Tag Man Page 14

  Sally left her at the door and crossed to the side street where her father had parked the car he was using as a listening post. She tried reading his expression as she drew near, but couldn’t quite get by the almost-polite smile he used to greet her.

  “Nice job,” he said. “Expertly done.”

  She cut to whatever was lurking beneath the compliment. “But?”

  The smile became more genuine. “I was getting ready to run over there just to kill you. But you did very well.”

  “So you’ll come in with me and meet with this lady?” she asked dubiously.

  He hesitated before asking, “She alone?”

  “I think she is, and she’s really nice. You think you could do that?”

  “Of course, of course,” he said distractedly, stashing his headphones and recorder back in their case.

  She knew he’d do it—there was too much at stake. But she recognized his need to ready himself. This was a spontaneous moment, involving a person he’d never met—a double negative in his hyper-controlled world. But he overcame his phobias all the time, as she knew he was about to do again.

  He finally put the case aside and gave her a fiercely cheerful smile. “Let’s go to work.”

  Sally reached inside the open side window and picked up the small camera she assumed they’d want also. “Good deal,” she said.

  * * *

  She called him John when she introduced him to Gloria at the door, and carried the brunt of the conversation as the three of them traveled slowly down the hallway to the kitchen that Dan already knew so well, and from there to the tucked-away staircase leading down.

  There, Gloria stopped, saying, “This is as far as I go, I’m afraid. My legs aren’t what they used to be. These stairs almost gave me a heart attack when I was trying to figure out where Paul had gone, so you’re on your own. I hope that’s all right.”

  “Perfect,” Dan said, speaking for the first time since being introduced.

  “I’ll see you before we leave,” Sally promised, already halfway down.

  Before Gloria had even made it back to the kitchen, however, Dan cautioned his daughter, “Hang on. Slow down,” as he caught up to her.

  They halted at the bottom of the steps, by the closed door of the subterranean apartment.

  “She checked once, right after she found him missing,” Dan explained, his voice tense and low. “That just means that this would be the best place for him to hide out now.”

  “Oh,” Sally said, surprised and at last a little frightened.

  Dan stepped ahead of her. He pushed open the door with his foot and, knowing the light switch’s location, merely reached in and flipped it on. There was no response from within when the light lit up the landing.

  Dan and his daughter exchanged glances before he poked his head inside, half expecting to meet the business end of a baseball bat.

  The room was empty.

  “Okay,” he told her quietly, his relief audible. “We’re good.”

  Sally crossed the threshold gingerly, for the first time experiencing a hint of her father’s odd predilection for other people’s private environs, and glanced around the barren room.

  “Gross,” she murmured.

  Surprisingly, despite his fastidious nature, Dan paid little attention, focusing instead on whatever story he could glean from Hauser’s debris. Gloria had been right—it looked as if he’d departed with only what he could carry. Littering the furniture and the floor was the jetsam of a man packing in a hurry—and a man still bleeding from a recent injury. Dan noticed with satisfaction several drops of blood on the floor, along with a bloody tissue.

  The overall effect was like following in a burglar’s footsteps after he’d rifled through someone’s belongings. Most everything they saw appeared scattered and disorganized, as if tossed aside in anger and frustration.

  Dan liked the tone of that—a faint but lingering scent of despair. As he saw it, that gave him a little insight, along with a small advantage in what he saw looming as a high-stakes contest of wills.

  “Dad?”

  He turned toward Sally, having almost forgotten her presence. “What’s up?”

  She was looking at a loss, standing in the middle of the room, as if worried that something might rub off on her.

  “What’re we doing here?”

  “Two things,” he said, pointing at the floor. “First is to see if Hauser’s suitcase is still there.”

  He dropped to his knees before a section of floor that Sally couldn’t distinguish from the rest.

  “There’s a trapdoor?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, he pulled out his Swiss Army knife and carefully slipped it between two floorboards. With a smooth flip of his wrist, he liberated a single board, and from there several more, to reveal a shallow hole underneath.

  It was empty.

  “That explains his traveling light,” Dan said, sitting back on his heels.

  Sally leaned forward at the waist and peered into the dark space at her feet, as if expecting something to leap out. “He took the suitcase,” she confirmed.

  “That’s what people do in a crisis,” Dan explained. “They grab the things they think they can’t replace. Sadly, that usually means photo albums of loved ones—not pictures of dead people.”

  “So we’re screwed,” Sally said simply.

  He rose easily to his feet, looking oddly satisfied. “Remember? I said two things. I didn’t expect to find the suitcase. That would’ve been too valuable to lose, not to mention just a little incriminating.” He thought back a moment to what he’d found in Lloyd Jordan’s office, and mused, “I’ve never understood why people collect the things that could cause them the most damage, and then hang on to them instead of putting them in the fire. Weird, self-destructive habit.”

  Sally didn’t bother commenting about self-destructive habits. She was still digesting the pure irony of what he’d said.

  “What’s the second thing?” she asked instead.

  He looked around, forming a plan of attack. “People have no idea what they leave behind. And I’m not talking about fingerprints and hair follicles and DNA and the like. I mean the simple stuff—letters with return addresses, magazines with mailing labels, trash filled with information.”

  He stopped to face her directly. “We need to find something that tells us about this man—a connection we can follow to hunt him down.”

  He pointed to a spot near the door. “Start there and go through everything. If it’s clothes, check labels and pockets; if it’s a book or magazine, go through the pages to check for anything personal. Anything that catches your eye, put it in a pile in the middle of the floor.”

  “What about Gloria?” she asked. “We can’t leave her dangling forever.”

  Dan gave her a lopsided smile. “Then we better get cracking.”

  Sally considered her father quickly before joining the treasure hunt. He was incredibly focused, zeroed in on his goal. Where she’d heard of an awful discovery and was now standing amid its source, fighting revulsion, she saw Dan as a man suddenly inspired, driven by the same influence as toward a valued prize. Sally shook her head slightly. She loved him dearly, but times like this reminded her of how differently he saw the world they shared.

  There wasn’t that much to go through. Any DVDs they found, they just added to the pile for later checking. As for the rest, it amounted largely to trash and garbage generated from fast food outlets within walking distance of the house. There were no files, no piles of bills, no photographs or letters, no computer or even a sign that one had ever been here. There was nothing of a strictly personal nature whatsoever.

  With one exception.

  Sally nervously knelt before the long edge of the bed and peered underneath, hoping to see only dust. That she did—along with a small rectangle of something pale, caught between the baseboard and the wall.

  “Shoot,” she said softly.

  “What did you find?” her father
asked.

  “Probably nothing. It’s kind of stuck against the wall.” Sally tentatively began to reach out in order to grab hold of it, hoping her sleeve wouldn’t rub up against anything.

  “Hold it,” Dan said, moving to the head of the bed and easily shifting the whole thing away from the wall. He sidestepped into the open gap, bent over, and straightened with a postcard in his hand.

  “I’ll be damned. I remember seeing this tacked to the wall last time. I thought he’d taken it with him. It must’ve fallen here.”

  He circled back around to her as she got to her feet and showed her a postcard of a lake. He read aloud, “‘Hey there! Greetings from the boonies. Remember how cold the water was here? Shrink your you-know-what. Hope you’re not doing anything I wouldn’t do. Bryn.’”

  “Wow,” Sally said. “There’s a loaded message. It’s addressed to P. Hauser at an address in Claremont, New Hampshire—apartment nine.”

  “The sender’s name is certainly unique,” Dan said quietly. “That could be helpful. What’s the date on the postmark?”

  Sally held the card closer and squinted. “Old. Looks like 1988, unless that’s a six.”

  “And the lake? Where’s that?”

  She studied the faded legend in the upper left-hand corner. “Bomoseen.”

  “Western Vermont,” Dan finished. “Not far from Castleton. Popular place to ice fish. Let’s take that.”

  The postcard, it turned out, was the sum total of their relevant findings, assuming the DVDs came up empty as expected. A half hour after they’d hesitantly entered they killed the lights in Paul Hauser’s abandoned room and made their way back upstairs.

  They found Gloria Wrinn in her living room, having prepared a fully loaded tea tray.

  She looked up smiling as they appeared, their small collection of Hauser’s belongings in a plastic bag.

  “I thought you might enjoy some tea, after all your work,” she said, gesturing them toward the couch opposite hers. “How did you fare?”

  Dan answered for both of them, surprising his daughter. “Not all that well. He either didn’t have much to start with or took everything he valued and left the rest.”

  Gloria was pouring two cups of tea and now handed them out, indicating the cookies, cream, and sugar by twiddling her fingers over the tray. “Feel free, please. I don’t want to have to eat those myself. I’m not too surprised by what you say. When he moved in, he was carrying everything in a backpack.”

  “And a suitcase?” Dan asked leadingly.

  She looked at him anew. “Yes. And a suitcase.”

  “I could see where he’d stored one, from the dust mark it left on the floor,” Dan said easily.

  “You’re very observant,” Gloria commented quietly, her gaze steady.

  “That’s why we keep him around,” Sally said brightly, suddenly concerned that Dan had overplayed his hand. “Lord knows, it’s not his personality.”

  “Nancy told me Hauser didn’t talk about himself much,” Dan said, remembering the name Sally had used in her introduction an hour earlier.

  “No,” Gloria agreed. “He was a loner, all right.”

  “Estranged from his family, or what there was of it?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “What about friends? Did anyone ever drop by when he was living here, or did you ever see him with anyone?”

  Gloria, still smiling, merely shook her head.

  “How about Lake Bomoseen? Did he ever mention that? Or maybe Castleton or Fair Haven? Those’re both in the same area.”

  Gloria sat back on her sofa and studied them with a kindly expression. Sally braced for the worst, for the first time missing the usually taciturn father she was forever urging to talk more.

  “Where did you say you both worked?”

  “Agency of Human Services, Division of Indigent Residents,” Sally recited, her heart skipping.

  Gloria nodded. “Ah yes. Indigent Residents. Such a very Vermont thing, to have a branch of government solely devoted to the homeless. It’s such a wonderful state that way.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Sally said, feeling her smile brittle and false. “We like to think we try.”

  “And hard, too,” Gloria concurred. “You’ve been spending so much time on just one, and he’s not even around anymore.”

  Dan, the perpetual worrier, started laughing. “You’re not buying this, are you?”

  Gloria’s smile broadened. “Not really, but I am intrigued.” She pointed at him. “You could be the police, but your partner is far too young. You might be criminals, but you’ve been too obvious, and nothing about you strikes me that way. I can’t figure it out. Is it Paul? Are you after him for some reason?”

  “We think he may have committed a crime,” Dan said simply, hoping it would be enough. His daughter was speechless, staring at him.

  It was. Gloria nodded thoughtfully. “You may be right. I did mention that he struck me as a bit odd. What do you think he’s done? Or can’t you say?”

  Dan was grateful for the out. He shrugged and gave her an apologetic look. “I am sorry, but you apparently know how that works.”

  He felt his daughter’s gaze on him as he continued. “That being the case, Mrs. Wrinn, is there anything you can remember about him that might help? Some comment about his past or his family or any friends he might have mentioned? Or where he came from, for example?”

  “Well,” she answered, “as I told your sidekick…” She interrupted herself and pointed a finger at Sally. “You were very good, by the way. Very convincing.” She returned to Dan. “He didn’t go in for that much. For what it’s worth, whenever we did speak about the weather or local events—maybe an election or something—he always spoke like a native, as if he’d been familiar with the region and the locals all his life. You know how most people refer to their origins pretty early on in a conversation? He didn’t do that. I always got the feeling this was home.”

  “Brattleboro?”

  “No. Not quite,” she disagreed. “More generally than that. Maybe even from New Hampshire, since he said a few things about Vermont that were less than generous.”

  Sally’s memory returned to the postcard with that reference and snapped her out of her trance. “Claremont?”

  “Could be,” was the response. “I don’t know that for sure, but it would fit.”

  There was a slight lapse in the conversation before Dan stood up, prompting the other two to follow suit, and walked to the entrance.

  “I want to thank you for your time, Mrs. Wrinn, and apologize for our discretion. I am so glad you understand the position we’re in.”

  “I understand no such thing,” Gloria said pleasantly, pointing again at Sally. “If it weren’t for her, I never would have spoken with you. But I knew she was a straight shooter, even if she was following a script.”

  “What made you suspicious?” Sally asked, shaking her hand but feeling a little stung.

  “You assumed I knew nothing of state government,” Gloria told her. “In fact, I do, or certainly enough to know that there’s no such thing as the Division of Indigent Residents, much less enough money to fund two investigators to work for it.”

  “And yet you let me keep going.”

  Gloria patted Sally’s hand. “I was curious.”

  Dan was shaking his head. “All kidding aside, I’m very worried about this man. I think he may be dangerous, and I definitely want him held accountable.”

  Gloria nodded. “Will you ever tell me what it was all about?”

  “I will,” Sally quickly answered, seeing her father frown slightly. And, as if to drive home an unspoken subtext, Sally leaned in and gave Gloria a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. Mrs. Wrinn.”

  The old lady smiled and fixed Dan with her eyes. She had understood their pecking order if not their goal. “You take care of her,” she ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered fondly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It wa
s quiet in the squad room, despite the small crowd, with everyone looking at the desk nearest the window, featuring as it hadn’t in months the one man each of them liked to think of as a mentor, publicly acknowledged or not.

  Joe Gunther took a sip from his coffee mug and gave them all a small, somewhat sad smile. “Long time,” he said softly.

  “Welcome back,” Lester responded quietly.

  The full VBI squad was there, including Sammie, who’d found a babysitter, and Ron Klesczewski, J. P. Tyler, and their chief, Tony Brandt, from downstairs.

  “I’d like to start off by thanking each of you for your support,” Joe told them. “Throughout all this, it’s been a pretty big thing for me to know you were there, on the job.”

  “You’ve done it for us enough times,” Sammie said.

  “Whether we liked it or not,” Willy grudgingly added.

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “Point taken.” He took another sip and put his cup down. “But now we’ve got a small problem to solve.” He nodded at Ron. “Which is no longer as low-key as just running a background check on a victimized local resident.”

  “I guess that’s fair to say,” Ron acknowledged.

  “Guy’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” Willy groused.

  “True?” Joe asked.

  “Not if what we’ve been told is accurate,” Lester said. “He was, if we believe Abijah Reed, but assuming that Jordan did take out a little insurance against his former playmates, in exchange for retreating from Boston and that business, I’d think he’d be working overtime to walk the straight and narrow.”

  “Old dogs and new tricks,” Willy shot back. “No way he’s straight. It’s in the blood. He’s definitely up to something.”

  “That’s what you always say,” Sammie told him.

  “And I’m usually right. Besides, if he’s so lily-white, why did his old Boston buddies sic a triggerman onto him?”

  “Before we all get ahead of ourselves,” Joe interrupted, “what do we actually know? That Metelica is dead and appears to have been a hit man on assignment, targeting someone who frequents Bariloche.”

  Willy sighed wearily.

  “That Metelica got a phone call from Ben Underhill while he was on that assignment,” added Ron, well used to his old boss’s Socratic style.