Envy the Night (20 page)

She tried to get to her feet, and Frank put his hand on her shoulder and shoved her gently back.

“Stay down. I’m calling the police.”

She put her hands flat on the gravel and squeezed them into fists, wanting to hold something, watching idly as one short fingernail split against the stone.

“Did you see his leg?” she said. Frank was talking in a low voice into his phone. She repeated the question, and still he talked only into the phone. Her hands were trembling now on the gravel. She asked the question a third time as he put the phone back into his pocket and knelt beside her, wrapped his arm around her back.

“Did you see his leg?”

“Yes.” His voice was soft.

“They hurt him,” she said.

“I know.”

“They did that to his leg.”

“I know.”

From the time he’d called Nora and left the first message the night before, Frank had tried diligently to convince himself that most of this was undue worry. That his impression of the men who’d come to her body shop was inflated by the adrenaline of the moment, that bad memories of a man he barely knew had driven him to exaggeration and paranoia. All of that ended when he stepped into the body shop with Nora behind him and saw Jerry Dolson tied to the car, his blood drying on the floor. There’d been no exaggeration, no paranoia. He knew these men now, not by name, maybe, but he knew them. Waiting for the police
with his arm around Nora’s back as she wept, Frank felt a pang of desire to see his father in a form he’d been sure he would never wish to recall—with gun in hand.

These men were good, but his father had been better. Faster of body and faster of mind, a deadlier shot, superior in every quality of combat. The image of his father as the violent but righteous crusader, an idea that Frank had come to love as a child and loathe as an adult, returned to him in a desperate ache.
Come back,
he thought as he felt Nora’s jerking sobs under his hand.
Come back and make this right. Settle this in the only way that it can be settled properly
—
in blood. You could do that. I cannot.

His world disappeared into a cacophony of sirens then, three police cars arriving in succession, men emerging with weapons drawn as if there were anything they could do.

__________

T
hey separated Frank from Nora almost immediately, and for the next six hours he didn’t see her again. None of the cops bothered to search him for a weapon at first, but he was conscious of the gun in his shoulder holster, and eventually told the officer who seemed to be in charge of the scene that he was carrying. The guy didn’t handle it well, took the gun and then searched Frank with rough hands, as if he might have voluntarily given up the pistol only to attack them with a knife a few minutes later.

At first it was nothing but local cops, small-town guys who all seemed to achieve a certain level of shock with the realization that someone had been tortured and murdered at noon on a Saturday in the middle of town. They ran through the basic motions, asked Frank the basic questions, but nobody seemed focused, a high level of confusion permeating the group.

He was left alone in an interrogation room at the little Tomahawk police station for more than an hour. People came and went outside, talking in soft voices, and he caught snippets of their words, muttered curses and musings, references to Mowery. Tomahawk’s police department had just hit the big time, and Frank probably understood this better than they did.

When the door finally opened again, the cop who entered wasn’t one he’d seen before. Even before the guy settled into a chair across the table and introduced himself, Frank knew he was an outsider. He was about fifty, with a
receding hairline and weathered skin, bony shoulders poking at his shirt. When he looked at Frank, one eye drifted just a touch, seemed to gaze off to the left and up.

“Mr. Temple, my name is Ron Atkins. Feel free to call me Ron. How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Frank said. “Who are you with?”

Atkins raised an eyebrow. “You imply I’m from a different agency than the one that brought you here.”

“I do.”

“What makes you think that, might I ask?”

“You don’t look excited.”

Atkins considered Frank for a long moment after that, then gave him a few slow nods. “Interesting observation, Mr. Temple. No, I am not excited. There’s nothing exciting about what we’re dealing with here.”

“Rest of the cops seem to think so.”

“Agreed. That’ll pass with time.”

“So who are you with?”

The repeated question seemed to irritate Atkins, causing a quick, hard flicker of his eyes before he answered.

“I’m with the FBI, Mr. Temple.”

“Milwaukee?”

Atkins’s eyebrow went up again. “No, Wausau. We maintain a small field office there.”

Frank nodded. If Atkins had come in from Milwaukee already, that would have told him something, suggested that the cops here were already getting a sense of things, maybe knew something about who these guys really were. Nobody from the FBI responded to a murder otherwise. But if he’d just made the hour-long drive from Wausau, maybe it wasn’t quite as strange. There weren’t a lot of homicides up here, certainly not of this nature, and Frank guessed the FBI office in Wausau wasn’t swamped. Probably welcomed the chance to step in, give this one a look.

“Not a real good start to your weekend, is what I’m hearing,” Atkins said. “First you had this trouble yesterday in which, according to what I’ve been told, you performed quite admirably. Then, not twenty-four hours later, you found a murder victim in the same building.”

Atkins cocked his head at Frank. “No way to start a vacation, right?”

“Nope.”

“So you are here on vacation?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what brings most people here. Most people, though, they don’t have a string of bad luck like you’re experiencing.”

“I wouldn’t think so.” Even this early in the conversation, Frank had reached two conclusions about Atkins: First, he was smart, and deserving of respect. Second, Frank didn’t like him.

“You rent a cabin up here, is that it?”

“Own one.”

“Really? Very nice. Out there on the Willow Flowage, is it?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you come into possession of the cabin, might I ask?”

Here was the reason Frank didn’t like him, drifting out in these casual questions. The man had come here to ask about Frank’s father. Either he knew the name, or somebody had done the homework.

“It was in the family,” Frank said. “But I don’t see what relevance that has to the poor bastard we found with his leg broken and his throat cut, Mr. Atkins. Ron.”

“I understand that. I’m going to ask you for a little patience. See, I may find relevance in places you don’t.”

“Tell you what,” Frank said, “let’s go ahead and talk about my dad.”

Atkins pursed his lips into a little smile but looked at the tabletop instead of Frank. “Your father. Yes, I’ve heard about him.”

“A lot of people have. And, hate to tell you this, but he’s been dead for seven years. Tough to blame him for this one.”

“I’ve heard a few terms used concerning your father—”

“I’ve used a few of them myself.”

“I believe it. But I’m talking about his, uh, entrepreneurship, you see. Because the man didn’t just kill people. He made money doing it, for a while. One of those terms that people use is ‘hit man.’ ”

“I’ve heard it.”

“Right. So—and I understand how frustrating this has to be for you, trust me—when a cop ends up beaten half to death outside of a body shop on a Friday and another man ends up killed in the same body shop on a Saturday, and the key witness to both events is, well, the son of a hit man . . .”

“This is what brings the FBI up from Wausau,” Frank said.

Atkins nodded with a theatrical sense of apology. “Like I said, Mr. Temple,
I understand this may not be fair to you, but sometimes we have to endure a little extra suffering along the line just because of our families. That happens to everybody, in one way or another.”

I could tell you some of the ways,
Frank thought.
Could tell you what it’s like to be seventeen years old and fooling around with your girlfriend, biggest concern in the world just trying to get her shirt off, when your father comes home and walks into your bedroom. And for a minute, Mr. Atkins, you’re still worried about the girl and about his reaction and this all seems like a major crisis. Seems like that until he says,
Son, we’re going to need to be alone right now,
and something in his eyes tells you that the pending conversation has nothing to do with anything as innocent as you and the girl.

“So I understand, is what I’m trying to say,” Atkins said. “But I’ve still got to ask the questions.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “I kind of figured you would.”

“Right off the bat, I’m curious about this: I was told you were wearing a gun when the police got down to the body shop. A gun, I might add, with your father’s initials stamped into the stock. FT II would be him, right? You’re FT III?”

Frank nodded.

“You always carry the gun?”

“No.”

“Okay. Then you come up here on vacation, a fishing trip, and you think, yeah, this seems like the time and place to pack a pistol?”

Frank looked at Atkins for a long time before he said, “It had started to seem like a dangerous town.”

Atkins nodded. “Almost from the moment you arrived.”

__________

T
his couldn’t be her life. The longer Nora thought about it, the less sense it made. Hit men, tracking devices, murder? No, they didn’t fit. None of those things belonged.

Yet there they were, the reality hammered home by the parade of police interviewers.
Can you describe . . .
they’d say, time and time again. Of course she could describe it. Jerry had been murdered. Try seeing that and forgetting it. She’d be able to describe that scene for a long time, far longer than any of the things she
wanted
to remember. The way his head had hung at that unnatural angle, the way the bone had bulged from his thigh . . . this couldn’t be her life.

She’d gone through a few rounds of interviews and one short talk with some sort of grief counselor who’d left a card and told her something about the pain of those left behind lingering longer than the pain of those who suffered. What that meant, Nora had no clue. The idea seemed to be that Nora would suffer more than Jerry, but the grief counselor hadn’t seen Jerry’s leg.

The only thing that stood out in all the talking was the lead cop’s disclosure that no tracking device had been found in the locker. He wanted to know if it could have been left somewhere else, and she gave them permission—as if they needed it at this point—to search the whole shop, but she knew it was gone. That’s what they’d come for, and now it was gone. The only physical link she’d had to them was missing.

The last visitor was a man in an ill-fitting brown suit who showed his badge almost immediately, the only person who’d done so all day. FBI, it said. That surprised and comforted her. About time somebody like this was involved.

The reassurance his presence provided didn’t last long. After some of the same preliminary questions, his focus shifted to Frank Temple and stayed there. How long had she known Mr. Temple? Just a day, huh? Was she aware of his father’s story? Oh, Mr. Temple had already offered that. Interesting. What else had he said?

That’s how it went for more than an hour. One thing was settled—she didn’t need to do that Internet research to verify Frank’s story. Mr. Atkins of the FBI did a fine job of that.

“You seem to be suspicious of Frank,” she said. “Is that my imagination?”

“Suspicious?” Atkins leaned away from the table and hooked one ankle over his knee. “That’s getting ahead of the game, Ms. Stafford. I’m just gathering information.”

His words reeked of insincerity, though, and she felt instantly sorry for Frank. This was the price he paid for the family he’d been born into. When she walked through the streets of Tomahawk, people stopped her and told her stories about how wonderful her father was, asked after his condition; strangers gave her hugs on a regular basis simply because of her father’s history in the town. Frank’s experience was quite different.

“I understand you need to gather information,” she said, “but Frank was nothing but a help. I’ve already told you what he did yesterday.”

“Yes, I know. But when you consider his background, Ms. Stafford, you can surely understand any heightened curiosity we might have.”

Heightened curiosity?
Now, there was a good FBI phrase. A minute ago he’d denied being suspicious of Frank, but now he admitted to
heightened curiosity.
Huge difference, clearly.

“Whatever his father did when Frank was essentially a child really seems insignificant to this situation,” she said.

“Perhaps.”

“You disagree?”

“Let me ask you this—has Mr. Temple told you anything of what he’s been doing for the past seven years?”

“I just met him yesterday. Obviously I don’t know his life story.”

“That’s a no, then?”

“He told me he’s been a student.”

“He’s been enrolled in school for a grand total of six semesters in seven years. Those six semesters were scattered among five different schools, in five different states. He has lived in at least ten different states for short times. His highest level of employment is as a bartender, his longest stint at that five months, yet he’s paid his rent, bills, and tuition in full and on time.”

“Wonderful. So your point is that he’s a model citizen?”

Atkins gave her a long, unpleasant stare. Things were becoming contentious, and she knew part of her defensiveness was a product of guilt. She’d basically berated Frank as they’d driven back to town, dismissing his concerns and suspecting him of lies. Then there was Jerry, a terrible but undeniable support for Frank’s story. His concern had clearly been genuine and well founded.

“My point,” Atkins said, “is that there are many unknowns about Frank Temple the Third. He leads a nomadic lifestyle, maintains few connections to his past, and somehow generates a steady cash flow. It is a pattern, Ms. Stafford, not unlike many of the men in his father’s profession.”