“Ring any bells?” the man in the chair asks. “Take you back at all?”
Hunter cocks his head, and the man in the chair realizes he’s hit home a lot harder than he meant to, and possibly in the wrong direction.
“You’re talking to me about kids?” Hunter says quietly. “Because of you, I don’t have kids. Because of you, I spent sixteen years in jail for the murder of the woman I wanted to have children with.”
“Just as well. You’re a loser, and she was a whore. The world doesn’t need more of that in the genetic stew.”
Hunter kicks out again, and this time he does it hard. Hard enough to cause the man in the chair to cry out, something halfway to a scream—and to make the chair rock back on the concrete promontory.
“You want another?” Hunter asks, his voice thickening. “How many more kicks before a chair leg goes out over the edge, do you think?”
Light-headed with pain, suddenly unsure if this is such a great idea after all, the man nonetheless looks up at him. “You’re not going to send me over, asshole. Do that, and you got nothing.”
Hunter looks at him, breathing hard.
“You’re smart,” he says finally, and his voice is calm again. “Course you are—else you wouldn’t be such a success in life, right? I really do not want to have to push you over yet, it’s true. But that leaves me in something of a pickle. It limits the range of the threats I can make—and you, smart boy that you are, have got right onto that. Hmm. Oh wait, though, I just thought of something.”
He turns and walks back to the far wall, where he stoops and picks up the cinder block.
“I found some comfort in repetition and ritual during the years I was in jail,” he says. “When time started to weigh on me, it was things happening in the same way and at the same time each day that helped. It turned it into a long dark dream, so that sometimes I could pretend it wasn’t happening to me at all, but was some weird shadow turning over and over itself in one endless night. Maybe you’ll find the same.”
He walks back until he is standing in front of the chair. He raises his hand slowly, lofting the block high over the other man’s knee again.
“Let’s find out,” he says softly.
And that’s the point at which the man in the chair decides he’s waited long enough and he’s wound the guy up sufficiently and it’s time to end this right here and right fucking now.
He says a name. Blurts it quickly, says it three times, the syllables tripping over themselves.
Hunter freezes.
He looks down at the other man for a long moment, the arm with the cinder block held out, perfectly still.
“Really?”
The man in the chair nods, feverishly.
“I guess I can believe it,” Hunter says, lowering his hand, his eyes already elsewhere. “Motherfucker. I kind of looked up to that guy, too. Well, thank you. That’s a start. You done good. I hope we can keep things moving along this more positive road in the future.”
He takes the block back to the wall and puts it down. “I’ll leave that there, though—just in case tomorrow’s session doesn’t go so well.”
He picks up the water bottle. He returns to the man in the chair and drops it in his lap. “You be thinking about some more names,” he says. “And maybe next time I’ll even let you drink some of that.”
Then he steps over the edge of the floor and disappears, like a bird of prey dropping out of the sky.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Steph had left the house by the time I got out of the shower. I knew she had some big-deal meeting, though I couldn’t recall who it was with. As I trotted down the stairs toward a kitchen that seemed larger than usual and preternaturally empty, I was aware of how strange this was making me feel. Our lives are meshed at root level. I’m normally very aware of Steph and her movements, her doings and concerns. Not this morning. She was out, meeting someone somewhere. Not a big deal, yet a big deal. Life felt different on the back of it.
She’d gone early, too. It was still only seven fifteen. I put a pot of coffee on and fetched my laptop—now destined to be looked over by Kevin at his very earliest in/convenience—and my phone. I copied the folder of photographs off onto a USB thumb drive and deleted the original from the laptop. If Kevin was going to geek all over my computer, the folder clearly couldn’t remain in place. Then I picked up my phone and found Melania’s number. My finger was a quarter inch from tapping it when there was a knock on the front door.
I swore irritably and went to open it.
Outside was a man in a police uniform. He had short brown hair and was about the same height as me, but with the trim, fastidious-looking build that comes from working out with free weights. His upper arms looked, in fact, as though he’d come straight from doing bicep curls.
“Mr. Bill Moore?”
“Yes,” I said. “What—”
“Deputy Hallam,” he said, showing me his ID. I blinked at it. He stowed his badge and held something else up. “This yours?”
It was one of my Shore Realty business cards. “Yes,” I said. “But what are you doing with it?”
“Can I come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”
“What about?”
“A man called David Warner.”
I took the policeman back through to the kitchen and offered him a coffee, which he declined. I poured one for myself, feeling as if I was acting a part.
“I should tell you straightaway,” I said, “that I don’t know the guy well.”
Hallam held my card up again, this time flipping it over to show me the other side.
Call me when you’re ready to do business.
“I found this wedged into the entry system of Mr. Warner’s property,” the cop said. “Is that your handwriting?”
“I called round yesterday morning, on the off chance. He wasn’t there. I left my card.”
“The message could be interpreted as threatening, sir. Snippy, at the very least.”
“I was feeling snippy,” I said. “I was supposed to meet with the guy. He gave me the runaround.”
“How?”
“We arranged I’d view his property at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. But he wasn’t there. The meeting was rearranged, for a bar in town. He didn’t show up to that, either. So I bailed. Got home at midnight, a couple beers down, which did not make me popular with my wife.”
The cop didn’t respond to this attempt at guys-together chumminess. Either he didn’t have a wife or being unpopular with her was business as usual.
“Next morning I happened to be near the guy’s house, so I stopped by in the hope we could talk. He wasn’t there. I left my card, went to work.”
“You arranged these meetings with him direct?”
“No—via his assistant, on the phone. What exactly is the problem here, Officer?”
“The problem,” the cop said, returning my card to the pocket of his short-sleeve shirt, “is that David Warner seems to have disappeared.”
My stomach turned over, as if I was in a plane that had suddenly dropped five hundred feet.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”
He cocked his head. “That’s a word most people have a ready understanding of, sir. You really need help with it?”
“Pardon me?”
“I apologize,” he said, his gaze flicking away. “Mr. Warner is an extremely wealthy person, and my boss is all over this. Warner was supposed to be having lunch with his sister yesterday, but didn’t show up at the agreed place and time. It’s under twenty-four hours, in which case normally we wouldn’t be paying any attention. But with Mr. Warner, evidently we are.”
“At what point did he, uh, stop being where he was supposed to be?”
“That’s what I’m trying to establish.”
“I know my colleague Karren White had a meeting with him late morning, day before yesterday.”
“What time was that?”
“Not sure. But she was back at the office ar
ound lunchtime. So I don’t know, maybe one thirty? I mean that’s when she got back.”
“And she’d come straight from seeing him?”
“Far as I know. Then evidently Mr. Warner was out meeting someone Tuesday evening—he missed my appointment because a dinner engagement ran late.”
“Time?”
“It was a little before half past eight, I think, when we rearranged. I waited fifteen minutes before I called his assistant. Though . . . his message to her had come in a little earlier, so I don’t know when exactly.”
The deputy noted all this down and asked if I had any idea who Warner’s dinner had been with. I said I did not. He asked for any information I had on Warner’s assistant, and so I got my phone off the counter and—without really knowing why—made it appear as though Melania’s number wasn’t already sitting there on the screen, ready for me to call. I spent a few seconds looking as if I was going through different screens before I read out her number. He noted this down, too, then flicked back a couple of pages in his little pad.
“That’s different from the one I have.”
“I believe there’s more than one line of communication,” I said. “When I was on the phone to her she talked about having a BlackBerry, too.”
“Oh, okay.” He stowed the pad, then handed me a card of his own. “If this guy gets in touch with you again, will you do me a favor and let me know right away?”
“No problem,” I said, leading him back out through the house toward the front door. “But probably he’s just not picking up his phone, right?”
“Or he doesn’t want to talk to his sister,” the policeman muttered. “You have a good day, sir.”
I watched him stride pugnaciously down the path to his vehicle, thinking that were I Deputy Hallam’s boss—Sheriff Barclay, presumably—I might want to have a conversation with him about not wearing his heart so evidently on his sleeve.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When I got to The Breakers I was relieved to see I was the first to arrive. The mere act of speaking Karren’s name to Deputy Hallam had made me feel odd. I didn’t want to have to deal with her in person right away. As soon as I got to my desk I called Melania’s number. There was no reply. It was early, but I got the sense David Warner’s assistant was used to being at his beck and call.
I left a voice mail asking her to call me back. Then I e-mailed Kevin the Geek, thanking him for sending the instructions the night before and saying I’d like to take him up on his offer to give my laptop a sweep. I offered to buy him lunch at his choice of venue. Finally, I sent an SMS message to Steph, saying I hoped her meeting was going/had gone/would go well.
I felt extremely jumpy, and lack of sleep wasn’t helping my mental clarity. The arrival of the police officer that morning had complicated matters in ways I hadn’t yet been able to quantify. One of the doors I’d seen while floating in the pool still hung open in my mind, however. Finally, I walked through it.
Someone, somewhere, was fucking with me—seriously, with malice and forethought.
The photographs on the USB drive were not tied to me, in the sense that it couldn’t be proved that I’d taken them. They couldn’t be, as I hadn’t taken them. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the images had linked them to me by association. First, by causing them to be discovered on my laptop; second, by causing the camera to date-stamp each picture. It was this second link—pinning the event to an evening when I hadn’t been at home, and so could feasibly have done what I was purported to have done—that seemed far more important, and had kept me awake half the night. It proved it was a deliberate setup, one that had been planned. It might not to Steph, but it proved it to me. If enough odd things happen—inexplicable little events, one after another—after a while you start to question yourself. The date stamp on the pictures got me out of self-doubt jail. On any normal evening I’d have been at home, or out with a friend (or Steph), who could have been a witness to my whereabouts. On Tuesday night I’d been out on what had proved to be a wild-goose chase . . . and perhaps deliberately so. Whoever took the photos knew I wouldn’t be at home, either because they’d observed me being out or—probably far more likely—because they’d engineered me to be where I was in the first place. And who could have done that?
I only had one answer.
David Warner.
He’d called the office midday, got hold of Karren instead, and so played along—but then insisted it be me who turned up for part two of the negotiations. He’d had his assistant call and set up the meeting . . . to which he didn’t show. Having committed me to being out, he then kept me out by rearranging the time and place via his assistant (even though, as she’d mentioned at the time, it would have been easier for him to call me direct). Using Kevin the Geek’s technique of Occam’s Razor, you only need one guy to make all this so.
But why the hell would Warner do this?
I didn’t even know the guy. I’d met him just once, that chance encounter in Krank’s—and it wasn’t like I’d latched on to him and got feral Realtor upside his face, hustling him to the point where I deserved some kind of comeuppance. I was in the bar with Steph and a couple of her colleagues from the magazine. They were all over some minor work crisis, and so I’d wound up chatting with a stranger about the Reds’ chances in the state league, as two men leaning on the same bar will sometimes do. It was Warner who’d brought up his house, not me. So why on earth would he meet Karren on Tuesday, think, “Hey, here’s a pretty girl, here’s some leverage, let’s stir things up for the asshole Realtor . . .”
Why?
I heard footsteps approaching the office, and froze. The door opened and Karren walked in. There was nothing different about her, but she looked different.
“Hell happened to you?” she asked, as she dumped her purse on her desk.
“What do you mean?”
“You look like a bad passport photo. Late night?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
She winked. “Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What do you mean?” My tone was a lot sharper than I’d intended.
“Whoa,” she said. “Just a pro forma dig, okay? The ‘How do you sleep at night, dude?’ routine. Not that I’m implying you have anything to . . . Look, whatever, you know? Call off the dogs. Relax.”
“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”
I was finding it hard to look away from her. Once you’ve seen a picture, you can’t forget it, and I had seen pictures I should not have seen. Being in her presence wasn’t turning me on, however. I felt . . . protective, perhaps, which was not something I’d ever have expected to feel about Karren White, a woman I believed had chosen to spell her Christian name in a nonstandard fashion purely to give her an excuse to spell it out to clients, the better to lodge it in their minds.
I felt that I should warn her about the photographs. But you can’t just pipe up with “Hey! I’ve got a dozen seminude pictures of you on a USB drive in my pocket . . .” unless you have a very innocent and convincing second half to the sentence, ready and waiting. I did not. Maybe I could do it when I had an explanation for how the pictures had ended up on my machine, but not yet.
“When you met with this David Warner guy on Tuesday,” I said instead, making it sound casual. “Anything strike you?”
“Apart from him being a sexist asshole? Not really. Why?”
“I didn’t tell you. He arranged to meet me that evening, to see the house.”
“Good for you.”
“Uh, not so much. He blew me off. Twice.”
“Huh,” she said, a little less tart. “Seems like he’s prepared to piss off Realtors regardless of their race, creed, or gender.”
“An equal opportunity asshole, for sure. You get a number for him?”
“No,” she said, looking sheepish. It was appealing because of its rarity value. Karren did not make unforced errors. “Forgot to take a note of it off the log. Duh.”
Indeed. One of the first r
ules of the job is to get a potential client’s phone number. I smiled and said something about it being no great loss.
As she settled down to bash out e-mails, I picked up one of the office handsets and scrolled laboriously back through the log of incoming calls. I went more slowly once I got back to Tuesday morning, knowing that what I was attempting would likely be hard—as we get a lot of calls, almost all with local codes.
I was about to give up when I saw a number I thought I recognized, however. I cross-checked with my phone and confirmed it. When I’d been sitting with Hazel outside Jonny Bo’s, a call had come into the office from the number I had stored for Melania’s cell phone.
“Karren—he called the office himself, right? Warner? Not his assistant.”
“It was him.”
“And not a pass-through? A ‘Got my asshole boss on the line, will you take a call from Planet 1970s’?”
Karren actually laughed, unaffectedly, a sound I hadn’t heard before. “Nope.”
I didn’t know what to make of that.
Kevin the Geek was a cheap lunch date, professing himself a big fan of some grilled sandwich on offer at Starbucks. I met him at the one on St. Armands Circle and left him at a table with my laptop while I ran a few errands. I performed these with about a third of my mind. The bulk was taken up with trying to work out whether to try calling Steph, and with wanting a cigarette, pretty badly. I didn’t call her, though I sent another SMS. I didn’t buy any Marlboro Lights, either.
“What’s the deal with the word ‘Modified’?” Kevin asked, when I returned.
I stiffened as I sat down, horrified that I’d somehow screwed up throwing away the pictures, and the folder was still there on my desktop. “Why do you ask?”
“You got about ten, twenty folders called that. Plus, it’s what you named your hard drive, right?”
“No,” I said, concerned that I hadn’t even noticed this the night before. “It was called, well, whatever the default is. Hard Drive, HD . . . I can’t remember.”
“Well, I’ll add that to the Pile of Strangeness, but I’ll warn you it’s a very small pile. You got nothing on here that raises a red flag. No keystroke recorders. Nothing unusual when it comes to wifi. Built-in firewall operating as it should, no suspicious ports open. Your machine is clean, basically, and your desktop as tidy as any I’ve ever seen. I have given it a gold star.”
Killer Move Page 9
