Triple Threat

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Kearny."

  Sellitto's round face cracked a smile. "Ha, you're funny for a private dick. Why don't you join the force? We need people like you."

  "Marsh, huh?"

  "Yeah. It's all swamp. Serious swamp."

  Caruso asked, "Why'd they think there?"

  "Ran John Westerfield's tags. They had him at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He got off at the Two-Eighty exit and back on again a half hour later. Security footage in the area showed the car parked in a couple places by the Marsh. He claimed he was checking out property to buy. He said he was this real estate maven. Whatever maven is. What's that word mean?"

  "If we were in a Quentin Tarantino movie," Caruso said, "this's where I'd start a long digression about the word 'maven'."

  "Well, it isn't and I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

  Sellitto definitely had Game.

  Caruso flipped through the smaller folder inside the bigger one. The smaller was labeled John Westerfield. Many of the documents were his own notes and records, and a lot of them had to do with real estate, all the complex paperwork that rode herd on construction in Manhattan: foundation-pouring permits, crane permits, street-access permissions. Interestingly--and incriminatingly--these were all multimillion-dollar projects that John couldn't possibly have engaged in without Sarah Lieberman's money.

  "Good policing. When was Westerfield in Jersey?"

  "I don't know. A couple days before she disappeared."

  "Before? Was there a toll record of him being there after she disappeared."

  "No. That's where the grassy knoll effect comes in."

  "The...?"

  "Dallas. Kennedy assassination. The other gunman."

  "I don't believe there was one. It was Oswald. Alone."

  "I'm not arguing that. My point is that the Westerfields probably did have an accomplice. He's the one who got rid of the body. In his car. So there was no record of Westerfield returning to Jersey."

  "Yeah, my client mentioned there might've been somebody else. Why would he be the one who dumped the body, though?"

  Sellitto tapped the file. "Just after they killed her--Crime Scene knew the time from the blood--the Westerfields were seen in public so they'd have an alibi. They would've hired somebody to dump the body. Probably somebody connected."

  "Organized crime?"

  "What 'connected' means."

  "I know that. I'm just saying."

  Sellitto said, "We think some low-grade punk. The Westerfields had connections with mob folks in Kansas City and they must've tapped some affiliate here."

  "Like Baja Fresh. Mobster franchises."

  Sellitto rolled his eyes, maybe thinking Caruso wasn't as clever as he'd first thought. The detective said, "The Westerfields stole three-quarters of a million from Mrs. Lieberman, cash and jewelry. They would've paid this guy from that."

  Caruso liked it that Sellitto called her Mrs. Lieberman. Respect. That was good, that was part of Game. "Any leads to him?"

  "No, but he was after-the-fact and nobody in the DA's office gave a shit really. They had the doers. Why waste resources." Sellitto finally gave in. He opened the lunch bag. It did smell pretty good.

  Caruso began, "The couple--"

  "They're mother and son, I wouldn't call 'em a couple."

  "The couple, they say anything about the third guy?"

  Sellitto looked at Caruso as if he'd gotten stupid himself. "Remember, it was gangbangers who killed her. Or she decided to take a cruise and forgot to tell anybody. To the quote couple, there was no third guy."

  "So I go searching in Jersey. Where exactly is this Kearny Marsh?"

  Sellitto nodded at the file.

  Caruso took it and retreated to a corner of Sellitto's office to read.

  "One thing," the detective said.

  Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.

  The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. "Stay at your own risk."

  # # #

  Hopeless.

  Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield's green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.

  There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

  Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type--tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.

  New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn't laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitos.

  Slap.

  And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.

  Slap.

  The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.

  He wasn't surprised searchers hadn't found her brutalized corpse.

  And there was plenty of land, too--in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.

  He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.

  A flash of red caught his eye.

  What's that?

  It was a couple of people in a canoe.

  New Jersey Meadowlands Commission was printed on the side.

  Eddie Caruso's first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.

  His second thought was: Shit.

  This was government land, Caruso realized.

  Meadowlands Commission...

  John Westerfield claimed he'd come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There'd be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He'd done that intentionally. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn't get convicted if the body was never found. So they'd left a trail here to stymie the police.

  In fact, they'd buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.

  Where...?

  Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto's office. He believed he knew the answer.

  # # #

  An hour and a half later--thank you very much, New York City traffic--Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.

  He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.

  A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.

  "Sign for these."

  He did.

  "Can I check these out?"

  "No."

  "But, the thing is--"

  She said reasonably, "You can read 'em, you can memorize 'em, you can copy 'em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody's been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change."

  "Do you have--"

  "We don't give change."

  Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.

  These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman's townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield's p
olice file, the one that Sellitto let him look through. They'd been discovered in the man's desk. John had claimed to be involved in real estate work, so who would have thought twice about finding these folders? No one did.

  But Eddie Caruso had.

  Because why would John Westerfield have copies of permits for construction of buildings he'd had nothing to do with?

  There was only one reason, which became clear when Caruso had noted that these three permits were for pouring foundations.

  What better way to dispose of a body than to drop it into a pylon about to be filled with concrete?

  But which building was it? Eddie Caruso's commitment to Carmel Rodriguez was to find out exactly where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

  As he looked down at the permits he suddenly realized how he could find out.

  He copied the first pages of all three permits, after getting change from another customer because, yeah, his dollars'd all been rejected by the temperamental Xerox machine. Then, returning to the cubicle, he carefully--and painfully--worked the industrial-sized staples from the paper and replaced the originals with the copies.

  This was surely a misdemeanor of some kind, but he'd developed quite an affection for Mrs. Carmel Rodriguez (he had dropped his rate by another twenty-five dollars an hour). And, by the by, he'd come to form an affection for the late Mrs. Sarah Lieberman, too. Nothing was going to stop him from learning where the poor woman was resting in peace.

  To his relief, the clerk missed the theft, and with a sincere smile Caruso thanked her and wandered outside.

  Lord be praised, there was no ticket and in a half hour he was parked outside the private forensic lab he sometimes used. He hurried inside and paid a premium for expedited service. Then he strolled down to the waiting room, where to his delight, he found a new capsule coffee machine.

  Eddie Caruso didn't drink coffee much and he never drank tea. But he loved hot chocolate. He had recipes for eighty different types and you needed recipes--you couldn't wing it. (And you never mixed that gray-brown powder from an envelope with hot water, especially envelopes that contained those little fake marshmallows like dandruff.)

  But the Keurig did a pretty good job, provided you chocked the resulting cocoa full of Mini-Moo half and half, which Eddie Caruso now did. He sat back to enjoy the frothy beverage, flipping through a Sports Illustrated, which happened to describe the Nigeria-Senegal match as the Game of the Century.

  In ten minutes, a forensic tech--a young Asian woman in a white jacket and goggles around her neck--joined him. He'd been planning on asking her out for some time. Three years and four months, to be exact. He hadn't been courageous, or motivated, enough to do so then. And he wasn't now.

  She said. "Okay, Eddie, here's what we've got. We've isolated identifiable prints of six individuals on the permit documents from the city commission you brought me."

  Technicians were always soooo precise.

  "Two of them, negative. No record in any commercial or law enforcement database. One set are yours." She regarded him with what might pass for irony, at least in a forensic tech, and said, "I can report that you are not in any criminal databases either. It is likely, however, that that might not be the case much longer if the police find out how you came to be in possession of an original permit, which by law has to remain on file with the city department in question."

  Precise...

  "Oh," Eddie said offhandedly, "I found 'em on the street. The permits."

  No skipped beats. She continued, "I have to tell you none are John Westerfield's."

  This was a surprise and a disappointment.

  "But I could identify one other person who touched the documents. We got his prints from military records."

  "Not criminal?"

  "No."

  "Who is he?"

  "His name's Daniel Rodriguez."

  It took five seconds.

  Carmel's husband.

  Sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn't....

  # # #

  Whatever you call your profession, security or investigation, you need to be as professional as any cop.

  Eddie Caruso was now in his office, number-crunching what he'd found, not letting a single fact wander away or distort.

  Was this true? Could Daniel Rodriguez be the third conspirator, the one who'd actually disposed of Sarah Lieberman's body?

  There was no other conclusion.

  He'd worked in Sarah's building and would have been very familiar with John and Miriam Westerfield. And they had known that Daniel, with three girls approaching college age, would need all the money he could get. He was involved in the trades and would know his way around construction sites. He probably even had friends in the building whose foundation was now Sarah Lieberman's grave.

  Finally, Daniel hadn't wanted his wife to pursue her plan to find out where Sarah's body was. He claimed this was because it was dangerous. But, thinking about it, Caruso decided that was crazy. The odds of the other guy finding out were minimal. No, Daniel just didn't want anybody looking into the case again.

  And whatta I do now? Caruso wondered.

  Well, there wasn't much choice. All PIs are under an obligation to inform the police if they're aware of a felon at large. Besides, anybody who'd participated, however slightly, in such a terrible crime had to go to jail.

  Still, was there anything he could do to mitigate the horror that Carmel and their daughters would feel when he broke the news?

  Nothing occurred to him. Tomorrow would be a mass of disappointment.

  Still, he had to be sure. He needed as much proof of guilt as a cop would. That's what Game required: resolution, good or bad. Game is never ambiguous.

  He assembled some of his tools of the trade. And then decided he needed something else. After all, a man who can toss the body of an elderly woman into a building site can just as easily kill someone who's discovered he did that. He unlocked the box containing his pistol, nothing sexy, just a revolver, the sort you didn't see much anymore.

  He found the bullets, too. They weren't green. Which meant, Eddie Caruso assumed, that they still worked.

  # # #

  The next day Caruso rented an SUV with tinted windows and spent hours following Daniel. It was boring and unproductive, as 99 percent of tailing usually is.

  On the surface, round Daniel Rodriguez was a harmless, cheerful man, who seemed to joke a lot and seemed to get along with the construction crews he worked with. Eddie Caruso had expected--and half-hoped--to find him selling crack to school kids. If that had been the case, it would have been easier to report him to the police.

  And easier to break the news to his wife and daughters? Caruso wondered. No. Nothing could relieve the sting of that.

  Daniel returned home to his small but well-kept house in Queens. Caruso cruised past slowly, parked up the block and stepped outside, making his way to a park across the street, dressed like anybody else in the casual, residential neighborhood--shorts and an Izod shirt, along with sunglasses and a baseball cap. He found a bench and plopped down, pretending to read his iPad, but actually observing the family through the device's video camera.

  Apple had revolutionized the PI business.

  The weather was nice and the Rodriguez family cooked out, with Daniel the chef and Carmel and their daughters his assistants. Several neighbors joined them. Daniel seemed to be a good father. Caruso wasn't recording his words but much of what he said made the whole family laugh.

  A look of pure love passed between husband and wife.

  Shit, Caruso thought, sometimes I hate this job.

  After the barbecue and after the family had been shuffled off to the house, Daniel remained outside.

  And something set off an alarm within Caruso: Daniel Rodriguez was scrubbing a grill that no longer needed scrubbing.

  Which meant he was stalling. On instinct, Caruso rose and ducked into some dog-piss-scented city bushes. It was good he did. The handyman looked ar
ound piercingly, making certain no one was watching. He casually--too casually--disappeared into the garage and came out a short time later, locking the door.

  That mission, whatever it was, smelled funky to Caruso. He gave it two hours, for dark to descend and quiet to lull the neighborhood. Then he pulled on latex gloves and broke into the garage with a set of lock-picking tools, having as he often did at moments like this an imaginary conversation with the arresting officer. No, sir, I'm not committing burglary--which is breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. I'm committing trespass only--breaking and entering with intent to find the truth.

  Not exactly a defense under the New York State penal code.

  Caruso surveyed the jam-packed garage. A systematic search could take hours, or days. The man was a carpenter and handyman so he had literally tons of wood and plasterboard and cables and dozens of tool chests. Those seemed like natural hiding places but they'd also be the first things stolen if anybody broke in, so Caruso ignored them.

  He stood in one place and turned in circles, like a slow-motion radar antenna, looking from shelf to shelf, relying on the fuzzy illumination of the street light. He had a flashlight but he was too close to the house to use it.

  Finally he decided: The most likely place one would hide something was in the distant, dusty corner, in paint cans marred with dried drips of color. Nobody'd steal used paint.

  And bingo.

  In the third and fourth he found what he suspected he would: stacks and stacks of twenties. Also two diamond bracelets.

  All, undoubtedly, from Sarah's safe deposit box. This was his payment from the Westerfields for disposing of the body. They hadn't mentioned him, of course, at trial because he had enough evidence to sink them even deeper--probably enough to get them the death penalty.

  Caruso took pictures of the money and jewelry with a low-light camera. He didn't end his search there, though, but continued to search through all the cans. Most of them contained paint. But not all. One, on the floor in the corner, held exactly what he needed to figure out Sarah Lieberman's last resting place.

  # # #

  "Come in, come in," Eddie said to Carmel Rodriguez, shutting off the TV.

  The woman entered his office and glanced around, squinting, as if he'd just decorated the walls with the sports pictures that had been there forever. "My daughter, Rosa, she plays soccer."