Now came the fun part. I stepped inside and closed the door.
Ten seconds. The air inside the condo was stale and odorless. Twenty seconds. No blaring siren. I locked the door behind me.
The entryway was wide enough to allow for a bench, and a wrought iron coatrack hung with half a dozen coats. A man’s coats, mostly, leather and microfiber jerseys and Gore-Tex from a higher price range than most outdoor enthusiasts could afford. There was one woman’s jacket, a sleek waterproof raincoat in dark green. Assuming it was Elana’s, she might have chosen it to match her eyes.
There was a narrow chance that the condo had a silent alarm. I searched around the entryway for a telltale keypad, and found only a closet stuffed to the ceiling with more clothes and shoe boxes.
His home was spacious. I guessed it at two bedrooms and maybe thirteen hundred square feet. But despite the size, the apartment felt stifled, like a cocoon. The soundproofing blocked any exterior sound, creating a private little world.
The first piece of furniture after the bench was a thin table with a stack of junk mail on it. The envelopes were addressed to Kendrick B. Haymes, or K. B. Haymes, or to just to Resident.
The flat anonymity of Resident summed Haymes up for me, too. Beyond his famous name, he was a blank. Had Kend been a violent whack job who’d killed his girlfriend in a rage and then taken the express train to Hell himself? Was he just some sorry bastard tormented by depression or fear? That was another kind of victim, I supposed. But any pity I might have felt was swept away by the memory of Elana’s wings.
Kend must have had friends, other than his girl. His phone had given me a few names and numbers. Maybe I could learn more here, find the people closest to him. Or I could paste the pieces of his life together myself. Figure out what he was thinking behind that crooked smile in his license picture.
You think that will explain anything? Willard had asked.
I started in the bathroom, checking the medicine chest. Kend had a Mantelukast prescription for seasonal allergies. Elana had a mild antidepressant. I’d taken shit a lot heavier when I’d been in therapy. There was nothing in the cabinets to imply Kend was bipolar or fighting anything more serious than clogged sinuses. Nothing that might signal that the poor bastard was a risk for suicide. Unless of course he’d decided to flush his meds.
In the living room, a brocade sectional couch took up a majority percentage of the living space. Broad sliding glass doors revealed a narrow balcony. Real hardwood floors and eight-foot ceilings, with the walls painted the color of eggplant. The furniture was sleek and low to the ground. It was a toss-up which had cost more: all of the furniture, or the eighty-inch flat-screen that looked like a glass tabletop bolted to the wall.
Everything was so immaculate there had to be a regular cleaning service. Even the appliances shone. I wondered what days the service came, and what time. Hopefully not first thing in the morning.
The living room also had a black walnut desk with a Macintosh laptop in a docking station. I tapped the space bar and saw the password prompt. No checking Kend’s e-mail, unless I wanted to steal the machine and find a way to hack into it. Better to leave the forensics for the cops.
There were photographs in wooden frames on the shelves, and taped to the fridge. One on the wall showed Kend as a young boy, red curls flying as a woman who I guessed was his mother swung him around. I didn’t see any pictures of Kend’s famous father, Maurice. Elana appeared in half a dozen pictures, in groups at parties or candid shots. She looked good in the candids, striking when she turned her gaze on the camera. A few faces repeated in the party pictures. I took snapshots of each with my phone.
I found one other picture, facedown in the desk drawer. The photo showed two white women in their midtwenties, both in glossy black dresses. The woman on the left was short and gamine, with bobbed hair the shade of thick honey. The other was taller and darker. A beauty mark accented the corner of her mouth. The girls were winking broadly and brandishing champagne flutes at the photographer. Both of them were good-looking. That seemed to be the kind of circle Kendrick Haymes ran in. All the men were rich, all the women beautiful. At the bottom of the picture was a line written in neat feminine cursive—Barr and Tru at Bob’s wedding.
The rest of the slim drawer was full of Post-its and bits of notepaper. The one on top read You’re So Much Marvelous, Mister written that same cursive, inside a felt-pen heart. Love notes that Elana had written to her man, and a few that Kend had scrawled back. The notes ranged in tone from cute to NC-17 for sexual content. None of them seemed to have been written as apology, or in anger. Maybe the lovers only kept the nice ones. Sweet, even if they were all stuffed in a drawer.
My phone buzzed. It was Bill Eberley. Major Eberley, of Eberley Tactical. Calling to give me news about the possible job, most likely. It buzzed once more while I decided. The walls here were probably thick enough.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice low.
“Van?”
“’M in a library, but didn’t want to miss your call.”
“Okay. I’ll do the talking. It’s not good news. We couldn’t make the deal with the Oregon state troopers. They want us, but February’s just too late to get onto their budget for the year. I’m still talking to Olympia, but those conversations are looking bleak. Short answer, I don’t think we’re going to have capacity for extra resources soon. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for letting me know fast.”
“Like I said, these things wax and wane. Oregon might have funds free up later for extra SWAT training. But I expect you’ll be settled into another job well before that.”
In other words, don’t stare at the phone expecting it to ring. I said thanks again and we hung up.
Shit. Double shit. I had been counting on that job, maybe more than I’d let myself realize. But I couldn’t dwell on my employment situation right now. I might not have much time left in Kend’s apartment. Kend’s really upper-fucking-class apartment.
I went to the master bedroom. It had the same dimensions as the living room, with the same identical set of glass doors to the balcony. Framed large-print photographs decorated the blue walls, artfully time-lapsed prints of a Japanese street, a casino floor, an empty restaurant. In the nightstand drawer by the California King bed I found sticky buds of pot in an unlabeled aspirin bottle, along with rolling papers and an ashtray with a few layers of smudged resin. I examined the nightstand surface and the inside of the drawer closely. Addicts nearly always kept their works close to the bed, the better to collapse. There were no pinprick holes or scratches, like clumsy handling of a syringe might leave. No scorch marks in the soft wood from a hot pipe set down quickly.
Elana’s things were neatly tucked away in the dresser and the closet. She had lived simply. Almost minimalist. I got that. When you relocated every couple of years, you found you could cast off a lot.
There was something else I hadn’t found, I realized. No box of 9mm Parabellums, or a carrying case or gun cleaning kit. Had Kend lifted the Glock from somewhere? Or had he kept it hidden?
A small dog barked in the hallway. Then more barks, loud and frantic, right outside the door.
Crap.
I liked dogs. K9 units had saved our company’s collective ass in the Army more times than I could count. None of that kept me from wanting to punt this particular canine through uprights from twenty yards out.
The owner called to it from farther down the hall. The little terror kept up with its yapping. Finally I heard footsteps and the dog protesting as it was being carried away.
I couldn’t stay much longer. Maybe I’d been heard on the phone. Or the neighbor down the hall would start thinking about his dog’s sudden interest in the Haymes apartment.
I’d searched Kend’s place for drugs, or signs of psychological distress. There were other ways a person might be pushed to the limit. Even a rich man. Romantic woes. Family suffering. I knew a little something about that.
An antique rolltop desk and matc
hing file cabinet took up the bedroom corner. I rummaged through stacks of bills on the desk. Most were standard. I found a bank statement and a car registration. Maybe Kend had been buying himself new wheels. He could’ve done all the window-shopping he wanted at Willard’s card game.
The registration wasn’t for a purchase, I realized with a second look. It was the seller’s record for a Porsche Panamera, two years old. Kend had signed over the car to someone named Torrance X. Broch about three weeks ago. There was no entry in the space labeled Sales Price.
I glanced through the recent bank statement. Kend’s checking account had less than two hundred in it at the time the statement was printed. His savings were nonexistent. Maybe he had another account, or kept all his money elsewhere.
A rich guy with a practically zero balance. Thirty seconds earlier I would have said I had nothing in common with Kendrick Haymes. But based on the quickest of glances, he looked just as broke as I was.
The file cabinet was a mess. I had just figured out which drawer held the scattered piles of bank and credit card statements when I heard voices from the hall.
“. . . a court order if we have to, but given the state of the family . . .” said a man’s low voice.
“Of course. Let me just . . .” Keys jingled.
Terrific. I was missing the mutt already.
I grabbed the stacks of papers and stuffed them into a canvas messenger bag that was next to the desk, and slung the bag over my back. The key turned in the front lock just as I eased open the sliding door to the balcony.
Fourth floor. I’d have to hope Kend’s downstairs neighbors weren’t at home. I climbed over the railing to clamber down and hang. My feet touched the railing on the third-floor balcony below. I jumped down and without pausing did it again, down to the second floor, and then I dropped the last ten feet to the alley.
My landing slammed my knees all the way up to my chest and gave me an instant headache. But no busted ankles. I eased back to a standing position and walked away, picking up speed and a little more oxygen as I went.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BACK IN THE TRUCK, I tossed the messenger bag on the passenger seat and started the engine. I wanted a look at the guy asking the manager to unlock Kend’s apartment. A family member, maybe, or a cop. It might be useful to know if it was Peninsula deputies working remote, or if they’d passed the case off to SPD. I drove around the block to park where I could see the building entrance. It had started to rain, graduating rapidly from a drizzle to an insistent pelting shower.
The large stack of Kend’s bank and credit statements took some reshuffling to put in order. I read through them as the precipitation streamed down the windows.
They told a story. Kend’s finances were a holy mess. Every month he received one deposit into his bank account in the whopping sum of twenty grand, from something called GLV. The deposits stretched back as far as the statements went. I assumed it was Kend’s trust fund. That was the only bright note for him.
Then the money went right back out again. In cash. During each of the past few months Kend had made withdrawals in large round numbers, until he’d completely wiped out his monthly allowance. The trust fund money was usually gone within four or five days after it arrived.
The credit statements proved he was living on borrowed time, charging everything from groceries to the cable bill. At least it looked like the condo was paid for.
He hadn’t bought another car, though. No gas receipts, either. The Panamera he’d sold seemed to have been Kend’s only ride. I checked the bank statements again. No deposit of extra cash from a few weeks before, when Kend had signed off on his hundred-K Porsche.
What was burning through Kend’s money like this? Drugs? No sign of that in the apartment, and he’d have overdosed long ago at this rate. Was he dealing? That was possible. If he were buying in quantity and laundering the money somewhere else. But why max out his credit cards?
The door to the building opened. A stout, middle-aged guy in a blue business suit and tie came out, walking so fast he verged on jogging. He held Kend’s Mac laptop under his arm, hunching to shield it from the rain.
He had the look of a cop, from the stone scowl to the bristly mustache. But a cop wouldn’t grab just one piece of evidence and remove it with his bare hands. Ex-cop, I decided.
I got a closer view through the river running down my windshield, as he crossed the street to a gray four-door Taurus two cars in front of me. His face was as chubby as his body, made rounder by a comb-over that swooped light brown hair over his tanned pate. Fat but strong looking, like a junior college lineman gone to seed. He hustled his gut behind the steering wheel and the Taurus zoomed away.
I began putting Kend’s financial statements back into his monogrammed messenger bag. The bag had looked empty, which was why I had grabbed it. There was an interior pocket, half unzipped. Inside the pocket was a large piece of paper, folded in quarters. The paper was thick and a little waxy, like a blueprint. I unfolded it.
It was a schematic. For an alarm system.
With pencil notes around the sides, pointing out how and where to beat it.
Kendrick Haymes, scion of old money, had suddenly become much more interesting.
Of course, just because the schematic had been tucked away in Kend’s monogrammed bag didn’t mean it was his. Elana was more the type to be familiar with burglar alarms. Was it hers? Both of theirs?
The alarm was complex. In a quick scan of the diagram I spotted redundant power sources, and both hardwired and wireless zones. Not the toughest system to beat, but not DIY crap from Radio Shack, either.
Where was it installed? The design was intended for a commercial building, or a series of connected smaller buildings, I guessed. There was no company name or identification number. A blank white strip showed at the bottom, maybe where those details had been masked before printing it on this strange waxen paper.
And had Kend or Elana or both already followed the penciled instructions, and broken into the place? If so, I had to assume there would be a police record of the burglary. But matching that to this diagram would be tough, without access to the same reports.
I knew how I could get those police reports. Or who could get them for me.
While the truck’s vents were laboring to defog the windows, I checked the faces in Kend’s and Elana’s snapshots against what I could find on their social media accounts. I got a handful of matches. Barrett Yorke was the elfin girl with honeyed hair, Trudy Dobbs her taller friend with the beauty mark. Barrett had a brother, Parson, who had been a looming presence in the background at a couple of the parties.
No doubt they had heard of their friends’ deaths. Kend’s had been reported, with very careful wording, on last night’s news. The reporter had named father Maurice as one of the dozen wealthiest people in Seattle, according to Forbes. And a quick check on my phone showed me the socialverse was on fire with rumors. One gossip claimed Kend and Elana had been only two of dozens secretly killed in the forest that night.
I sent a group text message to Barrett, Trudy, and Parson.
My name is Van Shaw. I was a friend of Elana’s. I was the one who found them at the cabin.
And then a following message:
Someone else was there, too.
If that didn’t pique their interest, I’d have to get drastic. Maybe I’d start my own horrible rumor circulating. I had a doozy about a bear.
CHAPTER NINE
THE MORNING TRAFFIC JAM was making like an inchworm by the time I reached Belltown. I could have low-crawled the last four blocks in full battle rattle—body armor, weapons, and all—and still beat the pace I set in the Dodge.
I stashed the truck in its usual spot at a garage three blocks from the bar. The morning’s rain hadn’t let up. I pulled my jacket tighter and strode down Western Ave, through people hurrying to work and Pike Place visitors seeking the shelter of the vendor stalls.
Only the panhandlers stood in place, one staking a cla
im on every corner. I gave my last single to a woman with ratty scarves wrapped around her head, framing a face with more deep wrinkles than teeth. She held a cardboard sign saying 4KIDS. I didn’t know if that meant she had four kids or intended to use the money for her kids, or if the sign was bullshit and my charity would just fund the woman’s next bottle. A dollar wouldn’t go far in any case. A drop of malt liquor on a bonfire.
The door to the Morgen was halfway down an alley off Lenora. It was bright green. Nothing on or around the door told you the bar’s name. When the bar opened at noon, Luce or one of her people would put out a sandwich board that directed customers to the right place.
I knocked on the door. No answer. Luce was probably hustling around somewhere in the back, in that efficient frenzy she always had while working. I tugged on the brass handle, and was surprised when it opened.
Most of the Morgen was a single room, long and wide, with thick ceiling beams and banged-up wooden tables and chairs. The overhead lights were turned off, making the interior murky. The walls were painted black, and so were the planks of the pine floor. Dust motes floated in the soft light coming through the high windows.
A man was seated at the table farthest from the door, half in shadow. I could make out a wispy black beard, but the rest of his face was hidden by a fraying cotton hood. He wore a dark blue wool coat over the hoodie. On the table in front of him was a plate of what looked like half-eaten chicken wings from the bar’s kitchen. Luce wasn’t in the room.
“Hey,” I said.
The man didn’t answer. His hands were out of sight under the table. His face could have been Asian, but it was hard to tell from just his chin and mouth. On the floor next to his bench was a large backpack. It was stuffed near to bursting and stained and faded from hard use.
A couple of street people made a habit of coming by the Morgen before opening, looking for food or spare change or whatever Luce could offer. If they weren’t drunk or high, Luce usually found something to wrap up for them.
Hard Cold Winter Page 6
