Damaged Goods (4 page)

“Cold Springs Correctional,” Hannibal said. “Two and a half, three hours south of here. But not a bad place, as such places go. Minimum security.”

“They figured if he behaved he'd be out in two years. But in the meantime, there was no money. I left school and got a job with a house cleaning company, but I knew it wouldn't be that long.”

The espresso was hot and strong and flavored with just enough cinnamon. Hannibal guessed it was brewed from medium roast Arabica beans. He let it play across his tongue as he listened. “And is your dad still away?”

“Daddy,” Anita clenched her eyes together for just a moment. “Daddy died in prison last year. They said it was a
heart attack. Sudden. Unexpected.”

In that instant, Hannibal's coffee became as bitter as ashes. No, he realized, it was this young woman's life that had turned to ashes in a matter of months.

“I'm so sorry. What did you do? Was there insurance?”

“He had it at work,” Anita said, “but it lapsed while he was away. He had left some savings, but with keeping the house going and the, you know.”

Hannibal nodded. “The final arrangements. I understand. So you kept working. And I assume you looked for the gift that your father left behind.”

“I never found anything that looked valuable in the house,” Anita replied. Her fists were clenched tight as she spoke. “Of course, I didn't know what I was looking for. Jewelry? Stocks? An account number? No idea. Anyway, after enough time passed I began to even wonder if there was a hidden treasure. Maybe he just told me that to keep my courage up while he was in prison. But I kept on with life, you know, cleaning and saving up to get back to college. And then Rod came.”

“Rod is the boyfriend?” Hannibal asked.

Anita's lips pressed tightly together. “Could you please take off your glasses, Mr. Jones?”

Hannibal slid his Oakley's off his face. Anita stared for only a moment. Maybe it didn't seem as odd to her as it had to some others.

“Are they blue?”

“Sometimes,” Hannibal said. “Technically I guess you'd say hazel.”

“Men don't have hazel eyes. For sure Black men don't. You are unusual.”

“I don't mean to be,” Hannibal said. “Now, Rod? The boyfriend?”

Anita locked eyes with Hannibal as if preparing for some reaction. “Rod was my lover, Mr. Jones. He showed up at the house about a month after daddy passed. He said he had known my father in prison, and daddy would have wanted him to take care of me. He had no place to go. I was lonely.
So, I let him stay with me.”

Hannibal knew she was steeled against disapproval, but it was not his place to judge her. For him, these were just facts in a case. Every case eventually grew out of people doing wrong and if he tried to sort the good people from the bad he'd never have a client. He sipped his coffee. It had grown cold, but bringing the cup to his lips gave his hands something to do.

“I take it your father told you about this fellow?”

“He had mentioned him,” Anita said. “And he showed up at the right time. None of my father's other friends from work or anywhere ever bothered to check on me after the funeral. All my friends were up at school. I was alone, starting to drift, wandering aimlessly. Do you understand that, Mr. Jones? I needed someone to guide me, to help me get through it all. Rod was a strong man, and he just captivated me.”

Hannibal hated him already. Of course, Hannibal had a prejudice against guys named Rod. Or Dick. Or Peter for that matter. What were they trying to prove? “So you were comfortable with this guy?”

“I fell in love with him, Mr. Jones,” Anita said, fixing him with a defiant stare. “I needed him, and I felt like he needed me. And he asked about Daddy all the time. He spent a lot of time in Daddy's study, almost as if he was trying to make it his own.”

“No doubt,” Hannibal said. “And at what point did he become uncomfortable there?” Anita looked down. Hannibal's words had been dry. He knew all of this must be embarrassing to share with a stranger.

“It came as a total surprise, Mr. Jones. Six months ago, I came home from work and he was gone. And Daddy's study was a mess. Books tossed here and there, papers just strewn about. I realized while I was cleaning up that he must have been searching for something. Daddy's notebooks were very orderly and organized and I made sure they were all in place before I was done. At first I thought nothing was missing. Then I noticed that a whole box of spare computer discs was gone. I had never thought that Daddy's hidden treasure might
be information, Mr. Jones. I think Rod took something out of the computer.”

Hannibal had gotten there ahead of her, but this wasn't a real answer. Were they talking about directions to hidden money, the account number of a secret bank account, or a stock brokerage account? It could just as easily be information about a coworker to be used for blackmail. The possibilities were endless, and everything he thought of was intangible. Lost diamonds could be recovered, but stolen information was probably worthless after being used by the thief.

“Right. So he disappeared six months ago, and you haven't seen him since.”

“Oh, no,” Anita said, leaning forward with her palms on the table. “I saw him last week.”

Hannibal also leaned forward, startled the way we so often are when the ending of a story isn't what we expect. “Where?”

Anita's hands locked in an odd way, palms facing with the fingers of one hand curled to hook into the fingers of the other. “I had just finished cleaning Mrs. LaPage's house. I was getting into my car when he pulled up in front of hers. God, it made my heart hurt to see him. I was so flustered I almost caused an accident pulling away. My mind was just spinning. I didn't know what to do. That's why Tonya dragged me out to the club that night. And that's when I saw you.”

“Timing is everything,” Hannibal said with a smile.

“I think maybe it was fate,” Anita said with total seriousness. “You were sent to help me.”

Hannibal squirmed under the weight of such a divine responsibility. “I'm not sure I have the solution to this particular problem, Miss Cooper. Why don't you sit tight for a minute and I'll go talk to Mr. Blair again, to see what we might be able to work out.”

Anita looked frightened when Hannibal stood. Frightened of being alone, he wondered? In any case, she sat obediently while he wandered into the living room. Hannibal pushed his
sunglasses back into place before he stepped into the living room. He stopped at the end of a plush sofa, on which Blair sat watching the tape of a baseball game on his sixty-one inch plasma television screen. The Red Sox were pitching to the Yankees. Blair's feet tapped, and he twitched to the point that he almost vibrated in his seat. Was he a bundle of nervous energy, or did his brain just run at such a frenetic pace that it fired out energy his body had to bleed off. When he looked up, it was as if he was coming out of a trance.

“So, taking the case?”

“Let's get through the basics first,” Hannibal said. “Can we talk for a minute?”

Blair didn't hesitate to mute the game and turn his attention to Hannibal. “How can I help?”

“From what Miss Cooper told me, this is too simple. Have you spoken to this Rod? Made him an offer for whatever it is he took?”

Blair shook his head. “I had my people call Marquita LaPage, you know? He's left town again.”

Hannibal watched Jeeter swing hard at a pitch that was low and inside. “How far did the police get?”

“Police?” Blair made a noise of contempt. “This isn't a case for the police, if only for personal reasons. I don't want the man arrested, I just want you to find him and get back whatever he took from Anita's house. Besides, police probably wouldn't even believe a crime had been committed, right? I mean, no valuables gone, at least nothing the victim can describe, and no forced entry. No crime from their point of view. This is a case for you, my friend. You know, we're in the same line of work you and I. What do you know about data mining?”

“Not much,” Hannibal said. “I guess it's all about extracting the information somebody needs from large databases.”

Blair lit up like a school kid. “That's it exactly. That's how I made my fortune, you know, and I think it's what you do too. We‘re both in the information business, Mr. Jones. The only real difference is that my databases are in
computers, and yours are usually in people's heads. That's the only way to find a person who doesn't want to be found in this world. We all leave a trail, after all, it's just lost among all the other material. It's all out there, you just have to dig up the right bits of data.”

“Yes, well, buried treasure that might be missing isn't usually the kind of thing I do,” Hannibal said. “Ms. Cooper doesn't appear to really be in any kind of trouble. And I did have a little vacation planned. Not to mention, there doesn't seem to be much to go on.”

“Please, just do me one favor,” Blair said. He picked up a thin envelope from his glass topped end table and handed it to Hannibal. “This is a check for one day's work and a retainer for a week of your time. Please just go to Anita's place and look around a bit. Get your feet wet with the case. If you decide it's not for you, just tear up the second check and move on. I promise I won't bug you again. Okay?”

Hannibal thought that little kid grin must work for Blair nine times out of ten, and he couldn't resist returning it. “Okay, you've got a deal. Let me mull this one over, and I'll let you know in the morning if I'll take the case or not.”

Blair stood and extended his hand. “I had you checked out pretty thoroughly, Mr. Jones. If Anita told you her whole story I know you'll pursue this.”

Anita Cooper insisted on making lunch for them after Hannibal drove her the five blocks to her home. Her townhouse was a bit more modest than Blair's but the much greater difference showed in the contents. Expensive furniture doesn't really look so special until you have something to compare it with. Hannibal thought her father had bought a home just a little beyond his reach. To compensate, he had ordered the cheapest carpet, the least expensive blinds and the most basic kitchen appliances. They had furnished it along the same lines.

Hannibal toured the house while Anita did kitchen things.
Being a bachelor, he was amused at how neat she kept the place relative to his own apartment. Beyond that, nothing upstairs seemed remarkable to him except perhaps the after-shave lotion in Anita's medicine cabinet. The second bedroom was preserved as if someone lived there, but dust motes floated in the strong shaft of sunlight beaming in through the window. He suspected the room was merely a shrine to her lost father.

On the main level he walked into the odor of tuna fish oil and mayonnaise as he passed Anita. She seemed focused very hard on making the world's best tuna salad sandwiches and soup from a can. The living room held the usual items, although her nineteen-inch television looked puny after standing in front of Blair's home theater screen.

Another flight of stairs led Hannibal to a family room, and finally, a small office. This room showed signs of recent use. Papers were neatly arrayed on the desk. Perhaps Anita used the computer every day to send e-mails and such. Bookshelves lined the room, and one set of them held a row of numbered green notebooks. That didn't mean much to Hannibal until he noticed the floppy discs.

A transparent case on Hannibal's desk holds two rows of poorly labeled discs. Three similar cases stood on Anita's desk. Perhaps a total of one hundred eighty discs, all grouped by color and separated by dividers. The woman was absolutely anal-retentive. Or maybe her father had been. Looking more closely, he could see that the discs were labeled and numbered with great care. Well, she did say her father was a researcher. Maybe he worked at home.

Again, Hannibal's attention returned to the green hardcover notebooks. Each was numbered in sequence with a label pasted to the spine. He pulled down the first one and opened it. The pages were lined but much of the content was drawings and diagrams and writings that he recognized as chemical symbols. Each triangle or pentagram with letters at the corners represented a chemical compound but like the accompanying paragraphs it was all gibberish to him. Curious, Hannibal reached for the last volume, number thirty-eight
. It was blank. As were thirty-seven and thirty-six. She must have prepared them in advance. But number thirty-four was full to the last page. The book in-between was absent.

“It's ready,” Anita called.

Hannibal bounded up the stairs to find Anita facing him with her back to the stove, pointing toward the table at the front of the house where a glass of lemonade already stood. He smiled a thank-you and moved to a chair while stuffing his glasses and gloves into inside jacket pockets. Green plants lining the windowsill beside him were a silent testament to one more thing he could not do, keep plants alive in his home.