Past Crimes (9 page)

T
HE THUNDER HURT, SO
I figured it must be close. Each time it rumbled, there was a golden flash of lightning that lit up the sky and slowly faded until the next time. Part of me knew that was wrong, that the booming sound should follow the electricity, and it bothered me. I could feel my eyes shut tight in frustration. Except
that
was wrong, too. If my eyes were closed, how could I see the lightning? I’d have to open them. But I didn’t want to.

And then I was abruptly back, eyes open after all, staring up at the ceiling of the foyer. The front door was still ajar. I could feel a breeze across my face. The room was still dark, too, although the streetlamps outside gave the windows of the front room a yellowish glow.

I was lying about ten feet from where Dono had fallen, I realized. Some of his dried blood might be under me right now.

That thought was enough to get me moving. I sat up, very slowly.

The pain had an epicenter somewhere over my left ear. I didn’t have to touch it to feel the knot already forming there. My hand bumped against something on the floor.

It was Dono’s blackthorn shillelagh, which he kept in an umbrella stand by the door. I picked it up and looked at it. It was typical of Dono’s humor that he would keep an Irish stereotype
like the club-shaped walking stick in the house. It was also typical of him that the knobbed end was filled with an extra half pound of lead shot, to create the kind of impact that had put out my lights so efficiently. A harder knock and it might have split my skull like a cantaloupe.

Even as spacey as I was, it wasn’t difficult to piece together what had happened. Someone—a small man with a healthy amount of white curls, if I could trust what I’d only partially seen—had broken into the house. He had heard my drunken progress toward the door and availed himself of the shillelagh before hiding around the corner. When I walked in, the motherfucker had used my head for a piñata.

I tried to listen over the slight ringing in my ears. Was he still inside the house? I didn’t think so. I was fairly certain he was hightailing it even as I was taking my first bounce off the floor. If he’d meant to hang around, he could’ve tied me up like a rodeo calf—or taken another swing with the stick to finish me off—and enjoyed all the time he wanted.

I got to my feet with a lot of help from the wall. Carefully, I tottered to the pantry and opened up Dono’s hiding place at the back. I took out the nine-millimeter Browning. It was doubtful I could hit anything outside spitting distance right now, but the weight of it in my hand made me feel better.

Back in the foyer, I saw that someone had been poking at Dono’s security system. The rectangular metal facing plate was lying on the floor, and the internal wires were pulled out and stripped in places.

I stared at the alarm. It hadn’t been bypassed by being rewired. The intruder hadn’t
needed
to bypass it, because the alarm had remained off since Dono’s shooting. So why would he take it apart and strip the wires, just to leave it alone?

I walked through it. The intruder had picked the dead-bolt lock on the front door—no easy task—and immediately opened up the alarm box inside, expecting to have to bypass it. And then he’d realized that the alarm was turned off, saving him the trouble.

The wires were already stripped, because he’d stripped them before.

Tonight wasn’t the first time the fucker had broken into the house.

I moved slowly through each room. No other door or window had been breached. And nothing obvious had been taken. Maybe I’d stumbled in before he could do whatever he’d been here to do.

In Dono’s bathroom I foraged through a drawer full of under-the-counter meds, a rainbow collection of safety-cap bottles and foil packets. The alcohol still in my system was probably dulling the worst of the headache, but it wouldn’t last. Codeine, Darvon, an unlabeled bottle of what looked like OxyContin. I chewed two tablets of codeine. Bitter taste, to match my mood. I grabbed a handful of packets and put them in my pocket for later.

I went back downstairs to look at the security panel again.

The guy had skills. Better than mine, maybe. Not just picking the front door lock. Whenever he’d first broken in and beaten Dono’s alarm system, he’d opened the box and played a few notes of Chopin on the wires before the allotted thirty seconds elapsed. That was Ph.D.-level breaking and entering.

If the intruder had decided to pay a visit at two in the morning, then it was a good bet he also knew that Dono was out of commission. Sure as hell he had thought no one would be at home. I’d surprised him.

Okay. Put myself in his shoes. I’m a professional burglar. I’m prepped with the tools I need, and I’m not expecting trouble. The target is the home of an old thief. What the hell could be in the place to make it worth the effort?

Thieves attract thieves. Maybe the burglar knew about a score Dono had made, and he was looking for the take. Maybe he was even a partner of Dono’s on the job. Fair enough.

But presumably he was also smart enough to guess that Dono wouldn’t leave a pile of money just lying around his house. I’m not breaking in on spec. I’m not tearing the place apart. I know what I’m after and where to find it.

I turned all the lights on and took a harder look at each room. Nothing appeared out of place. The semi-organized clutter of an old bachelor’s home.

I felt a little ridiculous. A half-drunk, half-concussed man looking for something unusual in a house he hadn’t occupied in years. The burglar might have been after something scribbled on a Post-it note, for Christ’s sake.

Easing my way back down the hall to the taped-off front room, I paused to rest the side of my head against the cool doorframe.

Keep at it, dummy,
I thought of Dono saying.
Better to seek and come up empty than wonder what you might have found around the next corner.

Sometimes fortune smiles. Sometimes fate gives you a painful kick in the right direction.

Without the leftover fingerprint dust, I wouldn’t have noticed it—Dono’s chair had been moved. There were darker square patches on the oak floor, clean of any white residue, where the front legs had been. Two inches from where they were now.

I stepped around the tape and into the room, walking over to look at that corner. There was a tiny screw on the floor, resting in a groove between the hardwood planks. The ventilation grille on the wall had an empty hole where the screw belonged. When I bent down, I could see fresh scratches on the screwheads of the grille.

Dono had always kept a small toolbox for light house jobs in the kitchen. I went into the kitchen and found it, came back and used a screwdriver to remove the ventilation grille.

I leaned down and craned my neck to peer inside. About a foot from the opening, there was something taped to the top of the ventilation duct. It was compact and rectangular, with a dark gray plastic cover over most of its parts. A green wire led from the plastic box through a hole that had been drilled in the side of the duct.

I pulled the little object out of the vent, tearing the wire and the tape loose. I sat on Dono’s chair and removed the plastic cover to examine the gadget more closely. It had a SIM card and electronics and keypad taken from a basic cellular phone, all soldered to a plastic housing and connected to the tiny horn shape of an expensive-looking receiver.

It was a bug.

And a reasonably good one, from what I could tell. I had seen a few
hidden listening devices in the military. Those were mass-manufactured gadgets. This one was handmade—and with care.

I could guess how it worked. The receiver allowed it to be voice-activated, so that if someone spoke in the room, the microphone would register the sound and the cell-phone bits and pieces would call another phone somewhere, which would probably start recording.

The attached battery wouldn’t last long. But there had been the green wire through the hole in the duct. The wire was probably tapping into the house power at the electrical outlet a few feet from the vent.

Slick. By feeding off the house, the bug could operate 24/7. The voice activation might mean you’d lose a sentence or two at the other end, but that was the only real flaw. It might have been sitting in the vent for weeks, happily transmitting everything within its range.

How long had it been there? And how many more of the things were in the house?

Over the next half hour, I checked every outlet and vent in the house, from the basement to the bathrooms. I shoved furniture out of the way and nearly tore the vent grilles off the walls with my bare hands. I found two more of the bugs and evidence of others in the holes drilled in ventilation ducts in almost every room, including the basement.

Dono had one landline phone in the house, on the wall in the kitchen. There were shiny scratches on the minuscule screwheads on the underside of it. Nothing unusual inside the phone. Not anymore.

I sat down at the dining table and laid the three bugs out in a row. All the same parts. All handmade.

The burglar hadn’t been here to take something of Dono’s. He had been here to get his toys back. I’d come along just as he was getting to the last of them.

That fit with the lump on my skull. I’d spooked him, and after he’d dealt with me, he’d chosen a hasty retreat over finishing the job.

And he’d left me alive.

Dono had been left alive, too. Was that intentional?

The burglar had planted the bugs. He had listened in on whatever Dono had said in the house, and to Dono’s phone calls, for some unknown
number of days. When he’d heard enough, he had returned to retrieve his gadgets. And maybe he’d been surprised by Dono.

My thoughts flew back over the last few days. What had I said in the house? There was the first morning, of course, with the whole circus of cops and paramedics and Guerin. I’d had my conversation with Addy Proctor. I’d talked to Ganz, and Hollis, although I was pretty sure I hadn’t said Hollis’s name. I’d talked to the hospital, checking on Dono.

What the hell did Dono know that was worth the trouble of bugging his entire house?

Dono. It finally hit me then, and I stood up, headache be damned. His shooting. His shooting would have been recorded by the bugs.

And the guy who’d shot him.

D
ETECTIVE GUERIN KNOCKED BACK
the last of his coffee. I sat across from him at the kitchen table, holding an ice pack behind my ear.

Guerin’s people hurried in and out of the rooms around us. They were hunting for any bits of wire or other evidence that the burglar had left attached to the power outlets in the house. As the crime-scene crew found each bit, they bagged it as evidence and brought it back and laid it on the table in front of Guerin. Like timid cats offering dead mice to their owner.

They had screwed up. After Dono was shot, the CSU should have seen the same scratches on the vent covers that I’d found and uncovered the bugs.

Guerin didn’t offer any excuses. Their mistake was his mistake.

He nodded at the ice pack in my hand. “You sure you shouldn’t be at the hospital?”

“I’ve had concussions before. This is just a headache.”

He inclined his head a fraction. “Maybe call a friend to stay with you instead.”

“How many other cases are you carrying?” I said. “Besides Dono’s?”

Guerin picked up a larger plastic evidence bag, which held one of
the two bugs on the table. The third bug was rolled up in a sock in my coat hanging by the door, where I’d hidden it before the cops had arrived.

He looked at the bug through his bifocals. “Your grandfather has my full attention.”

I got up and walked over to the window. Dawn hadn’t touched the sky yet. Every light in the house was on. The cluster of cop cars and lab vans on the street in front of the house had their parking lights blinking, per regulation. A Christmas display.

“Did he have your attention before he was shot?” I said.

“If you’re asking me whether Dono was under investigation, I can’t answer that.”

I pointed at the evidence bag. “The guy who planted those went to a lot of trouble. There’s money somewhere in this.”

“Which means crime, when your grandfather is involved. Weren’t you the one telling me you didn’t know anything about Dono’s life nowadays?”

“I didn’t. But I can make some guesses. So I’m going to guess that you’re even more in the dark than I am.”

Guerin started to say something and then closed his mouth.

They drill politeness into the Seattle cops with six-inch galvanized screws. It always amused Dono, and I was starting to get the joke.

When Guerin spoke again, his voice was level and hard enough to skate on. “If you go around looking for your grandfather’s associates, firing off any question that comes into your head, then we could lose a chance to build a case against someone. He could walk.”

I took his coffee mug and refilled it from the pot. I traded my ice pack for a fresh one from the freezer—Dono had at least a dozen in there—and sat at the table again and looked at the detective.

Guerin could park me in a cell for a while. Two days, if the law hadn’t changed recently. Then he’d have to let me go. A harassment charge could keep him from doing it again. Ganz could set that up.

But I didn’t want to lose two days. And I didn’t want Guerin distracted, thinking he should keep half an eye on me.

“Okay,” I said. “You handle it. I want Dono’s shooter busted, same as you.”

Guerin frowned. “Are you sure about that? The same as me?”

“Why does everyone assume I’m going to kill the guy?”

He took a long inhale. Then he looked at the bug again.

“We’ll find him,” Guerin said. “These are handmade. There can’t be too many guys running around with that kind of expertise.”

I knew of at least one. Jimmy Corcoran.

AFTER THE COPS WERE
gone, I left a voice mail for Hollis, asking him to get in touch with Corcoran. I checked the doors and windows in every room of the house and settled in on the couch in the upstairs office to get some downtime.

An hour later I got up and checked all the entrances again.

Eventually I went back to the couch, where I lay and just stared at the textured white semigloss on the ceiling.

I didn’t want to close my eyes. Every time I did, I saw the three flashes of light, just off at my two-o’clock.

It almost always started the same way. Three flashes, the night flares from an enemy’s Kalashnikov. The shots that had kicked off the fight. Then came the blast of an IED somewhere to my left, a slap of wind and a keening buzz that filled my ears and made the rest of the fight nothing but more hot lights and sweat trickle stinging my eyes and slaps on my shoulder to tell me when it was my turn to move and cover the next man as we fell back, rock by rock, out of the village.

It wasn’t a long exchange. It wasn’t even especially bloody. Two casualties on our side, one serious enough to earn a ticket home. The bad guys had lost at least three times as many.

There had been worse nights. Much worse. But that action was one of the times that stuck with me. Maybe because the K fire had surprised us all. Maybe because it had been my first real heat since I’d rotated back with my face patched together. The scars had still been pink.

I fought the urge to get up and check the house once more.

Instead I stared hard at the whorls of paint on Dono’s ceiling, breath whistling fast and shallow over my dry lips. I held it in for a count of five, a three count after the exhale. And again.

My heart beat faster. Nearly up to the pace my stress had set. Like paddling fast on a surfboard to catch a wave. I let my breathing settle down, and my pulse followed like an obedient dog.

The breathing trick was only one step. There were others that the shrinks had explained. Most of them had me focus on the reality of my situation. Telling myself that I was safe.

Those wouldn’t help this time. Because it wasn’t true.

My hometown was one big minefield, just waiting for me to wander back in.