Tag Man Read online

He smiled through his nervousness. “Well, okay. You get the idea. Somebody had done their research.”

  She was back to being serious. “No one asked me, Dad. No one has even approached me—about anything. At least not in a while.”

  He pressed his temples with the heels of his hands. “I killed a man, Sally,” he said softly, “because I thought he was going to harm you.”

  She reached up and took hold of his wrists, pulling his hands down. “Then you did the right thing, Dad.” Her voice changed tone ever so slightly as she said, “I’m not challenging you, but why didn’t you call the police? You didn’t, right?”

  He took a half step back, although not breaking her hold on him. “I was having a hard time explaining to you how this started, until you figured out the Tag Man part. How’m I going to do that with the police?”

  He stepped up close to her—a proximity he never practiced with anyone else. “I have one job in this world, sweetheart, and that’s to make sure you’re okay. I don’t crowd you, I don’t question you, I try to be there when you need me, I give you advice when you ask for it and supply it when you need to know what I’m thinking.”

  “I know, Dad, I know,” she repeated quietly as he spoke.

  He continued. “All that goes away if the police get involved. They lock me up for what I’ve done, for the breaking and entering and for killing that man.” He broke her grip to wave his arm around to include their surroundings. “And this goes away, too, once the school hears about your old man and what he does for entertainment.”

  This time, he cradled her face in his hands, looking closely into her eyes. “I live for you without trying to burden you with it. I know what that’s like—to be crowded by people. I can’t go to the police.”

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Dad. I understand. I just had to ask.”

  He nodded, visibly helped by his own confession.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “We disappear,” he answered simply.

  She tried to hide her disappointment, with mixed results. “Meaning I have to leave here?”

  He’d anticipated that, knowing her needs to be far different from his own. “Just for a while,” he said with hopeful emphasis. “Finals are mostly done. I’m sure we can work something out with your teachers, with your grades. Kids have to do this all the time.” He squeezed her shoulder. “I am only talking about a little while, Sally. I promise. I know I can be a little high-strung, but you have to admit, this is real—or it’s real until we can get to the bottom of it.”

  “We’re not just running away?”

  He shook his head repeatedly. “No, no.” He looked around, as if suddenly feeling surrounded, and headed deeper into the field, saying, “Let’s walk more.”

  She fell in beside him, surprised that he’d stayed put as long as he had.

  “This man,” he said. “The bad man I stumbled across. Not the one … who died. I think he’s behind this. What I discovered about him was really frightening. There were pictures, keepsakes. In a suitcase hidden under the floor. I think he stalked young women, and maybe killed them.”

  Sally was staring at him as they walked. “When, Dad? Where? I haven’t heard anything about this.”

  He sighed with frustration. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to put it together. Figure it out.”

  He stopped again. “You asked what happened to my face. I went back to the house—where he lives. I wanted to see the pictures again. I only saw them quickly, the one time, and there were others I didn’t see at all. I was going to copy them with my camera.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “He was waiting for me,” Dan explained, again reducing the truth to shield her. “He set up a trap in the house. I had to get out some way he didn’t expect, and that’s how I got cut up, falling into some tree branches.”

  “From out of a window?” she exclaimed, filling in the blanks.

  He waved that away. “The roof. Anyhow, it worked. That’s the point. But he was waiting, like I said, which tells me he’s guilty of something.”

  Sally was looking reflective. “There was a string of murders years ago, wasn’t there? Before I was born?”

  “I thought of that,” he told her. “I don’t know. It’s possible. That’s one of the reasons I went back to copy the pictures. I was so thrown by finding them that I couldn’t remember the details. I mean, they’re burned into my memory—but to accurately describe the young women…”

  “Maybe if you saw face shots of the victims from back … when was it?”

  “They stopped in the late eighties,” he said, thinking over her suggestion. “That’s a good idea. There’s a fair amount on them, in books and on the Internet. I’ve already done a little digging, but one of the things I found out is that since no one was ever caught, nobody’s positive about the total number of victims, either. Some skeletal remains have surfaced that can’t be identified; some women disappeared that were written off as runaways. It’s hard to tell. And,” he added, “there are probably half-a-dozen people that have been accused—none with anything approaching proof.”

  Sally shook her head. “God, it’s like a zombie movie. Do you know anything about this guy?”

  “His name’s Paul Hauser. That’s all I have. He works as a handyman, living in the basement of an old rich woman in Brattleboro.”

  “How did she find him?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is that he found her—made her an offer she couldn’t pass up: free work for free room.”

  She glanced into the distance before musing aloud, “And now he knows about you and me—where we live, what we do, God knows what else.”

  “I don’t think so,” her father said.

  She faced him. “What? Why not?”

  “It’s a long shot, but I got the feeling that while the hit man knew where I worked, he had no idea that I lived upstairs. He was waiting for me after work, hiding in that alley across the street. Why did he do that if he knew where I lived? He was planning to follow me home.”

  “Or he was waiting to ambush you in some dark corner, which is almost exactly what happened,” she countered.

  Dan shrugged. “Whatever. The punch line’s the same: We have to move out of the restaurant and I have to quit my job. But I think we only have a tiny window to do so.”

  “What if they’re already waiting at the apartment?” she pressed.

  “I’ll check it out,” he told her, smiling to make her feel better. “After all, I have my ways. I can discover if anyone’s watching the place.”

  She smiled back, but her expression was questioning. “I think the Tag Man thing is totally cool, even though it’s made you Public Enemy Number One with the wrong people, but why did you do it?”

  He nodded, his smile struck away by the question. “Sweetie, you’ve got a pretty crazy father, not that you don’t know that.” He chose his words with care. “I was feeling the need for some kind of accomplishment, I think, on my own terms, not society’s. And maybe I wanted to make a statement here and there, even if I was the only one to understand it.” The smile returned as he added, “And it was also a lot of fun.”

  He stopped, looked around, and sighed slightly. She waited, knowing there was at least a little more to come.

  “The shrinks would have a field day with it,” he admitted. “It’s probably devious, unhealthy, voyeuristic, and sociopathic, just for starters, not to mention illegal.” He brought his attention back to her as he said, “But you asked why I did it, and I guess it was mostly because it made me feel in control.”

  Sally absorbed this quietly. Despite their unusual journey together, he had remained her sounding board, confessor, supporter, and guide, all wrapped up in one quirky, intelligent, sometimes marginally functional package. She wasn’t about to argue with him, now that he finally needed her.

  She stepped into his arms and gave him a tight hug, her words muffled by his chest. “I love you, Dad.”<
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  “I love you, too, sweetheart. I’m really sorry I got us into this mess.”

  She looked up at him. “Will you let me help when you think I can?”

  “You bet. I put you at risk; the least I can do is let you defend yourself.”

  She nodded once. “Then don’t worry about it. We’ll make it work out.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Willy Kunkle looked around with a grimace. “Guess a dump is a dump, no matter where you live.”

  Lester glanced at the Lowell, Massachusetts, cop accompanying them, but saw only a smile greet the comment.

  “You got dumps in Vermont?” the man asked. “You’re kidding me. I heard it was all cows and trees and shit like that.”

  “You got the shit part right,” Willy agreed.

  They were in an apartment near Lowell’s center, in a run-down section of town called the Acre, surrounded by a moatlike commingling of rivers, streams, and canals. It was all part of a hydropower system that had once fed a true manufacturing behemoth—hard as it was to imagine now, Lowell had been the nation’s largest industrial center in 1850.

  Of course, the standard capitalist folly back then of creating entire cities for a single purpose had ended here as it had everywhere else in New England, and modern Lowell—although benefiting somewhat from its proximity to Boston—remained largely a bruised and worn-out remnant of its former glory.

  Not surprisingly, the late Leo Metelica had fit right in. Hollywood depictions of hit men in custom suits and decorator-designed penthouses notwithstanding, Metelica, like most of his ilk, lived in a neighborhood of crack houses, brothels, strip joints, and bars. And he did so as much out of familiarity as from economic need.

  In this case, his apartment was located in a century-plus-old triple-decker, originally built for factory workers, now overlooking an alleyway clotted with trash. It consisted of one bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room with a kitchenette nook, all of it barely illuminated through three cloudy, narrow windows and a bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. The building’s trademark exterior wooden staircase, zigzagging across its street-side facade, had been much patched and reinforced, but the clapboard had been covered with weather-streaked vinyl siding, reducing the entire structure to an awkward collision of decaying historical and tacky modern.

  Willy and Lester were here on a search warrant secured through the Lowell PD, represented in the oversized person of Alvin “Big Al” Davis, one of 230 sworn local officers—a point made relevant only because by contrast, the entire Vermont State Police had but 90 more officers, grand total.

  Not that Willy much cared or noticed. An ex–New York City cop himself, he found this environment to be reasonable and acceptable. Lester, however, was more in shock. He was a Vermonter born and bred, traveled outside only when he had to, and emotionally recoiled as soon as he crossed the border, feeling as much as seeing the press of millions of people all around him. Maneuvering Lowell’s streets earlier to pick up Davis and the necessary search warrant at the bunkerlike police department, and then to proceed to Metelica’s old address, had been enough to make him pray that this search would be a model of efficiency and that he and Willy wouldn’t have to spend the night down here.

  Willy was staring at him now, as Lester took in his surroundings. “Yo,” Willy said. “It’s not the Grand Canyon. You wanna stop admiring the view?”

  Lester nodded without a word and passed into the bedroom, while Big Al loitered by the front door, watching.

  It was a far nicer place than many they’d searched, despite the chaos and clamor of its neighborhood, sounds of which came in muffled through the dirty windows. Leo Metelica hadn’t been neat or tidy by any stretch, or driven to wash dishes, vacuum, or make his bed. But he hadn’t been a slob, either, or a packrat, and he had thought to take out the garbage before heading off to die in Vermont.

  He had also apparently been either a man not to invite guests or not to care if they discovered what he did for a living. Strewn across what passed for the dining table was a copious assortment of gun-related paraphernalia, from cleaning rags and oils to reloading equipment and spare parts, including two more barrels for the missing .45.

  Also, more telling to these visitors, stuck to the wall above the table were maps of Vermont and Brattleboro, downloaded photographs of the latter, and printed pages from Bariloche’s Web site. There were no pictures of people, however, to indicate who might have been Metelica’s intended target.

  Nevertheless, Willy was pleased by the discovery. Up until now, the notion that this man had been a professional killer, sent to Brattleboro to knock off one of its own, had been based entirely on educated intuition.

  No longer.

  “How’re you faring?” Lester asked forty-five minutes later, stepping out of the bedroom bearing two rifles, which he carefully propped against the wall before peeling off his latex gloves in exchange for another pair. His hands glistened with sweat.

  Willy was on his knees under the table, peering at a scrap of paper with the aid of a small flashlight. It was a receipt for some fast food, which he dropped back onto the floor as he spoke.

  “Not bad. Got a few things worth checking out. What did you find in there?”

  “A decent wardrobe and a better-than-average porno collection. He also liked war novels, gun magazines, and K-Y jelly.” He nodded toward the guns. “Oh yeah. And a .308 Remington 700 with a Leupold scope and a .223 Bushmaster. Not to mention a pair of fifteen-power Swarovski binoculars that would make Bill Gates drool and a couple of knives to put Rambo to shame. I’m guessing a bit of penis envy going on.”

  Big Al let out a laugh from his station by the door. Despite his name being all over the legal paperwork, he’d been more than happy to watch from the sidelines.

  “You find a phone?” Willy asked.

  Lester shook his head. “Nope. You neither?”

  “Probably used a cell,” Willy mused, climbing out from under the table. “But if he did, then it’s missing.”

  “Or he used a drop phone or pay phones. That would be quaint.”

  Willy looked over at Davis. “You still have pay phones around here?”

  Davis frowned. “Few and far between, and none of them work. Local dirtbags seen to that.”

  Lester walked over to the dining table, which seemed to be where Metelica had spent most of his time when he wasn’t in the bedroom either watching TV or pleasuring himself, or both. Willy had constructed a small pile of bagged evidence on one of the chairs, most of it consisting of shopping receipts from the trash, always a good source of time-and-motion information.

  Lester pointed at it. “No computer, either?”

  Willy glanced at him sharply. “Interesting point, Watson. And no mail.”

  They both looked around, reappraising their surroundings.

  “Okay,” Willy resumed. “We got a guy who either works for whoever hires him, or exclusively for one client, but it’s still a job where he has to be contacted, like anyone else taking in orders for fulfillment.”

  “Nice way of phrasing it,” Les agreed, following Willy’s train of thought. “But how’s he do it?”

  “Right,” Willy said. “What did the landlady say about how long he’d lived here?”

  “Metelica? Maybe five years. She wasn’t sure.”

  Willy addressed Big Al. “This neighborhood have all the usuals? Groceries, restaurants, Laundromats, one of those shipping places, maybe?”

  “Most of that, yeah,” Davis said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I don’t know about any shipping place.”

  “Bars, though,” Willy said, largely to himself. “I saw a couple on this block alone.”

  “What’re you getting at?” Lester asked.

  Instead of answering, Willy crossed over to Davis. “You do us a big favor and stay here while my buddy and I check out a couple of the local bars?”

  Davis smiled lazily. “I’ve heard that one before.” He then added, “Sure. I know what
you’re after. I’ll give you thirty minutes. All part of the babysitting service.”

  “Want us to bring you back anything?”

  The big man chuckled. “Tempting. I’ll settle for a coffee that doesn’t have anything swimming in it. Thanks.”

  Willy and Les got lucky at the second bar they entered—immediately across the street, named, without any attempt at originality, the Emerald Isle.

  Even this early in the day, there were several patrons scattered near the two pool tables at the back, or at the far end of the bar. It seemed that everyone had an aversion to the front door—or the sunshine it briefly allowed in.

  Willy and Les sat on neighboring stools and waited for the bearded barkeep to wander down in their direction.

  “Name your poison,” he said.

  “Leo Metelica,” Willy said without preamble.

  “Never heard of him,” was the hair-trigger response.

  “You say that about all your regulars?”

  “I don’t know the man. You want drinks? Or are you on duty?”

  The last was delivered with a faint smile.

  Willy raised his eyebrows. “Whoa. Very slick. I can’t imagine what gave us away. Why do all you guys like to fuck with us so much? Especially when you got a business hanging in the balance.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean? I just don’t know the guy, is all.”

  Lester wearily rested his elbow on the bar. “It means that you’re putting your license at risk for no good reason.”

  Willy removed Metelica’s morgue photo. “Feast your eyes on your dead buddy, clever boy, and ask yourself exactly what you owe him.”

  The barkeep leaned forward, scrutinizing the picture without actually touching it. “What happened?”

  “Off a bridge and onto the rocks. Really mashed the back of his head.”

  The man straightened back up. “Where?”

  Willy replaced the photo, reached out, and simply hooked the index finger of his muscular right hand into the top of the barkeep’s breast pocket—a tiny gesture gleaming with threat.

  Kunkle looked deeply into his eyes as he spoke. “This is very simple. You talk to us about Metelica and we don’t turn into your worst migraine. He’s dead, and so is your business arrangement with him.”