A Welcome Grave (28 page)

“You think I just looked into this months ago, of my own volition, and then decided to blackmail Jefferson?”

“Somebody blackmailed Jefferson,” he said, “and so far, you’re the first person to produce even an idea of what the blackmail material might have been. Interestingly, you’re also the lead suspect. Your background lends itself to a deep investigation of the man’s life, to uncovering things that amateurs might not find.”

“I haven’t had anything to do with Alex Jefferson since that night at his country club. It ended there, Targent. You have to believe that.”

“Glad you brought that night up. I heard an interesting story the other day, from someone who was in the country club parking lot. Remember what you yelled at Jefferson that night, right before you swung on him?”

“I yelled a few things.”

“You know the one I mean.”

I met Targent’s eyes. “I said I’d take his life apart.”

“That’s what I heard. Now the question is, is that what you
did
?”

Responses and rebuttals spun in my head, but I left them there. It wouldn’t do any good. Targent was locked on to me now. There was no dissuading him, not until we had somebody else in handcuffs who was ready to confess. Maybe not even then.

“Targent,” Joe said, “are you completely ignoring the fact that Doran is
out
? Don’t you think the timing of that has significance?”

“Yes, I think it does. It could mean he’s involved, or it could mean it gave somebody else an opportunity. If our killer was an intelligent guy, as intelligent as, say, Perry, he wouldn’t go through with it unless he felt he had a cover story. A fall guy. The sort of story, the sort of guy, that’s been presented today in the form of Andy Doran.”

“So I’m still a murderer,” I said, “but now I’ve been promoted to both opportunistic and intelligent.”

“Explain the fingerprint, Perry.”

“I can’t. It had to have been planted.”

“Five times. With three fingers.”

“Maybe they stole money from me, I don’t know.”

“Stole a few fifties, but you didn’t notice.”

“I
don’t know,
Targent. All I can tell you is that I didn’t send money to that idiot in Indiana.”

“But your fingerprints are on it.”

“And Jefferson’s aren’t. You said that yourself. So you’ve got no proof—
none
—that the money is one and the same.”

“I’m going to get it, though. You want to bet everything you’ve got on one sure thing, pick that one.”

He was out of his chair, leaning on my desk, as aggressive as I’d ever seen him.

“I will go down to Jefferson’s bank and stay there until I can prove it, Perry. I will drive those people out of their minds, make them show me every camera and every computer and every transaction record and serial number, and I will check and double-check and triple-check until I’ve got something that proves that was his money. You think that’s impossible? You’re kidding yourself. That money in Indiana was withdrawn by Alex Jefferson and given to you. I will prove it, and then I’ll come down here and put you in handcuffs. When that happens, Perry? You better start telling the truth. You’ve lied your way through it so far, but that road’s coming to an end. I’m sealing it off, understand?”

“The irony,” I said, “is that you even believe you could recognize the truth if you found it.”

He straightened up and moved back from my desk, his jaw set, and shot Joe a look as if daring him to step in. When Joe didn’t say anything, he turned back to me.

“I’ll see you soon, Perry. If I were you, I’d spend the rest of the day finding a good defense attorney. Got a feeling you’re going to need one.”

A
fingerprint is a fascinating thing. A small speck of residue left behind at each touch, marking your identity as you move through the world. A fingerprint, like your identity, is unique. It belongs only to you.

Mine was gone.

My fingerprint and my identity. With one went the other, and now a police detective had walked into my office and informed me that they were gone, missing, out of my control.

I had not touched that money. I had not sent it to an investigator in Indiana, had not handled, even seen it. But the facts—those irrefutable scientific facts—said that I had. The reality I knew had just been trumped. People are willing to believe words as the truth up to a point. That point, it seems, is when the facts—particularly those of hard science—dispute the words. Now all I had was the words. Targent had the facts.

It was just Joe and me in the office again, behind our respective desks, angled to face one another, the appearance of the afternoon just like a thousand that had preceded it. None of them had ever felt like this, though.

“You were right,” Joe said after a few minutes of silence had passed. “The money isn’t Jefferson’s. If it was, it would have his prints, not yours. I don’t know how they got the money, but—”

“It’s his money.”

He looked at me as if I’d confessed. “What?”

“It’ll be his money, Joe. Targent will prove that. Maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. He’ll find a way. It’ll be Jefferson’s money, and I won’t be able to explain it. That’s how this is going.”

“He doesn’t have as much as you think. Not as much as he thinks, either. That money isn’t connected to the murder in any direct way. It wasn’t recovered on Jefferson’s body, doesn’t have his blood on it. Even if they do find a way to show it was in that chunk he withdrew from the bank, that’s no proof of guilt in a murder.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that if Joe had suddenly become the office optimist, this thing was reaching dire straits, indeed.

“How did they get the fingerprint?” he said.

“I do the final money count each night in the gym. Touch a number of fifties. If they stole a few of those, or even one, and put it with the cash they had . . .”

“That would work. But how did they get in the gym office?”

“These guys? I don’t think that would be much of a problem.”

“Your cameras show the gym office, right? We can go back and look at the tapes and—”

“They don’t show the office.”

“What? You spend all that money on cameras, don’t you want one on the money?”

“It was never about that. The cameras show the gym so people feel safer, and it helps with my insurance liability. I wasn’t worried about security in the typical sense, someone breaking in and stealing a few dollars.”

He studied me with uneasy eyes, then got to his feet and walked to the window and looked down on the street. He had his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders—good one and bad one alike—were stooped. Usually, he stood so damn straight you wanted to salute and break out into a goose step.

“It’s not as bad as it looks, Lincoln.”

“That’s comforting. Because it looks damn bad.”

He turned from the window. “We don’t stop. Okay? We don’t let this stop us, or even slow it down. We keep working, countering every one of Targent’s moves with one of our own.”

“He’s the one countering, Joe. Each time we make a discovery, he does, too. And his seem to carry more weight.”

“There are still things we can prove. Robert Walker, for one. That should be easy. Let’s call the department and see if they’ve ever had a detective by that
name. If they have, maybe that’s even a bigger break. Maybe he’s the one who can explain some of this.”

I gave in on that, found the number for the CPD records division, and asked for a woman I’d known for years. She asked for ten minutes to check. It took her five.

“I’ve got no record of a Robert Walker in this department in the last twenty years,” she said when she called back. “There have been seven Walkers, but none of them have Robert as the first or middle name, and the only one who was a detective is still here, and he’s a black guy, first name Darryl. Not who you’re looking for.”

I thanked her, ended the phone call, and turned to Joe. “No Robert Walker. Jefferson brought in a fake cop, and one who matches the description of the guy who threatened Donny Ward.”

He nodded, but there wasn’t much excitement there. We’d both known Walker wasn’t legitimate, so this wasn’t news, just confirmation.

“Ward’s killing me,” I said. “If he’d be honest, if we could show Targent that the guy who threatened him and the guy who came with Jefferson to see the Heath family were one and the same . . .”

“So let’s try it. Go out and see him again. Make him understand the importance.”

“Whatever he says to us won’t mean a damn thing, though. It’ll only count if he actually goes through with it, talks to Targent.”

“Let’s try him,” Joe said. “And this time, let’s bring a tape recorder.”

The tape recorder was a good idea, and maybe it would have paid off if we’d been able to find Donny Ward. He wasn’t home, though. We stood on the porch beneath the sagging roof, water from the last rain still trickling through the breaks and cracks, dripping off ruined gutters, and pounded on the door, waited, pounded again. Nobody answered. We tried yelling for Donny, and the only response that provoked was a long, forlorn howl from one of the dogs.

“His truck’s here,” Joe said.

“Could be out in the woods. Could be someone drove him into work. If he actually works.”

“Door locked?”

I tried the knob and nodded.

“Last thing we need to do is force the door, give Targent an excuse to arrest you.”

“Probably not the best idea.”

It was closing in on five now. The sky was already dark with the rain clouds, but now the day was disappearing, too. We could sit on Donny’s porch all night. Maybe he’d show up, maybe he wouldn’t. A neighbor came along in a wheezing Honda hatchback and gave us suspicious eyes and slowed before driving on.

“Hate to think we wasted another drive all the way out here,” Joe said.

“Should we wait?”

He ran a hand along his jaw, staring at the shadows growing along the porch. “By the time we get back to Cleveland, it’ll be late. That attorney should be home, or headed that way. Cole Hamilton.”

“You think we should try him?”

“I think we should take a swing before Targent does. Once he sets up a pattern of lying to the cops, he’ll likely stick with it. If we can make him bend first, it would be a help.”

“All right.”

We walked off the porch, and the dogs milled around our feet, friendly now, even the one who’d growled at us on our first visit. Now we were familiar, or maybe they were just hungry, waiting on Donny’s return. When we got into the car, they whimpered, as if they were sorry to see us go. The rain was opening up again, fat drops sprinkling the windshield, then a fast, fine rain by the time we got to the end of the rutted lane. The wind was a steady tug on the trees, peeling away the few leaves that remained on the branches and dusting them across the road. In another month, these heavy clouds would be dumping snow instead of rain, letting loose over Ashtabula County in the way they always did, the wind howling in off the lake, bending the pine boughs and snapping frozen power lines. This was the heart of the Snow Belt, recipient of more annual snowfall than anywhere else in the state. Those lakeside villages, so busy in the summer, would be long-since empty by the first snow, Ohio’s version of Maine’s south coast—visitors welcome in the summer, but you better be a hardy bastard to hang around in the winter.

We didn’t talk much on the drive back, just watched the highway fill with headlights and tried not to think about fingerprints and stacks of fifty-dollar bills. Amy would be home by now, maybe. Be damn nice to pick her up for a proper dinner, share a relaxed evening, no worries of police or fugitives or the faceless associates who swirled around them. I thought of her, and my mind flashed on that picturesque gazebo in the Indiana orchard, cloaked in the smells of the autumn woods. What a gorgeous spot, right up until the blood
had pooled on the deck boards and dripped into the shimmering dark water of the pond.

At least he has a reason. You’ve got nothing but greed.

The city was glowing when we got back, the downtown bridges lit with colorful floodlights. We drove past them and on to the west and got off the interstate at West 150th, headed for Lorain.

“Stopping by the office first?” I said.

“You got Cole Hamilton’s address on you?”

“Nope.”

“Then I guess we better.”

The rain had stopped, at least temporarily, but when we got inside the building it was dark in the stairwell. The only glow was coming from the emergency lights in the jewelry store at street level and the exit sign over the door.

“Power outage,” I said. “You write that guy’s address down, or will we need to go somewhere else to use a computer?”

“I’ve got it on paper.”

We made our way up the steps through familiarity rather than good vision. At the top of the steps, Joe reached for his keys, but I already had mine out, and I reached past him, got the key in the lock and turned it, stepped halfway inside, and reached for the light switch, sliding my hand along the wall.

“Power’s out, remember,” Joe said.

“Right. I’m an idiot.”

I gave up on the light switch and dropped my hand from the wall just before I felt a hand on the back of my neck and tasted metal as someone pushed the barrel of a gun into my mouth.