Tag Man (23 page)

“More than once,” he allowed. “Even recently. A close friend of mine died unexpectedly. Shook me up.”

“I’m so sorry.” Her voice verified the truth of that. “This was a personal friend? I mean, not another police officer?”

“No, no, although I’ve had that happen, too. This was a woman I kind of lived with. Well, not really, but we saw a lot of each other.”

She surprised him then by reaching out and stroking the back of his hand, just once, saying, “That is so sad. You loved her. I can tell.”

He remained still, his eyes on the middle space separating them, filled with a sudden upwelling of emotion. A bad idea, he told himself. God, what a bad idea. What the hell was he doing?

“Can I get you something?” Lisbeth asked, getting ready to rise if necessary. “Something to drink, maybe?”

He held up a hand. “No. I’m all set, thanks. Stupid.”

Her voice was stronger than he was expecting. “No, it’s not.”

He looked up at her, surprised.

She continued. “I think what you’re feeling is the way it should always be. I envy you that, even with your loss.” She waved at the acreage around them. “I’d trade all of this for—”

Her voice stopped momentarily before she pasted on a smile and said in a false tone, “Good Lord. Listen to me.”

He saw an opportunity to both get back on track and show respect for her honesty. “I
was
listening, Mrs. Jordan. I meet a lot of people in this job, but I rarely get to really speak with them. There’s all sorts of heartbreak out there. It’s too bad we’re either too tough-minded or distracted or messed up to be more open about it. So, don’t apologize.”

After a telling pause, she said in a near whisper, “I’m not complaining.”

“But you’re not happy,” he suggested, slowly getting back on course.

She frowned briefly before admitting, “Things didn’t turn out the way I thought. I suppose that’s been said before.”

“Had you known each other long before you married?”

“No,” she said mournfully. “It was your classic whirlwind romance.” Again, she half turned and took in the house, this time dismissively. “I didn’t come from this. My parents live in a suburban ranch in need of a new roof. Lloyd seemed like a visitor from another planet.”

Her voice trailed off.

Joe figured that he probably wouldn’t get a better opportunity. “What do you know about your husband, Mrs. Jordan?”

Her expression was mournful as she corrected him. “Lisbeth. Call me Lisbeth. He calls me Liz, but I don’t like it. And I’m not Mrs. Jordan. Not in my mind, at least. Very little, to answer your question.”

She hesitated, and he let his own silence fill the void, suspecting what might be going through her mind.

“That night,” she finally asked, “it wasn’t just about some creepy guy breaking into houses, was it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Lloyd,” she said simply. “He changed. I could tell something had happened.”

“Changed how?”

“He’s edgier, more short-tempered. He needs a lot of time alone, and to be honest, I’m happy to give it to him. He can be an angry man.”

“Has he ever hit you?” Joe asked.

“No.” But her answer was slow, revealing that she considered it a possibility.

“But he hasn’t said anything.” It was more statement than question.

“No,” she repeated.

“Lisbeth,” he said. “I need a favor.”

She looked into his eyes. “About Lloyd?”

“Yes. I would like permission to bring some colleagues of mine into your house and check a few things out—maybe even in his office. When he isn’t here.”

“I could do that?” she asked, which he found a telling question.

“You can let us in every place that you control and can access,” he said carefully.

She nodded. “Sure.”

He watched her closely. Her back was straight and stiff, as if braced. Her jaw was set and her eyes were steady on his.

“You have access to his office?” he asked pointedly.

“He told me once that everything he owns is mine,” she said.

“If what you say about his temper is true,” Joe counseled, “you might want to give this more thought. By helping me, you could be putting yourself in danger. I don’t want to minimize that.”

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “We don’t have all that much left between us anyhow. He doesn’t think I know, but I’m pretty sure he’s seeing someone else. This whole thing is just a matter of time.”

Her back had slumped as she spoke and, by now, she once more looked like the kneeling penitent.

*   *   *

There were five in their party the following day, counting Ron, including Sam, Willy, Joe, and J. P. Tyler, who as usual had brought his oversized evidence bag.

Ron gave Lisbeth his friendliest smile. “Hi, Lisbeth. Joe said you’d be expecting us. I’m really sorry to be bugging you again.”

She looked at Joe and gave him a brave smile, stepping back to let them in. “I thought that might be it when Lloyd said he had to make an emergency trip to Boston.”

Ron laughed self-consciously. “Yeah. A little sleight of hand.”

In fact, they’d asked one of Boston’s finest to call Jordan for an interview down there. They’d even watched him drive off earlier in the day, and had assigned an officer to tail him.

Once inside the house, Joe made introductions, making even Willy shake hands.

At that point, after signing the carefully worded consent search form they handed her, Lisbeth told them, “I know you have your job to do. I’ve decided that since I don’t know why you’re here, I don’t want to know. I think it’ll be better that way. So, I’m just going to hang out in the kitchen and cook something and let you get on with it. If that’s all right.”

It was. Ron and Sam had discussed that they would probably keep Lisbeth company while the rest of them checked out Lloyd’s office, but now, instead, the two of them let her be and went up to the master bedroom, to revisit Lloyd’s personal effects there.

Willy, J.P., and Joe repaired to their primary point of interest.

“A man’s desk is his command post,” J.P. announced as he circled Jordan’s yacht-size version. “And this guy looks like he plays the role with a vengeance.”

After studying the surface of the chair quickly but carefully, the diminutive forensics man settled into the seat and surveyed the world before him, ignoring the laptop computer for the moment.

“Jesus Christ, J.P.,” Willy told him, beginning to check behind the books and paintings along one wall. “What the hell? You bucking for a promotion?”

“This is where he calls the shots,” Tyler explained. “I’m thinking that if there’s something he really cares about, I’ll be able to see it from here.”

“Very Sherlock, Sherlock. Turn on the stupid computer—that’s where everybody keeps everything.”

Tyler wasn’t about to be bullied. Also, while highly qualified to deconstruct computers and their contents, he remained at heart an old-fashioned man. Joe sidled up behind him and surveyed the same scene over his shoulder, studying the pattern of strewn-about paperwork. He pointed to an area to the right of the desk’s surface. “There,” he said. “What’s that? Looks different somehow.”

“Right,” Tyler agreed, clearing the spot and running his fingertips across the polished wood surface.

“What?” Willy asked.

“There’s a panel designed to look like the rest of the desk,” Joe explained. “But the paperwork on top of it was neater than the rest—easier to move.”

Tyler had risen and was scrutinizing the place. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “The cracks here aren’t just inscribed. They go through. It’s well done, though—beautiful craftsmanship.”

He dropped into the knee well and pulled a small flashlight from his pocket. “I got a latch here…”

Willy and Joe saw the panel suddenly drop an inch and slide from view under the rest of the desktop. A blank, flat TV screen rose with a gentle whirring sound and tilted to face them.

“Cool,” Willy said. “Double-O-Seven via Neiman Marcus. What a joke.”

There was a control panel under the screen, which J.P. studied for several minutes.

Willy, quickly bored, began checking out the rest of the enormous desk.

Tyler finally pressed a button that got the screen glowing. “That’s a start,” he murmured. Surfacing from the black background, a message floated up:
Password.

“Shit,” Joe said.

“No, no,” J.P. said. “Most people make this easy. Plus, it’s only him and his wife in the house, so it could be as easy as this.” He punched in “Lisbeth.”

The message box read,
Not a Valid Password. Try again.

“Try ‘Liz,’” Joe urged. “That’s what he calls her.”

Tyler typed it in with the same results.

Willy’s voice drifted up from over the far side of the desk, where he was crawling around looking for more secret compartments. “Christ. You guys are such dopes. It’s ‘Susan.’”

J.P. and Joe exchanged looks.
Jordan’s girlfriend,
Joe mouthed without a sound.

Tyler tried it and saw the screen come alive. What appeared was a series of eight small photographic rectangles.

“I’ll be darned,” J.P. said. “He’s got a surveillance system.” He quickly worked the controls and cycled through all the screens, making each full-size, including the one showing them around the desk.

Willy stepped in beside Joe to watch. “Hold that one,” he ordered and moved across the room to where the shot’s angle indicated the source of the camera. The other two saw his face loom enormously on the screen.

“Ugly, Willy. Wicked ugly,” Tyler said.

Kunkle ignored him. “Hidden camera,” he announced. “I can barely see it from three inches out. I bet they’re all that way. The son of a bitch is a paranoid snoop, probably hoping to catch his wife or the maid doing Christ knows what. That thing have an archive?”

Tyler was already searching. The screen came up with a calendar legend. Joe leaned forward and tapped the date of the Tag Man break-in as Willy returned to join them.

They watched all eight frames as Tyler keyed in an approximate time of day.

“Jesus,” Willy said, watching where and how the cameras had been positioned. “What a freak. He looks at his own wife taking showers.”

Tyler moved the time up a notch. They saw most of the screens turn dark, except for the bedroom.

“I bet he tapes them having sex, too,” Willy added. “Seems like the type.”

Not that night, however. The three men saw the couple settling in, reading or watching TV for a while, and eventually extinguishing the lights.

Tyler added a couple of hours to the log. There was a movement on one of the screens, and they saw the camera’s diaphragm automatically adjust to brighten the image. A slim, athletic figure dressed entirely in black began moving from screen to screen, going through the house with the sure-footedness of a cat, sitting on furniture, checking out rooms and their contents, and helping himself to whatever was in the fridge. At one point, he glanced unknowingly into one of the cameras, and they all witnessed a full-face shot of Dan Kravitz.

“You little bastard,” Willy said.

“Damn,” Joe added. “This is making sense.”

Tyler, less engaged in the case’s intricacies, looked up at him. “How?”

“In a nutshell? Dan is the Tag Man; the Tag Man gets tagged in turn by Lloyd; Leo Metelica gets hired to rub out Dan; Dan kills Metelica instead.”

“Except that it doesn’t explain shit,” Willy grumbled. “Why’s Dan doing this? What did he do here that got Lloyd so bent out of shape?”

“There,” Joe said, pointing.

On one of the screens, they saw Dan enter this office and begin to search it with astonishing efficiency, and in the near dark as well.

“Jesus,” Tyler said admiringly. “We ought to sign him up. Look at him go, and without disturbing a thing.”

“He’s a detail freak,” Willy explained. “With attitude. He sees stuff the rest of us don’t even notice. That’s why I’ve been using him all these years.”

He suddenly pointed. “There—that’s the shot we found in Metelica’s motel room. Jordan just printed it from the video.”

They watched Dan sit down at the desk, turn on the computer, and get through its password protection as if he owned the device. He spent about thirty minutes perusing its contents before killing the power and moving on.

“Guess nothing turned him on,” Joe commented.

“Here we go,” Willy said, as Dan extracted the desk drawer and checked its back end. “The mother lode.”

Dan separated a packet of papers from the drawer, slid the latter back into place, quickly examined the contents of the packet with the help of a flashlight, pocketed a few items, and replaced everything as it had been.

Joe straightened his back as Dan left the office. “There’s your Kewpie doll,” he announced. “The thing worth killing for.”

Seeing Dan finally return to the bedroom and leave his calling card Post-it note next to Lisbeth’s sleeping body was almost anticlimactic.

Joe tapped J.P. on the shoulder. “Okay, slide out of there. Let’s see that drawer.”

Tyler did as asked, and Joe mimicked Dan by removing the drawer. Not surprisingly, there was no packet to be found.

“Jordan’s either burned it or it’s in a bank vault by now,” Willy suggested.

“It’s got to tie into what Abijah Reed was telling me about Lloyd’s connection to the Boston bad boys,” Joe said. He pointed at the computer. “As things develop, maybe we’ll come back for the contents of that with a search warrant. I seriously doubt that her permission to search trumps his own personal password protection. In fact, we all know we’ve seriously pushed out those boundaries already.”

Willy smiled at his boss’s manner. He’d been appreciating Joe’s gradual resurfacing since Lyn’s death. Not only was he as attentive to detail as ever, but there seemed to be an added element—a small sense of release, as if the Old Man, as Willy called him, had been cut loose in some way by the death of the woman he’d loved. Willy considered his own evolution—now sharing a house with the mother of his new child—and wondered if he wasn’t witnessing a rebirth of sorts in Joe, perhaps stemming from the belief that he had little left to lose. It was a bittersweet thought—while Willy could celebrate the resurgence of Joe’s powers, even he could recognize its genesis as a sad thing.