Criminal Intent (MIRA) (17 page)

After more thoughtful deliberation, he decided on the most suitable approach, and then he went shopping. He was able to buy most of what he needed right at the Wal-Mart just down the street from his motel. A call to a local P.I. he found in the Yellow Pages netted him the name of an electronics supplier who gave him a good deal on a few inexpensive pieces of surveillance equipment. The rest he found at Home Depot. Thank God for chain stores. They made his life so much easier. He rented a white panel van and stuck his peel-off Verizon logos, carefully crafted by an associate in Cincinnati, on both front doors. The workman’s uniform was generic, but he doubted anybody would question it. People looked right through workmen. He should know; he’d used the disguise often enough in the past. Put on a blue work shirt and a tool belt, and you became invisible.

Before he left his motel room, he checked himself in the mirror. The crisp blue Dickies shirt and pants, the tool belt with its screwdrivers and wire cutters and serious-looking electronic gadgets, were perfect. And the Detroit Pistons hat that he’d picked up at a Goodwill store was a nice touch. It branded him as a local. Just your basic blue-collar guy, drinking beer with his buddies after work, watching the Pistons on the TV over the bar. When the job was done, he’d keep the hat as a souvenir, add it to his extensive collection, along with the Florida Marlins jersey he’d bought at the airport in Miami. Everybody had a hobby. His was collecting sports memorabilia from the places he visited in his travels.

The dogs were out this morning, roaming a fenced-in section of side yard. Through the greenery that intertwined with the chain-link fence that kept them in, he caught a glimpse of them, all playful and innocent-looking, cavorting with a red Frisbee. Louis parked the van on the street a couple of houses away, got
out and opened the rear doors, and began rummaging through the crap he’d loaded in the back. Whistling cheerfully, he kept an eye on the Sarnacki house, waiting for his chance. All he needed was five minutes, ten at most. Talk his way in, pretend to check out all the phone lines, install his listening devices, and leave. Easy in, easy out.

Except for those goddamn dogs.

While he waited, he took inventory of the property, surveying it with the eyes of a seasoned investigator. He’d driven by the place several times, but this was the first time he’d stopped, the first time he’d been able to get more than a brief glimpse as he passed. A man’s home was his castle, or so pundits said, and Sarnacki’s home was no exception. The house was large, even for this neighborhood, a modern architectural wonder of bricks and glass and jarring angles, surrounded by shade trees old enough to tell him that another house, some old and venerable antique, had once sat on the property where the Sarnacki residence had been built.

Adjacent to the house was a three-car garage, with a basketball hoop over one of the bays. The hoop, together with the gleaming red mountain bike parked inside the open bay, told him there was probably at least one teenager in the household. That could be a good or a bad thing, depending on circumstances. He’d never met a kid yet that he couldn’t talk his way past. Louis was a good judge of character and a quick study. Ten seconds and he could size a person up, ferret out his most vulnerable point, and tailor his spiel accordingly. Still, kids were unpredictable, much more so than adults, so he’d have to be extra careful.

Parked near the garage, off to one side, was a hideous bile-green Ford Pinto. How many decades had it been since he’d seen one of those incinerators on wheels? Considering all those exploding gas tanks, he’d have thought by now they’d all be in Pinto Heaven. But there it sat, mute testimony to the bad
judgment and worse taste of Ford Motor Company’s designers. There was no way it belonged to Sarnacki, and he doubted it belonged to the kid, either. Not in this neighborhood. More likely the maid. Nobody else who lived in a house like this would be caught dead driving one of those things.

Louis closed the doors to the van and got back in the driver’s seat. Pretending to read the owner’s manual he’d found in the glove box, he kept an eye on the side-view mirror. While he watched, a heavyset woman in her fifties, dressed in jungle-print capris and a mustard-yellow knit top—Gulden’s, not French’s—came out of the house. Purse swinging, she walked to the garage, climbed into a silver Cadillac, and backed it out into the circular drive. Louis watched as she adjusted her mirrors, then slowly pulled to the end of the drive. She looked both ways and eased the Caddy out onto the street, passing the white van without so much as a sideways glance. Probably on her way to Marshall Field’s to practice the great American pastime of consumerism. Judging by the looks of her, she probably had more than a passing acquaintance with the local Krispy Kreme franchise as well. Louis smiled, his theory confirmed. There had to be a kid. The mountain bike certainly didn’t belong to the svelte Mrs. Sarnacki.

Ten minutes later, the man of the house himself came out the front door, walked to the gate that enclosed the side yard, opened it and whistled to his two slavering beasts. The dogs came running, leaping and bounding around their master. Sarnacki closed the gate back up, rubbed each of their heads in turn, and led the fearsome creatures indoors. He came back out a moment later, carrying a golf bag which he proceeded to toss into the back of a massive black four-wheel-drive SUV. Sarnacki backed the monstrosity out of the garage, shot to the end of the driveway, took a quick look right and then left, and barreled down the street in the opposite direction from where Louis was parked.

After
a reasonable amount of time had passed, Louis pulled a packet of Juicy Fruit from his pocket, peeled open a couple of sticks, and popped them into his mouth. When they were chewed sufficiently so that he could open and close his mouth without difficulty, he got out of the van, clipboard in hand and tools dangling at his hip. Adjusting the Pistons cap, he strolled nonchalantly up the driveway of the nearest house, climbed the front steps, and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was in her midthirties and slender, with short, choppy blond hair and sharp features. She wore pink capris and a white tank top, the kind with the tiny little straps that hardly amounted to anything. Louis wondered what it was with the capris. Were they some kind of neighborhood uniform or something? At least she looked better in them than the Sarnacki woman had.

Sounding bored, she said, “Can I help you?”

Louis shifted the gum from one cheek to the other. “Yeah,” he said, looking down at the fake work order attached to his clipboard. “I’m from Verizon. We got a complaint that your phone’s out of order.”

Looking puzzled, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with my phone.”

“It says right here, 22923 Mayflower Drive—”

“That’s my address,” she said, “but we haven’t called the phone company.”

“Sarnacki, right? 22923 Mayflower Drive.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re at the wrong house. You want 22927 Mayflower Drive. Two houses down.”

“I don’t get it,” he said, lifting the bill of his cap and scratching his head. “It says right here, Robert Sarnacki, 22923 Mayflower Drive, phone not working. You’re telling me you ain’t Mrs. Sarnacki?” He looked her directly in the eye, snapped his gum, and waited.

Coolly, she said, “I’ve already told you, this isn’t the Sarnacki
residence. You have the wrong house.” She started to close the door, but he stuck his foot in it.

“You sure?” he said. “Because I’m new at this, and I don’t want to catch hell from my boss. You’re absolutely certain that this is 22923 Mayflower, but nobody named Sarnacki lives here? Phone number 555-3281?”

“For the last time,” she said, “you have the wrong house. This is the Miller residence. The Sarnackis live two houses down the street.”

Louis managed to remove his foot an instant before she slammed the door shut in his face. Muttering loudly and irritably about the stupid broad in dispatch who couldn’t even get the address right, he walked back down the driveway to the street. He opened and closed the back doors of the van again, just for show, then took his clipboard and sauntered off in the direction of the Sarnacki residence.

The door was answered by a red-haired beanpole of a kid wearing size-thirteen sneakers and an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt. Three feet behind him, the twin Dobermans sat silently, their bright, watchful eyes trained directly on Louis. Probably wondering if he’d taste good with ketchup. “Yeah?” the kid said.

“I’m from the phone company. Mrs. Miller up the street’s having a problem with her phone. Lots of static, calls not going through, that kind of thing. I’ve traced it to the pole outside your house, but I need to check all your phone lines, verify that it hasn’t affected you, too, before I go up and replace the transmitter.”

The kid just looked at him. “Hunh?” he said.

“You got DSL?” Louis said.

“Yeah. Why?”

“This issue we’re having could screw it up pretty bad. You probably better let me check it out and be sure you’re okay. If it goes bad, you could be without online service until Monday or Tuesday.”

As
if a light switch had been flipped, something sparked to life in the kid’s eyes. “Yeah, dude,” he said. “Come on in.”

Louis glanced at the twin beasts who sat behind the kid, saliva dripping from their jaws, and felt his palms begin to sweat. “Can you do me one favor first?” he asked the kid.

“Sure. What’s that?”

“Can you lock up those dogs somewhere?”

“Apollo and Troy? You scared of them? Dude, they wouldn’t hurt a freaking flea.”

“Humor me. I don’t have a lot of time to waste. I got service calls up the ying-yang.”

“Geez. Come on, boys.” The kid opened a door off the hallway, shooed the Dobies through it, and closed it behind them.

Louis’s stress level went down about twenty notches. “Thanks, kid,” he said. “How many phone lines do you have in this place? Not including computers.”

“Three. You gotta check ’em all?”

“Yep. Your mom or dad home?”

“Nah. Just me and Rosa.” The kid led him into an opulent, state-of-the-art kitchen. Granite countertops, Sub-Zero fridge, glass-topped electric range, copper-bottomed pots hanging from a rack over a center work island. “Kitchen phone’s on that wall over there,” the kid said, pointing.

Louis moved toward it, picked up the receiver, and listened to the dial tone. From his tool belt, he took the little handheld voltage meter he’d picked up on eBay. Waving it around near the receiver, he snapped his gum and said casually, “Who’s Rosa?”

“The maid. She’s in the den, watching a Tony Robbins infomercial. She thinks that guy is, like, God or something.”

“Hunh.” Still waving the meter, Louis palmed the tiny transmitter he’d hidden up his sleeve and attached it in a spot where it would never be noticed. “This one looks good,” he said. “See?” He
pointed to the voltage meter, whose needle wasn’t so much as quivering. “She’s not showing anything.”

The kid peered at the circular gauge with its still-as-death needle. “So what does this thing measure?” he said.

“Your telephone emits tiny radio waves,” Louis said. “If something goes screwy with it, this little baby will pick it up in a heartbeat.” He returned the phone receiver to its cradle. “Where’s the next one?”

Six minutes later, he was back in his van, all three of Sarnacki’s phones successfully bugged. In and out so quickly, so smoothly, that Rosa the maid, preoccupied by the mesmerizing Tony Robbins, never even noticed he was there. He’d succeeded in his mission. Better yet, he’d gotten out alive. The Dobies would have to look elsewhere for their midmorning snack. Louis was sure his blood pressure would be back to normal within an hour. Two at the most. Now all he had to do was find a parking spot nearby, sit there with his listening equipment, and wait.

He just loved it when a plan came together.

T
hey
assembled in the video store around ten, a motley group dressed in jeans and T-shirts, ready to tackle the wreckage and wrestle it into submission. Estelle showed up armed with a pen and clipboard for keeping track of what got tossed and what could be salvaged, and a bag of Tootsie Roll Pops to satisfy her sweet tooth. Perched on the neon-pink striped checkout counter, she waved the bag of pops in Annie’s direction. “My addiction,” she explained. “Ever since I got pregnant, I’ve been craving these things.”

Davy Hunter arrived carrying a travel mug of coffee in one hand and a can of white paint in the other. Accompanied by his stepdaughter, he’d thought to bring trash bags, something Annie hadn’t remembered. Although Jessie and Soph had met the night before at the Crowley house, now that they were expected to spend the day together at close range, the two girls eyed each other with all the distrust normally seen in a pair of tomcats circling a female in heat.

Annie set them to work sorting through the movies that littered the floor. “The salvageable ones you can put on the shelves,” she told Sophie. “At this point, don’t worry about organizing them. We can work on that later. The primary objective
is to find the floor underneath the mess. Jessie, you can bring the destroyed videos to Estelle to put on her list, then start filling up trash bags.”

Picking their way carefully through the rubble, both girls got to work. In the closet under the stairs, Annie found a broom and dustpan and an old upright stick vacuum. She took them out even though it was a little premature to be thinking about such things. They had to find the floor before they could sweep it. While Hunter returned to his car for paintbrushes and cleaning solvent, Annie waded into the mess.

The VCR that had provided Estelle with companionship on lonely workday afternoons was a total loss. It looked as though somebody had picked it up and heaved it with all their might at the wall. Stepping carefully, Annie carried its mortal remains over to Estelle, added it to her list of destroyed items, and placed it in a trash bag. The computer monitor suffered a similar fate. The vandals had put something—a baseball bat, a hammer, possibly somebody’s work boot—right through the screen. By some minor miracle, they’d managed to miss the 19-inch Sony television that sat on a shelf behind the counter. When Estelle turned it on, it sprang to immediate, full-colored life.

The cash register hadn’t been as fortunate. Annie’s nocturnal visitors had tossed it on the floor with such force that it had gouged the hell out of the hardwood flooring. But the register was one of those old-fashioned, indestructible dinosaurs. It was dinged up a little, but as far as she could tell, it was still in working order. As bad as this was, she realized it could have been worse.

Once they’d cleared some space on the floor, she and Hunter heaved and tugged at the toppled wooden shelving unit, wrestling it back upright into a spot that was a fair approximatioon of its original location. It was scratched and dented, but
usable. “I’ll slap a coat of paint on it,” Hunter said, “and you’ll hardly know anything happened to it. These things are rugged. I built ’em that way on purpose.”

Annie scraped back a fistful of hair from her face. Surprised, she said, “You built these?”

“Yep.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “You’re a carpenter?” she said.

“I build furniture, cabinets, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I guess some people might call me a carpenter.”

“Don’t let the humble act fool you,” Estelle said around the lollipop in her mouth. “He’s a damn good carpenter. He built my mom’s kitchen cabinets.You don’t have to worry about shoddy workmanship with this guy. Those cabinets will outlive us all.”

“I’m impressed,” Annie said. “You’re a multifaceted man, Hunter.”

“Well, golly gee. Keep up the compliments and you’ll make me blush.”

By twelve-thirty, they’d made a respectable dent in the disorder, and they broke for pizza and soft drinks. The girls dove in, ravenous, claiming half a pizza and carrying it outside, where they sat on the curb beneath the vacancy sign to eat. “Watch out for broken glass,” Annie warned them. “We don’t want to be carting you to the hospital to get stitches in your backside.”

Sophie rolled her eyes, but Jessie giggled through a mouthful of pizza as though Annie’d said something incredibly funny. Nice to know that not everyone between the ages of ten and twenty found her inconceivably lame.

Estelle parked herself on the stool behind the counter so she could watch TV while she ate. Annie and Hunter took the last available seats, side by side on the front steps. “I think we’ve made progress,” she said to him as she pulled a slice of pizza from the box he held on his lap.

“We’ll get the worst of it cleaned up today.” He helped himself
to a slice. “How soon will you get that check so you can start replacing things?”

“I think it should come pretty quickly. The adjuster saw the damage with his own eyes, so it’s not as though they’re questioning the validity of the claim.” While she ate, she watched the two girls, who’d been so wary of each other just hours ago. Now they sat shoulder to shoulder, talking animatedly. “Look at those two,” she said. “It didn’t take them long to start bonding. How old is Jessie?”

Hunter swallowed before answering. “Sixteen going on thirty-five. In a good way. She’s probably the most responsible teenager I’ve ever met.” He picked up his bottle of Pepsi and took a sip. “I don’t suppose she had a choice about that.” His blue eyes, watching the girls, grew thoughtful, distant, and Annie wondered what his cryptic words meant. Wondered where he’d suddenly disappeared to.

A loaded pulp truck, headed for the paper mill in Rumford, roared past. Through the open doorway behind her, the television emitted the low murmur of conversation. “Did you talk to Jeffrey Traynor?” she said.

Hunter returned from wherever he’d been. “Yeah,” he said, taking another slice of pizza. “But I didn’t get anywhere.”

“Thoughts, comments, impressions?”

“He’s your typical small-town yahoo. Likes to drink too much and isn’t averse to roughing up a woman if he’s not happy with her, although he’ll deny it if you press him. But I’d be surprised if he had anything to do with your break-in.”

“Damn. Any other suspects?”

“None that spring to mind immediately. This kind of vandalism’s usually teenagers. Except…”

“Except what?”

“I don’t know. Something about it feels deliberate.”

She raised an eyebrow. “It would be hard for something like this to be accidental.”

He
almost smiled. Almost, but not quite. “Bad word choice. What I meant was that it doesn’t feel random.”

“You mean it was aimed specifically at me.”

“Or at somebody connected with the Twilight.”

“Somebody female.” When he looked at her, she said, “The word they painted on the wall. BITCH. It’s not too likely they were aiming it at Kenny Moreau. Not unless he has a secret he’s keeping from us.”

There it was again, that almost-smile. “Which leaves you and Sophie, Estelle, and—” His gaze landed on Jessie. The near-smile disappeared, and deep furrows bracketed his mouth.

Following his gaze, she said, “Have you talked to Jessie? Questioned her?”

“Yeah. I didn’t get any further with her than I did with any of you.”

Three or four cars passed on the highway, all of them exceeding the 45 mph speed limit. “What about the fingerprints?” she said. “Any luck there?”

“Pete checked the samples you gave us and pulled out any matches from what we’d gathered. He sent the rest off to the state police to be run through the computer.”

“The state police? Why involve them?”

“We’re not involving them.” He lifted the lid to the pizza box and took out the last slice. “You want half?” When she shook her head, he said, “Serenity’s a small town with a small municipal budget. We can’t afford the technology that no twenty-first-century police department should have to do without. The Maine State Police have access to a regional database. We have an agreement with them. If anything pops, they’ll let us know.”

“Is that typical? Small towns not having access to fingerprint databases?”

“Given budget restraints, unfortunately, yeah. There are a lot
of small towns in the same boat we’re in. No modern technology, no money to train their officers to use it even if they had it. They have to turn to the Staties for help. Which means it could take a while.”

“How long a while?”

“A few days at best. Could be longer.”

“Shit.”

“You have to understand how busy they are. Their priorities probably aren’t the same as yours. This wasn’t exactly the crime of the century.”

“It is to me.” She’d already invested so much in this place, in reinventing herself, in the concept of breathing new life into the Twilight. This act of vandalism had been a hard slap in the face, one she could have done without.

“Annie.” He spoke her name softly, like a caress. It was the first time he’d called her by her first name, and the word hovered in the air between them, charging the atmosphere around them with a sudden, intense sexual awareness. Her insides tightened and tensed like catgut on a fiddle, and the tiny hairs on her forearms stood at attention. In that unforeseen instant of attraction, she became aware of the most minute of details. A tiny cut on his jaw where he’d nicked it while shaving. The scent of soap that clung to him, in spite of the fact that he’d been working for hours in the summer heat. A narrow scar at the corner of his lip. She hadn’t felt this kind of pull towards a man since Mac. There were a million reasons why she shouldn’t be feeling it now. At the top of the list, running neck and neck, were the two major truths that dangled like twin swords over her head: she wasn’t who he thought she was, and somewhere out there was a madman who was determined to track her down and kill her. Those were pretty big reasons not to get involved with the man. A host of other, less urgent reasons followed, although at this precise moment she couldn’t seem to remember what any of them were.

“We’re
done,” Sophie announced from three feet away, dropping Annie abruptly back to earth. “What do you want us to work on now?”

The moment, fraught with possibility, vanished. But she could see it lingering in his eyes. The attraction wasn’t one-sided. Davy Hunter felt it, too, and wasn’t any too sure how he felt about the situation.
Multiply that times two,
she thought, and cleared her throat. “Why don’t you girls start sweeping up?” she said. “Once that’s done, we can start painting.”

Parked a couple of blocks from the Sarnacki residence, Louis wasted an entire afternoon sitting in the white van, reading the latest issue of
Cosmo,
eating M&M’s, and listening through a plastic earpiece to a dozen meaningless and inane telephone conversations. Occasionally during his career as a private investigator, he’d been approached at cocktail parties or backyard barbecues by civilians who, when they discovered what he did for a living, somehow found the idea of being privy to people’s deepest, darkest secrets titillating. What they didn’t know was a lot. You spent most of your time sitting on your ass until it turned numb. You drank endless cups of coffee until you had to pee like a racehorse—and in a neighborhood like this one, public bathrooms weren’t exactly on every corner—usually without finding out anything worthwhile. The simple truth was that people just weren’t that interesting. Their secrets weren’t that interesting, and their telephone conversations were a real snooze fest.

Take, for example, the lady of the house, who’d spent a half-hour this afternoon relating to someone named Madge her adventures in the lingerie department at Lord & Taylor. The Sarnacki woman was built like a Sherman tank, and Louis tried not to picture her in the frothy and painfully revealing black lace teddy she gushed about buying. But it was like
rubbernecking at a particularly horrific accident. The mental picture it created was so compellingly agonizing that he couldn’t bring himself to look away from it.

He found out that the teenager, whose name was Josh, had his own little side business selling illegal goodie bags to the neighborhood kids. Like his dad, young Josh Sarnacki was quite the entrepreneur. At the rate he was going, he’d be a candidate for membership in the local Jaycees any day now. When Josh wasn’t drumming up business, he was fending off calls from lovestruck teenage girls with lousy taste in men who kept calling him up so they could pretend they didn’t like him. Ah, the mysterious workings of the adolescent mind!

And then there was Rosa, the maid, whose life rivaled a Mexican soap opera. Her husband was in jail for holding up a 7-Eleven. Her son had just been fired from his job at Burger King, and he was scrambling to find another job before his probation officer found out and sent him back to the slammer alongside his old man. Her sister was involved in a nasty custody battle with her soon-to-be-ex-husband for custody of their two
niñas.
Rosa spent nearly two hours on the phone with various friends and relatives, talking in rapid-fire Spanish and with dramatic flair, hoping to drum up some support in the form of good old U.S. greenbacks. The people she worked for were rich, greedy, tightwad pigs. They paid her slave wages, treated her like an idiot, and had repeatedly refused to give her a raise, in spite of the fact that she cleaned up after those disgusting dogs every day, put up with Josh’s godless music, and scrubbed all three of their toilets at least twice a week.

Fortunately for Rosa, her employers didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

Unfortunately for Louis, he did.

It seemed that everybody in the household had some kind of little drama going on, something they desperately needed to
share with a phone buddy or two. Everyone, that was, except the one person he was hoping for. After five hours of sitting in the same spot, Louis was getting nowhere fast. Bobby Sarnacki had made a single routine business call that lasted approximately ninety-three seconds. Louis had read
Cosmo
from cover to cover twice, and he could no longer feel his own ass. It was time to pull the plug. Take a break. Come back later, and better luck next time.