by Sam Reaves
Ned said, “What was she working on? Do they know?”
Elford said, “I’m sure they’ll find out soon enough. The question is: What goes on around here that’s worth killing a reporter?”
Ned frowned. “I would have asked the same question about a lawyer and a real estate guy.”
Ned and Elford exchanged a long look. “If this is connected to the others,” said Elford, “that’s really, really interesting.”
Abby sat with her mouth firmly shut, remembering Lisa Beth talking about land sales, remembering Ned telling her that Everett Elford was the biggest landowner in the county, remembering Elford and Ingstrom, and Ned talking about skeletons in closets.
“If this is connected to the others,” said Ned, “that’s really, really frightening. If you ask me.” He turned to Abby. “Where are you staying tonight?”
Abby was still thinking about Everett Elford, and it took her a second to refocus. “Probably Jerry’s tonight. I just came to pick up a few things.” She blinked at Ned. “Can you maybe give me a ride over there? I lent my car to Lisa Beth.”
Ned stared, and she could see when the penny dropped. He put his hand over hers. “Ah, shit,” he said.
Abby used the key Jerry had given her to let herself into Lisa Beth’s house. The first person she saw, coming up the hall, was Ruth Herzler. “Oh, Abby.” Ruth reached for her, looking stricken. “So awful.” They embraced, and Ruth held her for a few seconds.
Abby disengaged. “How’s Jerry?”
Ruth shrugged, on the edge of tears. “As you’d expect. His sister and her husband are driving up from Terre Haute. They should be here soon. We’re all in the kitchen. I’m working on getting some kind of dinner together.”
In the kitchen Philip Herzler and Jerry were sitting at the table. A teapot and two cups on saucers sat in front of them. Jerry looked old, tired, deflated. Ruth went to the stove, where something was simmering. Abby nodded at Philip and sat down across from Jerry. “I’ve been talking to the police. They’re going to come and look at Lisa Beth’s computer.”
Jerry’s expression was bleak, remote. “They already did. That Ruffner came and took the computer away, along with a lot of papers and things.”
Herzler said, “Lisa Beth had everything password protected. He managed to get logged on, but she’d put a password on most of her documents, too. And that’s a lot harder to crack. So Ruffner just took everything he could find, notebooks and so on, where she might have written down her passwords. And he said there are ways to get by the passwords if they can’t find them. Do you know why they want the computer?”
“Lisa Beth had been working on something that had to do with these other murders. She told me she thought she knew who was behind them. She’d written it all down.”
Ruth turned from the stove. “Oh, dear God. Poor Lisa Beth.”
Jerry said, “They killed her because she was writing a story about it?”
“She went to meet a source. That’s what she told me. So it looks like it was about the story, yeah.”
Voice breaking, Ruth said, “Oh, God, it’s a nightmare.” She reached out and Philip took her hand.
“She did it,” said Jerry. “She finally did it. She broke a really important story.”
Jerry’s sister was a female version of him; her hair had curled and whitened instead of falling out, but she had given in to the same tendency to embonpoint. She limped a little, wincing occasionally as she moved about the kitchen. Her husband sat at the table, gray and hatchet-faced, black brows clamped down in generalized disapproval.
“Are you one of Lisa Beth’s friends?” the sister said, moving to the table and sitting with a grimace.
Abby took a second or two trying to decode that and said, “Jerry and Lisa Beth were just about the first friends I made here. They have both been very good to me.”
That seemed to satisfy the sister, who put her chin on her hand and assumed a thousand-yard stare.
The husband said, “Probably one of her dyke friends that killed her.”
Abby turned on her heel and went up the hall into the library. Lisa Beth’s desk looked bare without the computer. Abby stood for a moment thinking of Lisa Beth bent over the keyboard, tapping out the exposés that were going to make her reputation. A weight settled on her heart.
The floor creaked behind her and she turned to see Jerry in the doorway. “I can’t believe she’s not coming back,” he said.
“Oh, Jerry. I’m so sorry.” Abby didn’t know what there was to say besides platitudes when a man’s wife was murdered.
Jerry came into the room, his eyes falling on the sideboard. “Who’s going to drink all that booze now?” He picked up a couple of bottles, examining the labels. “The drinking would have killed her eventually. Her liver was going.” He turned and gave Abby a rueful look. “But it would have been nice to be able to take care of her when she got sick.”
Abby wept silently. Jerry stared for a few seconds and said, “I knew she was gay when I married her. I think I knew it before she did. And she figured out that I was terrified of sex, probably because of my brutally religious upbringing. I guess we were a good match. Her little affairs never bothered me. I was actually happy for her. It was a marriage of convenience. But you know what? I really did love her.”
He stood gazing at the floor, one hand on the sideboard. Grumbling voices drifted up the hall from the kitchen; a car sighed by on the street outside. Struggling to find her voice, Abby said, “She was a good friend to me.”
After a moment Jerry roused himself and said, “I’m forgetting what I came down here for. I’m so sorry to do this to you. You see, Lisa Beth’s nephew Tom is driving over from Indianapolis, it turns out, and he’s expecting to stay here. And that’s going to make for a very full house. I was wondering . . .” Jerry faltered.
“Jerry, of course.” Abby was immensely relieved. “I’ll go back to my place.”
“I do so appreciate everything you’ve done. You’re such a sweetheart. There’s a reason Lisa Beth loved you.” He stood in front of her, looking dazed and drained and desolate.
Abby drew a deep breath, knowing she had to cut this off or everyone was going to lose it. “Let me go grab my things.”
“Oh. Another thing.” Jerry reached into the pocket of his robe. “I found this in the bedroom.” He pulled a small spiral-bound notebook from the pocket and held it out to Abby. “Maybe the police should see it, I don’t know. Lisa Beth kept notes in it. I don’t know if it means anything.”
Abby opened the notebook. The pages showed scraps of writing, a haphazard scrawl in black ballpoint, barely legible. Abby made out:
Elford pd $850K for 200 acres ($4,250 / acre) 6/16/15
She turned over a page.
easement: 140 acres
IDT to pay $2.41 mil ($17,214 / acre)
profit: $1.56 mil on $850K investment
Abby’s heart had quickened. There were other notations below:
appraisers: easement worth $658,800
IDT ignored valuations—Ingstrom?
Abby flipped pages and saw another name she knew:
Frederick bought 100 acres 7/24/15.
She looked up at Jerry. “Yeah, I think this might be important. I will see that the police get this.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll have Lou run you home.”
“Um, that would be great.”
The brother-in-law looked affronted but agreed to give Abby a ride. In the car Abby made no attempt at conversation beyond giving terse directions, thinking about Lisa Beth’s notebook in her purse. When they pulled into Ned’s driveway, lights were on behind curtains but Elford’s car was gone. Abby stood on the porch and watched as the brother-in-law backed out and pulled away. She could feel the rage building. She looked at Ned’s door for a moment, thinking about him and Everett Elford sitting together drinking, and dug in her purse for her keys. She hoisted her bags, crossed the porch, and went down the stone steps, triggering the light o
n the eaves. I am not afraid, she thought. That’s over. The halo of light just reached the edge of the woods at the top of the slope.
Abby let herself into her apartment. It was dark inside. She stepped to the nearest lamp and switched it on. She strode across the room, dropping her purse on the coffee table, opened the door to her bedroom, switched on the light and tossed her pack onto her bed. She went into the study and took her laptop out of its bag, set it up on the desk and booted it up. She stood for a moment listening: above her, in Ned’s house, she could hear music playing, faintly, a languorous jazz tune. Abby went into the kitchen and turned on the light, poured herself a glass of apple juice. She went back into the study and pulled Lisa Beth’s notebook out of her purse.
Abby sat at her desk and read through the notes again. Some were cryptic: I-69. Some were clear: landowners sold easements. She brought up her web browser on the computer. A search for I-69 easement IDT and a little exploration brought up an article that clarified some things: State acquires land for interstate extension. Abby read about how the Indiana Department of Transportation was intending to purchase land to complete an interstate that came up from Texas, heading for Canada by way of Indianapolis. Secrecy in land sales criticized, read a subheadline.
Upstairs, just audible, cutting through the soft music, the doorbell rang. Above Abby’s head the ceiling creaked. Footsteps sounded and then died away. Abby read on: Elford sold to Frederick: why? Below that, underlined three times, was the word blackmail.
She skimmed through pages of notes, one line catching her eye: Outlaws Ingstrom clients. Here was another name at the bottom of a page: Duggan acquitted 9/19/04. Abby searched online and found the case without too much trouble, reported in the Star: Biker walks on murder charge.
Abby skimmed the article and read how Bart Duggan’s attorney, Ron Ingstrom, had persuaded a jury that Duggan could not have beaten a man to death outside a bar on the east side of Indianapolis because the witness’s identification of him could not be relied on.
In the accompanying picture Bart Duggan looked nothing like the man Abby had seen; he was too heavy and had a full beard. But here was another note in Lisa Beth’s writing: Outlaws paid Ingstrom retainer. Abby searched online and found several articles about the Outlaws motorcycle gang and their involvement in racketeering, extortion, drugs and gambling in central Indiana, and their go-to lawyer, Ron Ingstrom. All the articles dated from the first decade of the century, before Ron Ingstrom had gone into politics and become the go-to guy if you wanted to get elected to Congress.
The ceiling creaked above Abby’s head. She could just make out the murmur of voices. She opened another online article: Outlaws gang uses violence to maintain hold on rackets. A mug shot accompanied the article; a biker convicted of severing a man’s finger with pruning shears was glaring into the camera lens. Again the face was not familiar, but a type was emerging.
How could I ever have thought he looked Mexican? Abby asked herself.
A line on the fifth page of Lisa Beth’s notes read: Ingstrom covering up?
Abby ran her eye over the notes one more time, wanting to be sure she had her thoughts in order before she called Ruffner. She laid the notebook on the desk next to her computer and stood up. Her phone was in her purse, which she had dumped on the coffee table out in the living room.
She heard a door open.
Abby froze. It had sounded as if the door was in her apartment. Her heart began to pound.
When the footsteps began to come slowly down the stairs, Abby almost collapsed with relief. The door she had heard opening was the one at the top of the stairs. Ned had heard her moving around and was coming to offer her a glass of wine. She went out into the living room. “Hello? Ned?”
The man who reached the bottom of the stairs in the far corner of the room and stepped around the newel post into view was not Ned. He wore cargo pants and Chuck Taylors and a black T-shirt that exposed his tattooed arms, and he had long dark hair swept back and hooked over his ears and a moustache that curled around the corners of his mouth down onto his chin and piercing black eyes. He halted as he caught sight of Abby.
He smiled at her, again.
Shock kept Abby in place for what seemed like a long time; she simply could not process what she was seeing. It was impossible, but here he was. Then her autonomic nervous system went to work, every alarm bell in her psyche going off as the hormones flooded into her blood. Her heart kicked in her chest and she gasped as she sucked in the breath she would need to fight or flee.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the man, still smiling. “Who we got here?” The voice made him real, jolting Abby out of shock mode. It was a Hoosier voice like all the others, and as he came away from the stairs, walking slowly into the middle of the room, amusement in the glittering black eyes, the dread that had haunted Abby for weeks crystallized in her tunnel vision into a very concrete threat.
Her knees had gone weak but she steadied herself with her hands on the door frame. Her mind began to work again. The bathroom was just to her left, and there was a lock on the door. There were also no windows, no way out. The bathroom was a cul-de-sac. Her phone was in the bag on the coffee table, fifteen feet from her and three feet from the man.
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do,” the man said, advancing past the coffee table. He was ambling, in no hurry, looking around, comfortable.
There were knives in the kitchen. She could dash across the alcove, tear her eight-inch vegetable knife out of the drawer, retreat into the laundry room, and be ready to slash him when he opened the door. Abby started to lean.
“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” He was ten feet from her now, and Abby had to choose: the long dash to the drawer in the kitchen, a fumble among the utensils, maybe a struggle; or the two steps to the bathroom. Her capacity to plan collapsed and she darted to her left, ducked into the bathroom, slammed the door and pushed the button on the knob to lock it. She leaned on the door, her ear to it. She heard the man take a couple of steps. The doorknob rattled a little and was still. She heard him say, “Well, shit.”
Abby backed away from the door. He could not get to her now, but she was trapped. Nobody would hear her, no matter how loudly she screamed. She stood with her heart pounding, listening. She heard soft steps, rubber squeaking faintly on linoleum, then she heard nothing.
The nothing went on for seconds, a minute, then more. Abby sat on the closed toilet, her legs giving way. If he could not get at her, he would go away. He would steal some things and go away.
A truer and more crucial insight followed: he did not come here to steal.
Where is Ned? Abby’s thought processes were stabilizing. Her first, horrifying thought was that Ned was hurt, lying bleeding on the floor somewhere above her head.
Her second thought was worse: Ned let him in. She remembered the doorbell. There had been a murmur of voices, and then the man had come down the stairs, through the door that Abby had not bolted.
Ned let him in.
Ned whom she had last seen drinking with Everett Elford. Ned who had an ossuary in his closet. Ned whom she had thought she knew.
Steps approached the door. There was a scratching noise and the button on the knob popped out. The door swung open and there was the man, smiling at her again, close now, close enough that she could see the scars on his brow, the gray in the tails of his Fu Manchu, the gleam in his eye. He held up a thin piece of wire, a straightened paper clip. “These here locks are easy,” he said. “They make ’em easy so your kids can’t lock themselves in the shitter.” He tossed the paper clip onto the vanity, next to the sink.
Abby had backed into the tub, as far as she could get from the door. She was heaving great breaths, hyperventilating. The flight option had never really been there. There was nothing left but the fight. Abby remembered her father talking to her after an escape from a drunken groper on a subway platform: “If it ever really gets serious, fight dirty. Go for the eyes, go for the nuts. Hurt the son
of a bitch.”
The man leaned casually on the doorjamb, the smile fading. “What the fuck you so agitated about?”
A few more breaths allowed Abby to settle enough to squeeze out in a quavering voice, “What do you want?”
“Well, since you’re askin’, you got a car?”
This astonished her so much that it took her a few seconds to answer. “No. Not anymore.”
“Well, you’re no fuckin’ help then, are you?” He glared at her for a few seconds. “You a friend of Ned’s?”
He does not know who I am, Abby thought, with sudden illumination. And that is why I am still alive. “He’s my landlord,” she managed.
“You fuckin’ him?”
“What? No.”
“Well, shit. Don’t act so high and mighty. You too good for that, are you?”
Abby could only shake her head. I am about to be raped, she thought. Can I take that? Can I survive that?
He was leering at her, his eyes going up and down the length of her body. “A college girl, huh? God damn, I wish I’da gone to college.”
Abby closed her eyes. “Don’t hurt me,” she said, thinking: here it comes.
Somewhere out in the apartment a voice called out. “Kyle?”
The man looked over his shoulder. “Yo! Down here.” He pushed away from the door and ambled back toward the living room.
Stunned, Abby gaped at the empty doorway. That had been Ned’s voice. She listened as he came down the stairs. She heard him say, “What the hell, man? This is my tenant’s place.”
“Yeah, me and your tenant was just gettin’ acquainted.”
“What?”
“Don’t get excited, I didn’t do nothin’ to her. Come on out here, sugar.” Abby ran wildly through her options, then stepped out of the tub and walked slowly out into the living room. The tattooed man was standing by the bookshelves, slouching and nonchalant. And there at the foot of the stairs was Ned, staring at her with an appalled look. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you were gone.”
