by Thomas Perry
As he drove it away, he began thinking about money. He was going to need more money soon, and the person who owed him some was the Broker. Even if the customer was giving the Broker problems, they were the Broker’s problems, not Moreland’s. Whether the broker got paid or not, Moreland had money coming. If he had to, he would go take it. But that was a problem, because Holcomb had never told Joey the Broker’s real name or his address. Maybe it was time to go visit Holcomb’s ghost.
21
Till was in Boston police headquarters. The man across the table from him was a homicide detective named Mullaney. Beside him was Detective Rafferty from Vice, but Till knew he had been included only to give Till a false sense of security. If Till showed signs of being uncooperative or defensive, they’d try some other method.
“So let’s go through this guy’s description again,” Mullaney said. “How old is he?”
“He looks about twenty-two or twenty-three to me,” Till said. “But I’ve only seen him through tinted glass in cars moving fast, and once from a distance in Phoenix. He was wearing sunglasses that time. I have a hunch he’s older. Maybe twenty-seven or so.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s definitely young and good-looking, with dark hair that looks kind of wavy. He seems young and slim, in very good shape. But he’s really good at manipulating the escorts he’s lived with.”
“Manipulating them how?”
“They let him live with him. He tells them some story or other, never that he’s a professional killer, of course. They all seem to buy his story, at least as long as he needs them to. He’s also good at killing, and good at disappearing. Those are things that take a while to learn, so I think he’s probably older.”
“But you managed to follow him all the way across the country.”
“He has a really strong preference for strawberry blonds. I noticed that some of the girls wore the same two pieces of diamond jewelry in their escort ads. I got in touch with jewelry companies, designers, stores, even pawnshops in the cities where the girls were killed, then in other cities. They all say the jewelry is custom-made. So whenever I saw an ad with a girl wearing the jewelry, I knew where he had been.”
“What happens if the pattern ends?”
“What usually happens. I’ll lose him for a while.”
Till had been through this many times when he was a cop. After months of studying a killer and learning his habits and quirks, the homicide cops lost him. The killer got scared—scared of himself, in this case. After that he tried to do everything differently. The smart ones simply closed up shop for a while, and waited until all the attention had turned in other directions. The cops got busy hunting other killers, and potential victims stopped looking over their shoulders. Then the killer would come out again.
“You think he’s a contract killer. Who do you think paid for the hit on Luis Salazar?”
“I don’t know. If I were to guess, I would say it was one of the people or groups that he was prosecuting or had sent to prison in Mexico. I would ask the bodyguards who came with him for a list. Then I’d try to find out if any agencies, here or there, have a record of the phone calls between that suspect and anyone in the United States.”
“Yeah, the FBI is working on all that.” He paused. “But you’ve been after this guy for months, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you have any idea how he operates? How does he get the jobs? How does he get paid?”
“I’ve never gotten anywhere on that. The victims are all over the country. They seem to be people you might expect to have enemies, but the police in the cities where I think he’s done jobs haven’t told me anything that forms a pattern. In Phoenix it’s two city councilmen who voted on hundreds of questions a year. In New York it was a rich man who owned an art gallery. None of the victims have anything to do with each other. So I think there’s probably a middleman who takes the contracts and passes them on to the killer.”
“Okay,” said Mullaney. “Any guess on where that middleman would be?”
“None,” Till said. He spoke carefully. “Do you think I could talk to Salazar’s bodyguards and ask them a few questions?”
“Not a chance,” Mullaney said. “You’re not a cop anymore, Till. You have no official standing, and the federal agencies are all waiting in line ahead of you. And unless you’re crazy you’re not going to head for Mexico to look for the client anyway. The best thing you can do is remember some detail that will help us catch the shooter.”
Till said, “I told you everything I knew or suspected yesterday. If it’s useful to you, I’ll stay in Boston as long as you want. But I’m pretty sure he’s left.”
Mullaney said, “You’ve been cooperative. That was nice of you, considering the whole issue of what you were doing discharging illegal firearms in the middle of the city. That’s been made to go away, at least for now.”
“I appreciate that,” Till said. He watched Mullaney for a few seconds as Mullaney brought himself to be reasonable.
“Don’t get me wrong. I took a look at the guy’s car, and I had to admire you for having the balls and the presence of mind to open up on him like that. If it hadn’t been a tricked-out car you’d have killed him, and we could all go home. I guess we know everything from you that we’re going to get. You can go. If I change my mind, I’ll call you. And if I do, I’ll expect you to head for the airport to get back here.”
“I’ll do that,” said Till. “Thanks.” He stood up and shook hands with Mullaney, then with Rafferty.
Rafferty said, “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”
The two left the interrogation room and walked down the hallway. It was lined with office doors so close together that Till thought the rooms must be the size of closets. “Thanks for all your help,” said Till.
“I wish it were going better. I don’t usually get involved in anything like this. My usual interest in these girls is making their business inconvenient enough so they quit. But this guy is really evil.”
“Yeah,” said Till. “He is.” They came to the lobby. “Well, if anything comes up, please give me a call.”
“I will,” said Rafferty.
Till went to his hotel, called the airline, collected his belongings, and then drove his rental car back to the airport. Late tonight, he’d be in Los Angeles. Tomorrow morning he would start over again, looking at ads, calling contacts, and exploring new avenues. There couldn’t be too many .50-caliber rifles around, and there were probably a limited number of places where the Boyfriend could have practiced firing one without having someone notice him. The Boyfriend had lost his car, and would be buying a new one. He would be looking for a new girl.
A week later, Joey Moreland approached Holcomb’s ranch in daylight. He drove up the freeway to Antelope Valley, and then took the smaller road north and east, watching the cars thinning out, the sudden absence of big trucks, which were replaced by pickups. When he turned off onto the second county road he saw that the weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement were more prevalent this year. They generally died off in full summer. A couple of real Southern California hot days were enough to do it. He passed a few rural mailboxes he remembered at the entrances to dirt roads. After another fifteen minutes of driving he made it to the Holcomb mailbox, an oversize galvanized one with a red flag and a rounded top.
Out of curiosity he looked inside it when he got out to open the gate. There were some yellowed ads from stores, but whatever else Holcomb had received by mail must have stopped long ago. He used his pick and tension wrench to open the padlock, swung the wide steel gate open, drove in, and then closed the gate again.
He drove very slowly along the dirt road onto the ranch. He didn’t want to kick up a lot of dust that could be seen from a distance. He was eight or nine miles from the nearest habitation he knew about, but being on Holcomb’s ranc
h made him more careful. Hartmann’s death had been solved at a glance, but Holcomb’s had not. Since Holcomb had been killed and the police had driven all the way out here to see who and what he had been, things might be different now. All Moreland would need would be to come face-to-face with a state cop who had been assigned to see if anyone still came around to Holcomb’s ranch and what he was up to.
He drove with his windows open at the speed of a man walking so he could hear or see anyone on the ranch a few seconds early. As he bounced along the dirt road, he could hear mockingbirds warbling to one another between the low California oak trees. There was a smell coming from the weeds, where wild lantana and goldenrod were swirled by the breeze into a mixture of pollen. He associated that smell with his killing lessons with Holcomb. He had not missed the scent, had not remembered it, but now that he smelled it again he loved it. The smell brought back the days of diving onto the ground, shouldering the .308 rifle, aiming and firing as quickly as possible without moving the brush around him, cycling the bolt and firing again at the distant target Holcomb had stuck on a post. The smell of burned powder and gun oil had mixed with wildflower and weed and dirt, and had made an indelible mark in his memory. When they had gone out at night, sometimes the wind was still and the smells were even stronger because the plants seemed to exhale more heavily into the hot, motionless air.
He stopped a hundred yards before the house and pulled his car in among the twisted trunks of the short, thick oak trees. The canopy of dusty leaves was only five or six feet above his head, but it was dense and almost impervious to the fierce sunshine. His car sat in deep shadow.
Moreland left his suitcase in the trunk, but he took the flashlight he had in the glove compartment. He had his nine-millimeter pistol stuck into the back of his belt under his shirt, but he didn’t reach for it. He walked at a steady, leisurely pace toward Holcomb’s two cinder block buildings, keeping both hands visible in case some future dead man was watching him from a distance. He resisted the temptation to speed up when he got close enough to the bigger cinder block building to relish the idea of being beside it and able to take cover. Instead he scanned the nearby brush and the high hillsides for any movement, and kept listening for sounds—a heavy foot on stony dirt, the slide of metal on metal.
The steel door that Holcomb had installed was still there, the dead bolt locked. He kept walking to the second building, and found that door locked too. There was one more way. When Holcomb had put up these buildings he had dug tunnels. There was one going from under the floor in the main house to the windowless storehouse and workshop. There was also one running from the workshop to the brush at the base of the hillside. Holcomb had said he’d used his small Caterpillar tractor to dig them as three straight trenches seven feet deep. Then he had cut four-by-four braces and set them in concrete every eight feet. Next he’d nailed a layer of four-by eight-foot plywood to roof in the tunnels, covered it with tarpaper, and then pushed the dirt back over the roof. Holcomb said he had put about three feet of dirt over each tunnel.
Moreland walked to the big tangle of brush under the hill, found the area where he had remembered the end of the tunnel; then, using his knife blade, he found the trapdoor. He used his hands and feet to uncover it. He opened it and walked down the incline into the tunnel. He took out the pocket flashlight he had brought and then closed the trapdoor behind him. He had to crouch and walk bent over for about a hundred feet before he came to the ladder. He climbed it and pushed up on the trapdoor. It was heavy, but he wasn’t surprised, because they had always hidden the trapdoor by putting the rug and then the big table over it. It was meant to be an escape route, not a way in. He pushed harder, got the rug to bunch upward into a ridge, and then pushed some more so he could crawl out under it. He slithered out of the rug, and then crawled to the wall and stood up.
In the dim round beam of his flashlight he could see that the police had been thorough. They’d broken open cupboards and toolboxes and gun cabinets and taken everything. He didn’t know why, exactly, except that they had searched for anything that might explain Holcomb’s shooting death, and they had been required by their own policies not to leave guns and boxes of ammunition unguarded. Holcomb had maintained a full arsenal, including pistols, a few assault rifles, and a lot of parts that hadn’t seemed to pertain to any weapon Moreland could see.
Guns weren’t what he had come to find. Somewhere there had to be a piece of paper that Holcomb had intended not to be read by anyone. Holcomb had written things down, even if he had them memorized. There had been padlock combinations, phone numbers, names, addresses. But Moreland knew that finding the piece of paper would not be easy.
Holcomb had been aware that he was exactly the kind of man the authorities most wanted off the streets. He had lived with the possibility that he might be the target of surprise raids, or even an unexplained disappearance, so he had not made either event an easy matter. He’d built his escape tunnels before he’d built his house. He had one steel door on each building, and no windows. He’d had a series of surveillance cameras around the place so he could see what was outside, but those were gone now.
Moreland went over every inch of the storage building and workshop. If there had ever been a piece of paper here the police had taken it. Moreland was beginning to feel hot and sticky. When Holcomb had been here there had always been a ventilation fan running, and most of the time there had been air-conditioning. The power had undoubtedly been turned off after he died.
He wanted to go outside, but he wouldn’t be able to get into the other building from there. The steel doors were locked. He lowered himself back down into the tunnel, pulled the rug to roughly where it had been, and closed the trapdoor. He made his way to the main tunnel that ran past the storage building to the main house. It was only about fifty feet away. As he went he ran his flashlight along the four-by-four braces and the corrugated steel ceilings to be sure they were all still in plumb, and didn’t look as though they might collapse.
He climbed the second ladder and lifted the trapdoor. This one was not as heavy as the first, because all that was over it was the rug. Holcomb had wanted to get out fast if something happened while he was asleep. Moreland searched. He could see that the cops had taken all the paper that they could find in the house. But Holcomb would never put anything this important where cops could find it.
Holcomb had told him, “Keep your biggest secrets in your head. But make sure you also have a place where the little ones are written down—the account numbers, passwords, addresses, and phone numbers of the people you’ll need on the worst day of your life. Because sure as shit, that day is going to come. It’ll only be your last day if you didn’t prepare for it.” He had taught Moreland to keep plenty of cash around, but store the big money in banks in other states under false names. Moreland still had a piece of paper with the little things written on it—account numbers; names he had used; the addresses and phone numbers of people he would want if he was on the run. He had a second copy in a safe-deposit box in a Texas bank.
Holcomb hadn’t needed to do that. His crib sheet would be here on his ranch. Moreland crawled around the floor to look under pieces of furniture, then used the round dining table as a scaffold to stand on. He reached up above the rafters to feel for the paper. Then he climbed down, moved all the furniture back, and went down the trapdoor. He moved along the tunnel back past the ladder to the storage building. Then he imagined the emergency Holcomb was preparing for.
Holcomb would have just been awakened by the sounds outside. Maybe he had even seen the lights under the steel door. He had been too smart to expect to have any hope of defending his little fortress against cops. They never had to give up and go away, and he could never kill them all. He would have taken a wallet, water, and a gun, and gone down into his tunnel.
He imagined Holcomb scuttling along the escape tunnel. He wouldn’t have hesitated or stopped to collect things. He would g
o straight down the tunnel to the end, as Moreland was doing now.
Moreland reached the end of the tunnel, the place where he had come in. He stopped at the foot of the incline where it bent upward. He took out his lock-blade knife, opened it, stared at the walls and the ceiling, and then knelt on the floor. It would be buried under the ground.
He stabbed the dirt again and again. Every six inches he stuck the blade all the way into the ground, then moved deeper into the tunnel and tried again. When he hit something solid below the surface he pulled the knife out and used it to dig. There was a white PVC pipe, about five inches in diameter. He dug it up. There were caps on both ends. He was able to unscrew one end and take off the cap. Inside were a tight roll of cash in hundreds, a compact .45 ACP pistol, a loaded magazine, a knife, and a folded sheet of lined paper.
Moreland carefully unfolded the paper and held his flashlight close to it. There was a list of account numbers, the false names connected with them, some computer passwords, addresses, phone numbers. And there was the phone number he had been looking for. He recognized it as the phone number of the Broker. It was an 800 number, so he had never known where it was located. But beside it was the name Daniel Cowper, and an address in San Mateo, California.
He was grateful to Holcomb for the stack of hundred-dollar bills. After he had killed Kelly in Boston, he had not had a chance to drive back and search her apartment for whatever cash she hadn’t taken with her, so he had arrived in California nearly broke. He put the money in his pockets. He took the .45 pistol and the magazine as keepsakes, and the paper because it was what he had come for. He restored the cap to the PVC pipe and buried it again.
He ducked up through the trapdoor, closed it again, and then pushed the dirt and rocks back over it to hide it. He could feel the fresh air wafting across his face, breathed it in, and tasted it happily. His legs had some spring as he walked back to his car under the oak trees. He was going to meet the Broker.
