AHMM, July-August 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I don't know,” Hannah said. “He's one of those preppy bastards, you know?"

  "Here they are,” the grandmother said.

  Donovan suppressed a sigh. She felt like she had just gotten into a rhythm with Hannah, and the grandmother had interrupted.

  Donovan turned in her chair. A gawky fourteen-year-old boy, all matted brown hair and pimples, stood behind her. The boy's shirt was buttoned wrong, and his face was swollen from crying.

  Beside him stood one of the most startling children she had ever seen. She was ethereal and angelic. When she got older, she would be a stunning beauty.

  No wonder the grandmother wanted custody. That girl alone would be trouble.

  "Thank you, Mrs. Ansara,” Donovan said. “Would you all mind waiting in the other room while I finish talking to Hannah?"

  The grandmother's eyes narrowed, but she led the two younger children out of the kitchen. Donovan could hear them rummaging around in the nearby dining room. They could probably hear every word, but she decided that it didn't matter.

  "It sounds like you didn't like Richard Martin,” Donovan said.

  "God, no.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “He was awful."

  "To you or to everyone?"

  She looked away then, moving the pile of bills with her fingers.

  That movement gave Donovan her answer. The boy had been mean to Hannah, but not to everyone else.

  "I'm not up on the terms,” Donovan said. “By preppy, do you mean that he dressed really well or are you referring to something else?"

  "He was going to go to an Ivy,” Hannah said. “He was a legacy, so he didn't even need SATs. My SATs were the best in my class, and they're not going to be good enough, that's what the guidance counselor said. And he gets a free ride because his parents went."

  It took Donovan another minute to catch up. An Ivy, meaning an Ivy League School. This girl was sixteen and she was already thinking about college? Things were very different from the time Donovan was a teenager.

  "I thought the schools take various things into account,” Donovan said. “Not just SAT scores, but extracurriculars and grades and everything."

  Hannah shrugged that shoulder again. “That's what Mom says. But it doesn't matter now. I'm not going anywhere. I'll either go to Linfield or Portland State. I'm staying with the kids."

  The fact that she had this all thought out within two days had startled Donovan.

  She nodded at the pile of bills. “What are you doing there?"

  "Making sure that with Mom's life insurance, we'll have enough money to finish school and go off to college. Don't worry. I've done this before. I helped Mom when Dad died."

  Donovan's heart twisted. The girl impressed her more than she wanted to think about.

  "I'm getting all the paperwork in order,” Hannah was saying, “so that when I talk to the lawyer, I'll be prepared."

  "Is this what your mother would have wanted?” Donovan asked, and then winced at how patronizing that sounded.

  "I don't know,” Hannah said. “We never talked about it past the insurance and stuff. Mom wasn't that old. She was going to be around for a long time. That's what she said."

  The wobbly voice again. Donovan could almost hear the conversation after the father died.

  Mom, you're not going to die now, are you?

  Of course not, baby. Nothing's going to happen to me.

  Donovan shook it off, and made herself focus on the case. “You said the Martins were strange. You knew the whole family?"

  Hannah's eyes narrowed. “You think they did it, right? That's what the news says."

  "The news people don't know anything,” Donovan said.

  Hannah grunted, then thought, clearly considering what she was going to say. “I only met them once. They were, like, plastic people, you know?"

  Plastic people. Donovan was going to ask for clarification, but she wasn't going to do so directly. Hannah already thought she was a bit slow—and maybe she was. Donovan didn't have children. Obviously, she had lost the knack for talking with them.

  "Where did you meet the family?” Donovan asked.

  Hannah looked away again. “A party."

  "At Richard's house?” Donovan asked.

  Hannah nodded, moving the bills. “That place was so perfect."

  A tear fell, slapping the paper. She shoved the papers out of the way and rubbed her eyes furiously.

  "What do you mean, perfect?” Donovan asked.

  "Everything in the right place,” Hannah said. “Everything was so neat. Mom would've loved it. That's what I remember thinking. Mom would've been so impressed. She always wanted our house to look like that, and it never did."

  Hannah's voice trembled at the end of the sentence. She bit her lower lip, trying to stop tears. When that didn't work, she put a hand over her mouth.

  Donovan looked for Kleenex but didn't see any. Hannah gasped out a sob, then shook her head, and pushed away from the table. She staggered out of the room. She didn't go into the dining room. Instead she vanished up the stairs.

  Donovan sighed. She wasn't going to go after Hannah. Donovan would let Hannah calm down, and maybe talk to her again, particularly if Donovan felt the Martin family belonged on the suspect list.

  Donovan stood slowly, moved the bills around just a little, looking for anything unusual. She didn't see much.

  Then she went into the dining room for her perfunctory questioning of the other two children. It yielded nothing. The grandmother seemed exceptionally clueless about the family she wanted to adopt.

  Donovan didn't like the elderly woman. She wondered if that was reason enough to trust a sixteen-year-old's judgment that the children were better off without the older woman.

  Donovan shook her head, reminding herself that catching the killer was her job. And to that end, the Martin family had caught her attention. No one in the neighborhood had mentioned the Martins had children. No one had said much about the family at all—except that their house had been a showplace, and everyone had been surprised to see the foreclosure notice.

  Donovan was a bit surprised too. Not at the foreclosure—half the planet was losing a home these days—but the mention of the Ivy League school, the talk of legacies, which meant that the Martin family had a long tradition of going to expensive East Coast colleges.

  There must have been money once. Ivy League legacies were usually impressive, prominent people. Donovan had always thought they sent their kids to one of those tony East Coast prep schools, usually a boarding school, instead of a local public high school.

  Had this Richard Martin been lying to Hannah? If so, why?

  Donovan returned to the station with more questions than she expected. Her first task was to track the Martins down. People who got evicted were usually hard to find. They didn't have to give a forwarding address, and they were usually so poor that their credit cards had been canceled before the loss of their home.

  Still, she started through the standard investigatory tools, trying to find the Martins, using their phone records, their credit cards, and any applications they might have made for new utility service.

  Everything she found had been canceled or was in default. The cell phone companies were trying to collect on a three thousand dollar bill, the credit cards had been in default for months, and no one had applied for new electric service or anything else.

  They had three vehicles, but two had been repossessed. The third was an old Chevy van, and it, apparently, was paid for.

  So she started there. She put a flag on the license, hoping that would turn up something. Then she decided to dig into the financials to see what went wrong.

  What went wrong seemed pretty mundane. The Martins lived at the edge of their means for years, juggling the mortgage, the cars, and the unbelievable credit card bills. They spent every penny they had plus.

  Gary Martin, the husband and father, worked as some kind of investment counselor at one of the downtown Portland firms. Two years before anyone was
talking about economic meltdowns, the firm let him go, though nothing had gone wrong at the firm or in the local economy—at least nothing that she could find.

  So far as she could tell, Martin never got another job. His credit card bills and his cell phone records told a familiar story: he went to job seminars and get-rich-quick seminars, often buying the materials. He called job service lines and talked to job counselors, but nothing seemed to pan out.

  The financial troubles started about six months in. The family didn't slow down spending, but they started skating bills, paying one this month and a different one that month. Irene Martin had a job too—a fashion consultant at a local department store—but it didn't pay a quarter of her husband's wages. And when the economy got worse, her job disappeared as well.

  Both of them were unemployed, unable to afford their lifestyle, and apparently unable (or unwilling) to get some kind of help.

  Nothing in their job history gave the Martins the kind of tech savvy that justified a smart house. Donovan dug into their education history. Gary Martin had been a liberal arts major at his “Ivy,” Princeton. His wife hadn't graduated from a real college, but from a school of fashion design.

  So Donovan called Gary's former employer. Once she got past the “we don't give that information out” response to why Gary Martin left his position, she got her answers.

  Gary Martin had been skimming money off his clients for years, maintaining the house and the lifestyle not on his salary, but on his salary plus all he could steal. Rather than charge him with embezzlement, the firm didn't pay him his vacation or sick leave when he left, using that money to repay the investors.

  The firm also didn't prosecute because they didn't want to publicize the fact that they had been victims of one of their own employees.

  "Of course,” the woman in the personnel department told Donovan, “we also didn't give him any recommendations. It's hard to get a comparable job when your former employer refuses to discuss you or your work."

  She said that with just a bit of glee, leading Donovan to realize that the firm had gotten its revenge, mostly in preventing Martin from ever working again.

  "Did he do a lot with computers?” Donovan asked.

  "A little,” the woman said. “The trades and funds were managed online."

  "Did he need a lot of technical expertise to use that equipment?” Donovan asked.

  "No,” the woman said.

  "Did you ever see any evidence of tech savvy from Martin?” Donovan asked.

  "No,” the woman said. “A bit of tech phobia, but that was normal for our traders. Every time we upgrade, they freak out. They're into the markets and money, not into learning new computer programs."

  Donovan nodded. She asked the same questions of Irene Martin's former boss, and got similar answers.

  "Do you have any idea,” she asked Irene's former boss, “why the Martins would have bought a smart house?"

  "Oh,” the boss said, “that was for the children. They were going to be the next Bill Gates. She thought they were brilliant."

  "Did she mention which child in particular was brilliant with computers?” Donovan asked.

  "Oh, they both were,” the boss said. “We even called them in one afternoon when we had a glitch in our system and we couldn't reach Tech Support. The son got us back up in no time, and the daughter put in some kind of fail-safe so we wouldn't have the same problem again."

  "I thought these kids were still in high school,” Donovan said.

  "The daughter wasn't quite twelve when she helped us,” the former boss said. “We had to pay her off the books. But it was because of those kids that we kept Irene as long as we did. We let her go when we no longer had a choice."

  When Donovan hung up from that call, she was frowning. The kids? She couldn't imagine children setting up bombs that sophisticated. Molotov cocktails, yes. Some dynamite with a detonator, maybe. But not something that tapped into a house's computer system.

  She had just moved from the Martins to the developer when Neygan sat down at his desk.

  "You got anything?” she asked him.

  "A headache,” he said. “I don't ever want to look at bomb components again."

  She didn't want to talk to families ever again, but she didn't complain about it.

  "What did you figure out?” she asked, trying not to be annoyed.

  "I didn't figure out anything,” he said. “The Bomb Squad now confirms that there were two devices. They don't know a lot about the first one, except that it was smaller than the second."

  "And the other device?” Donovan asked.

  "It was triggered off-site. Someone actually had to push a button or something to make it explode. No way it could've gone off on its own."

  Donovan rubbed her nose. Her eyes were tired, and she was getting a headache too. “I'd think some off-site trigger would give us a trail to the bomber."

  "You'd think,” Neygan said. “I got Computer Crimes on it. They've already traced everything to an Internet café in Sun River."

  "Sun River?” Donovan said.

  "Don't ask me,” Neygan said. “They don't know where the doer actually was, because you can route stuff through other computers. All I know is that it happened off-site and our doer was sitting there like a spider in a web, watching its prey work its way into the deathtrap."

  "You're mixing metaphors again,” Donovan said, as she pulled the file she had made on the developer. He didn't look very computer savvy either.

  Then she realized what Neygan had said.

  "The doer was watching these people?” she asked.

  "That we do know. There were cameras everywhere. This sick twist waited until the person in the kitchen got close, and then set off that device."

  "You're sure about this,” Donovan said. “The doer watched."

  "Probably from the time the team came in the door. The Bomb Squad isn't sure if the doer waited until they split up and got close to the devices or what. The squad still isn't even sure if there were more devices in that house, y'know, waiting for someone to get close."

  "This is targeted murder, then,” Donovan said.

  "How do you figure?” Neygan said.

  "If the doer watched the victims move through the house, then he could choose whether or not to push that button."

  Neygan frowned. “I hadn't thought of that."

  "I was just assuming these were random victims,” Donovan said.

  "We all were,” Neygan said.

  "But those bombs could have gone off when the sheriff evicted the family or when the city inspectors came in or when the lender's representative walked through the house. There were probably countless people who could have died in those explosions."

  "We don't know that,” Neygan said. “We don't know the bombs were there then."

  He was right; they didn't know. But it was probable that the bombs had been planted before that lockbox went on the building. But probable meant Donovan was making an assumption. Probable began that slippery slope to the right theory, but not enough proof to make an arrest, let alone a conviction.

  "Maybe that's something we can ask the Bomb Squad,” she said. “Maybe they can tell how long the bombs were there."

  She doubted it, though. Unless the materials used inside the bombs could degrade, they could have been in those spots for years. Or weeks. Or hours.

  There was no real way to know.

  Neygan's expression hadn't changed as she said all of this. She wasn't even sure he had heard her.

  "You're saying that the doer waited for those two people to go into the house.” Neygan tapped his forefinger against his upper lip. “I thought no one but the bank knew they were going in."

  "So far as I know, that's right,” Donovan said.

  "You're saying someone from the bank killed them?” Neygan asked.

  Donovan shook her head. “I'm just wondering if the bomber was waiting for one of those two people to show up."

  "How would he have known e
ither of them was going to be there?"

  She looked up at Neygan. “That's the question, isn't it? If we know the answer to that, we know the answer to everything."

  * * * *

  Donovan drove to the Ansara house. She brought Neygan along even though he didn't want to meet the family.

  They arrived at the Ansara house as the streetlights were coming on. Donovan could see the family through the dining room windows. The boy faced the street, his head bowed. He picked at his food. His beautiful younger sister was stirring the food on her plate like she was making soup.

  Hannah ate deliberately, as if she had to think about each bite. The grandmother held a cup of coffee before her chest like a shield.

  "Oh, I'm not going in there,” Neygan said as he got out of the car and looked into the window.

  "Yes, you are,” Donovan said. “But you're going to let me talk and you're going to listen."

  "Because?"

  "Because I need someone else's interpretation, to see if I'm completely off base."

  Neygan sighed. “We have Computer Tech working on this case. They'll figure it out. We don't need one of your hunches."

  Donovan's hunches were famous. They were always right, but they were almost impossible to prove in court. Over the years, she'd gotten smarter about them. Now, she at least tried to get some evidence to back them up.

  She didn't respond to Neygan's complaint. Instead, she marched up the front steps and knocked on the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see movement in the dining room.

  The grandmother was going to answer the door again.

  This time, Donovan was ready for her. Donovan pulled open the screen as the grandmother opened the door.

  "Mrs. Ansara,” Donovan said, “I have a few more questions for Hannah. It'll only take a minute."

  By the time she had finished talking, she was already inside the entry. She strode down the hall to the dining room. Behind her, she could hear Neygan apologizing, then introducing himself. Donovan didn't wait for him.

  As she walked into the room, the boy—Graden?—looked up. The younger sister stopped stirring her food, but Hannah was the one who spoke.

  "You know anything?” she asked.

  "I'm not sure.” Donovan felt awkward looming over the kids while food was on the table. The place smelled of roast beef and gravy. She pulled one of the extra chairs away from the wall, and sat near Hannah.