Web of Silence: A Ray Schiller Novel (The Ray Schiller Series Book 4)

by Marjorie Doering

“What about the woman you had the affair with?”

  “That was over a long time ago… even before the divorce. She moved to Anaheim or maybe it was Aruba. I don’t even know or care.”

  “All right,” Ray said. “Did you call to have food delivered, or to talk to a friend or associate maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Did someone see you out walking your dog?”

  “I don’t have one.

  Ray’s shoulders rose and fell as he sighed. “Actually, you could’ve been at home having a keg party for the Tabernacle Choir and it wouldn’t make any difference unless we can rule out a contract killing.”

  “Murder for hire? That’s ridiculous. Detective,” Dunn said, “I’ve told you all I can. Unless I’m under arrest, I’m leaving.”

  “If you were under arrest, I’d have read you your rights, Mr. Dunn. You’re free to go anytime you like.”

  Dunn stood. “As soon as I check on Ellie, I’m going to pick up my son. He must be scared out of his mind.” He tossed the pen down and slid the paper toward Ray.

  “Put your bookkeeper’s name and contact information on the backside.” Ray told him.

  Grudgingly, Dunn obliged, then slapped the paper into Ray’s extended palm.

  Ray glanced at the four names on the front. “That’s it? It’s an awfully short list.”

  “Not a lot of Ellie’s friends stuck around after she lost her voice—just one more thing she holds against me.” He turned away, then stopped. “Oh, on that list… Jeanette Seeger… that’s Ellie’s mother.”

  “Okay, got it. By the way,” Ray said, “when you get to the hospital, you can expect to find an officer posted outside your ex-wife’s room.”

  Dunn looked up, his worry lines getting deeper by the second. “An officer? Why?”

  “It’s a precautionary measure. The shooter isn’t likely to be happy about her still being alive. We don’t want him trying to change that.”

  “I don’t know anyone who’d want to kill Ellie. If it wasn’t a mugging, the target had to have been that Lundquist or whatever his name was.”

  “We’re checking into that,” Ray told him. “But even if you’re right, the shooter wouldn’t want her as a witness.” He tucked the list into his chest pocket. “Stop by the desk. They can give you the number for CPS. You’ll have to make arrangements with them in order to pick up your son.”

  Dunn strode to the door and stopped only long enough to say, “For what it’s worth, I want you to know I’d rather have been right about Ellie taking off with Nathan than to hear what actually happened to her.”

  Yeah, for what it’s worth.

  11

  With Dunn gone, Ray looked forward to getting home to Gail and the kids, but there was one more thing he needed to get out of the way first. He located the number for Bobbi Gunderson’s parents in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The alarm in her mother’s voice was unmistakable the moment he identified himself.

  “Your daughter’s safe, Mrs. Gunderson,” he assured her.

  He answered a flood of questions before suggesting that she and her husband go directly to the address he’d supplied rather than calling ahead—that given any idea they were coming, Bobbi might take off again, if she hadn’t already.

  The girl’s bravado had lost some of its bluster by the time he’d gotten her to the shelter—no doubt the result of the hard knocks she’d experienced since leaving La Crosse for Minneapolis. She would see his contacting her parents as a betrayal of trust, but his job made popularity a low priority. He’d done what he had to do.

  Even the bargain basement price he’d paid in exchange for Lundquist’s wallet was part of his strategy to keep Bobbi safe. If she had a brain in her head—and clearly she did—the Gunderson girl realized the chintzy ten dollars he’d given her wouldn’t go far. As he hoped, that had made it easier to persuade her to go with him to a safe location. If he hadn’t counted on that strategy to work, he’d have gladly given her every last cent in his wallet. Now he could only hope her parents could get there before she disappeared again.

  Each time he’d looked at Bobbi Gunderson, it was like seeing Laurie. The thought of his own daughter ever turning down the same treacherous path was unthinkable, but the unthinkable happened daily. Ray put it out of his mind as he pulled into his driveway.

  He walked through the front door calling, “I’m home. Who wants to go to the zoo?”

  From her spot on the couch, Laurie held her cell phone away from her ear and rolled her eyes. “We got back half an hour ago, Dad. Mom took us.”

  The quick job he’d gone in to do had stretched into an all-day project. As tired as he was, Ray acknowledged to himself that missing the outing wasn’t a huge disappointment. Letting Gail and the kids down again, however, was.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “She went to get something for supper,” Laurie said.

  Krista walked into the room with Joey, who raised his hands in the air, curling his fingers like claws. “Raaaaaar.”

  Ray scooped the three year old into his arms. “Are you a lion?”

  Joey only growled louder. “Raaaaaar.”

  Krista crossed her arms and huffed, “A cougar, Dad. That’s all he’s been doing since he saw the one at the zoo. Can you make him stop?”

  He set Joey down and gave him a get-along pat on the butt. “He’s just having some fun, honey. Let him enjoy himself.” He tousled her blond hair. “Believe me, he’ll get tired of doing that soon enough.”

  “But, Dad,” Krista said, “it’s so annoying.”

  Ray laughed and let it go. “Girls, keep an eye on your brother while I take a quick shower, okay?”

  On the way up the stairs, he got rid of his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He laid his suit jacket over the back of an upholstered chair in the master bedroom, stripped off his shirt, and detoured to the phone on the nightstand, anxious to update Waverly. Bare-chested, Ray tapped in his cell phone number.

  No answer.

  Ray thought about calling his home number, then reconsidered. Piling on more work-related stress wasn’t likely to alleviate the funk Waverly had been in for weeks on end. The update could wait.

  Ten minutes later, fresh from his shower, Ray went downstairs in jeans and a sweatshirt, expecting to see Gail. “Your mom’s still not home?”

  “Not yet.” Relieved of Joey-watching duty, Laurie headed off the couch and up the stairs.

  His mind strayed to Gail’s reports of funny noises coming from under her SUV’s hood. He’d meant to check it out, but hadn’t found the time yet. Another fifteen minutes passed, and visions of Gail being stranded on the side of the road grew more vivid. About the time he expected to get an SOS call, she came through the door with an armload of food containers.

  “Hi,” he said, taking a pizza box from her. “What kept you?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” she said.

  “Things just sort of snowballed today.”

  “So what else is new?”

  He changed the subject. “Umbria pizza? That’s not even three miles from here. What did they do—fly your order in from Italy? According to what Laurie told me, it must’ve taken over an hour for you to pick this up.”

  Gail set a bag on the kitchen table. “Frankly, I didn’t expect you home in time to miss me. And what are you doing—checking up on me?”

  “C’mon, you know better than that,” Ray told her. “I was worried you might’ve had car trouble or something.”

  “No, but now that you mention it, it’s still making that awful noise I told you about.”

  “I’ll look at it tomorrow. Right now I’m beat.” Ray watched her pull a stack of plates from a cabinet. “About the zoo… I thought you’d wait for me so we could all go together.” He heard her sigh. It was a sound he’d heard often enough lately to recognize its many subtle layers. Disappointment, annoyance, and resignation were all wrapped together in that single exhalation.

  Gail kept moving. “If we had wai
ted, we wouldn’t have been able to stroll through the zoo; we’d have had to sprint. Have you checked the time? The zoo closes at six, you know.”

  Ray looked at his watch. “I forgot about that. Sorry.” He looked over her shoulder. “Hey, a calzone.”

  “It’s yours.” She put the calzone on a plate and set it in the microwave. “You’ve said Umbria’s crust is thicker than you like.”

  “Yeah, good. Thanks. So if you didn’t have car trouble, what held you up?”

  “I bring you a calzone and you interrogate me?” Gail said.

  “You’re awfully touchy tonight.” Ray kissed her cheek. “My question was meant to fall under the heading of ‘Hi, how was your day?’”

  “We enjoyed the zoo, but it would’ve been nicer if you could’ve been there with us.” Her voice softened as she looked away and dished up a kid-sized portion of spaghetti for Joey. “Umbria’s was a madhouse. Everybody and his brother must’ve decided to have pizza tonight. On top of that, the girl who waited on me was a trainee. She messed up my order, and I had to wait for a do-over.”

  “It would’ve been quicker to have it delivered.”

  From the dining room they heard “Raaaar.” Then Krista. “Mooooom, make him stop.”

  Gail gave Ray a halfhearted smile. “Actually,I needed a little break.”

  His cell phone rang as he watched the microwave timer count down.

  “Hello? Yeah, I tried calling you, Dick. Don’t you answer your phone anymore?” He watched Gail hurry into the dining room with the pizza. “No, it’s important, but not urgent. Lundquist’s wallet is at the lab. A runaway found it. No, a girl. She can’t be more than fifteen. I took her to Avenues for Homeless Youth. No,” Ray said, smiling, “I didn’t hogtie her; I wooed her with my charm. Yeah, Dick, very funny.”

  The microwave dinged, and he fished his calzone out. “Anyway, I’ve got news you’ll like even better: our Jane Doe is Elena Dunn, Dave Dunn’s ex. Yeah, ‘It’s a Dunn Deal’ Dunn, and the boy from the theater… he’s their son.”

  Over the course of a minute or two, Ray filled him in with the bare-bone details before ending the call. He took his place at the table, calzone in hand.

  “That was Dick.”

  “Really? I’d never have guessed.” Gail cringed at her own sarcasm. “You could have asked to call him back later, you know.”

  Ray’s calzone no longer posed any danger of scalding his mouth. It was barely warm. He took a bite and swallowed without tasting. “I made it as quick as I could.”

  The girls kept their heads down, occasionally glancing in silence at Gail, then Ray, then at one another.

  “Girls,” Gail said a moment later, “if you want to, you can take your pizza and watch TV in the living room tonight. Just don’t get grease or sauce on anything, please.”

  They rose without a word, grabbed their plates and got out of the line of fire.

  “Ray,” Gail said with a sigh, “I ought to be used to this by now, but I was really looking forward to all of us actually getting away together today.” She grabbed a napkin and wiped sauce off Joey’s face. “Actually, I am used to it, but that doesn’t always make it any easier.”

  “I hate it as much as you do when this sh…” He glanced at Joey and said, “…when this sort of thing happens, and I know it’s been happening a lot lately. I get that.” Ray leaned over and kissed her. Being a man of his word, he didn’t offer false promises or guarantees. He squeezed her hand. “There’s nothing I can do to keep people from killing each other. All I can do is hope they do it in some other precinct. I need you to hang in there with me, Gail.”

  She pulled her hand away to remove a spaghetti noodle from Joey’s chin and changed subjects. “How’d your day go?”

  “Good, from a productivity standpoint, but right now I’m more interested in knowing how we’re doing.”

  Gail shot a quick look at him from the corner of her eye and crinkled her nose. “We’re fine.”

  A sucker for that crinkled nose, he smiled and took another bite of his cold calzone, then sat in thoughtful silence. “I don’t think Dick’s doing well. I can’t figure out what his problem is. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis or something. I’ve tried getting him to talk about whatever it is, but he’s not having any of that.”

  Gail wiped Joey’s face and hands, set him on the floor with a kiss and sent him into the living room with his sisters. “Ray, let it go.”

  “Easier said than done.” He groped for the right words. “Dick’s not fully engaged these days. He’s distracted and short-tempered. You know Dick, honey. That’s not like him.”

  “No, but you can’t force him to talk if he doesn’t want to. He’ll tell you when he’s ready.”

  “I’m worried about him. He’s not just my partner; Dick’s a friend. The kids are crazy about him. You, too. He’s practically a family member.”

  She looked away quickly and started gathering up the paper plates and napkins. “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, Ray…”

  “We’ve always batted things back and forth.”

  “Oh, like you tell him everything that’s going on in your life,” she scoffed.

  “Yeah, I pretty much do.”

  Gail groaned. “Let him be, Ray.”

  “Every day that’s getting harder, because whatever this is, it’s big. I can feel it. Ignoring it is driving me crazy.”

  She glanced at Ray and then looked away quickly. “Honey, Dick’s a big boy. If he needed your help, he’d tell you.”

  “I wish I believed that.”

  12

  Ray was getting situated at his desk the next morning as Waverly walked past the coffee cart and greasy bakery box without a second glance. He dropped into the chair on the other side of Ray’s desk. His shirt looked only slightly more rumpled than he did.

  “Morning.”

  “Yeah… morning,” Ray said. “It looks like it came a few hours too early for you today.”

  “It usually does lately.”

  There it was again, that indefinable something that got Ray’s attention like the check engine light on a dashboard.

  Waverly stood up again, took off his jacket and hitched up his pants. “Have you heard from the lab about Lundquist’s wallet yet?”

  “Not yet. I just got here myself.”

  Waverly groaned. “If there were any prints on it to begin with, that teeny-bopper you got it from prob’ly screwed them up.”

  “The lab could still find something. Bobbi Gunderson slipped the wallet inside a plastic sandwich bag.” Ray couldn’t help himself. “Is everything all right, Dick?”

  “Peachy. Why?”

  Ray shrugged. “You seem a little off—like you’re not yourself this morning.”

  “I could’ve sworn it was me when I left the house. Let’s just get down to business, okay, Ray?” Waverly settled back in the chair again with a world-weary sigh. “Tell me more about Dave Dunn,” he said. “I wish I’d been in on that interview.”

  “I do, too. The tag team approach has its advantages, but Dunn came across as pretty straightforward.”

  “He’s a salesman—a smooth talker, buddy. Everything that came out of his mouth could’ve been nothing but a load of crap. He can schmooze like nobody’s business. Have you seen his ads?”

  “Who hasn’t? According to Dunn, his dealerships are doing great.”

  “It’s prob’ly those big baby-blue eyes of his. Varsity quarterback. Eagle Scout. That’s the kind of image he projects.”

  Ray rubbed his temples. “Publicly maybe, but he came straight out and told me he’d had an extramarital affair.”

  “Yeah, you told me,” Waverly said. “A lot of that going around.”

  “Isn’t there always?” Mentally, Ray did a belated double-take, but the split-second delay allowed Waverly to change subjects before he could ask if there was a deeper meaning to his comment.

  “What about his relationship with his ex, Ray?”

  “Dunn claims he s
till loves her, and maybe he does. He just about lost it when I told him where and how his son was found in that theater. He defended her up, down, and sideways. He insists she’s a fantastic mother.”

  “Go figure,” Waverly said.

  “I had no legitimate grounds to keep him here, so I had to let him go before I was ready.”

  “At least we know who the woman and boy are now,” Waverly said. “So, whatd’ya think, Ray? Was the incident a mugging or a maybe a custody battle gone wrong?”

  “Damned if I know,” Ray said. “If Dunn’s involved, jealousy could figure in. Lewis Lundquist’s biggest mistake could’ve been stepping out on his wife with the wrong woman.”

  Waverly grumbled, “I never got that whole ‘If I can’t have you, nobody can’ crap. People are outta their minds.”

  “Tell me about it. And like I said before, Dave Dunn might not be the only one with a jealousy problem. There’s Marguerite Lundquist and, age notwithstanding, in my book, a woman scorned is a woman scorned.”

  “Okay, but I think you’re whistling Dixie out your ass when it comes to her.”

  “Listen,” Ray said. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe Lewis Lundquist really was a faithful husband. Maybe Elena Dunn does deserve to be nominated for Mother of the Year. We’ve seen nothing to support either of those things, but we could be wrong. I’m not sure what to think.”

  “Hold on while I check my ‘Magic 8 Ball’.”

  “Seriously… I’ve been going over and over this. Let me run something by you, okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay,” Ray said. “The night of the shooting, we know Lundquist’s wife backed out of their plans at the last minute, so he started out alone on Friday night.”

  “Right. And he was still alone when he left the comedy club,” Waverly added.

  “Yeah, and from there, he walked down Hennepin Avenue to Gluek’s.”

  “Where are you going with this, buddy?”

  “Hang on.” Ray’s eyes narrowed as he worked through it in his head. “The coroner fixed Lundquist’s time of death around midnight—about the time the bartender said Lundquist left the bar… still alone. We know he didn’t go to Kieran’s or the Lyon’s Pub after that, because we checked.”