The Finders

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  Everyman wouldn’t have tried anything at one of Reid’s classes anyway.

  Why would he when Mason Reid was coming to him?

  In the morning, Everyman would let the staff at the West Washington branch of the Illinois Department of Transportation know about Jake’s father, how the poor man had suffered a massive stroke, how Jake Saunders had flown to Scottsdale to be at his side, and would likely be there as long as it took. And perhaps next week Jake could remote in for some meetings, but, until then, please respect Jake’s privacy. He’d also email that irritating bitch of a cop that he’d found nothing on the Egg River digital—no Denise Nieland, no car with her plate number, no abduction. At nine o’clock, he’d go to his bank and, for all practical purposes, clean it out. Sure, the bank would eventually report the cash amount to the IRS, but he’d be long gone by then and there’d be no Bernt Landvik anywhere to be found before that meant anything to anyone. He could add that eighty-four grand to the hundred and forty grand he kept hidden in his office safe. He’d leave early tomorrow—not unusual for a Friday—and tell his secretary that he had a dentist appointment first thing Monday morning and, based on how he felt, would probably work from home.

  Days would pass and by the time a serious effort was made to find Bernt Landvik, Bernt Landvik would no longer exist.

  Bernt Landvik would have vanished into the ether.

  Everyman knew this day would come. But Landvik’d had a long run.

  Even if he stayed on at IDOT, and acted all shook up over Jake Saunders’s disappearance, the detectives at CPD would dig in. Red flags would run up Detectives Hanson’s and Marr’s flagpoles as well as whatever pole that bitch cop danced around. Inquiries would be made about the timing of Saunders’s disappearance, right after he was instructed to view footage on a certain date out of mile post 62. Others at IDOT would discover the gap in the video recording and inform investigators that Jake Saunders would likely have gone scampering to Senior Director Landvik with the news.

  Eventually, a tow operator would volunteer how Bernt Landvik not only used the IDOT cars and repair vans, which made perfect sense, but, periodically, the senior director would utilize the smallest of the fleet’s tow trucks.

  Yes, it was over for Senior Director Bernt Landvik.

  But it was just beginning for Ted Krause. Ted Krause of the buzz cut and blue eyes. Ted Krause of the beard and mustache and—hell, why not?—silver earring. Ted Krause who could certainly shed a few pounds about his midsection. Ted Krause who’d made a chunk of money when Bitcoin peaked and was bright enough to dump that “thin air” investment before it cratered.

  The world was Ted Krause’s oyster, and Everyman assumed Krause would have a grand old time in Reno or Albuquerque or St. Petersburg.

  Ted Krause preferred warmer climates.

  Ted Krause was raring to go. Up until now, Ted Krause had lived—outside of Bitcoin and a series of banking transactions—inside a box behind the drywall in Bernt Landvik’s rec room.

  But for right now—Everyman stared about the kitchen—he’d have to haul good-old Jake Saunders out to The Pond. What a pain in the ass to do at night. And then he’d have to ventilate his much-loved colleague, repeatedly, with a knife similar to the one he’d given the Champine boy, similar to the one he’d stuck in that old prick Weston Davies’s chest. Everyman would have to do this in order to keep the gases of putrefaction from inflating his subordinate’s body tissue, from making his favorite employee lighter than water, and from making Jake Saunders rise to the surface.

  And Jake Saunders needed to stay put, down there, at the bottom of The Pond, hidden in the murk with the others, all those road-weary travelers he’d met at the various pit stops along the highways and byways—along his prey grounds—in Landvik’s seven years as a senior director at the Illinois Department of Transportation.

  Everyman looked down at his young assistant, at his dented skull, and at the blood puddled on his kitchen floor.

  Christ, he’d have to use bleach.

  Everyman was going to miss Jake Saunders.

  And he was going to miss the Illinois Department of Transportation. He had full access to IDOT vans for repairs or replacements to be made at the various sites, full access to a string of IDOT cars from which to select for the monthly trips to the Hanley building in Springfield, and … best of all … full access to the IDOT tow trucks used by the tow and recovery operators.

  One of the perks of upper management was how those down the totem pole—the tow operators—didn’t come to him with any questions. If he borrowed one of the smaller tow trucks—instead of using a van on a repair run at a rest area facility—so be it. There were more than enough vehicles to go around in the back parking lot.

  And if Senior Director Landvik took the tow truck home after a late-night repair—no big deal, as long as he returned it first thing in the morning. He got along great with the tow operators. Hell, Bernt—call me Bernie—Landvik was one of the guys; he bought the supervisors cases of their favorite beers every Christmas and on the Fourth of July.

  IDOT vehicles were a symbol of trust. The general public utilizing the facilities felt quite at ease spotting an IDOT van on a dark night or an IDOT tow truck during an unoccupied weekday. Rest stop guests wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to spot an IDOT vehicle parked on the walkway by the backdoor … or slowly cruising the nature walks. And IDOT tow trucks reassured visitors whose cars or minivans had the misfortune of breaking down that there was help nearby.

  And of course you can trust the nice man from the Illinois Department of Transportation, even offer to lend him a hand if he needs help carrying a box out of his van or help in grabbing something from out of the back storage room.

  Everyman took his laptop with him on these trips, so he could block any potential viewers of any rest areas he frequented in his off hours. And Everyman made sure he deleted his presence off any digital recordings as soon as he’d vacated the sites.

  And Everyman always brought the IDOT vehicles back cleaner than when he’d taken them out.

  It was only the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 51

  “It’s too flimsy, Mace. We can’t run to Hanson and Marr with Vira barking inside a car and you recognizing Landvik’s stance in the IDOT hallway,” Kippy said. “Body posture ain’t probable cause.”

  I replied, “It was more an attitude or demeanor in Landvik’s stance that brought me back to Gomsrud Park. And Vira’s snarling was her coming down off a red alert after I left Landvik at his car and got you on the cell phone.”

  “I know.” Kippy added, “And Hanson and Marr might give you the time of day or they might think you’ve got PTSD.”

  We sat at a table outside a busy Starbucks in Batavia—the suburb in which IDOT Senior Director Bernt Landvik lived. Kippy had a large dark; I had a small with cream. Vira had a medium water in a paper bowl—no cream—and a sliver of Kippy’s blueberry scone.

  “I don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “I know, Mace. I was shaky when you first called, but two things swayed me over. First, guess what the Illinois Department of Transportation has at their beck and call?”

  “Free coffee?”

  “That, too, and a fleet of motor vehicles, repair vans, and tow trucks.”

  I recalled our brainstorming on how our guy would move both his and the victim’s car and said, “You think Landvik’s got access to all that.”

  “He’s an executive in the Chicago branch,” Kippy reminded me. “You’re the one who told me he’s got a corner office.”

  “Shit,” I said. “That works.”

  “Driving an IDOT tow truck or repair van is like a cloak of invisibility. And if that’s not good enough, Landvik gets to manipulate the digital recordings—delete any portions that involve him—and he knows it all goes bye-bye in sixty days if nothing is triggered, if no one raises a fuss.”

  “The fox guarding the henhouse,” I said. “What was the second thing th
at swayed you?”

  “I Google Earthed Landvik’s address. He’s in a private farmhouse on the ass end of Batavia, where the suburb ends and the countryside and woodland and bog kicks in.”

  “His lair.” I remembered Officer Wabiszewski giving me shit about the use of that word. “Where he does his thing.”

  Kippy’s phone buzzed. She answered and spoke for several seconds before tapping off.

  “That was Wabs. Landvik just pulled into IDOT,” she said. “Time to go.”

  CHAPTER 52

  The first thing Everyman did was grab himself a Dr Pepper—it’s not just for breakfast anymore—from the refrigerator at the coffee station outside his office.

  Second thing, after dropping his duffel bag and sitting behind his desk, with his office door open—Landvik always kept the door open—he texted the cell phone numbers Officer Gimm and Mason Reid had provided, sending them the following message: Jake and I tag-teamed the Egg River digital recording. No sighting of Ms. Nieland or anyone who looked like her DMV picture. No Kia Sorento with those plate numbers. No nefarious activity. Sorry. Bernie Landvik.

  Third, Everyman dug out the cards he’d collected from that first day—when he and Jake Saunders had presented on IDOT’s surveillance program at the police headquarters building on South Michigan—and sent a slightly more formal response of the same message to the email addresses of Detectives Hanson and Marr in addition to Officers Gimm and Wabiszewski.

  The fourth thing Everyman did was send out a department-wide email regarding Jake Saunders’s father—how he’d suffered a massive stroke—and how Jake had flown to Arizona to be with him in his time of need. Everyman further instructed that any questions in need of Jake’s input or signature should be run past him instead.

  All that busy work out of the way, Everyman grabbed the duffel and headed into his office closet to access the digital safe. It was a fire-resistant twenty-four inches by twenty inches—the cost of which had been absorbed into his annual budget several years earlier—thank you, taxpayers. And though the safe did in fact contain an official document or two, a handful of work-related flash drives, and office keys for conference rooms he never used, there were only two items of interest to him in these the final days of Bernt Landvik.

  Everyman tapped in the code numbers of his birth date—his true birth date, not Landvik’s—and the door to the safe popped open.

  First and foremost he stuffed the hundred and forty grand he’d secreted over the years—bigger paychecks without investing in a 401(k) plan he’d never see—into the duffel bag. The stacks of hundred-dollar bills fit neatly, with plenty of room for the eighty thousand from his savings account and the four extra grand from checking he’d be withdrawing from his bank about an hour from now.

  This stash of cash plus the minor Bitcoin fortune would assure Ted Krause the greatest of comforts as he carefully plotted the next chapter of his life.

  Everyman paused only a second before retrieving the second item of interest. He handled the weapon carefully, placed it on top of the cash and zipped the duffel shut. It was an ESEE-6P-B fixed high-carbon-steel-blade knife with a 5.75-inch cutting edge. Razor sharp, and no fucking around with stainless steel.

  It could do—would do—serious damage.

  Everyman started back to his desk when his iPhone began playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. He knew immediately what that meant; it was the alert notification he’d set for the motion-activated security cameras—his hidden motion-activated security cameras—that he’d set up at crucial points about his rural parcel of land in Batavia, not unlike the way he’d set up the rest stop facility surveillance for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

  Everyman tapped to open his video app. Of the six video squares on display, one indicated activity—two figures stood on his front porch. He tapped the screen to maximize the video square and bit at his lip.

  Dog Man Reid and the lady cop were outside his front door.

  CHAPTER 53

  “We got the basics off DMV. His driver’s license is valid. No warrants, no citations issued, no traffic violations or anything unusual,” Kippy told me, pressing the doorbell on Landvik’s two-story farmhouse.

  “But you don’t know if he’s married or has kids?”

  “Wabs and I didn’t want to push into other databases, ones that might raise flags.” Kippy now pounded on the door in addition to ringing the bell. If anyone did answer, they’d be mighty pissed off. “Landvik wasn’t wearing a wedding ring if I remember right, but we want to make sure no one else is home before we start poking about.”

  I stood on the porch behind Kippy. Vira stared up at us from the lawn, then took off to explore the far side of his front yard. I felt nervous, on edge—like a shoplifter with store clerks closing in—and found myself sneaking peeks at the infrequent cars on the county highway that zipped past Landvik’s gravel driveway, which meandered its way downward before coming to a stop at equal distance between Landvik’s house and his detached garage. I don’t know why I was anxious; knocking on a front door was hardly a federal offense. And in the unlikely event that someone answered, we had a better than half-assed—possibly a three-quarters-assed—cover story. Kippy and I were working on a project with the IDOT senior director and time was of the essence.

  Of course we knew in advance from Officer Wabiszewski—who had close eyes on the senior director’s Beamer in his reserved space in the IDOT parking lot downtown—that whoever answered the door wouldn’t be Bernt Landvik.

  Even though our three-quarters-of-an-ass cover story would work on a confused spouse or offspring, its shelf life had expired by the time Kippy parked her Chevy Malibu at the gravel’s end. Both of us had received a text message from Senior Director Landvik informing us, in no uncertain terms, that Egg River had been a dry hole. We’d discussed this new development in Kippy’s car with Vira eavesdropping from the back seat.

  Kippy’d had a total of three calls in to Jake Saunders that had gone unreturned. The first had been late yesterday afternoon, followed up again later in the evening, followed up a final time as we sipped java outside the coffee shop. All three of her phone calls had flipped over to Saunders’s voicemail.

  “He was so eager to help when I talked to him yesterday,” Kippy said. “He knew Landvik was tied up in meetings and that he’d be glad to do it … and now he’s completely blowing us off.”

  I pointed at the message on my phone. “Maybe this serves as his answer.”

  Kippy shrugged. “It’s from Landvik and Jake Saunders is not even on the text chain.”

  As we crawled out of the Malibu, Kippy’s smartphone chimed a second time. Vira and I stood in the yard while Kippy took a moment and then said, “Landvik just sent an email with basically the same message.” She stared at the screen another second. “He sent it to me and Wabs and Hanson and Marr.”

  I checked the email on my iPhone. “Guess I didn’t make the cut.”

  “Neither did Jake Saunders.”

  Kippy finished her clash with Landvik’s front door and then checked the doorknob … locked tight. She turned to me and said, “Let’s go see what he’s got in the garage.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Everyman’s first reaction was Haven’t you two fuckers checked your text messages? But that was immediately followed by They’re at my home.

  The business cards he’d handed them contained Bernt Landvik’s work address, which meant they had to have used other resources—cop resources—to locate his home address. And there’s no way in hell they’d be driving to Batavia to quiz him on Egg River when a phone call would suffice. He involuntarily looked up to see if any officers were pouring into the hallway and fanning out toward his office.

  Then Everyman tapped at the other surveillance cameras about his property. No cadre of squad cars lining his driveway. No Detectives Hanson and Marr directing subordinates.

  And no SWAT team lying in wait.

  Only the lady cop and the Dog Man.

&
nbsp; WTF … as in what the fuck?

  Everyman left his office, hiked up a floor, and took the hallway with the row of windows overlooking IDOT’s front parking lot. Also no cadre of squad cars or SWAT teams. The employee lot was filling up—it was eight-thirty in the a.m.—and the visitor lot was nearly empty, only three cars with one backed against the curb. He spotted a figure behind the steering wheel of the backed-in vehicle—a Dodge Charger—and rushed back to his office to grab his pair of compact binoculars from the top drawer of his filing cabinet. Upon return to the second-floor hallway of windows, Everyman centered himself across from the Charger and brought the binocs up to his eyes. He worked the magnification and immediately recognized the driver—Officer Gimm’s partner, the big guy with the impossible tongue-twisting Polish name.

  Everyman lowered the binocs and thought for a moment. Kippy Gimm and the tongue-twister were patrol officers—glorified meter maids. And Dog Man Reid was like some minimum-wage CPD contractor or volunteer for whenever a dead body got misplaced. And hadn’t it come up in conversation in their initial meeting that the two patrol officers worked the second shift?

  Could it be that Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were freelancing? That they were dicking about into matters well over their pay grade in the hopes of … of what … discovering something?

  If so, everything on his property was clean.

  Unless?

  Unless they checked his garage and noticed that sitting inside was Jake Saunders’s Ford Escape. If they were able to dig into the Illinois DMV database—hell, in his role at IDOT he had access to the DMV database—to find his home address, they sure as hell could find out the late Jake Saunders’s ride.

  As if to confirm his concern, Ride of the Valkyries chimed again on his iPhone. Everyman brought up the video app. This time the alert came from his detached garage. He maximized the live video feed.