Signature Kill (3 page)

Behr got home and carried his hunting gear inside. His clothes went straight into the washing machine, his boots back in the closet. The slug gun got a wipe-down with a chamois, but since it had gone unfired, it did not require a full cleaning before it was placed in the gun cabinet. It was late and he was nearly ready for sleep, but something kept him from his bed and steered him toward his computer.

He typed the name from the billboard into a Google search. He didn’t know what caused him to do it. Four articles about her came up: three within days of each other dating back eighteen months, and then a more recent one, from the beginning of the month. Behr read them in chronological order. The first piece was a brief posting about a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d gone out for the night and hadn’t come home or called, which was highly unusual.

Her mother, Kerry Gibbons, age fifty, of the Millersville Boulevard area, had called police. “I know something bad happened to her, because I was watching my daughter’s baby girl, and she always comes for her first thing in the morning, or at least calls. She always calls. Always. Even from jail.”

Jail?
Behr thought.

The second bit talked about police efforts to locate the woman and intimated that she was a prostitute who had gone out to work
for the night. A shoe had been found, a lavender-colored pump. Kerry Gibbons was trying to positively ID it as one of her daughter’s but wasn’t sure. The third article linked the Gibbons disappearance to a few others that had occurred over the past three or four years. “Women get into cars with these men around here or out at the Dr. Gas truck stop on 70, or the one on 465, and a lot of them don’t come back and we don’t see ’em again,” a neighbor commented.

Behr felt the familiar cold weight of parental grief as he read the last, most recent piece. It was about the unveiling of the billboard he had seen and the reward fund that Kerry Gibbons had established.

“I appreciate all those who’ve sent in their money. I
will
find out what happened to my daughter so my granddaughter doesn’t have to wonder, if it takes my whole life and every cent I can spare.”

Doing something for the money usually ends up costing plenty
.

Behr had risen early, and this was the thought in his head as he tied his running shoes and slipped on a heavy pack. He hit the street, his breath clouding in the cold morning darkness. The pack strap cut into his recovering collarbone and reminded him of what had happened six months ago. How the shotgun blast had come out of nowhere and leveled him in falling rain. He set out for Saddle Hill, hoping to outrun the memory.

If there was one positive by-product that came along with the paucity of work lately, Behr thought, it was his cardio. His empty plate and inability to lift heavy weights allowed him to run more regularly, and for longer than usual. While ten sprints up and down the long steep of the Hill used to constitute his morning run, he’d lately built to thirteen, then fourteen. He didn’t time himself, but he was pretty sure his pace had picked up. His strength at the finish surely had. He’d gone to swim with Susan a few times at the I.U. Purdue pool too. They took turns, each watching the baby on the side while the other swam laps. She put him to shame, though. She sliced through the water like a game fish, while he just wasn’t buoyant. He was made of lead apparently. She’d be done and toweling off
while he churned up a lane, his thrashing dissuading other swimmers from sharing with him, mostly ignoring her pointers, until his heart was chugging like a steam engine and he’d finally call it a day. No, the asphalt was where he belonged. One foot in front of the other, just like his life. He hammered up the incline, road salt shifting and shaking in the pack like a seventy-pound maraca.

It’s a stupid idea
, he thought about the Gibbons case, on the way down.

How could it hurt to just take a look?
he wondered his next time up.

If the police have nothing, how can you do better?
Up he went.

Because I have time
. He huffed his way down.

Why bother?

A hundred grand. Trev and Susan
.

The thought repeated itself on the way up. The same thought stayed in his head on the way back down.

By the time he was finished, he’d decided.

Behr’s Toronado rolled to a stop on a patch of pea gravel outside a modest but well-kept brick bungalow in Millersville. There was a Ford Taurus parked in front, and a pink tricycle tipped over against the side of the house next to a small plastic Playmobil jungle gym and slide set. He also noticed a once-yellow ribbon that had been tied around the trunk of a maple tree. It had faded to a pale buff color and was frayed along the ends. Behr continued toward the door and knocked.

“Mrs. Gibbons?” he said when a petite woman, around fifty years old, with cropped platinum hair opened the door.

“You’re that detective? Call me Kerry, and come on in.”

“If you’re here to get hired, you can forget it,” Kerry Gibbons said, handing him a cup of Vanilla Bean Taster’s Choice.

“Ma’am?”

“It’s not that I won’t spend the money, it’s that I been down that road. A couple three-thousand-dollar rides to nowhere. So there’s no retainer or hourly or anything on this one.”

“I understand,” Behr said.

“She’s dead, my little girl. I know it in my bones,” the woman said without excess emotion. “I know there’s no finding her alive. I just want to know how. Who …” It was only then that her anger
rose up beneath her words. “I want the son of a bitch who did it sent to Terre Haute and shot full of juice.”

“Well …” Behr said after her words had settled. “This kind of thing isn’t easy.”

“How’d you end up coming to me?” Kerry Gibbons asked, lighting a slender brown More 120 from a red pack.

“The billboard,” Behr said. He’d already mentioned it on the phone, but he supposed she had a lot on her mind.

“Of course,” she said. “I figured I’d get a lot more phone traffic after it went up. Even cranks and such.”

“And?”

“Not as much as you’d think,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was disappointed about it.

“Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking, where did you come up with this reward money?”

“Raised it,” she said, tapping her ash into a coffee cup with no handle. “First six months I offered ten grand—that’s all I had. Posted flyers everywhere. But that didn’t stir the pot. So I upped it. Had a series of community benefits and drives. People knew Kendra around the neighborhood. They cared about her.”

“I’m sure they did,” Behr said.

“Kendra’s friends and me out at intersections with buckets.” Then she smiled. “And those friends of hers, those little girlies, had a couple carwashes last summer in their short-shorts and halter tops, splashing around. Ten dollars a car. Twenty dollars a car. Plus tips. I was there too, but just organizing. No one’s paying to see these old things get soapy anymore.” She juggled her breasts and barked out a nicotine laugh that Behr couldn’t help joining.

“Well, it is a lot of money,” Behr said, “but still …”

“I know, I know, it’s impossible,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the cup and waving away the smoke. “But I’ve learned in my time that you can do damn near anything if you put your mind to it.”

Behr nodded. It was something he’d learned too. After spending a moment in thought over her Taster’s Choice, she put it down and the photos came out. They were snaps of Kendra. One was of her
smiling brightly in her high school graduation gown, another with a bunch of friends in jean shorts on the hood of a Dodge. Party shots. She seemed to be a vibrant, beautiful young woman. Then came picture after picture of the girl with an infant. There was the full version of the photo that had been cropped for the billboard. This one featured a swarthy, muscular young man with a proprietary arm around Kendra’s shoulder.

“Who’s this?” Behr asked, holding it up.

“Kendra’s dirtbag of an ex-boyfriend, Pete,” Kerry said.

“Pete what?” Behr asked.

“Lambrinakos. He’s a Greek.”

The last picture was also from graduation day, the mortarboard and tassel atop her head, blond hair pushed back, diploma displayed proudly.

“That was a great day. Kendra was in the top quartile of her class.”

Behr looked up.

“Yeah, quartile. We’re not just a bunch of dummies in this part of town,” Kerry said. “Wish she could’ve hung in at community college, things would’ve been different.” Then the woman picked up a folder from the coffee table, which was cluttered with knickknacks and television remotes and
TV Guide
s.

He took the folder from her and felt right away from its weight and thinness that there wasn’t going to be much of use inside. He flipped it open to find a copy of the police report from eighteen months prior.

Behr flipped to the witness statements. One was from a Village Pantry clerk. Kendra Gibbons had bought a pack of More 120s and Tropical Fruit Trident from the convenience store that evening around 8:00. Store security camera footage confirmed it. No other customers were in the store at the time. An acquaintance, a woman named Samantha Williams, with the notation “also known prostitute,” gave a statement that she’d seen Kendra across the street and waved to her, but had then “met a friend” and “gotten a ride from him.” Behr made a mental note to himself to talk to her.

The police report was dust—even finer than dust—it was motes of pollen on the wind. He’d read many of them in his day, enough to know that when they started off this flimsy they never did get closed. Never. Behr finished reading and looked up at Kerry Gibbons, pretty certain that his being there was one of the poorest ideas he’d had in quite some time. As if sensing his lack of will Kerry Gibbons started talking.

“Just so you know, that money’s currently residing in escrow in an interest-bearing account. It goes to whoever provides information leading to arrest or conviction. No funny business.”

Behr nodded.

She dug around on the table and came up with a statement from PNC Bank and handed it to him. The statement showed $97,500.

“I’ll find a way to make up the difference and get it all the way up to a hundred if anything comes of it.”

Behr was thinking about how to extricate himself from the house and this stone loser of a scenario, and was contemplating whether or not he should try some direct marketing by calling his past clients to see if they needed his services. He tipped back his cup and drained it, placed the folder on the table, and stood to say his goodbyes when a little girl came out of a back room. She was perhaps two and a half years old, her blond hair in pigtails, overalls printed with a pattern of strawberries, and her right Mary Jane unbuckled.

“Hey there, baby girl,” Kerry Gibbons called out to her granddaughter. “This little mermaid is Katie.”

“Gamma.” The girl’s bright blue eyes shone as she ran over to them. She glanced at Behr and stopped, but apparently had no great fear of strangers because she didn’t shrink back at his presence.

“It’s okay, sweetie, I’m talking to the man about your dear mother,” Kerry Gibbons said.

“Mommy,” the little girl said, her voice a song. Gears started churning around in Behr’s guts.

“She doesn’t know who that means anymore, I’m afraid. She was so small when Kendra went missing.”

“And her father?” Behr asked. He wondered instinctively if it was a custody dispute gone bad.

“ ‘Father’ is just a word, you know. There were a lot of men it could’ve been who made my little sweetie, but none of ’em were anything close to a real daddy to her.”

“So it wasn’t Lambrinakos?”

“Hell no. Whoever it was isn’t in the picture—that’s the way we seem to do it ’round here—so I’m all she’s got now.”

Behr felt himself slide back into his chair.

“Do you have children, Mr. Behr?” Kerry asked.

It was a question that pained him, one he’d once hated but now withstood. “Two. Two boys. I’m raising the one I have left,” he said.

“Oh, I see,” Kerry Gibbons said, a sense of warm knowing rising up from her own reservoir of pain. He watched her get up and swing the girl around by the arms, causing the child to erupt in delighted giggles.

“So, you think I could get a copy of that billboard photo and the names of those friends of your daughter’s?” Behr asked.

“Sure, but I don’t think they know nothing. I’ve spoken to ’em a million times about it.”

“It’ll be different when I talk to them,” he said.