Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  No, but their deaths might be.

  I hadn’t thought of that, PJ typed, letting his remark slip by.

  That’s what I’m good for, the Big Picture. Separately, they each have a lot of bad guys in their pasts. Go for the intersection points in their careers.

  I need to get on this.

  Not before you get your list. The word for the day is “connection “ and the list is mercifully short.

  1. Connections can be physical, emotional, or spiritual. Physical ones are the most fun.

  2. Revenge is a form of connection that isn’t on the plus side of the personality ledger.

  3. Soap operas = tangled connections.

  4. My stomach’s grumbling and I’d like to connect with a few enchiladas right about now.

  5. The ultimate connection is that we are all made of star stuff.

  Take care, Keypunch.

  PJ didn’t know much about the Rheinhardt case, certainly not any insider details. Ordinarily, Schultz would be her conduit for information about cases that didn’t belong to CHIP. She couldn’t rely on that. In fact, she couldn’t even reach Schultz. She had no idea if he’d contact her again or not.

  She was on her own, and she told herself she’d better start dealing with it.

  Then she realized that it wasn’t really Rheinhardt’s death she needed to learn more about, but his life—specifically, where it crossed Schultz’s. PJ had one contact she had developed all on her own. She checked the clock on her desk. Would he be there on a weeknight at 9:00 P.M.?

  Probably. It’s not like he has a wild social life.

  Gathering up a few things from her desk, she set out toward the Audiovisual Department in search of Louie Bertram.

  The AV lab door was closed, and PJ heard loud music coming from inside. She recognized it as Mars, Bringer of War, from the suite The Planets, by Gustav Hoist. Most people knew it as the music from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but PJ was familiar with it because her father used to play it at full volume when he finished his editing work for the day. When the arthritis in her father’s fingers got worse, he took to working from home so that others wouldn’t see him painfully pecking out articles or working with the layout boards. Sometimes PJ typed for him. Other days she’d be doing her homework or reading, and suddenly the music would come booming through the walls of the house, indicating another edition put to bed. It had startled more than one of her young friends who happened to be visiting at the time. She smiled as she heard the familiar music from the lab.

  PJ knocked on the door, but had little hope of being heard.

  After a minute of ineffectual knocking, she tried the knob. It turned, so she opened the door slightly. Peering in, she saw Louie, one hand moving his wheelchair back and forth in time to the thunderous beat, the other raised and holding an imaginary conductor’s baton. His eyes were open but unfocused and his face practically glowed. It was a private moment, and she didn’t want to intrude, but she couldn’t wait to get started on researching any possible connection between Rick’s death and Rheinhardt’s. Quietly she closed the door and went to an office a few doors down, far enough so she couldn’t hear the music, in search of a phone. She dialed his number, chastising herself for not doing that in the first place.

  She hoped he’d see the flashing light on the phone.

  The phone was picked up on the tenth ring. The background was silent. He’d turned the music off.

  “Bertram.”

  “Louie, it’s PJ. I’m surprised to find you in. I was going to leave you a message.” She kept her voice low and the phone close to her face. For all she knew, Louie could hear her through several dividing walls. The man had an uncanny knack for all things audio.

  “Always glad to talk with you, PJ. What can I do for you?” he said. She knew his lashes would be brushing his cheeks shyly as he talked. He gave no indication that he knew she was on the same floor of the building as he was.

  “Actually I’m still in the building, Louie. Could I come over and talk with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “See you in a few minutes,” PJ said. She hung up, waited in the dark office for several minutes, then went to his door and knocked.

  “Come in,” Louie said cheerfully.

  She pulled up a chair so she wouldn’t tower over Louie. As a short person herself, she didn’t care much for speaking to people’s chests, and she imagined Louie didn’t like talking to their belly buttons.

  To others Louie Bertram was an extension of his audiovisual equipment. Because he didn’t relate easily to most people, he became invisible to them, just another one of the levers and knobs to twist or pull when A/V expertise was needed. From the first time she’d met him, PJ had tried to penetrate his shell of isolation. She had been rewarded with friendship, tentative at first, then cemented when she called upon him for help. He’d gotten in trouble once by following her requests, but it didn’t matter to him. Friends helped out, didn’t they?

  He was neatly dressed in a long-sleeved blue dress shirt, open at the neck. Probably he’d worn a tie during the day and loosened up after hours. He wore black trousers and freshly shined black leather dress shoes. From the knee down his legs were spindly and twisted. As his trousers draped against them, she could make out their shape. He was about forty years old, with an unfortunate problem of overly hairy ears but a dazzling smile that she couldn’t help returning. After a few minutes in Louie’s presence, the ears didn’t seem so bad.

  “What can I do for you, PJ? A tape enhanced? Voices compared?”

  Louie had started out calling her Dr. Gray when they first met, but she had gently insisted on PJ. It was that simple show of warmth that had started a fledgling relationship.

  “Louie, I need something outside your area. But I thought you could point me in the right direction.”

  His smile faltered for a moment. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I need to know how to search old case files, pulling out ones that match compound criteria. It’s important.” PJ hadn’t had the need to examine archival computer records, and therefore didn’t have the access code or experience with the database search. She could poke around and probably hack in, but she knew that any security program worth its salt would record her initial attempts as unauthorized accesses. She’d leave a record, and Wall or someone else would be down on her head in the morning about it. Unless the idea panned out, she didn’t want to go public with it. She had resolved to give Schultz his three days, and she felt that she was sneaking around behind his back—which of course she was. She could obtain and use someone else’s ID, but she didn’t want to risk having anyone else blamed for unauthorized accesses they had nothing to do with.

  She could also wait and make a request through appropriate channels in the morning. She was assigned to the Rick Schultz case, and it would be a legitimate request that wouldn’t garner any special notice. But her sense of urgency wouldn’t hold still for that.

  Louie’s face lit up. “Oh, no problem. That would be Georgina.”

  PJ sat back, relieved. He hadn’t questioned her reason for wanting the information, and Louie seemed to know everyone. “Great. Let’s go see her.”

  “One small problem. She works days and always goes home right on time. She’s got two boys under five years old.”

  “Oh,” PJ said, disappointed.

  “I could probably get her to come in if I went over and stayed with the boys,” he said. “They’re asleep by now, and wouldn’t even know their mom was gone. And if they did wake up, they know me from the time I rewired her furnace and helped her put in smoke alarms.”

  PJ wondered how Louie could possibly help install smoke alarms on the ceiling, then moved on to another thought: Was there anyone around here that Louie hadn’t helped out at one time or another?

  When she thought about it further, she realized that all of his contacts were among the support personnel, technicians, or administrative staff, not the officers. There was an entire network of pe
ople who worked within, around, and underneath the visible structure of law enforcement that the public saw as “the police.” They were civilians, like herself, highly dedicated to their work.

  And Louie was the entry gate.

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that,” PJ said. “I’ll just wait until morning.”

  “Let me give her a call and see if she goes for it.”

  PJ shrugged. She felt she was imposing too much, but she was eager to see if the connections idea had any merit.

  Louie rolled over to a phone. He had a short conversation with his back to her, so she couldn’t make out much. Then he spun around.

  “It’s a done deal. I’ll leave now for her house. It’s only a twenty-minute drive, so she’ll be here in less than an hour.”

  “Louie, I don’t know what to say. Thanks, and if there’s anything I can do for you sometime, you just let me know.” She realized she had volunteered to enter Louie’s web of contacts, and might be called upon sometime to do a favor for someone else in the department she didn’t even know well. Louie was the controller who sat at the center, working the contacts for the benefit of all. He reminded her of Merlin. It wasn’t the first time she had called upon Louie for help—with this request, she’d used up her freebies. Sooner or later something would bounce back her way, and she hoped that she’d be up to the task.

  Georgina arrived as promised, and sought out PJ in her office. She had an authorization form for the release of archival information, which she had PJ sign and backdate with a time of early that morning. Georgina was covering herself in case anyone questioned the search, which was highly unlikely.

  Half an hour later, PJ sat at her desk with a stack of printouts of eighty-nine homicide case summaries in which both Schultz and Rheinhardt had played a role during their careers. She had decided to limit the search to homicides only, whether they were successfully prosecuted or not. She reasoned that if the defendant was found guilty, he or she—and there were only a handful of women defendants in the stack—could have served their time, been released from prison, and be bent on revenge. If the defendant was not found guilty, there could still be a vengeful party—a relative or loved one of the victim who felt that justice had not been served.

  PJ marveled at the fact that Schultz had been involved in eighty-nine homicides brought to trial—and those were just the ones that Rheinhardt had prosecuted himself, mostly from earlier in his career when he went to court more often in person. Schultz’s career actually included about two hundred and sixty homicides in his entire thirty-three years, but only eighty-nine had close personal involvement with Rheinhardt. The most recent one was six years ago, the oldest twenty-three, from before the time when Rheinhardt was elected to the top spot and was a peon in the prosecuting attorney’s office. She fixed a pot of coffee and began reading the first summary, hoping that something would leap off the page and strike her between the eyes.

  She also worried that she had taken the wrong approach, and there was nothing to be found in the summaries that would lead her to the person who killed Rick Schultz and Victor Rheinhardt and—if Schultz was telling the truth—had also run little Caroline Bussman down on the sidewalk. The whole thing could be a colossal waste of time.

  A couple of hours later she had rejected many of the eighty-nine cases for various reasons. The victim had no family to seek revenge. The convicted killer was still in prison. The killer was dead, either of natural causes or the ministrations of the State of Missouri, and there was no surviving family of the killer to resent that fact.

  An even dozen remained on her desk. She filled out twelve requests to pull the broader case files, hand carried them to Records, and went home. She needed a few hours’ sleep.

  Megabite greeted her and waited impatiently while PJ opened a double-size package of Tender Vittles and dumped it into the cat’s bowl. Megabite attacked her meal with predatory vigor. She left the cat in the kitchen and walked upstairs. The house felt very empty, and PJ’s anxiety expanded to fill the space. There were too many tough questions floating around in her head.

  Was her course the best way to help Schultz? How had helping Schultz somehow eclipsed solving Rick’s murder, or were they one and the same? What was the significance of the missing answering machine tape? People didn’t ordinarily grab answering machine tapes and run out of their homes to console their ex-wives.

  Did he kill Caroline Bussman?

  PJ found herself wishing she could hear Schultz’s voice again, even if it was another enigmatic phone call.

  By the time PJ got to her bedroom, Megabite had worked the feline magic of being in more than one place at a time—the cat was on the bed, delicately cleaning her whiskers. PJ pulled up the covers and got comfortable with the cat curled under her arm. Doubts mercifully faded, the world narrowed to the darkness behind her closed eyelids, and in moments she was asleep.

  Seventeen

  EARLY THURSDAY MORNING, SCHULTZ awakened in his motel room. He went to the lobby for a cup of coffee. Heavy dark clouds hung down so low that he could feel them on his shoulders as he walked. The air held a lot of moisture, enough so that he couldn’t cool off by sweating, and a thin film of sweat and condensation formed on his skin almost as soon as he stepped outside his room. The hairs on his arms rose with every distant lightning strike. On the way back to the room, a few raindrops dampened his shirt and thunder rolled over the roofs of the buildings like the echoes of a giant’s footsteps. The air was oppressive and gloomy, setting the stage for the kind of storm that made people want to stay indoors and pull down their window shades.

  He called Anita Collings at her home, looking for information. She came through for him without asking questions, and he’d remember that if he was ever in a position to do her a favor. He also appreciated her being his eyes and ears back in St. Louis.

  “Nothing big on Rick’s murder,” Anita said. She told him about the chemical supplies purchased by Ginger Miller. Bursts of static from the approaching storm punctuated her account. “On the hit-and-run, Wall and company have been inside your house. The liquor bottles didn’t help your case.” There was no suspicion in her voice, just flat sarcasm.

  “Well, shit, I could have figured that out myself.” He cursed the impulse that had led to the bottles’ presence in the first place, and his stupidity for leaving them there.

  “What about Mandoleras?” he said.

  “Found him. Personnel had a forwarding address. After his early retirement, he moved to Tucson.” She gave him the address.

  “And that other thing?”

  “No luck yet. I’m going back, and I’ll be a little more persuasive this time,”

  “Good. I owe you, Anita.”

  “Um, I never did get a chance to tell you directly. I’m really sorry about your son. And the way it happened. What a shitty way to go.”

  It wasn’t the most eloquent expression of sympathy, but Schultz was deeply affected. He choked up for a moment, and tears stood at the corners of his eyes. While he had been on the run, he’d had to put his grief on the shelf.

  Static crackled through the phone line.

  “Yeah,” he said finally.

  “Bye, Boss. Call again when you get the chance.”

  It didn’t take Schultz long to pack after he got off the phone. He had acquired a small suitcase that held his supply of cash, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit—plus a .40 caliber pistol, a Glock 22.

  The handgun made him feel a little safer, even though he knew he could be taken out by a sniper’s rifle before he had the time to use it.

  Schultz turned in his rental car, paid the one-way fee for not returning it to the city of origin, and bought a bus ticket to Tucson. He was on his way to find Glen Mandoleras. He wasn’t sure if the guy would be at home, in St. Louis, or out on the road searching for his last target. But he hoped that sooner or later Mandoleras would check in at his home base.

  Schultz was going to be waiting for him.

  One of the
advantages Schultz had in his detective work was an uncanny ability to connect with a killer. It came to him as an image of a thread that connected him to the person he was seeking. When he started out, the thread was insubstantial and not anchored on the far end, the end away from him. The far end waved in the darkness. The deeper he got into a case, the more solid the connection became, until it was a gleaming cord that terminated in the heart of the killer. It enabled him to make the last leap toward solving a crime, sometimes crossing a gap of information in a sudden blaze of understanding. It was almost as if he could swing hand over hand along the cord to the person he sought. He knew it sounded crazy, so he kept quiet about it, preferring to say that he had good instincts. He had told one person about it, and that was PJ. She hadn’t laughed, but he didn’t think she grasped the significance of it either. In any case, they’d talked about it once and then never mentioned it again. Schultz wasn’t about to push his explanation.

  He didn’t fully trust the mysterious ability. It wasn’t reliable. It couldn’t be commanded to perform. And he was convinced it had misled him before, possibly even more than he realized. If he was pinned to the wall about it, he’d say it was probably just an intense visualization of wishful thinking, like the process cancer patients used to mobilize the body’s internal defenses by imagining an army of defender cells.

  As the Greyhound moved out into waves of rain, Schultz leaned back, closed his eyes, and cast the thread out to see if the connection was there between himself and Mandoleras.

  The thread was cold and dull, and couldn’t penetrate the gloom.

  Idly, Schultz wondered how many other passengers on the bus were carrying handguns in their luggage.

  Eighteen

  THURSDAY MORNING PJ GOT an early start, expecting to have to ride herd on her archive records requests. To her surprise she found twelve thick folders in two side-by-side stacks on her desk at 7:00 A.M. She shook her head in wonder. It was probably more of Louie’s doing.

  The folders represented only a small amount of the actual case material. Homicide cases generated a huge amount of written reports, photographs, interview transcriptions, notes, and evidence logs. If every scrap of paper that existed for the cases had been sent, there would have been boxes filling her office and probably spilling over into the hallway.