by P. J. Tracy
‘She is that. Works child protection, mostly, and if you can get a six-year-old to tell you her daddy’s climbing into bed with her every night, you can get an adult to tell you almost anything.’
‘Oh.’ A single syllable, and then silence.
‘Sometimes the job sucks, Danny.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
Highway 29 flattened out and stretched for about five miles before it climbed a ridge on the edge of the state forest, and that was where the wind always hit you. As far as Halloran was concerned, it was about the ugliest piece of land in the county, especially this time of year: treeless and flat with the cornfields cut to dead brown stubble, as if something big had come along and sucked all the life out of the earth. He punched the cruise up to seventy and kept his eyes on the center line.
‘Going to have an early snow,’ Danny murmured, as if there were finally enough miles behind Halloran’s mention of incest to make talking safe again. It was still a touchy subject in this part of the country, and not all the media blitzes and public awareness campaigns in the world would change that. Some people – good people, mostly – just didn’t want to believe such things happened.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Highway Department’s two weeks late putting up the snow fence along here. Almost a sure-fire guarantee we’ll have an early blizzard.’
‘Just what we need,’ Halloran said, and that was enough small talk. ‘You know what we’re looking for out here, Danny?’
‘Yes, sir. Information.’
‘That’s right. Paperwork, mostly. Anything at all that’ll tell us something about the Kleinfeldts. Phone records, credit card receipts, legal papers, like that.’ He slowed the car at Steiger’s House of Cheese and Video and turned right onto a narrow strip of washboard gravel. ‘The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have figuring out who might have wanted them dead.’
Danny unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, folded it in thirds, and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Diaries, journals . . .’
‘They’re good.’
‘ . . . calendars . . .’
‘Anything.’ Something, he added mentally, because a dead end loomed large. ‘Forensics didn’t get anything useful from the church, and Doc Hanson said that all he got from the bodies was nightmares.’
‘We got a usable slug, though, right?’
‘The one out of the missus is still in pretty decent shape, but there were no hits in the database, so it doesn’t count for squat without the weapon. So right now we’ve got no witnesses, no physical evidence to speak of, and only one more thing to look for to shine some light on this thing.’
‘Motive,’ Danny said without hesitation, and for the second time that morning, Halloran smiled. The kid was going to do all right.
There was a gate at the end of the Kleinfeldts’ driveway, with a padlock that glinted in the cold sun, a taunting reminder. ‘Damnit, damnit, damnit.’ He banged his hand on the wheel.
‘Sir?’
‘I forgot the keys.’
‘Some of the guys say you’re real good with a pick.’
But apparently he wasn’t that good. In the end he’d said the hell with it and taken the bolt cutters to the chain.
It wasn’t much of a house, for someone sitting on seven million dollars. Just a boxy, two-story farmhouse, unchanged, as far as he could tell, from when the Tikalskys raised Holsteins and children here.
Halloran had gone to CalumetHigh School with Roman, their youngest, and the day after that boy graduated they’d turned the house over to Countryside Realty and moved to Arizona.
Smart people, he thought, tugging up the fur collar of his jacket and still feeling the promise of winter crawl down his neck. The Kleinfeldts bought the house three months later, according to Nancy Ann Kopetke at Countryside, who had apparently been knocked over with a feather when they paid the asking price without a twitch. The idea of Nancy Ann Kopetke, three bills if she was a pound, being knocked over with anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler had given him the only other smile of the morning.
He climbed the front porch with Danny, eyed the heavy plate of a good dead bolt, but still tried the knob. Stupid, of course. You didn’t padlock your driveway and leave your house wide open.
‘Should I try the back, Sheriff?’ Danny was almost on the toes of his spit-shined shoes, eager to get into the house, find the clue and solve the crime.
‘Go ahead. I’ll try running the picks through this one.’
For all the good it’ll do, his thoughts grumbled a sullen accompaniment to the strangely merry sound of Danny trotting around the house through a crackling carpet of dried leaves. He’d played with this kind of dead bolt before and knew damn well that it was far beyond his meager skills. Still he went down into a crouch and started fooling with it, going through the motions, just as he was doing with the whole investigation.
The minute he’d seen that cross carved into Mary Kleinfeldt’s chest, he’d had the bad feeling that this was probably one of those crimes that would haunt his old age. From that point on it had just been a matter of how much of his budget and how many of his resources he would use up before the county commissioners shut him down. Unless there were clues inside this house with big red arrows pointing to them, there was no way he could justify keeping the whole department committed.
He gave up on the lock, pushed against his knees, and felt a crick he swore hadn’t been there yesterday. He rapped once against the door just to feel the weight of it, and frowned. One of those heavy metal numbers you usually saw only in the city. Hinges on the inside. Weird. Unless Danny worked miracles and found a way in through the back, they were going to have to break some glass here, because there was no way he was going to drive all the way back to town for the keys.
He glanced down the porch at the old-fashioned six-over-six windows, thinking they’d have to break some hundred-year-old woodwork, too, and that was a shame. He reached inside his jacket for the package of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket. The cellophane wrapper crackled in the silence.
The house muffled the sound of the shotgun blast, as much as such a thing can be muffled. It was still loud enough, or maybe just so unexpected, that Halloran jumped backward away from the door, heart pounding. Instinct kicked in before thought, dropping him to a crouch, 9mm already in his hand. See that, Bonar? he thought crazily. How’s that for a quick draw?
Before the thought was finished he was down the steps, off the porch, still crouched but running now, below the windows, around the house to the back corner. He stopped with his shoulder pressed against steel siding, gasping in silent, shallow breaths, listening so hard he could hear dried cornstalks rustling in the back field.
Goddamnit, where are you, Danny?
The part of the backyard he could see was treeless, lifeless; nothing but brown, close-cropped grass stretching a good hundred yards to the corn. He stooped, shot his head out to look around the corner, and jerked it back. Nothing. No bushes, no trees, no place for a shooter to hide, just a shallow cement stoop at the back door. He hugged the house and crept toward it.
A few minutes later he found the first bloody pieces of Danny Peltier spattered all over the small mudroom. He walked a little farther into the house and found the rest of him, and almost wished that he hadn’t.
Bonar found Halloran an hour later in the middle of the Kleinfeldts’ backyard. He’d dragged a kitchen chair out there and was sitting hunched over with his arms across his thighs, staring at the house.
Bonar dropped to a squat next to him and started pulling out blades of dried grass. ‘Warming up,’ he said.
Halloran nodded. ‘Sun feels good.’
‘You okay?’
‘I just had to get out of there for a minute.’
‘I hear you.’ He held out a ballpoint pen stuck in a pack of Pall Malls. ‘Found these on the porch. Yours, or do we have to print them?’
Halloran patted his pocket, then reached for the cigarettes and tapped o
ne out. ‘Must have dropped them when I heard the shot.’ He lit one, drew on it deeply, then leaned back in the chair with a long exhale. ‘You ever out here when we were in high school? When Tikalskys owned this place?’
‘Nah. Different bus route.’
‘Used to be a lot of trees in this yard back then.’
‘Yeah?’
Halloran nodded. ‘Bunch of apples, couple oaks, biggest cottonwood I ever saw stood right over there, with a big old tractor tire hanging from a rope as thick as my arm.’
‘Huh. Storm damage, maybe. They had those straight-line winds out here six, seven years ago, remember?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Halloran thought about it for a while. ‘Wouldn’t think a wind would strip a place this clean. You could hardly see the house for the bushes; those droopy things with the white flowers . . .’
‘Bridal wreath, generic name, spirea.’
Halloran looked at him. ‘Where do you get this stuff?’
Bonar found a blade of dried grass long enough to stick between his teeth. ‘I am a man of great and varied and mostly useless knowledge. What’s your point?’
‘All the hiding places are gone. They got rid of them.’
Bonar spit out the grass and looked around, eyebrows and brain working. ‘Fits, I guess. You see the stockpile of guns in there?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Seventeen of them so far, just on the first floor. Do you know how weird that is? I mean, these people were old. You got Polident and bifocals and a .44 Magnum all in the same drawer. Survivalist books and magazines all over the damn place. And the rig they used to set up that shotgun? That thing’s so high-tech even Harris is spooked. He’s got the boys on their hands and knees, moving by inches, looking for more trip wires. These people were seriously paranoid.’
‘Maybe money does that.’
Bonar shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Me neither.’ Halloran took another drag, pitched his cigarette, then stood up. ‘The thing is, they had every entrance to this house locked up tighter than a drum, and then the back door, they just leave wide open.’
‘Where the shotgun was set up.’
‘Yeah. They were expecting someone.’
‘Oh, man, this one is going to be a pip.’ Bonar shook his big head, grunted his way to his feet, looked over at his old friend. ‘You look like shit.’
Halloran’s eyes were fixed on the empty gurney waiting outside the back door, Danny Peltier’s last ride. ‘I forgot the keys, Bonar.’
‘I know, buddy.’ Bonar’s sigh sounded like the corn.
6
Mitchell Cross arrived at the warehouse shortly before noon, parked his black Mercedes in the downstairs garage, and rode the freight elevator up to the loft. The morning had been a disaster.
He’d spent half an hour waiting for Diane in the virtual parking lot at airport arrivals, dodging parking police who were ticketing every car that idled at the curb for longer than two seconds. Then Bob Greenberg caught him on the cellular on the way back, snippy and self-righteous about the SKUD thing, almost threatening outright to pull the Schoolhouse Games account. Only the Lowry Tunnel had saved him, cutting the transmission just before Mitch lost his temper.
They spent fifteen minutes in that black wormhole, blocked by God knew what on the other side. Volume congestion, they called it. Mitch called it too many goddamned people with too many goddamned cars.
Diane’s fretting turned to whining after the first five minutes, and then in the middle of a diatribe about carbon monoxide poisoning, she had actually stuck her head out the window and screamed at a pickup truck full of blaze-orange hunters to shut their motor off. Jesus. Sometimes he thought the woman had a death wish.
He’d been so angry he hadn’t even gotten out of the car at the house, just dropped her off and pulled away. He’d caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror, just standing there in the driveway with her hands full of luggage, looking wounded and small.
The elevator workings clunked above him and the cage jerked to a stop. He looked at the loft through the latticework of wood and released a long breath, thinking, Home.
‘Hey, Mitch!’
Annie saw him first, but only because she was over by the coffeemakers, away from her computer. The rest of them were huddled around Roadrunner’s monitor like bad witches making a poison brew, utterly oblivious.
‘Come on out of there, honey. You look like caged Armani.’
‘Hi, Annie.’ He joined her at a wall counter that held four coffeemakers and the large white bakery box.
‘Damn, you look good.’ Fat Annie tucked all her chins and gave him one of those slow, seductive smiles that made most men forget she was carrying an extra hundred pounds. ‘Half-expected you to stay home and celebrate today. Diane’s got to be floating.’
Mitch shrugged. ‘More tired than anything. Maybe we’ll crack some champagne tonight. What’s everybody working on?’ He lifted the lid of the white box and peered inside, hoping for something not quite lethal, like a bagel.
‘Mitch, you scruffy sack of shit, get over here! We’re killing the last son of a bitch, is what we’re doing,’ Harley bellowed. ‘Securing an Ivy League education for your kids.’
‘I don’t have any kids.’
‘I know that, but I’m an eternal optimist. I keep thinking that one of these days you might get it up. Jesus. Did you pay money for that tie?’
Grace felt Mitch’s hand on her shoulder and glanced up at the little white clouds on a field of blue. ‘That’s a Hermès tie and I gave it to him last Christmas.’
‘You gave him a Hermès tie and I got a goddamned keychain?’
‘She gave you an Italian stiletto, you dumbshit,’ Annie said.
Harley thought a minute. ‘Oh yeah. So what cheap prick gave me a keychain?’
Roadrunner leaned back in his chair, exasperated. ‘Do you kids want to go play somewhere else so I can get this done?’
‘Is it really the last one?’ Mitch asked.
Grace nodded. ‘The big two-oh. And we’ve had over three hundred hits on the test site so far. Over half of them preordered the game.’
‘We’re going to need more than that to replace the Schoolhouse account. Greenberg called this morning.’
‘What’s his problem this time?’ Harley asked.
‘Oddly enough, he doesn’t think the company that designs his software for children should be producing a CD-ROM game about serial killers.’
‘It is not a game about serial killers,’ Grace reminded him. ‘It’s a game about catching serial killers.’
‘Grace, the damn thing is called Serial Killer.’
‘Serial Killer Detective,’ a chorus of four corrected him.
‘Apparently the distinction is lost on him. And me, frankly.’
Harley grabbed Mitch by the arm. ‘You and Greenberg have both been pushing paper too long. Come on, partner. I’m going to show you this thing, it’s friggin’ brilliant.’ He rolled an extra chair in front of a desk that looked like it had been sacked by vandals. ‘Sit down, buddy.’ He shoved aside stacks of file folders, printouts, and biker magazines, exposing four purring hard drives and a 21-inch monitor.
Mitch balked, but in the end, when Harley wanted you in a chair, you sat. ‘I’ve seen this –’
‘You saw the text files, not the game,’ Annie said. ‘For Christ’s sake you own twenty percent of this thing and you’ve never even played it.’
‘I don’t want to play it. I was the dissenting vote, remember? As far as I’m concerned, the whole concept is sick.’
‘That’s because you don’t get it,’ Grace snapped. ‘You never got it.’
The comment stung, but Mitch kept his mouth shut.
‘Well, he’s going to get it now.’ Harley’s large fingers started dancing over the keys with surprising agility. The monitor went black for a moment, then snapped back to life. Huge, shadowed block letters began to materialize, then seemed to jump off the sc
reen:
MONKEEWRENCH SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Throw a MONKEEWRENCH into the works
‘Okay, okay!’ Harley was almost quivering with excitement as the screen went black again. ‘Check this out!’
Thousands of sparkling red pixels started to materialize on the screen, bonding together into giant, red, scrawled letters.
WANT TO PLAY A GAME?
‘You like the font on that or what? I did it – I call it my serial killer font.’
Mitch shuddered. ‘Oh, good Christ.’
‘Okay, here comes the good part. We’re entering the game now. First thing that comes up is a digital photo of the murder scene.’
Mitch watched in horror as a picture of a dead jogger appeared on the screen. ‘Jesus Christ! Did you have to use real people? I thought this was going to be animated!’
‘Nah, this is better. Much more realistic. Looks just like a police photo, doesn’t it? Except this is art.’ Harley stabbed a thick finger toward the screen. ‘Check out how I used the shadows from that tree to enhance the negative space. Really pulls your eye toward the subject, doesn’t it?’
‘But . . . aw . . . aw, God.’ Mitch grimaced at Roadrunner. ‘It’s you?’
Roadrunner leaned back in his chair far enough to see Harley’s monitor. ‘God, I’m good.’ He grinned. ‘I look so dead. Hey, Harley, skip to murder two.’ He winked at Mitch. ‘That’s my best performance.’
‘Performance my ass,’ Harley snorted. ‘Everyone knows the real genius here is the photographer.’ He was working his magic with the mouse now, nodding enthusiastically at Mitch. ‘Roadrunner’s right, though. Number two’s a great one. Probably the best, although I can’t take credit for the creativity, much as I’d like to. This one was Grace’s idea.’ Harley punched a few keys and a new photo appeared.
Mitch leaned forward and squinted at the image. Roadrunner – well, Roadrunner dressed as a prostitute – was draped over the wings of an enormous stone angel, looking quite dead. ‘What the hell . . . ?’
