by Thomas Perry
Jane left the porch and went around the house looking for the best way in. At the side was an old-fashioned cellar entrance, a concrete frame covered by a pair of wooden doors at a thirty-degree angle from the house to the ground. There were a hasp and padlock to keep it closed, but Jane took out her pocketknife and removed the screws holding the hasp. She went down the steps, avoiding a rattrap on the fourth step, then closed the doors and waited for her eyes to adjust to seeing in the moonlight that the small cobwebbed cellar windows admitted. Then Jane carefully headed for the wooden steps leading upstairs into the kitchen, watching her feet to keep from stepping on anything in the near darkness.
The kitchen was small and neat, without much space for clutter or adornment. She opened the refrigerator door to verify that the girlfriend was still living here, and saw women’s food—yogurt, carrot sticks, celery sticks, a lot of vegetables in one drawer, boxes of vegetarian burgers and breakfast sausages in another, and premade diet meals in the freezer.
Jane moved through the house, not looking for anything, but looking at everything. The newspapers had said the girl was twenty-three, but none had carried a picture of her. In the bedroom Jane found framed photographs on the low woman’s dresser. One was a blond, blue-eyed girl about the right age with a woman about forty-five to fifty who resembled her. Jane studied the photograph, then moved to the next one.
This time the girl was with a young man. He was more than a foot taller than she was, and broad shouldered with a small head. The word that came into Jane’s mind was “lout.” He was beefy, but the arm muscles showing were not defined. He had a quarter inch of blond hair, small, pale close-set eyes, and a smile that was crooked, as though the smile was about to become a smirk. The eyes had an opaque quality that Jane had seen in people who weren’t very bright but prided themselves on their cunning.
Nicholas Bauermeister had not been a very attractive man, but Jane was aware that there were certain young women who found his type very male, and therefore, appealing. Jane had never been one of them, but so far there was no indication that Bauermeister had ever done anything that would have made his murder deserved or even likely.
Jane looked in the closet at Chelsea’s clothes. She was a size four. She didn’t have bad taste, but the clothes were inexpensive, mostly from discount chains. She had a collection of sneakers and flip-flops, all well-worn, and three pairs of high heels that she hadn’t worn much, and some bad-weather boots. There was another bedroom that had an old, swaybacked bed with a clean cover, and a closet full of male clothes. Nick’s clothes were big—size thirteen boots and sneakers, double-X shirts, and jeans with a thirty-five-inch inseam. He had a few pairs of cargo shorts, but no sport coats or dress shoes.
Jane worked as efficiently as she could, touching little, moving nothing, and searching a whole room before going on to the next. She found that Chelsea kept a shoebox filled with the upper parts of bills she had paid and other business mail. One piece was a set of bank statements dated two weeks ago. Since banks predated everything, these had probably just arrived. Chelsea had just under two thousand dollars in her checking account, and a bit under five thousand in a savings account. Nick had about nine thousand in checking, and no savings.
In a drawer near the kitchen door Jane found a flashlight. She turned it on and went down the steps to the basement. It took only a few minutes of searching to find the first surprise, a large battered toolbox under a workbench. She opened it and found a black cloth bag with handles like a satchel. Inside were an eighteen-inch crowbar, a center hole punch, a pair of wire cutters, long-handled bolt cutters, a headband with a light on it, a small bright LED flashlight, a couple of hacksaw blades with tape wrapped around one end to form a handle, and a piece of sheet metal cut with a hook on the end to make a slim-jim for opening a car door lock. The last object in the box was a small white cloth bag. Jane touched it and recognized the feel. She opened it and found a pair of thin leather gloves, a pullover ski mask, and a Glock 19 pistol. Jane ejected the magazine, found it was loaded, and pushed it back in.
Nicholas Bauermeister had been a thief.
Jane returned the objects to the cloth bag, and then the toolbox, and put the box back under the bench. How had the police missed Bauermeister’s burglary kit? They had come to the house in response to Chelsea’s call that he had been murdered, and that made the whole house a crime scene, not just the living room and the field in front of the house. It was true that they hadn’t come to investigate the victim, but when police had control of a victim’s house they usually tried to figure out who he had been and what could have brought him the kind of enemies who shot people to death. Jane supposed that the local police in this peaceful rural area had very little experience with homicides.
Jane searched harder now, examining every part of the basement for anything else that might be hidden. She checked the oil furnace, then tugged on the aluminum air ducts to see if one made a suspicious rattle or had a joint that came apart easily. That was one of her favorite hiding places in the old house where she had grown up. Nothing.
She used the flashlight to take a panoramic view of the basement. There were the standard sewer pipes, a water heater and copper pipes, the work bench, the washer and dryer, a couple of stationary tubs. There was an old refrigerator in the corner. She opened it, found about a case of Molson’s Golden, and a few diet colas. She lifted each to be sure none was heavier or lighter than the others. She opened the freezer, but found it empty.
In another corner of the basement were a snow blower and a double stack of twenty-five pound bags of rock salt. Nick Bauermeister had undoubtedly used the salt to melt ice on the steps and the blower to clear the long driveway in the winter. As she moved the flashlight beam again she noticed something and brought it back. The top two bags and the bottom two bags were identical, but the two in the middle seemed thinner.
She came closer, removed the top two bags, and examined the middle pair. As soon as she touched the first bag she knew she had something. The seam of the bag facing the wall was just folded over. The two bags had been opened from the bottom. She opened the first bag and felt inside, then pulled out a clear plastic Ziploc bag. Inside were a ring with a diamond of at least three carats, five pairs of stud earrings with colored stones, and a woman’s Cartier tank watch with a sapphire on the stem. The next bag had three men’s watches—two Rolexes and a Tag Heuer. There were a few other bags that held only one or two items—a spectacular cocktail ring, a necklace, or a pin. She laid them out and took pictures with her phone’s camera, and then put them back in the salt bag. The next salt bag had some odd things—about twenty gold coins in the small cardboard coin holders with plastic windows that collectors used, and a fancy pocketknife with a handle of inlaid opal, onyx, and coral. There was a set of heavy gold cuff links and tie tack with blue stones she guessed were lapis lazuli. She photographed these too and returned them to the salt bag.
She tried to interpret what she had just found. What it looked like to her was not the proceeds of one burglary. The trove seemed to be small, choice items from a number of burglaries. But a professional burglar wouldn’t hold on to a cache of distinctive traceable jewelry for very long. If the pieces were insured, then the insurance company would have pictures. A pro would want to move the jewels quickly, usually to a fence who would break them up, reset them, and melt the original settings down. The fence would at least sell them in another part of the country. Burglars didn’t want to build up collections of stolen jewelry. What they wanted was cash.
Bauermeister’s hoard brought to mind one of the hazards of holding on to loot. It made the burglar a potential robbery victim. But the one who had killed Bauermeister hadn’t come after the jewels. He had simply shot him and left without ever coming inside. Maybe Bauermeister had been working with a partner, or even a crew, and had gotten into the habit of pocketing an especially valuable item now and again. That m
ight make a colleague kill him. It was true that nobody had come for these hidden jewels, but if there were a colleague Bauermeister had cheated, maybe he didn’t know about these items. Maybe he had caught Bauermeister stealing something else.
Theories kept occurring to Jane as she searched the basement, but she couldn’t find evidence to make her settle on one theory, and she found nothing else. It was very late, and she had been in the house too long. She went up the steps to the kitchen and returned the flashlight to its drawer, then went through the darkened basement to the cellar door, climbed out, and closed the doors. She put the hasp and padlock back, then reinserted the screws and tightened them with her pocketknife.
She stepped to the garage and opened the door. There were two vehicles inside, a small old Mazda and a newer black Dodge pickup. Jane did a quick search of the Mazda and found little except the sorts of things Chelsea might be expected to have left—gum, hairbrush, bottled water, hand lotion, sunscreen, pens, receipts, a yoga mat. Chelsea was apparently a woman who used her car as a big purse. There was nothing in it to tell Jane anything about Nick Bauermeister.
The pickup was next. The flatbed was empty; the glove compartment held only the manual, registration, insurance receipt, and a pocketknife. On the floor was a bar for locking the steering wheel that had its key in it. She popped the hood and searched for hiding places, looked beneath the truck and under the seats, but found nothing.
She searched the garage, but found nothing else that was of interest. There could be more, she thought. But then she realized where it might be, if there was anything. Nick Bauermeister had worked at a storage facility.
Jane left the garage, closed the door, and made her way across the dark field and along the road to the gas station to retrieve her car. She got in and drove along Telephone Road, then stopped after a mile, checked her printed sheets to be sure she had remembered the address correctly, and went on.
When she reached Box Farm Personal Storage it was after 4:00 am. As she drove by she studied the complex. A seven-foot chain link fence with four strands of barbed wire strung along the top enclosed it. Inside were four long, low buildings, each consisting of nothing but a double row of storage bays, one after another. There was also a two-story building, which seemed to have smaller storage bays on the ground floor and an office with big windows on the second floor. In one of them she could see a man sitting at a desk. She caught a glimpse of a row of television monitors on the wall above him. That meant there were security cameras mounted on the eaves of the buildings or on the light poles above the parking lot.
She passed without stopping. When she reached the outskirts of the town of Akron she found an empty carport in a large apartment complex, parked her car inside, and went to sleep.
At six the sun woke her, and she drove to the business section, where she found a diner that seemed to have the right number of customers. She took a booth near the back, sat where she could face the rear wall, and ate breakfast while she thought about what she had seen during the night. At seven she drove back past Chelsea Schnell’s small farmhouse. As Jane drove past she saw that the same lights were on in the windows, and nothing else had changed, so she drove another half mile and parked her car off the road. She walked back and stationed herself in a thicket of saplings beneath the tall maples at the rear of the field behind the house.
The car that brought Chelsea Schnell home at noon was a new Range Rover. As it turned off the highway onto the long gravel drive to the house, Jane studied what she could see of the driver. He was a man in his early forties. He drove up to the front porch and got out to let Chelsea out of the passenger side. She was wearing a fancy black dress and high heels that seemed wrong for this time of day. She took a set of keys from her purse and unlocked the door, and the man followed her in.
Jane moved in closer until she could read the license plate, then moved in close enough to take a picture with her phone. She put it away, and then moved to the side of the house, where she couldn’t be as easily seen from the street, and then to the back. As she ducked to cross under one of the rear windows, she heard voices. She stopped to keep from making noise or having one of them look out the window and see her. The voices stopped, and then she heard something else. There was a squeaky sound, slow at first, and then a bit louder. Could it be?
She moved her body close to the wall, slowly raised herself, put one eye to the corner of the window then away almost instantly, and ducked down. She had seen enough to know that it was time to go. Neither of the people inside the bedroom would be looking out the window very soon, because they were on the bed having sex.
Jane made her way to the back, where there were trees and bushes to hide her. She walked a course parallel to the road, and didn’t alter it until she came to her car. As she left, she looked at her watch. It was half past noon.
Jane drove to Interstate 390, took it north to the Rochester Inner Loop and got off on Main, then drove to her hotel and parked in the underground garage. She put the lanyard that held her badge for the medical records management convention around her neck, carried her folder under her arm, and took the elevator upstairs to the lobby, where there were dozens of other men and women with convention badges coming in or out of the hotel restaurants and the business center. She took a second elevator to her floor, went into her room, hung the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door latch, closed the door, and bolted it.
It was strange to be in this room. All of this time she had been within seventy miles of her home and her husband, but she was in hiding. She couldn’t do the things she needed to and then go home and sleep in her own bed. She couldn’t risk leading someone back to the McKinnon house. Those things had all been clear from the beginning. But what bothered her at that moment was that she couldn’t be there because Carey would ask her questions, and she would have to lie to him, have to avoid letting him see her come and go, and argue with him about what she was doing. If she argued this time she couldn’t say that what she’d been doing was legal, or that it was safe, or that it was nearly over. It was none of those things.
She took off her clothes, showered, and then went to bed. She slept from two o’clock until nine in the evening, and got up still thinking about what she had learned during the night and morning. She wondered how Jimmy was doing, and whether he was still safely hidden. She knew she had to trust him, to assume that he had the sense to follow her instructions long enough for her to find out what was going on.
At ten she was dressed in a black shirt and black jeans and ready to go out in the dark again. She went down to the garage, retrieved her car, and drove to the Tonawanda Reservation. She pulled over to the side of the road near Ellen Dickerson’s house and walked along the shoulder. She listened to the sound of her feet crunching the first sycamore leaves to fall to the ground. It was still summer, but the sycamores always seemed to drop a few green leaves bigger than the spread of a big man’s hand about now, reminders that summer was not permanent, and someday winter would come back. Jane felt an increasing sense of reluctance and trepidation at dropping in like this at the home of the clan mother of the Wolf clan. What she was doing felt presumptuous.
She stepped up the four steps to the wooden porch and the front door opened. Ellen Dickerson was standing in the doorway wearing blue jeans and a loose shirt with the light behind her and her face in shadow. “Hello, Jane.” There was no surprise in her voice, no real emotion except patience.
Seeing her there already waiting made Jane pause for a second before she came forward the rest of the way. Maybe it had been a coincidence. Maybe Ellen had seen the light from Jane’s car and wondered who had come, or heard her walking on the crisp dry leaves. Maybe she had heard her feet on the porch and already been near the door. “Hello, Ellen,” she said. “I’m sorry to come without calling.”
“We’ve been waiting.” She came out onto the porch and closed her front door be
hind her, leaving them both in shadow. She stood by the railing and stared up the road into the darkness beyond Jane’s car, then in the other direction. When she was satisfied, she said, “Come in. We’ll talk.”
They went inside, and Jane followed her through the small, neat living room into the kitchen. Ellen was as tall as Jane and a bit broader, with a face that had obviously been striking and beautiful when it was young, and had aged without softening. Her face had a way of making anyone in her presence try to read what she was feeling and fail. Her expression was calm, dignified, attentive, motherly at the same time—but not the doting sort of mother, the stern sort. Her piercing black eyes had a clarity and intensity that must have made some people want to look away, but made Jane want to look into them more deeply.
Ellen said, “Things aren’t going as well as you’d like.”
“No,” said Jane. “I still haven’t been able to do what you asked.”
“Tell me what you can.”
Jane said carefully, “Jimmy is living in a small town in another state. He has what he needs to live comfortably for a while.”
“Thank you, Jane. That’s what we’d hoped you would do.”
“But it isn’t what you asked. It’s only a way of delaying what’s going to happen, not preventing it. Jimmy is still in danger.”
“From whom?”
“That’s where the problem begins,” Jane said. “There are so many people involved in this that I’m not sure yet what really happened.”
“We know about the men who are waiting for Jimmy in jail.”
“Yes,” Jane said. “They could be some of Nick Bauermeister’s friends or relatives. But Jimmy and I were being hunted and chased in Cleveland by men who looked and acted like something else. One of them fired a gun into the side of our car. The man who lied about selling Jimmy the murder weapon has got at least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of new toys—TV, car, and Jet Ski, at least.” Jane went on with her recitation. She had seen the girl the newspapers referred to as the murder victim’s fiancée having sex with an older man in the bed she must have shared with the victim. And the murdered man had been a burglar, had probably been stealing from his partners, and hidden the loot he’d kept from them in his basement. “These are all people who benefited from the death of Nick Bauermeister or had motives not to want him around.”
