Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel) (7 page)
“You’re making a big mistake,” Nick said.
“The only mistake I’ve made so far is wasting time talking to you.” He shooed him again.
When Nick finally turned and started toward his car, Misco called after him: “By the way, about your little ‘Murder Club.’ Just out of curiosity, has the FBI ever consulted you people on a case?”
Nick turned but didn’t reply.
“Uh-huh. What about NYPD?”
Nick said nothing.
“I didn’t think so,” Misco said. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“Ego,” Nick said. “It’s a chronic problem with people who wear badges.”
“Is that the reason? Or is it because they’ve got good people of their own? The Philadelphia Police Department is the fourth largest in the nation, Polchak—that’s why we don’t need you either. Now be a good boy and go home.”
N
ick left his car three streets over and approached Pete’s house from behind, slipping over fences and ducking under windows as he crept through the narrow side yards that separated each house from its neighbor. He had to move fast because night was quickly falling and there was a moonless sky. The neighborhood behind Pete’s was unfamiliar to him and he needed the last vestiges of daylight to find his way; the last thing he wanted was to surprise some neighbor’s pit bull or to garrote himself on an invisible clothesline.
He emerged from the last row of houses and found himself directly behind Pete’s garage. He quickly crossed the open driveway and ducked into the concealing shadow of the house. He sidled his way to the corner of the house and poked his head around, searching for signs of a patrol car surveilling the front of the house—but Misco had left the house unguarded. Nick smiled—Misco must have thought he was a lot more intimidating than he really was.
Misco’s final words still buzzed in Nick’s head like an annoying mosquito:
Now be a good boy and go home
. What was it about the human species that so easily confused arrogance with competence?
The
“
Women’s Murder Club
” . . . The guy actually thought Vidocq was a joke! He thought
Nick
was a joke too—that’s what really burned him. Well, the feeling was mutual, and Nick was not about to leave the investigation of an old friend’s murder to some amateur with an inflated ego.
Pete’s body would have been removed from the house as soon as the forensic technicians had finished taking photos and collecting evidence; by now it was probably at some downtown morgue awaiting autopsy by the medical examiner. Nick wished he could have examined Pete’s body in situ, for both personal and professional reasons. But even without the body there were still things to look for in the house—and nothing was going to stop Nick from taking that look.
He crossed in front of the garage doors again and climbed a stairway to a small porch with a white wooden railing and two empty lawn chairs that looked out over the driveway. He lifted the sisal welcome mat and found a silver key.
Definitely a friendly neighborhood
, he thought.
Maybe a little too friendly
. He wondered if Pete’s killer might have gained access to the house in exactly the same way.
When Nick stood up and faced the door he found two strips of yellow crime scene tape crisscrossing the frame in an ominous X. Nick ignored the warning and unlocked the door, then ducked under the tape and entered the house. He quietly shut the door behind him and listened for a moment before switching on his flashlight and shining it about the room.
He was in the kitchen. The house was completely dark and the narrow beam of the flashlight illuminated the room in disjointed fragments, the same way his memory recalled it: side-by-side refrigerator on the left, arched doorway, wall-mounted telephone with long dangling cord, laminate countertop, electric range, breakfast nook under a window on the right. He started toward the doorway to the living room, but before he even reached it he was met by the stomach-wrenching odor of decomposing flesh.
Nick entered the living room and shined the flashlight around the hardwood floors; he saw the taped contour of a body near the center of the room, marking the location where the Philadelphia police had discovered Pete’s body. He approached the spot carefully, aiming the flashlight directly in front of his feet to avoid disturbing any potential piece of evidence. He squatted down beside the contour and held the flashlight over it at arm’s length . . .
The head’s positioned toward the back of the house with the feet pointing toward the front. Misco said he saw two bullet wounds in the chest, so the body had to have been lying on its back. Pete must have fallen backward, so the shooter must have been standing toward the front of the house when he fired. That means either Pete walked in on the shooter, or the shooter entered the front door looking for Pete. But who in the world would want to kill Pete—and why?
Nick walked to the front door and pointed the flashlight at the area around the knob and the dead bolt. The doorframe was still intact; there were no signs of forced entry. He ran the flashlight around the room—at the walls, the picture frames, the bookshelves, the furniture. Nothing seemed disturbed or out of place; either the shooter was the neatest burglar Nick had ever seen or theft hadn’t been the motive.
Nick returned to the taped contour again. This time he laid the flashlight on the floor at the body’s feet, pointing toward the head, then walked around to the head and got down on his knees. He bent forward, placing his fists on the hardwood floor to avoid leaving fingerprints. He turned his head to the side and looked at the flashlight; the brilliant beam passing along the glossy floor silhouetted every speck in its path. Dust balls looked like miniature sagebrush and dots of blood were as black as ink. He searched for shell casings first, but he knew that was too much to hope for—even the world’s worst forensic tech would spot brass on a hardwood floor.
Next he noted the location of blood spatter in relation to the body; he noticed some at the feet, but it wasn’t widely dispersed and there was no sign of smearing. That was good; it meant the first two shots probably killed Pete quickly—he didn’t have time to crawl or drag himself across the floor.
Thank God for small blessings
.
There was no sign of insect evidence—no maggots or puparia—but Nick didn’t expect to find any. The windows were tightly sealed and had prevented blowflies and flesh flies from gaining access to the house; the only insect that might have reached the body would have been a common
Musca domestica
already inside, and there wouldn’t have been time for its eggs to hatch and the maggots to begin to develop. It didn’t matter; the medical examiner had lots of reliable methods for estimating a postmortem interval this brief. Time of death wasn’t important here—at least not to Nick. To Nick, this case wasn’t about
when
—it was about
why
.
He got up off his knees and retrieved the flashlight, then walked toward the front door and turned left into Pete’s office. Nick pointed the flashlight around the room; there was Pete’s beautiful cherry rolltop desk against the far wall with a fourdrawer file cabinet standing beside it. Bookshelves covered most of the walls, each one lined with neatly arranged books categorized by subject heading and then alphabetically by author—there were even little labels on the edges of the shelves like in a library. Nick shook his head. Pete had always been a compulsive organizer, but the man himself was so sociable and friendly that he could seem absentminded at times. Nick was the diametric opposite; his mind was compulsively organized, but his physical environment was always in chaos. Pete Boudreau was like Nick’s evil twin—or maybe Nick was the evil one, because his own office back at NC State looked like a toxic waste site, with stacks of books and journals teetering on every level surface while documents and articles cascaded from ledges like paper waterfalls. Everything in Pete’s office was assiduously arranged, right down to the calendar on the desktop oriented at a precise ninety-degree angle to the edge of the desk. Nick tried to remember if he even owned a calendar; he wondered how many times he had jotted down some important reminder on the back of an undergraduate’s blue book and then handed it back in class.
He moved to the desk and began to flip through the pages of the calendar. The date of each Vidocq meeting had been faithfully entered, and the current month’s meeting bore the additional notation, “NICK IN TOWN.” Pete hadn’t forgotten their meeting; he would have been there if not for the intervention of three lead slugs. Nick placed his finger on today’s date and began to scan backward week by week and month by month, noting every entry Pete had made in his perfect script. A brief notation in late November caught his eye: CALL MARTY—no last name, no phone number. Three days earlier he found a similar entry: CALL MARTY. He continued to work backward through the fall calendar and found the same notation again and again. According to the calendar, Pete spoke repeatedly with some guy named Marty just a few months prior to his death. Nick remembered the words of Pete’s letter inviting him to Philadelphia:
We’ve really had some interesting cases the last few months . . . I’ve been working on one since last fall and I think it’s about to come together .
. .
Who’s this guy Marty
, Nick wondered,
and how do I find him?
Nick turned to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer— but just as he did he heard the blaring
whoop
of a police siren outside the house and almost simultaneously a pounding knock on the front door.
“Police—open up!”
Crap
—some nosy neighbor must have spotted the beam from Nick’s flashlight and called the police. He thought about making a run for the back door, but he knew it was useless— the police would have surely sent a man around back before announcing their presence. There was no way out, and there was nowhere to run—and he probably had less than a minute before they let themselves in.
He turned back to the file drawer and searched through the section headings:
Correspondence, Financial, Personal
. . . There it was—right where it should be, in the back, in alphabetical order:
Utilities
. Nick had never been so glad that Pete was a compulsive organizer; he could find his way through Pete’s files faster than he could his own. Nick rifled through the file folders in the
Utilities
section and quickly found it: the file marked
Telephone
.
He pulled the file and ran out of the office just as he heard the sound of a key scratching in the dead bolt. He raced across the living room to the window and threw open the drapes; he unlatched the window and lifted it just an inch or two— then he slid the file folder out the window and let it drop to the ground behind the bushes. He had just drawn the drapes again when the front door flew open and Detective Danny Misco burst into the room with two patrolmen behind him. Misco held a flashlight in his left hand and a Glock in his right; he pointed both of them at Nick.
“Well, it’s about time,” Nick said. “I want to report a Peeping Tom.”
A
lena waited under a streetlamp on the sidewalk in front of the Endor Tavern & Grille. Two of her dogs sat obediently beside her, one on either side like canine bookends. On her left was Dante, one of the enormous black neo-mastiffs that she always kept nearby for protection; on her right was tiny little Ruckus, the gawky Chinese crested that looked like a half-plucked chicken with its tongue hanging out.
She glanced down at her cell phone for the umpteenth time and remembered what Nick had told her:
Three bars on the right means your battery is good; three bars on the left means you’re getting a signal
. She remembered something else Nick had told her too:
I’ll call at exactly nine o’clock
. She checked the time—it was now 9:45.
She could have kicked herself for walking instead of driving; she could be waiting for Nick’s call in the privacy of her truck instead of standing on a street corner like some hooker. But it took less time to take the footpath directly down the mountain than it did to make the drive to Endor on the long and winding road—and she didn’t like to pass up an opportunity to exercise her dogs. Besides, she never expected to end up standing on a street corner; she had hoped to wait for Nick’s call at Resurrection Lutheran Church on the outskirts of town. But when Nick’s call didn’t come at exactly nine o’clock she wondered if she was close enough to town to get reception. She knew that Endor’s only cell tower was an ugly eyesore standing in a field directly behind the Tavern & Grille—so for the last forty-five minutes she had been gradually working her way closer to the tower, hoping to improve reception and increase the chances that the call would finally come through.
Alena had been standing on the street corner for twenty minutes now, enduring the looks from men in cars and pickup trucks who slowed down to ogle her as they passed—one of them even circled the block and came around for a second look. And all she could do was stand there, waiting for Nick to call— but each time they passed she lowered her head and shook her long black hair down to cover her face a little. She couldn’t help feeling cheap and ashamed somehow—but why should she? Those men were the ones who ought to be ashamed—the men who slowed down to drool over her and then drove home to their waiting wives.