by Ben Rehder
“I don’t blame you for thinking I’m full of shit,” he said. “But I don’t wanna go to prison. Could be you did me a favor. You and your partner both. A wake-up call.”
“Maybe you should start this remarkable transformation by finding some new friends,” I said.
“Probably.”
I nodded my head, then walked closer. It appeared to make him nervous.
“You know who set the fire, Shane?”
“Man, I don’t. Really.”
Unfortunately, I believed him, which meant he probably didn’t have any information for me to badger out of him. I pulled out my wallet and handed him a business card. It didn’t list any information that he couldn’t find easily enough online. I noticed that his hand was trembling slightly when he took the card from me. Now I was almost a little sad for him.
“My cell number is on there,” I said. “If one of your buddies set that fire, I will find out, and I will take the appropriate steps to make them regret their actions. If any of them goes near her or her house, they will be lucky to live for the next 24 hours. I hope you realize how much I mean that. Do you think I’m exaggerating, Shane?”
He looked at me briefly and shook his head.
I said, “You learn anything useful and want to share it, just between you and me, feel free to call. That’s what someone who’s trying to lead a better life would do. That’s how you redeem yourself for past fuck-ups. But don’t ever—I mean ever—come to my apartment again. You clear on that?”
He tried to look tough for about three seconds. Old habits. Young punks don’t like to be dissed, and all that crap. Then he reached out and took the card. “Fair enough,” he said.
Thirty minutes later, when Candice opened her apartment door, it took a moment for her to recognize me, and then her expression clouded just enough to be noticeable.
Despite the look on her face, I said, “Hey, Candice. Remember me? Roy Ballard.”
“Yeah. Hi.”
“And this is my partner, Mia Madison.”
“How are you?” Mia asked. “I’m really sorry about what happened to Tyler.”
“Me, too,” I said. “It’s horrible.”
Candice was dressed in sweats and a T-shirt, and she wasn’t wearing make-up. Obviously she had no plans to go anywhere this morning. Of course, she no longer had a job to go to.
“Thank you,” she said. “I just don’t even know how to process it.”
“Did Tyler happen to tell you why I was meeting with him last week?” I asked.
“Not really, no. Something about the Boz Gentry claim.”
“That’s right. Any chance we could come inside for a few minutes and talk?” I said.
When she opened the door fully to let us in, a big, gray cat immediately pressed itself against my ankles and began purring insistently. Candice offered coffee, but we both declined. Now Mia and I were seated on a blue floral-print couch. Candice took a matching chair on the other side of a glass-topped coffee table. There was no television in the living area. The cat jumped up beside me and forced itself into my lap.
The apartment was a lot like mine—but then again, many apartments are like mine. Light-brown carpet that hides dirt. Walls painted with beige satin that can be wiped with a damp cloth. Two bedrooms, one bath. A galley kitchen with a pass-through bar. A small patio, on which I kept the obligatory barbecue grill. Totally practical, and boring as hell. Fine if you’re a college kid or maybe in your twenties, or if you just need something temporary. But living like this in your thirties, as I’d been doing? I don’t know why it hit me right then, but I made a resolution to move out of my place as soon as my lease was up in three months.
“Candice,” I said, “We need to be right up front with you about something, okay?”
She nodded, looking earnest. For Mia and me, a lot was riding on this conversation. If Candice had nothing valuable to share—as in Boz’s exact location, or at least some ideas where we should look—I didn’t know where we would turn next. We’d exhausted the obvious possibilities, as well as some that weren’t so obvious. We might just have to give up. I hated giving up.
I said, “You know that Boz Gentry is under investigation for fraud—for faking his death. And now he’s a suspect in Tyler’s murder. I met with Tyler twice because the insurance company that issued Boz’s policy hired Mia and me to find him—to provide evidence that he really is still alive. We’ve been doing a lot of digging in the past week, and we’ve learned quite a bit. Some of it is very personal in nature. For instance—and I don’t mean to be indelicate—but we learned that you and Boz had an affair.”
I paused there. She had been making eye contact, but now she looked down at the carpet. After several long moments, it became obvious that she wasn’t going to respond. She was going to let the silence speak for her.
“We’re not here to judge you,” Mia said softly. “Not that you should care if we were. I mean, you don’t even know us. And it’s not our business. But we do need to ask you some questions, Candice. Just a couple, and then we’ll leave you alone.”
Candice looked up now and nodded her assent.
“When did you and Boz first get together?” Mia asked. She was naturally taking the lead, so I decided to stay out of the way. I was glad the first question out of her mouth hadn’t been, “Do you know where Boz is right now?” You have to work up to that sort of thing.
“Last fall,” Candice said. She grabbed a tissue from a box on the coffee table and dabbed her nose, at the same time saying, “I already told the police all of this. Is Sadie bothering you? She doesn’t care for women, but she loves men.”
She was referring to the cat, which was purring right in my face. I’d much prefer Lucian’s yappy dog Gwendolyn to pushy Sadie. I’m not a big cat fan.
“No, she’s fine,” I said, because I didn’t want to break up the conversation.
“That was smart to talk to the police,” Mia said, “but they don’t share their findings with us. So please bear with me. Can you tell me how long it lasted?”
“A couple of months. Maybe three or four. It was stupid. I’ve never done anything like that before. Boz said he and Erin were basically separated and that he was going to get a divorce. I fell for it. And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one he was seeing at the time.”
“Why did you think that?” Mia asked.
“Just intuition. The way he’d act when his phone would ring, like he was afraid who might be calling. Or contradicting himself when I’d ask where he’d been the night before. Stuff like that.”
In other words, Candice had had to endure all the suspicions of cheating that Erin had dealt with. Some people would say Candice deserved it. As for Boz, it appeared he was the kind of guy who liked to fool around with a lot of ladies, and he’d say just about anything to make it happen. Did Erin know that Boz had talked about a divorce? She hadn’t said anything to us about that. Most likely it was just another tactic from Boz’s playbook.
“How did it end?” Mia asked.
But Candice was rising from the couch. “Sadie, come here.” And she came over to grab the cat from my lap. Sadie tried to wriggle free, but Candice walked to the bedroom, dropped Sadie inside, and closed the door. I could immediately hear Sadie’s muted meows from behind the door.
“Sorry about that,” Candice said, taking her seat again.
“Not a problem,” I said. Now I had cat hair all over my clothes.
“I was just wondering how it ended between you and Boz,” Mia said, keeping the conversation rolling.
Candice shook her head. I felt I was seeing authentic regret and humiliation. “From what I understand, Erin suspected what was going on, so she asked Tyler if he had seen anything between me and Boz. So then Tyler followed me at lunchtime one day. I came here, to my apartment, and Boz met me. Tyler totally busted me when I got back to work. He said it was unprofessional to carry on with a client, especially a married client, and it was. I knew that. I still can’t believ
e he didn’t fire me.”
All of that matched up with what Erin had told us. I was starting to suspect that Boz’s scheme had been a one-man operation. Erin wasn’t involved. Candice wasn’t involved. Alex Albeck wasn’t involved. And it didn’t seem likely that Boz would conspire with Tyler. There would’ve been too much animosity between the two of them.
“Did you know Tyler slept with Erin?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, I knew. Boz told me. He was really pissed.”
“At Erin or Tyler?”
“Both. I was pretty mad, too, since Tyler was being a hypocrite. Why was it okay for him to see a client if I couldn’t?”
“Did Boz ever confront Tyler about it?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know for sure,” Candice said. “Maybe on the phone. He talked about going over to Tyler’s house and kicking his ass, but he never did, as far as I know.”
Pretty good confirmation that Tyler almost certainly wasn’t tied up in Boz’s fraud scheme.
“Did you tell the cops about that?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, I told them everything.”
“At any time during those months when you were seeing each other, did Boz ever bring up the idea of faking his own death?”
“Absolutely not,” Candice said quickly. “I may be stupid, but I’m not a criminal. I would’ve told Tyler if anything like that had ever come up.”
“Do you have any idea whether Boz is dead or alive?”
She took a deep breath. “I assume he’s alive, because that’s what everybody is saying. But if he is, there’s no way he killed Tyler. That’s ridiculous. He just wouldn’t do that.”
Candice obviously didn’t know anything about Boz’s whereabouts. Disappointing, but in an odd way, I was sort of relieved that Candice wasn’t involved. She seemed like a sweet girl. But I still had questions.
I said, “This past Saturday, I went to Alex Albeck’s ranch to see if Boz might be hiding out there.”
She looked at me. Despite the circumstances, she appeared amused. “Saturday afternoon?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where were you?” she asked.
“In a deer blind along the main road to the ranch house,” I said.
“So you saw me,” she said.
“Yeah. And I’ve been wondering...”
“Why I was out there?” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Looking for Boz,” she said. “He talked about that place a lot, and how much time he spends out there, so it seemed like a logical place for him to hide.”
“But,” I said, “I guess my other question is: why? Why would you look for him after he treated you the way he did?”
She started to speak, but stopped, seeming to search for the right words. “Despite everything that happened, I’d like to make sure he’s okay. Underneath it all—I realize this is probably hard to believe—but underneath it all, Boz is actually a decent guy. The bottom line is, we all have things we aren’t proud of. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have positive qualities, too. He has a good heart. When you meet him, you can’t help but like him.”
I was thinking, Jerry Gillespie would have a different opinion on that. Maybe Boz only worked on making himself likeable to the ladies.
“Were you in love with him?” Mia asked.
“Oh, God,” Candice said, dabbing the corner of one eye. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? How dumb would a girl have to be to fall in love with a guy like Boz? But I guess, yeah, if I’m being honest, I probably was.”
Boz wasn’t just a player. He was a heartbreaker. But I couldn’t get sucked into feeling sorry for Candice. She was an adult and made her own decisions.
“Can you think of any other places Boz might be hiding out?” I asked.
She contemplated that for a few seconds, then said, “No, I really can’t.”
“If you could think of other places, would you tell us?” I grinned at her, but the question was serious.
“I would, yeah,” she said. “I think the best thing for him to do is turn himself in. I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“I agree,” I said. “Nobody wants him to get hurt.”
Mia said, “You can’t think of even one more place he might hide? With a relative? Some special place nobody knows about?”
Mia knew we had to leave here with something, or our investigation would basically be at a dead end.
Candice said, “Well, the only thing that even comes to mind... Have you ever seen The Shawshank Redemption?”
“Sure.”
“You remember how the guy broke out of prison and went down to Zihuatanejo?”
I didn’t like where this was headed.
“Yeah.”
“We were watching it one night—it was Boz’s favorite movie—and he said he’d love to do that. Just chuck everything and take off for Zihuatanejo. Live on the beach. Never come home again.”
Great.
“Did he seem serious about that?” I asked.
“No, not really, but if anyone would actually do something like that, it would be Boz.”
32
We didn’t give up, per se. We took a break. A breather. A pause, until one of us had a suggestion as to what we should do next. I did not call Heidi and inform her that her best and favorite investigative team was spinning its tires in the mud. No, I was betting that we weren’t quite done yet.
In the meantime, I went to a big-box electronics store and bought four high-definition Dropcam video-surveillance cameras for Mia’s house. I was sold when the sales guy showed me how sharp the picture was, and how the cameras streamed encrypted video to the cloud for immediate storage. Perfect. That meant there was no way for a burglar or intruder to get that footage back. You could also receive motion and sound alerts on your smartphone, so you’d know if anyone was on your property or inside your house, and then you could view a live video stream. Amazing. You could even talk to the guy and tell him he’d better get the hell out of there right now. Or just call the cops.
As I connected the cameras via Mia’s Wi-Fi network, I tried to ignore the fact that her house smelled like the world’s largest ashtray. Regardless, she was obviously happy to be back home, and while I was working on the security system, Mia’s handyman showed up and replaced the scorched door between the sunroom and the rest of the house. Mia fed me and the handyman lunch, and then I finished installing the system by mid-afternoon.
Now I had some time on my hands. How to use it, how to use it? Not a tough question.
I found Jens Buerger stocking the breakfast cereal shelves at the super-sized chain grocery store where he worked. It was entertaining to watch his expression sour as he saw me coming up the aisle toward him.
“Hey, look at you,” I said. “Back at it, despite that nasty neck injury. And you obviously have a knack for unskilled labor, which means you’ll excel at making license plates.”
I could tell he didn’t get the joke, but still he said, “You wanna keep it down?”
His eyes were darting over my shoulder, watching, no doubt, for a shift manager or department supervisor. A guy like Buerger was probably always on shaky ground at any job he held, and he didn’t need his legal troubles to be common knowledge in the workplace. Also, should there be any fraud-related court proceedings in his near future, it wouldn’t look good if he were unemployed. I’m sure his lawyer had informed him of that.
“Sure, I’ll keep it down,” I said, speaking even louder. “I can understand why you’re embarrassed, considering the way your fraud scheme collapsed around you.”
“What do you want?” Now he was hissing. But he was still putting boxes on the shelves, trying to make it appear that everything was normal.
“Oh, come on. You know the answer to that.” I grabbed one of the boxes. “Oh, this one is my favorite. But were you aware that there really isn’t such a thing as a frankenberry? Talk about deceptive marketing.”
“Are you high?” he said.
“Just o
n life, my friend. Just on life.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got work to do.”
“Then I won’t keep you. Just tell me where you were on Saturday afternoon when the fire started.”
“Why should I?” he said.
“Because I can make your life hell.”
I could see in his eyes that he badly wanted to challenge that claim, but he knew better.
I couldn’t resist saying, “For example, my partner could tell your boss that you said perverted things to her while she was shopping. You were harassing her in the produce section. Very creepy. Better yet, I could say you propositioned me in the men’s room. Maybe I could make my complaint anonymously. Bet I could get two or three of my friends to make the same complaint. And if they say—”
He held his hands up, giving in.
“I already told the cops everything,” he said. “I have an alibi.”
“And I want to hear that alibi myself.” I raised my voice again.
“God damn it, you’re gonna get me fired.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we? I’m a reasonable guy. Just answer the question and I’ll take off.”
“I was at home watching the Astros, okay? Craig was with me.”
I snickered. “Seriously? You and your fellow delinquent provided mutual alibis? And the cops bought it?”
“It’s the truth. We ordered a pizza and the delivery dude backed us up. He said we were both there.”
Well, crud. I guess it was possible the pizza delivery guy was a liar, but cops can generally spot a lying alibi witness in just a few minutes, and they can just as quickly coerce that witness into telling the truth. If the cops were willing to believe the pizza guy, so was I.
“Bet you were memorable because you didn’t tip him,” I said. “Am I right?”
“You’re an asshole,” Buerger said, just barely audible.
“That just leaves Zeke,” I said. “What’s he got to say for himself?”
A middle-aged woman with some sort of electronic gizmo in her hand had just entered our aisle. She was wearing the same type of red shirt that Buerger was wearing. A fellow store employee—possibly a boss of some kind—which explained why Buerger got noticeably more nervous.
