Wayne Beacham sat upright on the made bed. He was dressed in his full town constable uniform, service belt and all. His long legs stretched straight out in front of him as if to show off the precise creases in his trousers. His chin rested on his chest, the tone of his skin a close match for the white of his dress shirt.
I turned in time to catch Dez by the upper arms as she came toward the bedroom.
“Don’t,” I said.
She pulled herself gently free and went to see for herself. Her body sagged against the wall, cheek against the sunshine-yellow molding.
“Oh,” she said. “Wayne.”
His uniform jacket had been hung neatly over the back of a wicker chair by the tiny feminine desk next to the bed. A spiral pocket notepad was left open on the desk, with a ballpoint pen placed precisely beside it. I risked walking into the scene to see what had been written.
Sue
I’m sorry for Erle. I thougth it would help us
I love you
Wayne
The words were small and tightly formed, including the misspelled one, in an odd mix of cursive and printing.
Jesus. Constable Beacham. Not Leo or Dez or even Jaeger and his men.
Beacham must have shot Erle before heading up the dead-end street to the dress shop and its broken window. Before Fain and Zeke and Gillespie had seen him working there. Which meant Erle had been dead longer than anyone had assumed. At least half an hour before Leo had arrived on the scene.
Spit had dribbled from Beacham’s lips onto his shirtfront, the stains dry now. I leaned down to see. His mouth was coated with drool and maybe salt. The room didn’t yet have the low reek of death. Instead, the constable gave off a dry whiff of old sweat.
Running parallel with the salt tang was another sharp scent. Whiskey. Enough booze that once I caught it in my nostrils, it was all I could smell.
“I’m going to check the house,” I said to Dez. “You okay here?” She said yes, but I wasn’t sure she’d really heard me.
A bottle of Jameson’s waited on the yard-wide circle that passed for a dining table. The liquor left at the bottom wouldn’t cover the handspan of a child. Next to the whiskey, an empty prescription bottle. I squatted down to read its label. It was Beacham’s own prescription, filled a few weeks before, twenty 0.25-milligram pills of Halcion for treatment of insomnia. Take as needed, no more than one pill every twenty-four hours. No telling how many he’d taken, or how much of the whiskey he had downed. It had had the intended effect. Somnolence. Respiratory depression. Death.
Dez was still looking at her husband.
“He . . . Did he.” A statement asking a lot.
“Yes. There’s an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the table.”
She shook her head. “He was so angry. All the time.”
There was something I had to know. I walked back inside the room and picked up the notepad with a tissue from a box on the desk and brought it to Dez. When she reached for it, I drew it back.
“Better not to touch,” I said. Her eyes moved over the note, backed up as she read it again, over and over while its terrible meaning sank in.
“Erle?” she said. “Oh, God. Wayne, what did you do?”
“Is this Wayne’s handwriting?”
“Yes. He has some dyslexia. He sometimes still made mistakes like that. But Erle.” She stared at the note. “Why?”
“Maybe Wayne thought you’d get the money back. That it would change your mind about leaving him.”
Or if it didn’t, at least Beacham would wind up with half of her inheritance in the divorce. He’d win either way.
But now wasn’t the time to talk that through with Dez. She still had her eyes fixed on the paper, as though willing it to speak truth to her.
When I returned the notepad to the desk, I spared a moment to examine Beacham’s shoes. On the right sole of the size-twelves, the outer rim of rubber was missing a deep notch. Regular use had worn the shallow tread flat. It had been a long time since the shoe leather had seen polish.
“I’m going to go get the truck,” I told Dez once we were back outside on the porch. “Do you want to stay here or come with me?”
She chose to walk. We took a different path, around the house to the road and straight to the Dodge. Instead of turning around, I drove us to the packed earthen driveway and stopped next to the police cruiser.
“Hang tight,” I said, grabbing my pack.
Back inside the bedroom, I removed the bloodstained coveralls and paper boots from the freezer bag Fain had given me—careful not to touch them directly—and placed the folded bundle on the wicker chair where the constable’s jacket hung.
I compared the tread marks inside the paper boots to Beacham’s shoes. Same flat tread, same notch. No question, at least not to my unscientific eyes. They matched.
The note might be enough to spring Leo. The clothes should clinch it.
I left the house and closed the door before calling 911.
Thirty-One
The rest of the night passed in a blur of questions. First from Deputies Thatcher and Roussa, who were first on the scene, and then Lieutenant Yerby at the sheriff’s station, after he’d separated Dez and me. Our story was ninety-eight percent true and thus hard to screw up: we’d driven to the house, seen Constable Beacham’s cruiser, Dez unlocked the door, and we found the body and called for help.
Still, Yerby seemed determined to find a hole in our tale, until Roussa confirmed that Henry Gillespie and Jim Seebright had seen Dez and me off at the saloon only thirty minutes before my call to 911.
Around one o’clock in the morning, Yerby let us walk. Roussa drove Dez back to her friend Jaye’s house. I let the Dodge coast down the deserted road toward the rental house while I had one last conversation over the phone with Ganz.
Ephraim was not pleased to be woken yet again. He was halfway through a complex string of epithets before I managed to interrupt and explain what had happened. I claimed that I’d seen the suicide note while checking Beacham for signs of life. The bloodstained coveralls and boots I pretended not to have noticed. The cops would bring those to light soon enough.
Ganz promised to rustle the bushes at Judge Clave’s office once they opened. For now, he told me, don’t do anything. The else on the end of that command was implied.
I lay in bed in the rental house, counting stains on the popcorn ceiling. Waiting between rounds of interrogation with Yerby and the deputies had given me plenty of time to think. I’d normally feel some regret at a suicide, even the suicide of a fuckup like Wayne Beacham. But I could guess why Dez’s estranged husband had chosen to use a gun from Leo’s workbench to kill Erle. And why he’d hung around the scene after the murder.
Leo came to work when the gun shop opened every morning. Beacham made early morning rounds through the town, checking locks, looking for vandalism like that conveniently broken window at the dress shop. It wasn’t a stretch to say that the constable knew Leo’s schedule and counted on it.
I could piece together most of Beacham’s probable actions that morning. He had slipped away from the dress store and thrown the coveralls and boots over his uniform before murdering Erle. Then he had forced the lock on the shop next door to quickly stash the bloody clothes and hightail it back before he was missed.
The rest of his intended plan was simple. The constable would wait for Leo to arrive for work, and then kill him, too, staging it as a justifiable shooting. Beacham could have pretended that he had overheard the shot that killed Erle and had run to investigate. The town would probably give him a medal. For killing his wife’s lover.
Except that Henry Gillespie and Zeke Caton had shown up, allowing Leo to escape out the back of the gun shop. Bad luck for Beacham. He’d have had to be content with Leo getting busted for Erle’s murder.
Maybe the constable’s overzealous application of the baton to Leo’s head had been a last-ditch effort at killing him, or at least getting one good shot in before the arrest.
The facts w
eren’t a perfect fit. I couldn’t figure out how Beacham had known Erle’s security cameras were turned off. How he’d known it was the right moment to enter the gun shop. He must have moved very quickly. Fain and Zeke had seen him at the broken window at seven o’clock, within twenty minutes after Erle must have been killed. And I also couldn’t reason why the constable had taken Erle’s cell phone. Had Erle called him? Was that how he’d learned the cameras were turned off? But why would Erle have told Beacham that?
I thought back to how strained Beacham had looked when he had braced me in front of the courthouse. How hollow. Hard to live with killing someone. Even if you have a lot to gain by it. Even in war. The number of Rally booths dedicated to stress management and mental health were proof of that.
The constable was dead now. His only reward would be a full-dress funeral, if the town permitted it. A few words from a book, a folded flag, and then Mercy River would do its best to forget the whole fucking mess.
With the morning sun high above the horizon, I set the kettle on to make instant Sanka. Ganz had left behind a can of the granules. Maybe I’d caught a taste for it from him, like a virus.
A computer had come with the rental house, a desktop tower so old that I doubted the owners worried much about theft or damage. I booted it up and plugged in the thumb drive I had liberated from Jaeger. I wasn’t certain what I was searching for—though I could admit to some professional curiosity about the cash trucks—but a little knowledge about Jaeger’s potential targets could be useful.
The thumb drive held a lone Excel spreadsheet. I scrolled down the sheet for a quick count. More than five hundred rows, each detailing a single truck’s daily schedule. The column at the left told me the type of truck—Full-Armored, the big tank-like monsters, Protection Transit, a smaller version for chauffeuring clients, or what HaverCorp called a Road Truck, which must be one of the lighter unmarked vans for less obvious deliveries. Jaeger and his gang had stolen the drugs from a road truck in Nevada. No one had expected trouble.
I read through a few rows, getting a feel for the information. Every truck had target times for hitting each stop. Another series of columns specified the coordinates of the required route. If HaverCorp ran a tight ship, the truck’s GPS tracker would signal any deviation from the route, and alert the dispatcher that something was wrong.
A few of the truck routes were pickup-only, stopping at stores and banks to take the day’s cash receipts. Those routes didn’t attempt to predict how much the drivers might be taking on; a column labeled $ COLLECT next to each stop was left blank.
The big money was in cash deliveries. The truck—always a full-armored—would leave the dispatch, pick up preloaded ATM cassettes from a central bank, and distribute those little boxes of twenty-dollar bills to area banks throughout the day. One Portland truck was scheduled to carry more than seven hundred grand.
A good haul, but maybe not worth the risk when that score had to be shared with multiple accomplices. One full-armored would be a tough enough target on its own. If Jaeger’s goal was to hit as many armored cars as he could, as fast as he could, before HaverCorp took precautions, he was even more insane than Schuyler Conlee claimed.
I toyed with the spreadsheet menu, figuring out how to filter and sort the data. Cash deliveries only, highest dollar value at the top.
At first I thought what I was seeing was an error, or a row of junk data somehow mixed in with the others. The first space under the column labeled $ DISPATCH read 11,200,000.
Eleven million dollars. In cash. It must be wrong. No bank would require—
Not one bank, I saw. Multiple banks on the route, all branches of Prime Bank National, each one of them receiving somewhere between half and three-quarters of a million dollars. From where?
I’d missed seeing columns at the very far right, past all of the drop points on the route. The columns were blank for most trucks. For this one, under ORIGIN it read FRBSF-RNWA. Under TYPE it read RECIRC-50.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s local branch was in Renton, Washington. I knew that, the way that a mountain climber knows what nearby peak is the highest and most dangerous.
Holy shit.
The kettle’s whistling had become a shriek. I got up and poured the frothing water into a mug, where it melted the granules instantly. My mind was churning at about the same rate.
RECIRC-50 must mean recirculated bills, in fifty-dollar denominations. Each Federal Reserve branch takes in billions from banks and other vendors across the nation. Currency still in halfway decent shape is sent right back out to other banks. Moving cash where it’s needed is part of the Reserve’s mandate. Macomber had told me HaverCorp had won a big government contract. Maybe making deliveries for the Reserve was part of that package.
I had stumbled upon one of Prime Bank’s major deliveries for the year. Sixteen Seattle branches. Enough money to keep their ATMs stocked until Thanksgiving.
It wasn’t a perfect target for theft. Every bill through the Fed is scanned, the serial number recorded. If stolen money turned up at another bank after a theft, the FBI would be on that trail like coyotes after a housecat.
But there were a thousand ways to launder cash, including selling it for a percentage or spending it overseas where the FBI had no jurisdiction. And eleven million was eleven damn million.
Jaeger would go for the big money. I was certain of it, just as I was sure that he would immediately murder the guards to eliminate witnesses, as he had in Nevada.
A column on the list told me how many potential victims. Two. A driver and a hopper, to make the dash into each Prime branch. Plus any civilians who were unlucky enough to be within range.
I wasn’t responsible for whatever that freak and his damned First Riders did. I could remind myself of that truth as often as I liked. Maybe it would help to while away the winter nights to come.
The Federal Reserve route was scheduled for Thursday morning, three days from right now. If Jaeger was as smart as I thought, he wouldn’t risk hitting another truck first. HaverCorp might start swapping routes around.
I could call HaverCorp myself. Read them their own truck route details, shock the crap out of them, and the Reserve truck would be out of danger. Which would only kick the problem downfield. Jaeger would shift his attention elsewhere, and other people would be in line for a bullet. Including me and the Conlees. I hadn’t forgotten Jaeger’s promise.
Or I could call the FBI. Convince them I wasn’t a crank somehow, without giving them enough details to hang Conlee and the general and Fain’s team along with Jaeger. Maybe they would be able to nail Jaeger in the act.
It was the “in the act” part of that idea that worried me. The FBI would wait until they had Jaeger dead to rights, to where a robbery charge would be undeniable. Confronted by a tactical team closing in, it was easy to picture Jaeger’s men turning that scene into a charnel house.
Three days. Eleven million dollars. I had a lot of thinking to do.
Thirty-Two
When Leo and Ganz walked out of the sheriff’s station, I was sitting on one of the two white-painted ornamental boulders that doubled as vehicle barriers for the walkway. Leo had on a clean black T-shirt and the same jeans as when he’d been busted. And a battered pair of Nikes, which Dez had brought from Leo’s room at the inn. The deputies had kept his boots. Those were still evidence.
“That was trippy,” Leo said to me. “From talking sentencing over the weekend to full release by Monday night. How’d you swing it?”
“He swung nothing,” Ganz said. “Judge Clave realized that accepting the guilty plea of a man with—you’ll excuse me—a documented history of psychiatric concerns would be extremely actionable, now that there’s another suspect with more substantial evidence against him and no chance of challenging the case.”
“Wayne’s dead,” said Leo. “I still can’t believe it.”
“Very dead. Very tidy as far as the authorities are concerned. Suicide confessions, now, t
hose swing some weight.” Ganz looked at me on that, a question in his eyes. But instead of voicing it, he handed a manila folder to Leo. “Here’s the paperwork. Hang on to that. You are released on your own recognizance, pending a formal decision on dropping the charges.”
“I can leave town?” Leo said.
“You can and you should, until the court summons you back. I guarantee that plenty of these good people don’t give a flying fart about evidence or the court. They’ll think you’re guilty. One of them will get himself drunk and angry and this carousel will start all over again.”
“Beacham’s death has already got the town on edge,” I said. “Two people asked me about it on my way here.” I had also spied Wayne’s brother Lester, sitting on one of the painted logs that made a sidewalk barrier for the grocery store parking lot. Holding a large can concealed in a paper bag, but not showing much interest in it. All of the fight wrung out of him.
Ganz fixed me again with that curious look. “It was remarkable luck, Constable Beacham deciding to end things, and leaving conclusive proof of his guilt.”
“And me finding him. Is that it?” I said. I knew what Ganz was implying, and I didn’t like it.
“Truth can be stranger than art. Ah, good.”
A Cadillac livery pulled up in front of the station. Before the driver could step out, Ganz opened the rear door for himself.
“I am taking my own advice and returning to Seattle in time for a late dinner,” he said. “If you should get into trouble again—”
“—call anybody else,” I said.
“Perfectly phrased.”
He shut the door and the Cadillac sped away.
Leo stared at me. “You didn’t really . . .”
“What?”
“Kill Wayne Beacham. Set him up to take the blame.”
“I’m not a murderer.”
“Sorry. Sorry, man. I’m just fried.” Leo stretched toward the heavens, like the ceiling in his cell had been four feet tall. “Where’s Dez?”
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