Presumption of Guilt (19 page)

“Nothing that matters,” Willy said. “Just like everything else on your list. Waste of time.”

“Maybe,” Joe came back. “Maybe not. Who knows what we've set in motion? There's a chance BB got himself whacked because we stirred up some old memories after Hank was dug up. Could be we hit a sore spot.”

“You think he was killed because Hank came back to haunt, so to speak?” Lester asked.

Joe raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“Why?” Lester pressed him. “Hank was no Jimmy Hoffa. It didn't make a splash when he disappeared—same as when we found him.”

“Willy said it after Dave was grabbed,” Joe explained. “It's one of those coincidences we've learned to distrust. And if we're not ruling out Dave's kidnapping as being possibly connected to the Hank case, why rule out BB's killing? Especially since—unlike with Dave—BB and Hank actually knew each other.”

Joe dropped his feet to the floor and sat forward to make his point. “I'm not saying this is all interconnected. But we should absolutely keep it on the table.”

Sammie was doubtful, recalling her conversation with Willy earlier. “Even his nearest and dearest figured he'd pulled up stakes for a lifestyle change. Why would all this be happening over some nobody who's been dead for forty years?”

Willy, however, took a different view. “It would if someone didn't know he'd
been
dead all that time.”

“Far out,” Spinney said under his breath, after a moment's consideration.

Sammie frowned. “Then that would turn it into a revenge on BB by somebody like Greg or Sharon.”

“Or one of Hank's drinking buddies,” Willy added. “Hank was a well-loved man, which suggests Lacey Stringer, as well.”

Sam rubbed her temples for a couple of seconds. “Hold on. That maybe covers BB. But where's Dave fit in? Assuming that's still a warning to us to back off looking into Hank.”

“‘Assuming' is the operative word,” Joe told her. “Just as we don't want to miss a possible connection between the BB and Hank killings, we also don't want to mess ourselves up by saying they're definitely related. That's even truer for Dave.”

Her eyes widened. “What? Which is it, then?”

“Right now?” Willy said, amusing himself. “Both.”

“Or neither,” Joe added.

Willy laughed. “Let's not forget the holy quartet, after all.” He held up one finger at a time. “Lust, lucre, liquor, and lunacy—the four corners of ninety percent of all homicides. Chances are good Bonnie Barrett whacked her hubby so she could redecorate his den.”

“Or not,” Joe emphasized once more. “In medicine, the old saying is, if you hear the sound of hoofbeats—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sammie interrupted. “Chances are it's horses. But it may be zebras. The way this is going, it's sounding like everything's a zebra. How do we run not one, but two homicides based on that? And a kidnapping? We have to have at least a couple of theories to run with, don't we?”

Her frustration showed on her face, stirring Joe's sympathy. Sammie Martens did not like ambiguity. There was right and wrong, and a bunch of crap in-between mucking everything up.

“We've barely started,” he pointed out, hoping to help her out. “All the interviews we've conducted in the past twenty-four hours? Those were just in case we got lucky and the bad guy burst into tears and fessed up to shooting BB, soon as we walked in. So much for that. Now we need to start chipping away at their alibis, putting their backgrounds under the microscope. If this idea about everything being connected is right, then the same ripple effect that went from Hank being discovered to BB being killed will still be in motion. Somebody benefitted from BB's death. It might've been emotional, or financial, or something I'm not thinking of. But it's there. You don't plug a guy with three bullets and just go back to the way things were.”

He stood up and looked at them all. “Our job now is to find out whose life has just changed and how.”

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The best time to sneak up on a paranoid, Dan believed, was when he thought he was most prepared to meet the enemy. Of course, it was Dan's own obsession that informed this theory, and explained why he was again inside Johnny Lucas's house one week later, in the middle of the night, with Lucas and his wife sleeping upstairs.

Even by Dan's risky standards, this was extreme. His only concession, however, was that this time, he'd left his daughter out of the equation. Otherwise, it was business as usual, based not on hubris, but on the reasonable assumption that since Lucas was in residence, he'd be less inclined to have the internal alarm activated.

Dan's two aces were that by now, he was familiar with the intricacies of the system confronting him, and that last time—as was his habit—he'd left behind a secret key of sorts.

Doing so was a private trademark: With almost every house he entered, Dan made enough subtle alterations to make any later re-entries easier—just in case. Some of these were electronic in nature; others purely mechanical, as in rigging a physical lock. In reality, he only rarely took advantage of his ploy later on, it being more a matter of principle than of need.

The problem here, of course, was that he was no longer confident that he'd defeated the house's entire system the first time. As he stood in the Lucases' home, silent and still, he couldn't be sure he wasn't being scrutinized as thoroughly as a bug under a magnifying lens.

The irony of this—the snooper being snooped upon—was lost on Dan Kravitz, whose sense of humor was sparse, at best. For him, tonight's mission was to right a wrong—one he was fearful he'd committed through sloppiness. Willy's suggestion that Dan's first visit here might have resulted in a reprisal upon Lester Spinney's boy had worked on Dan's conscience like acid. However perverse his sense of propriety, Dan's devotion to family and orderliness couldn't stand that he might have violated them both through carelessness.

The problem was that he was very good at what he did, and had been at it for a long time—a combination leaving him with little room to find what he may have missed. Nevertheless, his senses ratcheted up high, he began his survey of the house, almost inch by inch, looking to rule out that he'd been spotted the first time.

Dan had a second, more permanent base than his residence—an office of sorts, located off Arch Street in Brattleboro, alongside the railroad tracks. There, behind a series of locked doors in a building that looked ripe for a wrecking ball, he had an almost sterile laboratory jammed with computers and reference materials, in which he researched not just his people of interest, but where he also kept abreast of the latest developments in surveillance technology.

He therefore fully understood what he might be up against in Lucas's house—cameras had shrunken to the size of buttons, didn't need to be hardwired, and could be placed almost anywhere. There was essentially no aspect of any room—from its contents to its architecture—that didn't offer itself as potential cover for a device.

On the flip side, most of these instruments, and especially the wireless models, emitted signals of some kind. That, along with his experience, is where Dan had an edge. On his own, he'd constructed a portable wavelength sniffer, calibrated to his needs, which he'd brought along. It hadn't yet picked up anything he didn't already know about, but it offered him the kind of security a handgun might have during a stroll through the jungle at night—a little.

The downstairs analysis having been completed in just over two hours, Dan silently climbed the stairs to the bedrooms above.

He was still at a disadvantage, given his usual methods. For starters, under Willy's initial deadline, Dan hadn't had time to establish the nighttime habits of Mr. and Mrs. Lucas—as in, did either of them have a small bladder?

He got his answer with startling abruptness when, as he stood in the upstairs hallway, the nightgown-shrouded form of Lucas's wife appeared five feet in front of him.

He froze, standing in plain view, the glow of a faint night-light as effective here as a searchlight.

But she didn't glance in his direction. She swung away, walked a few feet to the guest bathroom across the hall—which he knew from before that she'd claimed for herself—and noisily placed herself on the toilet, without closing the door.

The safest but longest route to safety was to retrace his steps. But he didn't know how fast she might finish her ritual. He therefore opted for the bolder course of quickly passing before both bedroom and bathroom doors—timing his move to her turning and reaching for the toilet paper—before she re-entered the corridor without washing her hands, and repeated her near miss of him, in reverse.

It had all occurred within moments. He was still safe—or so it felt—but, along with a rapid heartbeat and suddenly being damp with sweat, he'd also had enough. What he'd been searching for was probably downstairs, where he'd found nothing. Mrs. Lucas's near sleepwalking experience implied that no one was tracking Dan's progress. And, finally, now he knew for a fact that the homeowners were clearly no longer fast asleep.

It was time to go.

Nevertheless, he remained of two minds. While he hated to leave unsatisfied, he also remembered that Kunkle had offered no proof of Dan's earlier entry being recorded—or used to target David Spinney. Indeed, Dan's lack of success tonight reinforced that Willy had merely been responding to his own hyped-up fantasies.

This wasn't a bad thing, Dan thought. If nothing else, he could say as much to Kunkle later, and perhaps help him to pursue an alternative scent.

Feeling better, Dan retreated as carefully as he'd advanced, and found himself in the cool night air some twenty minutes later.

It was only then that he tumbled to what he'd been seeking all along.

Leaving the building, he'd carefully attached his wavelength detector to the harness he wore on these adventures. But he hadn't shut it off, nor had he removed the earpiece he used to eavesdrop on its probings. That turned out to be a piece of good luck.

He froze in place upon hearing the unexpected signal, and carefully unhooked the detector to better interpret the tone's direction, strength, and distance.

All three came as a surprise. Exterior cameras were nothing new. In general, they outnumbered inside units, both because of their practicality and cost—they could be bigger, more obvious, and thus cheaper.

But they were usually attached to the houses they protected. What Dan quickly calculated was that this signal was originating from nowhere near the building, and, in fact, came from across the road and off the property altogether. Had he not been facing the wrong way, Dan never would have heard it.

This was a first for him, and it put him in a quandary. Not only was he being documented by a camera he hadn't known about, but the possibility existed that while it was watching the Lucas residence, it didn't belong to Johnny Lucas.

*   *   *

Kravitz met with Kunkle early the next morning, still dressed in black, as he had been inside the Lucas house—if minus the ski mask he habitually wore.

“You sure about this?” Willy pressed him after hearing his report.

“Yes,” Dan confirmed. “I had nothing to lose by then, so I tracked down not just the unit that had triggered my detector, but two more that were placed at different angles. They were all wireless and remote, all equipped with long-lasting batteries and hidden solar panels, and, from what I could determine, all rigged to use the house's own Wi-Fi router for transmission, meaning that whoever was at the receiving end could be anywhere in the country, or outside it, for that matter.”

“Damn,” Willy said. “I wish to hell we could figure out what that's all about. The make and model didn't tell you anything?”

“I couldn't get that close. I doubt it would have mattered.”

Willy nodded thoughtfully and gave his CI a sympathetic look. “What're you gonna do now?”

“Since I may have been caught twice on camera?” Dan asked. “It depends on who's doing the watching. You do realize this still doesn't prove a linkage between my visits and what happened to your colleague's son.”

“Prove?” Willy asked. “Yeah. I know that. But come on. Sure as hell something's going on.”

“Can't you do something legal?”

“No probable cause, not to mention it's in the wrong state. We don't even know for sure those three cameras
aren't
Lucas's.”

Dan didn't argue. He had more pressing concerns. “Mr. Kunkle, do any of your colleagues know about our relationship?”

“My wife—” Willy stopped himself, startled by having used that word to describe Sammie. “One of them does, but she knows not to repeat it. You're worried, aren't you?”

“I'd be an idiot not to be,” Dan said plainly.

Willy shared the concern, and was embarrassed by his role in the man's predicament. “You want help?”

Dan was sensitive enough to know what was going on, and irritated enough not to let Kunkle off the hook. “In what way?”

“I don't know. Maybe we could park you someplace.”

“As in jail? Where did you have in mind?”

“No. That wouldn't work.”

Dan moved in slightly, forcing Willy to look at him. “I wasn't being serious, and nor are you.”

Willy didn't respond.

“Mr. Kunkle,” Dan stated. “I think we've just officially entered a new arrangement. I do not owe you a thing any longer. Is that agreeable?”

Willy didn't hesitate. “Yeah.”

“I won't bring attention to myself, as before, but you leave me alone. Clear?”

Willy nodded. “You could've gotten me in almost as much trouble as I could've gotten you.”

“If that helps you in your decision, fine,” Dan told him.