, doesn’t it? You rely on them to come in every day, you have everyone’s schedules arranged, and then he just doesn’t come in. Pretty inconsiderate.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just the way it is in this business. You have to be flexible. But there are always new people who are willing to work. You can find them as fast as you lose them.”

  “But then you have to train them.”

  McDonald nodded. “Yeah. That’s true. It feels like a never-ending battle sometimes. But I’m trying to help these people out. It’s not just something I do for myself.”

  Zachary balked at the idea that McDonald was just hiring illegals out of the goodness of his heart, that it was some kind of cause for him. Of course that was a big, fat lie. He just stared at McDonald for a minute, letting him feel foolish for having made such a statement, then went on.

  “I realize that you already told the police everything you know; I just have a few follow-up questions for you. As you can understand, every little piece of information could be important. We don’t have any way of knowing what may lead us to our killer.”

  “That Dougan was a pain in the neck. Treated me like I was breaking the law by hiring illegals. How am I supposed to run a business without workers? And how are they supposed to live if they don’t get jobs? I’m keeping them off the streets. The government doesn’t have to support them. People don’t have to see them sleeping on the sidewalks and begging for money. It benefits everyone.”

  “I’m sure Jose was very grateful for his job. He had a wife and kids back in El Salvador that he was trying to support?”

  “Yeah, something like that. One of those countries.”

  “He was happy working here, as far as you know?”

  “I never had any complaints.”

  “And he was a pretty regular worker? He showed up here every day? Didn’t just pop in casually now and then? Didn’t miss Monday mornings because of a hangover?”

  “No, he was here every day,” McDonald said grudgingly. “He was reliable.”

  “That’s what I’m hearing. How did he get along with the other workers? Were there ever any signs of trouble? People he argued with or wouldn’t work with?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You never had any fights between him and someone else?”

  McDonald considered for a moment, his eyes narrowing. Then he shook his head. Zachary wasn’t sure whether he believed the answer. McDonald still seemed to be hiding something. “No, no fights.”

  “Nothing that concerned you?”

  “I wasn’t with them every day. I have foremen, designers, people who work with them every day. I’m just the guy that makes sure they have jobs to go to and that they get paid. I’m not the one working side-by-side with them.”

  “Who was? I should probably be talking to them too. And maybe to some of your other workers. They would know things about Jose that you would never have the opportunity to hear about, stuck here in your office.”

  “You’re not talking to anyone else on my staff. I’m giving you my time and that’s more than I think you deserve. I think this line about a serial killer is just that, a line. You don’t know what happened to Jose. You don’t know he’s dead. You think I wouldn’t have heard about it if the police found a body? Even if it didn’t make it into the papers, the cops would still be back here waving their hands around and saying that I should have known.”

  “You couldn’t have known that he was going to be targeted, and I doubt it had anything at all to do with his job. But we have to check everything out. It is possible that the killer first met Jose on the job. He could be another worker or he could even be a client. And at some point he made a connection with Jose, one thing led to another, and…”

  “You’re serious about it being a serial killer. Why haven’t I heard about this before now? It seems to me if there was a serial killer, we would have heard about it. You can’t keep something like that quiet.”

  “You can if everyone who is killed is undocumented and just looks like they have disappeared.”

  McDonald thought about that for a minute. “So you don’t know it’s a serial killer,” he said finally.

  “We’ve got a pretty good idea what it is that we’re looking at,” Zachary said seriously. “Just because we can’t produce the bodies yet, that doesn’t mean they’re not there.” He looked at McDonald significantly. “I’m sure you heard about that killer up in Canada who hid the bodies in landscaping planters.”

  The red color drained out of McDonald’s cheeks. His eyes widened and he shook his head. “That couldn’t happen here. We would know if anyone was tampering with planters. There’s no way that could happen here.”

  “In that case, it was the owner of the landscaping business that was the killer. He had full access whenever he wanted.”

  “Are you accusing me? That’s ridiculous!”

  “I’m not accusing you. I’m just pointing out that… this is one of the first places we have to look at. Is there any possibility that the bodies might have ended up in garden plots? Concrete pads or borders? Planters? There are a lot of places that you could hide a body, if you were so inclined.”

  “But I’m not out there. Like you said, I’m here in the office all day long. I couldn’t do anything like that.”

  “Maybe. You still have access to equipment and the work orders at night or on days off. But I’m not accusing you. There could be someone else on your staff… or it could be nothing to do with your business at all.”

  “There isn’t anything. You know there isn’t any connection with the business.”

  “I don’t think there is,” Zachary agreed slowly. “But I would like to have some questions answered.”

  Chapter Nine

  “S

  o ask your questions,” McDonald barked. “This has nothing to do with my business.”

  “When did Jose come into work last?”

  McDonald pulled out a handwritten ledger and looked at it, making sure that Zachary understood he was taking the question seriously and not just answering off the cuff.

  “The twenty-third. That’
s a week ago last Friday.”

  “And he didn’t tell you that he was going to be missing time or was taking vacation or going away somewhere.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything. And as far as I know he didn’t tell any of the supervisors either. But these people don’t. They don’t take vacations, and if they’re leaving, they just go. They don’t tell anyone.”

  “So you weren’t surprised when he didn’t show up for work the following Monday.”

  McDonald pursed his lips indecisively. “He had been a reliable worker until then, showing up for work every day. I was surprised to hear he hadn’t shown up. But I wasn’t concerned.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “Call him? Why would I do that?”

  “To see if he was sick or was coming back.”

  “No, I didn’t call him.”

  “Did you have a number for him?”

  McDonald glowered at him. But he got up and went to one of the filing cabinets and thumbed through the files there. He pulled one out and returned to his desk. He opened the slim file and looked over the information.

  “Yes, we had a number for him. No way of knowing whether it was a legitimate number or not.”

  “You could call it and see if he answers.”

  McDonald said nothing.

  “Did you give the police that number?”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve never called him?”

  “No.”

  “Could I get it from you?”

  “I don’t know about giving private employee information to anyone who asks. You are not the police.”

  “I can give you Detective Dougan’s number and you could give it to him. Then either he could call it, or he could give it to me. Or you could call the number and see if he answers. It seems a little silly to sit on the number without somebody calling it.”

  McDonald could no doubt see that calling Dougan to tell him that he’d had Jose’s phone number all along and had not provided it during their investigation would put him in a bad light. He’d already said that he didn’t want to give it to a private party. That left only one option. He picked up the receiver on his desk phone and held it between his shoulder and his chin. He jabbed at in the numbers in his file, his irritation clear. He waited for a few seconds, then hung up again.