Cruelest Month

by Aaron Stander

  “I should come out then.”

  “No. Listen. I appreciate all you’ve done, but this is mine. You can visit after everything is over. We’ll walk the beaches, drink wine, watch the sunset, the things couples do. But right now, just keep giving me the support. No more lectures. I’m going to figure this out and nail him myself one way or another.”

  42

  “How did your interview with Ms. Rood go?”

  “Just give me a few more minutes,” Ray said, his eyes not moving off the screen. “Where is Simone?”

  “She’s at home.”

  “All this time?”

  “I have a guest; flew in last night. He’s looking after her.”

  “Sorry,” said Ray.

  “It’s okay,” said Sue. “He needs to know what I do and the hours I work.”

  “Sure that’s a good thing?”

  “I was asking about your conversation with Sally Rood.”

  “I just posted my notes. You can look at the video when you have time. In short, she’s not a morning person, and she has a certain ambivalence about law enforcement, especially when she’s pulled from the arms of her lover at an early hour.”

  “I can relate to that,” said Sue, giving Ray a wry smile.

  “I may be wrong, but I don’t think she’s involved in Moarse’s death. I believe her when she says that she didn’t come north again after we stopped following her. And we can easily check on her alibi if need be.

  “Did you learn anything about Moarse that we don’t already know?”

  “He didn’t like driving his Jeep during daylight hours.”

  “Imagine that,” Sue laughed. “Hasn’t had an operator’s permit in years. Didn’t bother to update the tags on his Jeep, either.”

  “Why should he?” said Ray. “Just a waste of good money.”

  “I wonder how common that is?”

  “More common than either one of us would want to admit. If you took a reasonable amount of care—not that most of these characters are particularly skilled at taking care of anything—I’m sure you could get away with it for years. But back to your initial question. Moarse, according to Rood, was some kind of builder who was crashing financially and had a major drinking problem. The one thing she told me that might prove to be of interest is an old friend Moarse reconnected with by the name of Ricky.”

  “Last name?”

  “She doesn’t think she ever heard it. But Moarse told her they were working a big deal.”

  “Capone?”

  “No, no Capone. Never heard of it.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Well, almost. This Ricky has a large, light-colored car, perhaps an SUV that might be a Cadillac or Mercedes. No hint as to plate number or state.”

  “Can we have the road patrol guys pull over every large SUV and ask the driver if his friends call him Ricky?” asked Sue.

  “Only in Arizona,” said Ray. He sighed, stood up, and stretched. “I can tell we’re both way too tired given the direction of the humor. Let’s do some planning.” He lowered the whiteboard and retrieved the container with the markers.

  “First, I’d like to see if we could establish the fact that Moarse was the killer of Vincent Fox. I’ll contact Fox’s daughter and see if she’s ever heard of him. We can also look through the surveillance tapes from the casino to see if he was lurking around the day Fox made the big hit. And, of course, did he act alone or did he have accomplices?

  “Second, we need to know why he was murdered. Is it connected with the Fox crime or something else? We’re going to have to find out a lot more about Jim Moarse.

  “And third, the phantom 911 call. Someone was watching this crime go down. They wanted to make sure we were directed to the murder scene. So why aren’t they coming in to tell us about it?”

  “Okay,” said Sue. “This is how I would like to go forward. For the first item on your list, proving Moarse killed Fox: I’ll need to establish that the computer we found in Fox’s house actually belonged to Fox. That’s the easy part. Then I’ll search Fox’s house for evidence that placed Fox there or connects Moarse to his abduction. That’s the hard part.”

  “Approach it like an archeologist, try to stay with the upper layers.”

  “Ha ha. We also have to bring his Jeep in and go through the interior. I think we’ll get a match on the tires with the casts I made at Fox’s house. Just with that, there’s a lot of work to be done before we move onto the second part: why. I don’t even know what to say about your number 3.”

  “Give me some time lines,” said Ray.

  “The day’s going away, and I’m very tired. I’d like to start on the house tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” said Ray. “It can wait till Monday.”

  “Tomorrow, not early, by about noon. The area’s got to stay secured until I’m done. Let’s run one road patrol at night and two during the day. That will give us someone every shift to protect the scene.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I could have some help…. Brett, he should be learning this stuff. We’ll need at least two days, maybe more for the house, barn, sauna, a good look around the property, and to process the Jeep. We’ll have to cover his shifts with people working overtime.”

  Ray nodded in agreement. “Until Monday afternoon?”

  “No, there’s too much to do. How about Tuesday afternoon?”

  “Tuesday morning is better. How about your weekend guest?”

  “I’ll see how he and Simone get on. She has a really good sense of character. In fact, she might save me a lot of trouble.”

  43

  Mackenzie was back in front of the screen, caught in another unrecoverable yawn.

  “You still tired from the weekend?” Ken Lee asked.

  “No, I’m okay. I slept about 12 hours last night and then got up early and went to TC for yoga. Good instructor. I hope I’m in that good of shape when I get to be 60-something. Ken Lee, I apologize about getting pissy yesterday.”

  “No problem, I understand. Things have been….”

  “Here’s what’s going on,” Mackenzie cut him off, “I don’t know what to do now. I’m back to not having a plan. I’ve made a couple of passes of the Moarse property. Looks like the local sheriff’s department is securing the scene night and day. On my last drive by, there were three vehicles, probably the crime scene team. The garage door was open with no Jeep in sight. They must have moved it to another location. I wonder what that’s all about?”

  “Who knows what kind of stuff Moarse might have been into. I imagine the cops are trying as hard to figure this out as we are. And by now they’ve found the phantom phone. Bet that’s a real puzzler. What did you tell me the last major caper was up there—someone chopping down cherry trees? Lots of them?”

  “Yeah, during the late winter. Made both the paper and TV. Some kind of revenge thing.”

  “How’s the media covering this one?”

  “Nothing yet. Not a peep. Local news seems to shut down during the weekend. Actually, I didn’t turn the TV on this morning, and there’s nothing in the paper. I imagine the sheriff’s department does a regular press briefing. I’ll watch the local news tonight.”

  “I’m going to say it again. This would be a good time to say sayonara to all those pines and lakes you’ve been telling me about and get back to civilization. Let the local heat figure it out. Look at the facts. First, you’re breaking the law. You’ve observed a murder and not brought that information to the police. Second, Sabotny now knows that someone is watching him.”

  “And I’ll say it again, too. He doesn’t know who I am. I’m invisible.”

  “Are you? How invisible? You live in a little village. You’re new. In spite of all your precautions, people notice.”

  “Like who?”

  “There’s the mailman.”

  “I get my mail in Traverse City or electronically,” she answered.

  “Yeah, but the mailman drives by. He needs something for h
is brain to chew on as he covers his route. He notices the house is occupied. He sees you getting in the car. He wonders why you don’t get mail. He mentions it to his favorite waitress in town. She works at that cafe you go to; she recognizes you, and that night she tells her boyfriend…. Want me to go on? How about the UPS and Fedex drivers, the garbage man, the cop on the road patrol? How about the bag boy at the grocery who also sees what kind of car you climb into when he’s out collecting carts? How about the guys who upgraded your security system?”

  “We hired a downstate company,” she countered.

  “What if they farmed out some of the work to a local contractor?”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” Mackenzie replied.

  “Yeah, but you don’t know for sure. You don’t know anything for sure. I’m saying, you may not be seeing any of these folks, but some of them are seeing you. And now that Sabotny is tipped off, he’s trying to figure out who is watching him. Is it one of his neighbors? Someone with a view of his house?”

  “Dozens of people have the same view I do.”

  “And are all those houses occupied?”

  “Well, no. Not during the winter.”

  “So, he scans the environment and says to his old friend, the mailman, ‘Hey Herb, anyone new living along the shore on West Bay or up there on the hill?’ And Herb says something like, ‘No one permanent I’m delivering to.’ So Sabotny asks, ‘You haven’t heard about anyone new, maybe a woman in one of those expensive lakefront properties?’ And Herb thinks for a moment or two and says, ‘Well my brother-in-law put a dish on one of those trophy houses for some single woman. Says she must have big bucks.’”

  “Ken Lee, that’s all just fantasy. You have a great imagination.”

  “Yeah, that’s fantasy, but that’s the way things go down. Sabotny’s probably got a network of friends among the locals. Right now he’s looking in every direction. For Sabotny, this is a life-or-death situation. He’s on full alert. You’ve been so totally fixated on him, you haven’t seen anyone else, but lots of people have seen you.”

  “So what do you think I should do?”

  “You know what I think. You reject that straight up. So I want you to go on full alert. Make sure your security system is working and always turned on. Keep weapons within easy reach when you’re at home. Any time you leave the house, go fully armed. Don’t be surprised if someone tries to run you off the road. Watch out for a car jacking. Carry that satellite uplink on you at all times so I know where you are. Hit the panic button if you’re in trouble.”

  “How can I go to yoga?”

  “You know the answer.”

  “So now I’m a captive?”

  “The game totally changed Saturday night. Maybe it isn’t a checkmate, but it’s close. You’re going to have to figure out how to escape.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Exactly what I’ve been saying over and over. Pull you, and put three big, ugly ex-Seals in your place. Figure out a way to put some heat on Sabotny. Get him to do something desperate and stupid, then figure out how to get justice for your brother.”

  44

  Simone walked into Ray’s office, the end of her leash in her mouth, the remainder dragging behind. Sue followed, armed with a folder and her ubiquitous coffee mug. Ray spent several moments attending to Simone, collecting enthusiastic kisses as he scratched the ears of the wiggling terrier.

  “How did your weekend work out?”

  “We sort of had dates around the edges of my work. He took me out for dinner Saturday, then we went to a movie. I don’t think I made it past the opening credits. Sunday morning I took him for a forced walk across the top of Sleeping Bear before I went back to the Moarse place.”

  “It was raining cats and dogs all morning,” said Ray.

  “Yup, but he didn’t complain too much. And I made him a special dinner Sunday night.”

  “Yes?”

  “Stuff you taught me. Salmon with a caper sauce. I cooked the fish on the grill just like you do. And I served salad with a baguette that I resuscitated with a few minutes in the oven. I had a good bottle of Vouvray chilled, and topped the meal off with thimbleberry jam on Ben & Jerry’s vanilla, sort of an up-north touch.”

  “The jam or the Ben….”

  “Here, check this out,” said Sue, sliding a plastic bag containing a rectangular object the size of a cigarette pack in his direction.

  “What is it?” He held the bag up to his face and inspected the device, olive drab in color with a hard plastic exterior.

  “It’s the phantom phone,” said Sue.

  “Really? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “Neither have I. But I verified that it’s the source of the 911 signal.” She put her finger on the bag. “Notice there are two buttons on the front. You have to push them in sequence to turn the thing on, the small one first and the large one next. It looks as if it was designed so it couldn’t be accidentally activated.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Behind a pile of firewood next to the sauna.”

  “Why would anyone go to all that trouble to have a device like this fabricated when old cell phones are a dime a dozen?”

  “My question, exactly,” said Sue. “I sent photos to a guy I’ve taken workshops from at the Bureau. I asked the same question.”

  “Any response?”

  “Well, yes, I also phoned. I wanted to make sure he still remembered me. So, Nigel, that’s the guy, English sounding name, but I don’t think he is, or at least he doesn’t sound like it, said that’s a new one on him, and he’s a specialist in this kind of exotic stuff. He wants me to send it on to him when we’re done so he can have a look. His speculation is that someone built a super 911 phone with quality components to make sure it did what was needed. He said it probably has an excellent GPS function and a high output cell signal. He really liked the two button arrangement.”

  “Any prints?”

  “No, and I didn’t expect any, either.”

  “We’ve talked about this already, but what’s going on here?” asked Ray.

  “Seems pretty clear that the person who put the phone in place was either watching Moarse or the perp who did him.”

  “Or perhaps, both,” said Ray.

  “There’s that.”

  “Did this Nigel have any idea about the source? Maybe we could trace it to the person that way.”

  “He said this kind of device comes out of boutique shops, ones that build specialty equipment for corporate security. They do one-offs and small production runs. He said you won’t find this on the Internet. Someone probably dropped a few K or more to get a product with this kind of functionality.” Sue looked across at Ray. “And I take it no one has come forward looking for their non-phone?”

  “No.”

  “How about the press?”

  “I did a briefing this morning. No one showed. Here’s the release I put out,” he passed her a single piece of paper.

  “So Moarse died under suspicious circumstances, and his name is being withheld pending notification of kin. How are you doing on that?”

  “Everything I’ve done is in the file,” Ray tapped the aluminum cover of his laptop. “I have yet to find any relatives. Moarse has no outstanding warrants. We’ve talked about his priors—nothing recent. He’s got a number of civil actions pending against him. Property tax is a year in arrears. We need to do a lot more digging.”

  “Maybe you just need to get the name out there. Make an appeal to the community for help. We might get lucky.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ray. “Will you have the scene processed by tomorrow? The two of us need to…”

  “No way, it will take a month of Sundays to sort through that mess. But your first charge to me was to definitely connect Moarse to Vincent Fox’s death. I’ve got that. The tires on the Jeep match the casts I made at Fox’s house. More importantly,” she said, pushing a photo across to Ray, “look what I found in the back of
the Jeep under the passenger seat.”

  “The boot, the missing right boot. Did it look like it had been hidden?”

  “No, it was just lying there. My guess is Fox’s body was thrown in and his boot caught and was left behind when the body was tossed in the ditch. Moarse didn’t seem to be too good with the details, even something that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.”

  “How about the burned skin on the sauna stove?”

  “I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. The guys at the State Police lab are helping me.”

  “What did you find in the house?” asked Ray.

  “A couple of things. First, I found a copy of Fox’s book.”

  “Where?”

  “It was in the bathroom under a copy of the Northern Express. You’re smiling.”

  “Yes, but I won’t comment. Prints?”

  “Not yet, Ray. I haven’t processed them. Tomorrow.”

  “What else?”

  “This is even more interesting than the phantom cell.” She set a plastic bag containing a worn leather wallet in front of Ray, then two additional plastic bags, one containing a few small denomination bills, the other containing several $100 bills.

  “How many?” asked Ray, looking at the $100s.

  “Five, they were folded and concealed in a separate compartment.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. “And?” said Ray.

  “Same series as Ma French found. Crumpled, but they appear to be uncirculated 100s. So new question, how did that Iraq money end up in Moarse’s wallet? Did you find any service record for him?” asked Sue.

  “No, none.”

  “There have got to be a ton of Iraq war veterans living in this area. How do we get a list?”

  “And even if we could, how do we get enough legs to run this one down?” said Ray.

  45

  Mackenzie sat at her desk, staring at the screen. With her index and middle finger moving slowly across the surface of the Trackpad, she scrolled up the page. Then she dropped her hands in her lap, folded them left over right, and gently swiveled in her chair from side to side, her eyes still fixed on the screen.