The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  “What’s the idea not showing up at your own collar?” he asked.

  She didn’t look up. “Wasn’t mine. It was Bernard’s.”

  “The gun’s not going to hold up.”

  “You’re telling me.” She kicked her chair back. Her eyes were full of red. “Serial numbers were scratched off years ago. Bernard claims the notches in the handle make it Steve’s. His brother confirms it. But the gun’s wiped clean, no prints, and only one shot fired. Johanssen was killed point-blank, so the killer has to have powder burns. I’ll betcha Jenna Conner doesn’t.”

  “Why her? Why not Steve?”

  “Former cop with a brother still on the force?” Darcy snorted. “You tell me, smart-ass.”

  “Shouldn’t have arrested her at all, then.”

  “No, they shouldn’t have, but they want it wrapped.” She pulled a file from beneath her log. “Makes this all worthless.”

  Webb pulled up a chair. “What is it?”

  “Johanssen’s arrest record. Longer than my arm, some drug­related, all smuggling. No convictions, not even any overnight stays in jail. Big lawyers, big money.”

  “And you think they bought someone here?”

  She shook her head. “I think this town’s too wrapped up in its past to know what’s going on in its present.”

  Webb nodded. The analysis made sense. Tom Johanssen betrayed his wife, so she murdered him, first chance she got. What did it matter that she had to wait thirty-three years to do so?

  The problem was, the same logic applied to Flo.

  He swallowed, not liking the options. “You know about the trips, then.”

  “Every three years like clockwork,” she said. “Supervising international barges with some ‘special’ loads. A real hands-on kinda guy.”

  “Drugs?”

  She shook her head. “At first, I think. Then contraband. Going in and out. The Utah company was a front for chip smuggling. Disbanded last year just before the feds caught up to it.”

  “So you think this was a related hit?”

  “I’m sure of it,” she said. “He screwed up, let some investigator get too close. That’s why the Utah office closed. His friends didn’t like it, and they killed him.”

  “That’s not evidence, Darce.”

  “Evidence.” She waved a hand. “Look at the evidence. The hit’s professional. There’re no prints, no witnesses, no gun ID, and a weapon left at the scene. Someone wanted him, and they knew if they got him here there’d be plenty of other suspects.”

  “And a police department unused to these kind of cases.”

  Her smile was tired. She picked up the cigarette, flicked the long trail of ash into the tray, and took a drag. “I didn’t say that.”

  He smiled back. “But you could have.”

  “I could have.”

  He sat down in the metal chair beside her desk. The green upholstery had a rip in it that whistled under his weight. “Let me see the file.”

  She tossed it at him. “This bothers you?”

  “The whole thing bothers me. Tom was a bright guy. Why come here to meet a shipment if he knew his people blamed him for the raid last year?”

  “Money?”

  Webb frowned, remembering Flo’s face on the last beautiful day of her life. “He had other ways of getting that.”

  He opened the file. Many of the sheets inside were old. Arrest records originally done on typewriters and recopied so many times that the dirt dots outnumbered the keystrokes. As usual on the old ones, the photos were missing, removed to put in a mug book or on another, more successful arrest sheet. The fingerprints were dark whorls of unreadable lines.

  He flipped. The later arrest records were on a computer printout. Information, but no original arrest sheets. There was reference to an FBI file, and notes from Darcy’s conversation with the head of the FBI’s case. A reference sheet in the very back also had a DEA file number.

  “There’s a lot of stuff here, but not a lot of paper,” he said.

  She nodded. “They’ve been trying for him for a long time. He knew computers. He could make details disappear.”

  Webb closed the file and handed it back to her. Just like Tom. Slippery to the end. Never appearing to be the person he actually was.

  Webb pulled his gloves out of his coat—and paused, not liking the hunch that had just grabbed him and wouldn’t let him go. “Who did the autopsy?”

  “Cerino. There wasn’t a lot to do, since it was an obvious gunshot wound, so she did a prelim to establish time of death. She’ll do the rest tomorrow.”

  “DNA, fluids, fingerprints?”

  Darcy was frowning at him. “Why? We have a positive ID.”

  “Mine?” Webb asked.

  “Yours, and his brother’s.”

  “Scott’s?”

  “John’s.”

  Webb felt oddly lightheaded. “Get someone to fingerprint the corpse and check it against the federal database.”

  “I doubt he’s in the base. I said he disappeared things—God.” She stamped out the cigarette. “You don’t think he disappeared himself, do you?”

  “Why not?” Webb asked. “He did it before. He’s the only one who would have known there would be other suspects here. I don’t care how good a professional hit man is, he doesn’t research those kinds of details.”

  “But the ID—you ID’ed him.”

  “I haven’t seen him since 1962.”

  “But his brother—” Darcy started.

  Webb held up a finger, then picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone as he thumbed through Darcy’s battered phone book until he found the number he was looking for. He wedged the phone between his shoulder and ear, and dialed.

  “Evvie,” he said when she picked up the phone. “Webb again. Sorry to bother you. Is John there?”

  “No.” She sounded small, hesitant. “He’s at his folks’. You can reach him there.”

  “I will,” Webb said, “but tell me one thing. When was the last time John saw Tom? Did he go on any of those Utah trips?”

  “Heavens, no,” she said. “John’s too proud to let anyone pay his way anywhere. The last time we saw Tom had to be the last time we went west, which was in—I don’t know—’79? ’80? At least fifteen years ago.”

  “Fifteen years,” Webb said. “Thanks.”

  He set the receiver down. Darcy was staring at him. “No one’s that devious,” she said.

  “You don’t know Tom.”

  “But his parents could have identified him.”

  “He knew they wouldn’t,” Webb said.

  Darcy shook her head. “He couldn’t have relied on that.”

  “Sure he could,” Webb said. “He knew how it worked around here. He knew the department. He knew we would call John for the ID. John takes care of the family. And the entire town bends over backward to protect Tom’s parents.”

  “But his other brother—”

  “Hates his guts. Everyone knows that. You want a reliable identification, you call John.”

  Darcy was frowning. “So how did Tom get the gun?”

  “It was stolen from Tups, right? If you look, you’ll probably find that Tom was in town at the same time the gun went missing.”

  “You think he’d been planning this that long?”

  Webb gave her a bitter smile. “Tom always has a backup plan.”

  She shook her head once, as if it were all too much for her. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.

  FBI and DEA involvement somehow circumvented the usual state-to-state rigmarole. Darcy had impressed on them the need for immediate action. The fingerprint ID was fast, made even faster because the dead man was from California, a state that fingerprints all its citizens who get driver’s licenses. The body belonged to Anthony McGregor, a computer consultant who had left home three days ago. He had told his wife that he was on a buying trip to the Midwest with a new client, a man with a lot of cash and a lot of connections, a man whom McGregor met through a m
utual friend, a friend who had once commented on McGregor’s strong resemblance to the client. McGregor had hoped the trip would provide an upward shift in the family’s fortunes.

  Three hours after his death, Anthony McGregor tried to get a direct flight from Minneapolis to Miami. Since he didn’t book in advance, he wasn’t able to fly direct. He had a layover in New York City, a layover that extended from one hour to four because of ice problems at Kennedy. Two FBI agents and two DEA agents met Anthony McGregor when he disembarked at Dade County Airport. Strangely, Anthony McGregor was two inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than noted on his driver’s license. He’d also lost his need for corrective lenses.

  “We get him when the FBI’s through with him,” Darcy said. “The murder’s in our jurisdiction.”

  Webb rubbed his eyes and took a sip of his cold coffee. He’d been up all night. “You get him, Darce.”

  “He’s ours, Webb.”

  Webb shook his head. “I’m not going to taint this one. You got a clean case.”

  “You don’t taint it,” she said. “You solved it.”

  He smiled at her, liking that loyalty, knowing that sometimes this was where friendship hid—in the purposeful forgetting of important details. “I added local knowledge.”

  “Crucial local knowledge.”

  “Nothing more than some interviews would have provided.”

  “But not within the right amount of time. We solved this while he was still in transit—”

  Webb held up his hand, stopped her. “Darce, he screwed my sister, remember?”

  “Oh,” Darcy sighed. “A jury’d love that.”

  “Wouldn’t they, though?”

  She took out a pack of cigarettes, tamped it, then reached inside. It was empty. She crumpled it and threw it at the wastebasket, missing, as usual. “How bad do you want him?”

  “Bad enough,” Webb said, “to get out of the way.”

  “He sure ruined a lot of lives.”

  “He did that,” Webb said. “And some of the lives ruined themselves.”

  Thirty years of police work. Thirty years, and he finally caught the man he’d wanted to catch all along. Webb stepped outside the station into a pale peach and orange dawn. The snow reflected the sun, making the whole city and the lake beyond look rosy.

  But he couldn’t claim credit, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wasn’t sure he’d be a hero in his sister’s eyes.

  He sighed, ran his hand through his hair, and felt the stress of the last twenty-four hours in the oily strands. A shower, breakfast at a diner, and then he’d see Flo. He’d have to work on her now. She couldn’t live in silent hope anymore. She couldn’t play the victim any longer. If he were prosecuting, he’d call her as a character witness, and he’d make sure to have her talk about the double-cross, the first double-cross on Tom Johanssen’s record.

  She’d have to do it with Johanssen sitting across from her, older now, but still handsome, and rich enough to have real smart attorneys at his side. She’d finally have to stop taking responsibility for Tom Johanssen’s actions. She’d have to see him as he was.

  Just as Webb had had to do.

  He’d felt that little stab of betrayal in the police station, when his hunch rose to the forefront of his mind. He’d identified the body. He’d put himself on the line for Tom Johanssen once again. Believing the hype, believing the image, and almost letting the bastard go.

  Again.

  Webb had lied to Darcy. It wasn’t because of the future court case that he’d stepped aside. That was a good superficial reason, but not the true one.

  The true one was that he didn’t want to see the fallout from Tom Johanssen’s latest double-cross. Before, the victims had been his wife and kids, and Flo. This time Johanssen’d set up his whole family, his folks, his brothers, his ex-wife’s new husband, and an entire town. He’d used the animus he’d created thirty-three years ago as a smokescreen to cover his flight to a new life.

  At the expense of his ex-wife, his children, and one reasonably successful California computer consultant who had the misfortune to resemble Tom Johanssen enough to fool people who hadn’t seen him in years.

  Local knowledge.

  It worked both ways.

  Webb got into his car. He felt as if a burden had lifted, as if the dark cloud he’d been living under had finally passed by. He could move on now, maybe even escape the black-and-white winters, find a place with a bit of nuance, a bit of gray.

  He turned the car around and headed east, into the light.

  Into the warmth.

  LONES SEIBER

  Icarus

  FROM Indiana Review

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, they were ordered from the crippled field. Sweat streaked sunburned faces and soaked their prison blues. To the west, the sun had grown huge and crimson as it nipped the horizon; broken strings of pink clouds, the tops darkening to purple and black, drifted above its crest. Ramsey hadn’t seen it from such a perspective, not segmented by chainlink or razor wire, in years. Although shadows had grown long and distended, it would be midnight before the heat would abate. The monotonous drone of insects, awakened by twilight, sounded like rapid, wireless static.

  He and the others who had searched were shackled from hand to foot and then chained together. As they shuffled toward the Bluebird, prodded in the back with shotgun barrels if they stumbled, the links rattled like tempered wind chimes. After climbing aboard, they were herded to the rear into a steel mesh cage from which the seats had been removed and the windows blackened and barred. Since the bus had remained at the field all afternoon, the bare metal sides could sear flesh, so they sat on the floor, in the center of the cage, huddled back to back, arms resting on folded legs. Webster’s body had not been loaded. Ramsey assumed he lay where he had been killed, submerged in the sea of oats.

  After they were counted, a guard, wearing a dun-colored uniform, slammed and locked the narrow sheet-steel door. He stepped to the side, peering through the mesh, and flashed a whiskered, yellow grin as he rattled the keys, like ringing a bell. He was just one of many, all seeming emotionally cloned, governing Ramsey’s life, shamelessly flaunting their authority and license to abuse. Most, it comforted him to hope, probably despised their plight as much as he did his. He imagined them living in dented trailers, strewn like discarded cans along unnamed dirt roads, some alone, drinking themselves to sleep while watching reality TV; others with bitchy, pregnant wives and burdensome children running wild.

  While Ramsey and the others waited, sweltering, body odor thick, the guards opened a cooler. They popped tops and guzzled beer. With his free hand, the driver twisted the key. The starter growled, slowing with each rotation, until just when it seemed it might expire, the engine coughed and backfired to idle. He shoved the floor shift forward several times, stomping the clutch and scraping gears until the transmission engaged, the bus lurching ahead, the driver struggling to steady the steering wheel with one hand. Cans, some trailing foam, sailed out the open door. The interior began filling with a thin blue haze and the stench of burned oil and spent gasoline. The bus wobbled along the rutted dirt road, the chassis grating like a rusted hinge.

  Although residents had named the squalid settlement Carson Springs, as the town grew, the artesian sources and natural springs, which once fed twisting, unmolested streams churning over stones abraded smooth by time, had been harnessed and diverted through hand-hewn canals leading to the town. The clay banks of the depleted streams became etched with gaping cracks, the waterless depths littered with skeletal remains, the bordering forests withered and broken.

  Before the townspeople arrived to civilize the town by building the first church and banning the sale of liquor, ancient, nihilistic pioneers, with a penchant for women who were not delicate, had subsisted for decades on the same land, distilling, fishing, hunting, and enduring hardships they felt earned them an endowed immunity from newly imposed limits. But when one of the original settlers lethally avenged a “squatte
r’s” intrusion, he was tried and sentenced to death. Most of the residents, including children, attended the execution, which had become a social event. The condemned, his expression defiant, his hands tied behind, sat backward on a mule. A crudely fashioned noose, the attached rope dangling loose from a live oak limb, was strung around his neck. A minister read the Twenty-Third Psalm. After he sanctimoniously proclaimed “Amen” and slapped the Bible closed, the sheriff reread the jury’s verdict and then nodded to the animal’s owner, who cracked a whip across the animal’s flank. It bolted, leaving the man dangling. The drop had not broken his neck, so for several minutes his legs stroked the air, as if he were trying to run.

  No one claimed the body, because those who had first settled the land with him had already packed up and moved, rather than conform to flags and the Word, northwest to distant mountains where they hoped to find a less troubled land.

  Years later, after the town had grown and graveled streets had been named, the state paved SR 92 which ran straight 30 miles from the state line, north past Carson Springs, to connect with highways leading eventually to the Canadian border and both coasts. Sheltered by ridges dense with hardwood and pine, the town grew in the center of a copiously fertile valley bordering the prairie, the western landscape featureless and barren and worn, the horizon, wavering with the sun, stretching between blue mountain ranges so distant they looked like fallen clouds.

  George Smiley built Carson Springs’ first store, a sagging building, which looked as if it had been constructed of driftwood, sitting skewed on a rock foundation. George sold anything one might need, merchandise in disarray, pots and pans, yokes and bridles, hanging, in no particular order, from rafters and unadorned walls. For a while he sold the only gasoline in Carson Springs, dispensed from a single ethyl pump in the middle of the furrowed dirt parking lot, the Sinclair dinosaur standing on its pedestal out by SR 92. Even after Fred’s Market, a spotty, regional chain, moved in with lower prices, wire buggies, clean-shaven clerks in white aprons, and two grades of Esso, most folks still, out of loyalty, shopped with George, a generous man who would gladly run a tab for anyone who walked through the door.