Grimm: The Chopping Block (22 page)

“What is it?” Ellen asked.

“That’s what we need to find out,” Hank said. “The people associated with that flyer scared your husband so much that he took his own life so they wouldn’t come after you and your son.”

“This makes no sense,” Ellen said, her voice raw from choking back sobs. “Lamar was deathly ill. He… he probably only had a month or two left. Why would he do this? Without—without saying goodbye.”

“We need to find the people responsible,” Hank said. “Could your husband have kept records here, in the house? On a computer? Or a Rolodex? Something with the names, addresses or phone numbers of the so-called specialists?”

Head hanging low, one hand clutching at the fabric of her dress, the other clutching her son’s hand spasmodically, she spoke in a strained whisper.

“No computer records. No written records. No recordings. He said he couldn’t have any evidence here. To protect us from prosecution. And it was all for nothing…”

Hank fought to overcome the feeling of intruding on the family’s grief. He remained respectfully silent as Ellen Crawford tried to control her emotions. Beside her, her son throttled his own reactions, but a single tear slipped down the side of his cheek. Then Kurt stood up and ran out of the room.

After he left, Ellen looked up at Hank, her eyes red-rimmed, and said, “How?”

“How?”

“How did he…?”

“Gun,” Hank said. “Hidden in a desk drawer. It happened so fast, we couldn’t…”

Hank chose to spare her the details of the actual suicide, but wanted her to know that he would have stopped it if he’d had the chance. It seemed obvious that he would have intervened, but by telling her that much, she would know her husband hadn’t suffered.

Grabbing his crutches, he lurched upright and caught his balance.

“I wanted you to know before word got out,” Hank said. “You’ll need to go down to the Medical Examiner’s Office”—he avoided using the word “morgue,” which felt too raw—“to identify him.”

She nodded.

“We want to catch these guys,” Hank repeated. “If you find anything, or remember anything about them, give me a call.”

He handed her his card, which she placed carefully on the glass coffee table, almost as if it were fragile.

“I’ll see you out,” she said.

“Again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

As Hank navigated the few steps leading down to the driveway, he couldn’t help wondering if mother and son were both Geiers as well. If so, Nick would have seen them woge during their emotional outbursts. Though Hank knew of the Wesen, they remained, for the most part, undetectable by him, as a normal human. Unknown unless they chose to reveal their nature. They hid in plain sight. And when Hank dwelled on that simple fact too much, he had to admit that it spun the needle on the creepy meter up into the red zone.

Human or Wesen, though, the Crawfords had to deal with all-too-common grief.

* * *

Ellen Crawford stood by the front door, clutching a wad of tissues to her red, runny nose, and waited until the detective had exited their driveway. Then she took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully.

“Those bastards!” she exclaimed.

“Mom?” Kurt came out of the kitchen after she’d closed the front door and stood beside her.

Without looking over her shoulder, she reached back toward him with one hand, which he clasped and squeezed.

“We knew he didn’t have long,” she said. “But they shouldn’t have put him at risk of exposure.”

“He said it was his only chance,” Kurt said, his eyes red and swollen. “That it might be dangerous. But he shouldn’t have banned us. It was our right to participate.”

“They lied to him,” she said bitterly, and woged briefly into her Geier form. “Took advantage of his desperation. They made him do their dirty work. And forced him to…”

Kurt took a step forward and hugged her.

“I never wanted to participate,” Ellen said thoughtfully. “So I didn’t argue with him.” Finally, she looked over her shoulder at him, and saw some of Lamar’s determination in his eyes. “But now? Now I wouldn’t mind knowing all about it.”

“He can’t stop us now.” Kurt woged briefly.

“No, Kurt,” she said. “Not alone. It’s too dangerous.”

“I know,” Kurt said softly, disengaging from the hug to walk back into the kitchen, several papers clutched in his hand.

Lamar had wanted to protect them. And she would keep Kurt safe. Her son had agreed with her, but perhaps too readily. She recalled the steely glint of resolve in his eyes and shuddered.

* * *

The address on the flyer from the Homestead Food Co-op’s bulletin board led Nick to Portland First National Bank, close to six miles away. As soon as he saw the table in the outer lobby, riddled with flyers and business cards, he knew what to expect. Five copies of the circle-and-triangles flyer were stacked on the left back corner of the table.

He grabbed one, walked into the bank and was immediately greeted by one of the tellers. Again he asked if people needed permission to leave flyers or business cards on the table. And again, the answer was no, but this time his luck changed.

A woman in her mid-fifties wearing a peach pantsuit approached him from a bullpen area with several desks and a copy machine. She introduced herself as Charlotte Blumstein, the branch manager.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Nick identified himself and said, “You have a security camera trained on the entrance?”

“We do.”

“How long do you keep the footage?”

“It’s digital,” she said. “We store it for ten days before overwriting it. Next month we plan to upgrade our storage capacity and keep thirty-one days.”

“Are you familiar with this flyer?”

“No,” she said. “I’m afraid I barely notice the stuff on that table anymore.”

“I believe it’s been in circulation for a week,” Nick said. “No more than two. I’d like to review the footage for that camera, see if I can get a shot of whoever left it there.”

“No problem. Follow me.”

She took Nick to a cramped office in back with a small desk supporting a large flat-screen monitor that displayed eight black-and-white live video feeds from the interior and the exterior of the bank, including one over an ATM machine, another angled toward the drive-through lanes, and one facing the front door from inside the bank. The branch manager sat at the desk and clicked through a program that showed archive footage for that one feed.

“Start with the earliest and work forward,” Nick said.

“Ten days ago?”

“Why not?”

“Okay,” she said with a resigned you-know-best tone in her voice. “Ten days ago starts… now.”

Nick watched for a minute or two. “Can you play it at a faster speed?”

“Yes,” she said, followed by a couple clicks. “This is double speed.”

Customers showed up on the feed, seemingly in a hurry; most bypassed the table, but a few stopped and scanned the items on the table before continuing into the bank.

After a lull with nobody entering, Nick said, “Faster?”

She clicked again. “Four-times speed.”

People fast-waddled into the bank, while others fast-waddled out. The procession continued. One man stopped and placed a stack of a dozen business cards on the table before entering. A few minutes later, someone ripped a phone number tab off the bottom of a for-sale flyer.

“Faster.”

“Eight-times,” Charlotte informed him.

People darted in and out of the bank, like fish in a fast-moving stream, too fast to make out features and, sometimes, not even gender.

“Pause!” Nick said. “Back up.”

A gray-haired man looked over the table, then set down a stack of flyers. With the footage at normal speed, Nick could tell the flyers were white pages, with large type and no drawings.

“Speed it up again.”

After a couple minutes, Nick offered to take over the controls. Charlotte gave him the basics on operating the program and left him alone in the office. The speed was so fast, Nick simply stared at the table as a focal point—almost mesmerized—and waited for any hesitation in movement that indicated somebody was either looking at the table, dropping off flyers and business cards or taking any from the table. After a while, he increased the speed so that he watched activity ten times faster than normal, and had to refrain from blinking for so long his eyes burned.

When he thought he needed a five-minute break, he paused the playback, took out his phone and called Hank. He answered on the third ring.

“Hey, Nick,” Hank said. “Any luck?”

“Still following breadcrumbs,” Nick said. “Get anything from the widow?”

“She said Crawford kept her and the kid in the dark,” Hank said. “Told them he was involved in something illegal and potentially dangerous. Apparently he left no written or digital record in the house to avoid incriminating them.”

“Hard to believe he kept no records.”

“I know,” Hank said. “But he had his work computer wired to self-destruct. Makes sense he’d leave nothing incriminating at home. But I’ll get a search warrant.”

Nick told him about reviewing the security camera footage.

“We could do that in shifts,” Hank suggested. “Or get the techs down there. Let them come up with an algorithm or something to scan for interaction with the table.”

“For now, I’ll keep at it the old-fashioned way,” Nick said. “Since I’m tied up here, I was hoping you could check on Monroe.”

“Something up?”

“Texted him a copy of Crawford’s flyer. Now that we know it’s Wesen-related, I thought Monroe might be able to shed some light on it. Maybe something in one of his old reference books. I called but he’s not answering his cell or home phone.”

“Okay, I’ll head over to his place.”

Nick thanked him, disconnected, and directed his nose back to the digital grindstone.

Although the drive-through lanes opened early and stayed open late, the lobby ran on a nine-to-five schedule. All the cameras, however, ran twenty-four hours a day, which meant Nick could skip ahead in the time stamps from closing time each evening until the next day’s start of business.

During the next two hours, the branch manager checked on him a couple times, to see if he needed a cup of coffee or anything else, but he declined, never looking away from the screen.

In the third hour, while reviewing footage from eight days back, he spotted something. Backed up and played it again at normal speed. The timestamp showed 4:15 p.m. when the man came in. Tall and broad across the shoulders, wearing a black hoodie, black gloves and dark sunglasses. One gloved hand clutched several mottled pages the right shade. Without hesitating, the man pushed some business cards aside and placed the flyers in the same spot where Nick had found them.

Gotcha
, Nick thought.

His satisfaction was short-lived. Nick paused the image and stared, looking for something useful. He tapped a finger beside the mouse. Clicked “Resume.” And, as he’d seen at the accelerated frame rate, the man turned on his heel and exited the bank without coming into the main lobby. He scanned backward until he found the frame where the man set down the flyers, the only moment where any portion of his face was visible to the camera.

“Find something?” Charlotte said, startling him.

“Got the guy,” Nick said. “Not much to look at. Adult Caucasian male, possibly Hispanic. Can you zoom in on his face?”

She leaned down and glanced over his shoulder.

“It would be a digital zoom. Pixelated.”

She demonstrated, zooming in and turning the face blocky as the computer attempted to guess at what the larger version should look like without having the actual data to display the image at that size. The zoomed-in image was worse than the distant one.

“Should I print it out?” she asked.

“Yes,” Nick said. “The non-zoomed version.” He doubted it would help identify the suspect, but it might help eliminate other suspects at some point. He also requested all the footage to pass on to the computer techs at the precinct, in case they could identify someone who had picked up a leaflet. It was a longshot but he figured it was worth a try.

After thanking the woman for her help, Nick took his security feed printout and a copy of the bank flyer with him. He started the Land Cruiser, checked the address at the bottom of the bank’s version of the flyer and drove across town to the next breadcrumb.

Monroe prepared dinner, chopping green beans, boiling brown rice and broiling two veggie steaks. Decker hovered around, glancing from one pan to the next and clucked his tongue.

“What?” Monroe asked.

“Something is missing,” Decker said. “Trying to put my finger on it.”

“Let me guess,” Monroe said. “Meat?”

“Got it in one!” Decker exclaimed.

“Don’t knock the veggie steak until you’ve tried it,” Monroe said. “This could open a whole new world for you—a meat-free existence along with the inner peace we talked about.”

“Not sure I want to face a new world sober, brother,” Decker said. “Got any beer?”

“Some microbrews,” Monroe said. “Check the top shelf. I should have a few bottles from Hair of the Dog.”

“Made with real dog?” Decker said, standing with the refrigerator door open. “Yes, I might go there.”

“It’s beer,” Monroe said as he monitored the sizzling veggie steaks. “No actual dogs were involved in the brewing or bottling process.” He tried to work out a kink in his neck. Despite meditating—briefly—he found it impossible to relax around Decker. The house had become so quiet that Decker’s voice was the only—

He had a head-slapping moment as he remembered he’d turned off his house and cell phones.

“Keep an eye on the stove for a minute” he told Decker. “Don’t—don’t touch anything—unless something catches fire or boils over.”

Monroe hurried to the other room.
But, really
, he wondered,
what could Decker do to the meal? Burn it?
Not like he had any actual meat in the fridge the man could toss in the pan. Unless Nick had bought…

He grabbed his cell phone and powered it on before returning to the kitchen. Immediately, he saw a one-word text from Nick—“Recognize?”—with an attached image. Monroe squinted at the small image but all he could make out was a circle and some writing beneath it, so he sent the image to his wireless printer.