City of the Sun (35 page)

Paul nodded, took Jamie by the arm, and exited the room. Victor, standing above the fallen man, swung the door shut.

Paul and Jamie came upon Behr, bleeding and big-eyed, in the narrow hallway.

“My god,” Behr said at the sight of the boy he’d stared at a thousand times in photos. “Is he … ?”

“We’re gonna go, Jamie,” Paul said. “Can you?”

“Yeah,” the boy answered.

“Can
you
, Frank?”

“Follow me,” Behr said, gathering himself and raising his handgun. They followed him down the hall and out through the carnage of the house. Furniture was turned over and broken in the main area. The smell of gunpowder and the thick copper stink of blood were in the air. There were bodies. Paul saw two dead dogs sprawled on opposite sides of the room. They encountered one last guard, who was in the process of stealing something from a lockbox. He might have been the night gate guard, though neither Behr nor Paul could be sure, having only seen him through binoculars. Behr leveled his handgun. The man looked up and then ran out through a back door at the sight of them.

The sound of one, then another, shotgun blast reached them from inside as they made the car. Behr looked to Paul and gripped his gun.

“Victor,” Paul said.

“Victor?”

Jamie slid into the back and Behr lunged into the passenger seat. Paul started the car and began to drive. He expected the crack of a bullet from some unseen guard to tear his head away at any moment.

“Get down,” he said to Jamie, who did, lying across the floor in the back. Behr slumped lower, too, kicking off a shoe and peeling off a sock, which he pressed against one of his wounds. Paul rooster-tailed the car out of the gate, which hung open and still abandoned. No shot came. Paul fought to control his breathing, his sides heaving for oxygen, overloaded with adrenaline. He spit up in his mouth and let it go out the window, not taking his foot off the accelerator. Tears slicked his face.

“Jamie, get up now. I need to see you.”

His boy, impossibly, appeared in the rearview mirror. Paul thought for a moment that he himself had been shot back in the house and he was dying, and this was his death-moment fantasy image. But the moment went on and on. Paul got control of the car. Jamie was really there. Paul flashed on Carol, waiting at home for him,
for them
, to return. In his mind burned an image, of her face exploding with light, a light he could barely remember, in the instant when she saw her son again. Paul reached back with a hand and Jamie took it.

The dirt road gave way to gravel, and finally they were on asphalt again. They merged onto the main route, joining other cars and large trucks heading north. Mexican wind blew in the open windows. A cordon of federales’ cars passed them going southbound with lights and sirens rending the night. Paul glimpsed Jamie in the backseat, staring out the window, incomprehension and barrenness on his young man’s face. They used dirty T-shirts and what was left at the bottom of the water bottles to clean themselves up. Behr wrapped a shirt around his tattered forearm. They kept driving, looking out every window and then at one another. It wouldn’t be long now. They’d be at the border soon.

For the missing and those who wait for them

The author would like to thank Dale Wunderlich, Michael Levien, and Arthur Nascarella for generously sharing their insights on law enforcement and private investigation. These are three men who always go after the truth, and their contributions were invaluable.

Available in hardcover from Doubleday in July 2009

THE MORNING WAS
gray, and a cool that wouldn’t last. Frank Behr steered his Toronado across East Prospect, and appreciated the empty streets at 5:45 a.m. His neck still throbbed from a guillotine choke he had barely escaped a day ago, and he was having trouble turning his head to the left, but at this hour the city was his. He had a jump on the world, and that felt good. As he drove, he tried to leave his mind distant and unfocused. Better not to dwell on the soft bed he’d just left, or on the physical challenge that loomed ahead of him. In twenty minutes time he’d be soaked in sweat, his heart hammering, arms and legs turned to molten lead, as he attempted to gain limb-breaking position on a man who was basically impossible to achieve this against.

Pummeling, clinches, fire-feet and sprawl drills, takedowns, guard escapes, and technique work. Topped off by lunge walks with a hundred-pound ground-and-pound bag on his shoulder. It was enough to cause a replay of last night’s dinner, and that was just for openers, before they began to “roll,” which was what they called sparring at Aurelio Santos’s Brazilian Jiujitsu Academy.

Behr cut right on Sherman. There wasn’t much traffic, but whatever cars were out at this hour would be along 74, so he avoided it. Behr trained alone with Aurelio himself, and because of that made damn sure he was on time for their 6:00 a.m. starts. It was a matter of respect. Behr had tried the normal group classes in the evenings at the academy, but leaving the hardest thing of the day until the end was exactly the opposite of how it worked for him now. The specter of it tended to hang over his day and mess with his mind. It was a concession to his age, which was just on the wrong side of forty, but nowadays he needed to clear the physical effort first.

Aurelio charged him the regular fee of a hundred-fifty bucks a month despite the private lessons that should have cost at least a hundred an hour. For that, Behr figured, he owed Aurelio plenty. He had to consider, though, that it might not be a straight-up favor. Behr had a habit of accidentally breaking people. Six-seven and two-fortyish was a handful for the recreational martial arts practitioner, and Behr had caused plenty of unintentional injuries to various training partners during the decade and a half he’d studied karate, boxing, and kickboxing before taking up jiu-jitsu. Regular-sized, civilized, often white-collar folk, plying techniques on someone of his mass and dimension, tended to lose faith in a system when the moves suddenly didn’t work. Even those of a much higher belt rank weren’t immune. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to quit outright and not come back after practicing with him. Plain and simple, Frank Behr could be bad for business. Maybe Aurelio had gamed that out.

Behr hit a string of green lights along Campbell, letting the big car drift around some potholes, and then steered toward the academy on Cumberland Street. He felt it before he saw it, as he rounded the corner and clicked his right-turn blinker: there was too much activity in the parking lot, which should’ve been quiet. His eyes zeroed in on a pair of patrol cars, done up in graphite and black, the color scheme for Indianapolis Metro PD since the consolidation with the Sheriff’s Department, that still wasn’t the norm in his mind after all those years of taupe and brown. There was also an ambulance in the lot. The ambulance had its flashers on, no siren. The patrol cars were split, and parked in a wedge, one directly in front of the academy, the other at the door of the neighboring check-cashing place.

That doesn’t make much sense
, Behr thought, as he pulled in and parked and saw that the metal grate over the door to the check-cashing place was securely closed and the lights turned off. Then his eyes found the door to the studio, which was swung wide open.

Who the hell robs a martial arts school
? he wondered.
That is no kind of score
. Anyone who’s ever been to one has to know the office would only contain disorganized paperwork, out-of-date liability waivers, moldy addresses; and as for a safe to break: that’d be a petty cash envelope holding small change amounting to less than fifty dollars maximum. Not even worth the trouble.

Maybe somebody hit the studio hoping to go through the wall into the check-cashing place
, Behr considered, shutting off his car.

If that was the case, and Aurelio had arrived to discover some thief with the bad fortune to not be finished … Well, Behr supposed, that would explain the ambulance. He opened the car door. He wore sweats over shorts and a rash guard top, and automatically grabbed for his gear bag, which contained mouthpiece, towel, and dry clothes for after, and walked toward the studio.
No workout today
, it occurred to him, knowing too well how long the bullshit paperwork with the cops would drag on, until the morning class started to arrive. Then his experience reminded him that robberies didn’t happen at 6:00 a.m. very often. He quickened his pace.

The air inside the academy was thick with it. It was unmistakable. Behr stepped through the door and saw it in tableau. Two EMTs sat back on their haunches, idle and staring at the walls. A pair of cops stood, arms crossed, heads down. Silence. Between them, on the ground, was Aurelio, his face and skull blown away from his neck like a snapped-off match head. The once supremely powerful and intelligent body lay there, simply turned off, just a pile of bone, sinew, and other dumb tissue now. Dark blood spattered the blue mat.

Behr edged closer. What stared up at him from the ground made him go cold: death, still and final, that which had recently been his friend, now gone for good. He felt his stomach knot and threaten to turn over. He bit back on it hard and held his mud. It was the least he, the living, could do.

Then, even as he stood there, stunned, not saying a word, his eyes began to work, undirected. Aurelio’s fists were clenched, the knuckles raised and purpled, as to be expected after his fourteen-year Mixed Martial Arts career. There were damp patches on the mat. Water or sweat? The few pieces of furniture in the studio — chairs and a table — were upturned. A chunk of drywall was caved in. On another wall were a few small, round holes, buckshot pellets lodged in them. The blood streak on the mat grew chunky with solid matter as it neared and stopped at the body.

It came together in an instinctive rush in his mind: Aurelio had been shotgunned under the palate. It had been an interrogation finished by an execution, but not before a struggle. No
two
men he’d ever met could’ve held Aurelio down. A gun changed any equation, to be sure, but Behr’s gut reaction was that there had to have been three, at least. The body had been dragged a distance, but then abandoned.

“Ah, goddamnit,” he breathed. It just slipped out. Behr cursed himself for the words. He could have used an extra few seconds to take in the details.

But now one of the cops turned to him, REGAN printed on his nameplate. “This is a crime scene. You can’t be here. Who are you?” The kid in uniform was blond, maybe twenty-five, but his blue eyes were already going flat and probably only lit when his son or daughter was around. It was what happened.

“Frank Behr. I train here.”

“Behr. You used to be over on the Near North Side?” the other cop, a dark-haired, dark-eyed thirty-year-old said. His tag read DOMINIC. “My uncle Mike’s said your name.”

“That’s right. A while back,” Behr said, and tried to think. “How’d the call come in?” They gave him the courtesy.

“Bread truck delivery driver went by on Cumberland. He saw a flash in the window. Didn’t think much of it at first, but it stayed with him enough to call 911 further on along his route,” Regan said.

“Don’t suppose he saw anybody or any cars in front?” Behr wondered.

“Nah. Course not. Detectives are on the way to question him anyway.”

“You know
this
?” the second cop asked, gesturing to the body.

Behr bristled, but nodded. “Aurelio Santos.”

“Like the name on the sign.”

“Yeah. It’s his place.” Behr heard the defeat in his own voice. He’d seen enough of them to know that this was one cold crime scene. It looked icy. How many dozens of prints and partials would be all over the place thanks to the student traffic? And no witnesses either. A grim, hopeless feeling looked for a place to grab hold in his belly at the waste of it, at the empty hull that was now all that remained of a man.

Then anger settled on Behr, hot and familiar. His jaw set and he knew in that instant that whatever the police did or did not do, no matter how much or how little they threw at the case, no matter how quickly they might try to clear it, that
he
would invest the minutes, the hours, the days, the months it would take to hunt down the scum, the animals, the maggot-motherfuckers who did this. He felt his breath come in short stabs, a bellows of fury working deep within him. He tried to control it, to not be a “belly breather,” the way Aurelio had taught him when an opponent had a knee on your chest and was going for full mount and every cubic centimeter of oxygen left in the lungs meant the difference between light and blackness.

A random killing
? Behr tried it out in his head. Not the norm for Indianapolis. There’d been too many murders in the city lately, but they all had a crime-on-crime connection and Aurelio was the furthest thing from a criminal. It wasn’t right. He felt it again:
someone had wanted something
.

Behr’s eye fell on the office in the far corner of the main room.
Information
. It wasn’t a mere idea but an imperative that pulsed deep in his cortex, like a reptile’s desire for food. He figured Aurelio’s Rolodex would be on the desk, and his best hope of a lead would be found inside. But it would be a matter of moments before the officers threw him out, regardless of whether he’d once been on the job, and went ahead and locked down the crime scene. Like the cop saying went:
when you’re in you’re a guest, when you’re out you’re a pest
.

Taking a chance, Behr started for the office, going wide around the body and blood trail, staying on the edge of the mat. His movement seemed to stir the others into action. As he passed the high shelves holding tall, elaborate trophies from Aurelio’s wins in the Mundials and Abu Dhabi and Tokyo, the EMTs started closing their unused medical kits, and the cops looked to one another.