Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) Read online

He smiled under his mask and moved his hand slightly. “Now. No shouting or screaming, okay? No point making a lot of noise for nothing.”

  She nodded again and he removed his hand entirely, only to rest it, an implied warning, across her breasts—a gesture from which she tried to recoil into the mattress beneath her.

  “Okay,” he said gently. “Let’s talk.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Wit or witout?”

  Joe looked up, startled. “What?”

  “Onions.”

  He shook his head, already half regretting the invitation to be taken out to dinner and introduced to Philly cuisine. “No thanks.”

  Phil DesAutels turned back toward the man at the crowded counter and finished ordering their cheesesteaks.

  “Geez, Hon.” Elizabeth leaned toward Joe to be heard. “Live dangerously. I can’t introduce you to the local culture unless you stick your neck out a little.”

  “I think I am,” he told her, pointing at a dark rectangular slab of something resembling a breaded, oversized domino tile—without the white dots. “What’s that?”

  “Scrapple,” she said happily. “You never had that?”

  “Not knowingly.” He poked it with his finger and found it slightly spongy. “What’s in it?”

  “Pig,” Phil explained. “Everything but the squeal. Eyelids, intestines, organs, boiled-down bones—technically it’s called offal, but don’t let that stop you. It’s really good. It’s meat loaf meeting a hot dog.”

  “Yum,” Joe murmured.

  Elizabeth laughed. “Aren’t you glad you asked?”

  They gathered up their meals and drinks and muscled outside to where the SUV was parked by the curb. They were on Chestnut Street, west of Center City, across the Schuylkill River, having driven across town solely for Joe and Lester’s benefit. Supposedly.

  Although Lester was a believer. “I can’t wait to tell Sue,” he said to no one in particular, taking a cell phone picture of the gleaming, dripping concoction within the bag he was holding. “The Philly cheesesteak is like an icon.”

  “You better hope it won’t be iconic around one in the morning,” Joe said, thinking that they were sharing a motel room.

  “No problem,” Lester assured him, slapping his middle. “Iron stomach.”

  “Wait till we put some Tastykakes in there for dessert,” Phil told him. “That’ll break you.”

  “What’s next?” Joe asked their guide as she headed back east across the Schuylkill, using the Spring Garden Street Bridge.

  “Well,” she said, “like I was saying at Tommy’s, if you can’t get a guy one way, there’s usually another. You mentioned his friends and family. I figured we could do worse than to talk to a man who knows a man, so to speak.”

  Joe nodded silently, understanding that this would make better sense later, and concentrated on eating, discovering at last what all the commotion was about.

  “Christ,” he said around his first mouthful. “This is terrific.”

  Elizabeth pointedly took them on the tourist roundabout, passing before the city’s art museum, and worked her way back toward the general direction of Port Richmond, ending up somewhere on the edge of Kensington, near Frankford Avenue, where she pulled over, engine running, to make her own inroads into her meal.

  Joe glanced back at Lester, who merely shrugged, as the door beside him opened suddenly enough to make him almost drop his cheesesteak, and a rough-dressed man with long hair and a beard ordered him, “Shove over.”

  Lester did as he was told, while Elizabeth said with her mouth full, “Yo. Gents—this is Peter Kindler. Pete—the Vermonters I told you about.”

  “You get me one?” Kindler asked.

  Phil dug into the bag at his feet and passed a sandwich over, across Lester’s lap.

  Kindler murmured, “Ahhh,” as he unfolded the wrapper on his knees and took an inaugural bite. “Okay,” he finally said after taking a swig of soda to wash down the food. “What can I do you for?”

  “Tommy Bajek,” Elizabeth said. “What can you tell us about him?”

  Kindler seemed surprised. “Tommy? You interested about him in Vermont? We barely give a shit about him here. He move or something?”

  “He died up there,” Joe explained.

  Elizabeth went further. “Could be he was part of a hit team. Ended up on the short end of the stick.”

  “There’s a shock,” Kindler said, taking another bite.

  “You know who he’s been hanging with?” Phil inquired.

  “Not hired killers. He was more like the guy you leave outside to watch for the cops. You get any fries?”

  Another oil-stained paper bundle was passed along.

  “How ’bout his regulars, Pete?” Elizabeth asked. “If some outsiders were looking for somebody like that—driver, bagman, doorman, whatever—they’d ask around before they found Tommy, right? I mean, since he didn’t normally rent himself out to the killer elite.”

  “Yeah. I see what you’re sayin’,” Pete replied. “I didn’t know Tommy ’cept in passing, but I know the crew he hangs with—or hung with. And you’re barking up the right tree there. The Kielbasa Posse has its bad boys, for sure, but Tommy’s bunch is bigger on what you might call the illegal jobs business—you wanna be an electrician or a Sheetrocker or whatever, but you’re not union and you’re maybe not squeaky clean under scrutiny, these boys’ll set you up. They take a piece of your action, and later, ya gotta take who they offer under your wing, assuming you get big enough to start hiring yourself, but who cares? It’s all about the money.”

  Phil paused to eat again and then added, “Not Tommy, of course. He was more of a permanent filler.” He tapped the side of his head. “Not terrific in the brains department. Still, a solid worker.”

  “His crew cool enough for us to approach them solo?” Elizabeth asked. “Or should you be along to make the introductions?”

  Pete raised his eyebrows at her. “Very classy, girl. Nice of you to ask. Smart, too, ’cause I’d doubt they’d say diddly to any of you. The guys I’m thinking about don’t know I’m a cop, so we’ll play this kind of discreet, if that works for you.”

  “You call it, Pete,” she replied easily.

  * * *

  “Listen to this,” Sam said, her eyes on her computer screen.

  Willy looked up from what he was reading at his desk.

  “There’s a BOL been issued from the Burlington area for an unidentified man—”

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Medium height, medium build, hair light or dark, unless he was bald.”

  She ignored him out of habit, continuing, “—who’s wanted in connection with a home invasion and assault on Sandy Corcoran and her elderly mother.”

  “Sucks to be them,” he stated unsympathetically.

  Sammie persisted. “The old woman is a widow, while Sandy is an administrator of the Fleming Museum.”

  Willy immediately recognized where this was headed and went silent, absentmindedly watching their small child, who was fast asleep in a portable crib that they’d brought to the office as a way to give them all a bit more midweek family time.

  “While the man at the time of the attack,” she continued interpreting from the BOL, “wore a mask and gloves and spoke in a low voice so as not to be recognized, Corcoran said she suspects he was the same one who entered her office earlier that day and inquired about the source of the photo display currently at the museum.”

  Willy crossed the room to read over her shoulder. “Nice.”

  She looked up at him. “Thought you’d like that part.”

  He pointed at the screen. “They say why this guy came at her?”

  “Nope. They pretty much left it at that. No doubt the local PD’s case narrative will have it. I can probably access that.”

  He walked back to his desk, saying, as she’d expected, “Nah. Let’s do that ourselves, face-to-face. I don’t trust other people’s reports. They never ask what I want ’em to.” He che
cked his watch and glanced at the baby again. “Louise good to watch Emma if we take a trip up north? I can stay put while you fly solo, too. It’s fine with me, either way.”

  Sammie worked to control her reaction. The double whammy that he’d both stay behind to babysit and trust her to run an interview was virtually unprecedented. From the start of their relationship, everyone—except Joe—had warned her against getting too close to Willy’s quills. Nevertheless, in his uncomfortable, spasmodic, but dogged way, he was struggling to make her proud.

  She reached for her phone. “I’ll give her a call, but I doubt there’ll be a problem.”

  * * *

  Sandy Corcoran looked up nervously at the man who entered Milton’s police station, one wing of a modern, multi-building municipal complex that included the town library, town offices, and fire and rescue squads. The duty sergeant had placed her in a small meeting room, along with a cup of coffee that she hadn’t touched, and asked her to sit tight for the arrival of two agents from the VBI. He’d sounded impressed by this, emphasizing how the VBI was a major-case squad only, but she’d simply been baffled—and a little frightened. Now, eyeing this intense-looking, angular man with what appeared to be a nonfunctioning arm anchored to his left-hand trousers pocket, her apprehension escalated.

  She was tiring of being cornered by strange, domineering men asking weird questions.

  Fortunately, on his heels came a slight, athletic, if equally focused, young woman whose overall looks delivered a curious sense of comfort—her accompaniment of the man somehow legitimized his presence.

  Sandy stood nervously as the woman closed the door behind them.

  The man waved at her to resume her seat, speaking in a voice belying the scary authority in his eyes. “Please, don’t get up. We really appreciate your meeting us at such a time. How’re you holding up?”

  Sandy regained the edge of her chair.

  The man opened his jacket to reveal a badge on his belt, saying, “I’m Special Agent Kunkle. This is Special Agent Martens, from the VBI. Just to confirm, you are Sandy Corcoran. Is that correct?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Both cops shook her hand in turn and sat on either side of her, since she was seated at the head of the table.

  “We’re sorry about the circumstances that’ve brought you here,” Sammie said, her eyes directly on Sandy’s, making the latter look down at her hands.

  “We read about what happened,” Kunkle explained. “And we hate to make you relive it all, but we’re very interested in what you and this man talked about.”

  While he spoke, Sam pulled a small recorder from her pocket and laid it on the table, her eyebrows raised questioningly. “This okay?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Sandy answered, further comforted by her tone. “I guess.” She then looked at Willy. “You want to know what we talked about? It wasn’t like a conversation,” she told him.

  “I got that,” he replied, the hint of an edge to his voice. “But you did speak together, which seems to have been the major reason he was there. What about?”

  Sam murmured encouragingly, no doubt used to her partner’s effect on people, “It’s okay.”

  Sandy was beginning to wake up to the fact that these two were here for the content of what had happened to her, not the assault itself. “It’s what made me think he was the same man who came into my office that day. He asked about the photo exhibition. It’s a display we’ve—” She was stopped by Kunkle’s raised hand.

  “We know about it,” he said, his voice encouraging despite its abruptness. “What did he want to know?”

  “How we got it,” she explained, adding, “Not so much who took the images, but who brought them in for display. Everyone else has been curious about the photographer, but not him.”

  “Okay,” Sammie said supportively. “Now the harder part: Can you tell us about what happened at your home? Step by step—what he did, what he said. Try to include every detail, every gesture, even.”

  Sandy’s eyes welled up, her hopes dashed, realizing that she would have to go over it all again. Taking a breath, and trusting to an overall numbness, she forged ahead. “I woke up with him sitting on my bed. His hand was on my mouth, and he was telling me not to make a sound. He said he had someone else holding my mother and that she’d be hurt if I didn’t cooperate. It wasn’t true, I found out later. Mom never knew anything about it. She slept through the whole thing. I don’t know if the man had a confederate or not, but he did know Mom was in the house, so I believed him.”

  “Good,” Kunkle said patiently. “That was the right choice. Keep going.”

  “Okay,” she said, feeling her face redden as she continued. “He asked me if I’d scream—no, I mean, he said something about not screaming. Anyhow, I got the message because that’s when he told me that he had someone in with my mother, and then he … moved his hand.”

  Willy shifted his head so slightly that it barely moved, but Sandy sensed in the gesture his complete knowledge about everything that had happened.

  “He put his hand on my breast,” she said, her modesty overwhelmed by the sense of Kunkle’s clairvoyance.

  “On top of or under your clothes?” he asked.

  She pressed her lips together before answering, “On top at first, then underneath. But he didn’t do anything. He just rested it there. I was so scared.”

  Sam removed a tissue from her jacket pocket and handed it over so that Sandy could catch the tears that were traveling down her cheeks.

  “Thank you. I was so sure I was about to be raped, and that Mom was already dead. I was angry for not having locked my door, or done a better job of protecting my house. It was all a little crazy, thinking things that made no sense.”

  “That’s very common,” Sam said.

  Willy confirmed, “We hear that a lot. What did he do or say then?” he asked.

  “He pulled the blanket off me—all the way down—so I was just lying there, and he put his hand inside my nightgown, like I said, but all he asked about was the show.”

  “Details, Sandy.”

  “Right. He said something like, ‘I’m going to ask you again: Who brought you the photographs?’”

  “Again?” Kunkle almost interrupted, “Because he was the same man who came to your office?”

  “Yes. The voice was the same. He was whispering, but I’m sure of it.”

  “What did he look like?” Sammie asked.

  Sandy blinked. “He had on a mask.”

  “I’m sorry. I meant when he was at the museum—earlier.”

  “A baseball cap, beard, dark glasses, medium height. His jacket made him look kind of beefy, but it was hard to tell.”

  Sammie leaned back in her chair. Whoever it had been, he knew how to run himself. What Sandy had rattled off were accessories—not human characteristics. And Sam didn’t doubt for a moment that the beard had either been fake or was now down the drain somewhere, accompanied by some shaving cream.

  “What did you tell him, Sandy?” Willy was asking.

  “The truth. At the office, I was happy to follow policy, but at home? Being threatened that way? I wasn’t going to risk my life and Mom’s, both. I told him that one of our students approached her faculty advisor, and that—between the two of them—they’d written an application to have the work displayed at the museum.”

  “You gave him the names?”

  “I didn’t have the student’s,” she said. “That was the agreement between him or her and the advisor. I was told it was because of the anonymous standing of the photographer, who I gathered was still alive and pretty eccentric. The student didn’t want attention diverted away from the artist, and wanted the anonymity to be across the board. But the advisor was Nancy Filson. She’s in the art department.”

  Sandy hung her head before admitting, “I did give him her name.” She looked up suddenly and added quickly, “But I called her right after he left, and told her what happened. I told her to get away, to hide, tha
t she didn’t want happening to her what I’d gone through.”

  Willy frowned and placed his palm flat on the table, leaning toward her. “The guy in the mask just walked away after you told him about Filson?”

  Her face flushed and she reached out to grab his hand pleadingly, her earlier comforting numbness stripped away by the question. “He didn’t know how well I knew her. He didn’t know we were friends. I pretended to barely recall her name. He’d threatened me that if I ever told anyone, he’d be back to get me and my mom.” Her voice escalated. “I didn’t know what to do,” she cried. “It was either me and Mom right then, or Nancy later. It was an impossible choice.”

  “That makes you an incredibly brave woman,” Sam stated, adding, “How did Nancy react when you told her?”

  Sandy calmed a little, blowing her nose and dabbing at her eyes. “She thought I was kidding at first—for a second, at least. Then she heard how emotional I was. She told me to go to the police, which I did, and she agreed that she’d be careful.” Again, her voice grew anxious. “I told her it would take more than that. I told her how scared I’d been—what that man had done to me.”

  Sammie heard what she interpreted to be a deeper meaning there. She reached out and touched Sandy’s shoulder to get her full attention. “What did he do to you? Finish telling us what happened.”

  Sandy stared her in the face, her cheeks damp, her eyes bloodshot. “He ran his hand down my body after I told him what he wanted—slowly—feeling everything. I tried to freeze, to not feel it, but it was horrible.”

  “Did he do anything more?” Sam pressed her.

  Sandy hesitated, said, “No,” and then curled up on herself, crying convulsively. Sammie leaned over to rub her back as she glanced at Willy and raised her eyebrows.

  He rose and left the room, returning moments later with a box of tissues and a glass of water. He placed both before their witness and waited for Corcoran to regain her composure.

  This she did after several more nose blows.

  “We’re very sorry to put you through this again, Sandy,” he then said supportively. “But we need to get it all.”

  “I understand,” she said from behind a wad of tissues.