Dust Up: A Thriller

by Jon McGoran

  I got up and headed over.

  Danny laughed and shook his head. “Tell Mike I said hi. And call me when you get out. I’ll be out there doing what all the other narcotics detectives do.”

  I flipped him off jokingly as I went to accept my fate. Warren was sitting in one of the chairs facing Suarez’s desk. He looked away from me, his jaw set, breathing heavily through his nose.

  Suarez grunted as he sat behind his desk.

  “Carrick,” he said. “What the fuck?”

  Warren turned to look at me, his head at an angle as he waited for my response.

  I shrugged. “Danny and I finished surveilling Derek Hoyt, so I decided to stop by Energene and ask a few questions, see if anybody might have some idea why Hartwell was shot down on my front steps.”

  “It’s not your investigation.”

  “It was my front steps.”

  “You’re interfering in a homicide investigation.”

  “What homicide investigation? As far as I can tell, Warren already has it solved—domestic dispute, case closed.”

  “Bullshit, Carrick,” Warren cut in. “I never said that. Besides, if that was the case, why was I there at Energene?”

  I snorted. “From what I heard, someone told you I was there, and you didn’t want it getting out that you were neglecting such a basic part of the investigation. But once you got there, it seemed like your purpose was to tip everyone at Energene off to the fact that you already had a hard-on for the widow as a suspect.” I laughed. “I couldn’t believe you told them that, right off the bat.”

  Suarez’s head whipped around. “You told them that?”

  “Before he asked a single question,” I added.

  Suarez looked down and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re a witness on this, Carrick, not an investigator. If you had a lead or an angle or something, you should have told Detective Warren so he could follow it up.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m sure he’d love to hear my ideas, and he’ll get right on it when I tell him.”

  Warren snorted and looked away. Even he knew that was ridiculous.

  “Just keep out of his way, all right?” Suarez turned to Warren. “Are we done here?”

  Warren let out a disgusted sigh and stood up. “Next time, I’m not going to let it slide.”

  I watched him storm out the door, then I turned back to Suarez. “The guy’s an idiot.”

  “Yes, but he’s not my idiot. You are. And if you get in his way again, I’m coming down on you.”

  I nodded. Whatever. “I’m telling you, though, you should have heard these guys spinning all this stuff about corporate espionage and stolen secrets, and then he comes in and gives it all away.”

  Suarez let out a long breath. “Look, I know he’s a stiff. Frankly, if he was one of my guys, you wouldn’t be my worst. But he’s not my guy; this is not your case. Leave it alone. Besides, Warren’s keeping an open mind about things.”

  “How so?”

  “Combined the two angles, figures maybe the happy couple were in on it together, but she decides she doesn’t want to split the money.”

  “Actually, makes sense,” I said.

  “See? You’re not the only smart guy out there.”

  “Fact remains, the only reason Warren went there was because he knew I had.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Does the wife have any priors?”

  “No.”

  “And his theory still doesn’t explain why Hartwell was coming to my house.”

  10

  I met Nola after work.

  We were both still kind of freaked out about walking up to the front door. She, because of what had happened there. Me, because of the effect it was having on her. As we approached the front steps, I was relieved to see that the bullet hole had been patched and the center panel of the door freshly painted. We stood on the sidewalk, solemnly looking up at it for a moment. I couldn’t shake the sense that the life of Ron Hartwell was getting further and further away as the traces of his death were eradicated.

  Still, it was nice to have the door fixed and not to be looking at the bullet hole every time we came home.

  I was quiet when we got inside. Sometimes Nola likes to hear about my day. Sometimes, she really, really doesn’t. I wondered if news about the Ron Hartwell case would hit too close to home, so to speak.

  “Any news on…” She nodded toward the front door, which now stood as some sort of icon for the nameless thing that had occurred there the night before.

  We were standing in the kitchen. She was pouring the wine. She hadn’t asked if I’d wanted a drink, but she had guessed correctly.

  I told her about going to Energene, about what they’d said, and about Mike Warren showing up. The grief I caught afterward.

  “Can’t we request someone else?” she asked, which was a delightful thought.

  I shook my head. “If you could choose your own cop, everyone would want someone else.”

  She put down her wine and came up close to me. “Not me,” she said, so close I could feel her breath.

  “I’m not that hungry,” I said. “Are you?”

  She shook her head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.

  So there’s hungry and there’s hungry. Neither of us had been in the mood for dinner, but judging from the next forty minutes or so, I’d say we both had pretty healthy appetites.

  And when we were done, we were starving.

  The house felt different, like we had taken a big step toward reclaiming it. I was glad. In the back of my mind, I’d been concerned that the place was somehow haunted now. But it wasn’t. It was a house of the living.

  Nola had been planning on trying some elaborate recipe she’d read, but we ended up sautéing everything and eating it over pasta. It was delicious.

  Afterward, we sipped wine and talked about the Hartwell case, about my conversation with Bradley Bourden. I told her about the industrial espionage angle and how Warren thought that could still fit in with Miriam as the killer.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “But that still doesn’t explain why they were here.”

  “No, it doesn’t. And also, I only saw her for an instant, but she didn’t seem like a killer. She definitely didn’t seem like someone who had just killed. I guess there’s all different kinds of killers, but what I saw was terror and pain.” I told her what the women in the office had said, about how they seemed nervous but still very close.

  “So maybe they were up to something,” Nola said. “Together.”

  I nodded. “So why were they coming to me?”

  “Maybe they weren’t selling information; maybe they were just trying to share it. Expose it.”

  I looked at her. “You mean like whistle-blowers?”

  “Maybe.”

  I laughed. “I’m sure there’s all sorts of proper channels for anything they might have found. Why come to me?”

  “You know how powerful and connected these companies can be. Maybe the proper channels didn’t seem safe.”

  Twice, I’d tangled with big biotech companies outside of the normal course of my job. I’d seen how the pressure not to mess with them rolled downhill with a vengeance.

  I thought about that for a long moment. “But why me?” Both my altercations with big biotech had been declared secret, non-events, kept quiet ostensibly for national security and because I didn’t like talking about them.

  When I looked up, Nola shrugged. “You’ve got history in that area. You’ve taken them on and won. And I know it’s supposed to be secret or whatever, but people talk. Word gets around.”

  Seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. “Maybe. Meanwhile, if she didn’t kill her husband, she might have seen who did.”

  “She could be an important witness.”

  “Meaning whoever did it is probably looking harder for her than Mike Warren is. She could be out there on the run, terrified. Not just the police after her but whoe
ver killed her husband, too.”

  Nola looked at me for several seconds, solemn, maybe picturing herself with me murdered and the whole world coming after her. “Are you going to find her?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  11

  The next day was a bad one for Miriam Hartwell, wherever she was.

  “They found a gun,” Suarez said when I walked in.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “SIG Sauer P223. Looks like a match for the gun that killed Ron Hartwell. It’s down in ballistics. Prints all over it. Preliminary match for Miriam Hartwell. Warren wanted me to tell you. I’m not going to say what else he wanted me to tell you.”

  “Where’d they find it?”

  “Laundry room of their apartment building. Under the change machine.”

  “Anonymous tip?”

  He shook his head. “Landlord called it in.”

  “Hmm.”

  He nodded and slapped a hand on my shoulder as he turned to go. It was an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture between us. “I know Warren’s a bonehead, but it looks like this time he’s right. I hope you and Nora can take comfort at least now we know who did it.”

  He always referred to her as Nora. I corrected him the first ten times, but now I let it serve as a reminder, if ever I forgot, that I really didn’t like the guy.

  He went back into his office and closed the door. I dropped into the chair behind my desk.

  I still didn’t see it, still didn’t think it was the wife. Partly it was a hunch, naïve assumptions based on Miriam Hartwell’s photo, her expression as she drove away. Part of it might have been because I really didn’t want Warren to be right. But there was no explanation as to why he was on my front doorstep, why he’d been coming to see me. From my point of view, that was the most important part.

  Danny was out of town meeting with the DEA. I was supposed to be chasing down leads on our favorite new drug kingpin, but I’d gotten a head start—a productive midmorning that netted me three more names on Derek Hoyt’s growing Christmas card list.

  The way I looked at it, I was ahead of the game.

  It wouldn’t take long to match the gun to the bullet that killed Ron Hartwell and to match the prints to Miriam. I suspected both would come back as positive matches, and I also suspected I wouldn’t accept it when they did. But if I was going to pursue this any further, I needed more to go on, more to confirm my suspicions.

  That’s what I told myself as I pulled up in front of the large stone house owned by Dorothy Hartwell, Ron’s mother. Miriam didn’t seem to have any family of her own, so I figured I would start with Ron’s.

  I walked up the long slate path, past a painfully manicured lawn and onto the cavernous porch, where I rang the bell. Mrs. Hartwell might have been hurting, but not for money.

  The woman who came to the door was in her seventies, handsome and polished even though she had obviously just been crying.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, poised despite her sorrow.

  I showed her my badge. “I’m with the Philadelphia Police Department. I’d like to ask you a few questions about Ron.”

  She glanced at the badge. “Of course,” she said, sad and weary, stepping back and motioning me to come inside.

  “I’ve already spoken to the other detectives. You know that, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And forgive me if any of this is repetitious…”

  “I understand,” she said, waving off my apology.

  She offered me a beverage as she led me to the dining room. I politely declined, and we sat at the table.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and gave me a brief nod, swallowing hard against the screaming anguish that churned below the surface. Then she opened her eyes, once again composed. “What would you like to know?”

  “Do you have any idea of anyone who might have wanted your son dead?”

  A tiny fraction of a smile tugged at her mouth. “None at all. I mean, apparently my daughter-in-law, but I don’t see that happening.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I wasn’t crazy about Ron and Miriam getting married. When Ron’s brother Brian introduced them, I thought she was a little … young … a little childlike. Too much like Brian, in a way. But by the time they got married, I realized she was the sweetest young woman I’ve ever known and that they were very much in love. They remained so. The detective I spoke to earlier, he was very nice, but he kept saying how surprising it can be when something like this happens, and I know that. Half the time those who do terrible things are said to be the nicest people, of whom you would least expect it. Even so, I can’t accept it. Ron and Miriam were very happy together, happier than I ever thought he would be. But apart from that, Miriam wasn’t the type to swat a fly. Literally, she would be the one coaxing it out the window.” She laughed wistfully. “I thought it was ridiculous at first. I mean, a fly? But that’s how she is. Even if she hated my son, I couldn’t see her … doing what they say. And especially not now.”

  “Why not now?”

  Barely moving, she somehow shrugged, rolled her eyes, shook her head, and looked away, all at the same time, then looked at me with the resignation of a very private person who had already revealed personal information way beyond her comfort level and was about take another step down that road.

  “They’d been trying to have a baby,” she said, lowering her voice as if we weren’t the only ones there. “They’d been going to doctors, having procedures.”

  “Infertility treatments?”

  She nodded.

  “When was that?”

  “They were still going, as far as I know.”

  Not exactly what you’d expect in advance of a double cross and a murder. Her eyes teared up and I gave her a moment.

  “You say they met through Ron’s brother?”

  “Yes, Brian. His younger brother.”

  “How do they get along?”

  She smiled bitterly. “Surely you don’t think his brother killed him.”

  I smiled gently back. “Not at all. I’m just trying to gather some background. See what other leads might be out there. You never know what little bit of information might end up being crucial.”

  “He was here Sunday night, as I told the other detective. He came over for dinner and stayed.”

  “Where does Brian live?”

  She let out a sigh. “He lives in Torresdale, near the river. But he’s out of town.”

  “Oh. Does he know about…”

  “Yes, he knows. It crushed him. Devastated him. He said he needed to go away, to process it.”

  “He left you here on your own?” I had a hard time hiding my surprise.

  Her left eyebrow twitched the tiniest bit, like she was having a hard time hiding her reaction, as well, but that was as far as she allowed herself to show what she thought. “Just for a day or two. We all deal with tragedy in different ways, Detective.”

  I hadn’t been the best son in the world, but I couldn’t conceive of pulling something like that.

  “Ron and Brian were seven years apart,” she said. “They’d always been quite close, but they used to butt heads a lot too. The last few years, though, perhaps due to Miriam, the political differences that used to antagonize them seemed to fade, or maybe they just realized those things aren’t important enough to get between brothers. Anyway, this past year, I’d seen them become closer. Brian is devastated.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  She sighed again, smoothing a wrinkle from her skirt, trying not to look annoyed. “In a day or two.”

  “Could you give me his address and phone number? I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  She paused for a moment, then sighed. “If you must.” She got up and went to a small sideboard, wrote his information on a pad of paper, and tore off the top sheet. Before she handed me the paper, she put her other hand on my arm. “Promise me you�
��ll be gentle with him.”

  I nodded, and she handed me the paper.

  12

  A block away from Dorothy Hartwell’s house, I pulled over and called Brian Hartwell. His voice mail picked up, and I left a message asking him to call me back. I was just merging onto the Schuylkill Expressway, headed back into the city, when he did.

  “Is this Detective Carrick?” he asked, his voice tense, like a piece of wood bent to the breaking point.

  “Yes. Is this Brian Hartwell?”

  “Yeah. Sorry I missed you earlier. Reception’s not so good up here. I seem to be in a good spot now, though.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Lebanon. Just hiking a couple miles of the Appalachian Trail. Clearing my head, you know?”

  An asshole in a BMW zipped around me doing ninety, cutting me off and flipping me off at the same time, somehow without putting down his phone. “I’m actually on the highway. Do you mind if I call you back in twenty minutes?”

  “You can try, but I doubt you’ll get me. I could try you back tonight maybe or tomorrow. I’ll be home in a day or two.”

  I didn’t want to put off the conversation, but I needed to take notes. “I can’t get to my pen and paper. Do you mind if I record our conversation?” I had an app on my phone that let me record phone interviews onto a cloud server. It had become increasingly handy for long interviews with witnesses.

  “Um … no, I guess not.”

  “Hold on one second,” I said. I opened the app and began recording. Not the best behavior on the road, but I felt better knowing I wouldn’t miss anything. “Okay, still there?”

  “Yup.”

  “So tell me about Ron and Miriam. Were they happy?”

  He sighed. “Yeah, they were happy. As happy as anyone is happy. I’ll tell you one thing—Miriam absolutely, one-hundred-percent certain, guaranteed did not kill my brother. And no offense, but from what my mom tells me, your pal Detective Warren is a bit of a dumbass if he doesn’t understand that.”

  I checked the phone to make sure that was recorded. “I see. You introduced Ron and Miriam, is that right?”