Signature Kill (4 page)

“What’s it about?”

The tall, thin, dark-complexioned woman blocked the door with her body. The smell of nutmeg and baking apples reached Behr from inside.

“Kendra Gibbons,” he answered.

When she heard the name, the woman’s face fell.

Behr was at the home of Elisa Brook, a woman Kerry Gibbons had said was her daughter’s best friend. He’d come armed with her address, a copy of the thin police file, which was no more than a waste of paper, and the name “Jonesy,” apparently a local protector or pimp of girls in the profession according to Gibbons. Besides that, Behr didn’t have much else with him besides a mild sense of futility.

Elisa Brook may have been close to Kendra, but missing her friend wasn’t the sole cause of her dismay at the moment. She pushed a strand of dark hair away from her face and cast a half glance back over her shoulder into the house. A baby stroller was visible in the entryway next to her.

“I heard that you used to work together. That you shared some contacts in that world,” Behr said.

“Look, can we do this some other time? My husband’s at home. I’m recently married and he’s not a hundred percent clear on my … past employment history.”

“Well …” Behr began. He didn’t like rescheduling an interview with someone who was looking to avoid him. It generally turned
into more canceled appointments, and his trying to catch up with the subject. The pattern was often repeated until it became a test of wills. He usually won the battle, but he preferred to avoid it in the first place if he could.

“You have any information on where she might’ve gone?” Behr asked. Even though Kerry Gibbons thought her daughter was dead, Behr had the odds as being much better that the girl had just taken off in search of the mythical “better life.”

“Oh, I don’t think she went anywhere,” Elisa said.

“No?”

“Nope.”

“Why’s that?”

“Her daughter, obviously.”

“Uh-huh,” Behr said. “Plenty of young women have run away, leaving a child in the care of their mother.”

“Not Kendra,” the woman said.

“I see. Who’s Samantha Williams? You know her?” Behr asked in reference to one of the witnesses in the police report—the remaining one, the Village Pantry clerk, had recently returned to his native Bangladesh. So far Behr had been unable to locate the woman. All the Samantha Williamses listed in the vicinity were either too old or too young to be the likely candidate.

“Don’t have a clue,” the woman said.

“You know if Kendra had a boyfriend? Maybe one from out of town?” Behr had of course started his efforts by researching Pete Lambrinakos, the Greek ex-boyfriend Kerry Gibbons had mentioned. He and Kendra had broken up two years back, before she went missing, and he’d been jailed in Toledo on car theft, evading arrest, and past warrants at the time of the disappearance. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a new boyfriend in the mix. “Or a client from out of town who something romantic had developed with?” he continued. “Did she talk about wanting to get away to someplace?”

“She didn’t have a boyfriend,” the woman said, crossing her arms. She really wanted Behr to leave, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’d like to learn a little bit about Jonesy.”

Elisa grew even more agitated at mention of the name.

“Ooh, he is
not
someone I’ve kept up with,” she said.

“Maybe you can give me some background on him then, and an address where I can find him.”

“He lives with his girlfriend—girlfriend of the moment slash wife type or common-law something or other, but you did
not
hear it from me.”

Behind her, inside the house, a toddler walked by behind a toy lawn mower that popped colored balls inside a clear dome as she pushed it.

“My daughter. She plays with Kendra’s daughter sometimes. Used to anyway. My husband isn’t her father.”

“I see,” Behr said. If she turned out like her mother the little girl would have heavy eyebrows and a light mustache by the time she was thirteen, but she was as cute as a gingerbread cookie right now. And then the twice-mentioned husband appeared in the doorway beside his wife. He was stocky and powerful looking, with the first few buttons of his starched dress shirt open and a gold chain around his neck.

“The pie is browning,” he said to his wife, and then turned to Behr and asked: “What’s up?”

Behr said nothing.

“The pie is fine. He’s a salesman,” Elisa Brook said.

“What do you sell?” the husband wondered.

There was a quiet desperation in the woman’s eyes that found Behr. The modest rambler on the quiet street must’ve been a huge step up from nights spent climbing in and out of truck cabs on Pendleton Pike.

“Encyclopedias,” Behr said.

“Yeah? People still use them?”

Behr shrugged.

“Where are your samples?”

“Not printed books that take up your shelf space. Online. We sell an access code to the website,” Behr said.

“Don’t you guys usually just do e-mail blasts?” the husband continued.

Behr didn’t want to jam the woman up but wasn’t sure how long he was going to continue with the pretense.

“We don’t like to spam potential customers,” he answered, patience near an end.

“Well, that’s good to hear. Kid’s only three. Doesn’t even read yet, so thanks anyway.”

“I’m gonna slide him a couple of referrals,” Elisa Brook joined in. “He said I get a free access code if I give him five names.” When it came to lying, there was nothing like a hustler who’d perfected her craft on the stroll. Her delivery was as smooth as polished glass.

“Whatever,” the husband said and walked away.

Elisa Brook nodded her thanks but didn’t speak it. Instead she quickly got into what Behr had come for.

“I’m out of the life. Have been for over a year. It’s apple pies and bullshit now, but it’s better for my daughter and me. Kendra was my homegirl. We were
down
. We had so much fun together—she could be a real wild child. But what happened to her—what happened to some of the other girls—it freaked the crap out of me.”

“What happened to Kendra? What other girls?” Behr asked.

“I don’t know. She just went gone. Others too, over the years. Plenty of ’em come and go. Lots of the time they tell you they’re leaving to try L.A. or Miami. Vegas. Other times they just pack up and go. This is different. The feeling started spreading around that girls were getting into cars and never coming back. Jonesy, and guys like Jonesy, were supposed to prevent that kind of thing, but they weren’t a broke-dick bit of good. What was I supposed to do?” She lifted her palms. “So I bailed.”

“Where can I find him—Jonesy?” Behr asked. “I have a number and I texted him but got no response. And what’s his real name?”

“He rolls a new number every few weeks. He won’t text you back if he doesn’t recognize your number anyway. His first name is Adam. Adam Jones. He’s got a place on Rural and Sixteenth.”

“Rural Sherman?” Behr asked. It was one of the worst parts of the city.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, and gave him the house number.

“Thanks,” Behr said. “Good luck with that pie.”

She just nodded and closed the door on him.

There was a booking photo of the man: flat black eyes that radiated hate above a black goatee and mustache ringed around sneering lips. A face a mother had probably slapped.

Elisa Brook had given Behr the full name, and with it he’d been able to run a full P-check on him. The portrait that had come back was one of what his former brother officers in the Indianapolis Police Department would call a “Radar Delta Bravo,” or Regulation Douche Bag. That was the style in which the man lived as well.

Behr sat across from a decrepit ranch-type house on Rural and 16th. An ancient Corvair was up on blocks in the stripe of driveway next to it. An oxidizing jungle gym was where the grass should have been. The swing on the jungle gym dangled by a single chain, just yards away from a toppled death-trap refrigerator, its door still on. A hyena-like dog beset by an advanced case of mange paced the area inside the rusted chain-link fence. There was a brand-new DirecTV dish mounted on the south side of the buckling roof, of course. People are the same the world over; they’ll live in squalor as long as they have a flat screen and channels.

The place was a survival course for the children living inside, of which there were two, as far as Behr could tell from his surveillance, both young boys, poorly dressed for the weather. He hadn’t seen any sign of Jonesy over the past two days. The guy had either been inside the whole time or away. Behr wasn’t sure exactly what to look for besides the face either. Six foot two and 290 was certainly large, but it could be flab or it could be jacked, and there was a big difference.

Behr had door-knocked the dump on day one, and a massive mocha-skinned woman had answered, a hearty baby clad only in a diaper cocked on her hip. Before he could even run a pretext on the woman, who was Samoan or Hawaiian or Fijian as far as he could tell, she started right in.

“He don’ do nothing.”

“Ma’am—”

“He not here and he don’ do nothing.”

“Okay, look—”

“He don’ violate his parole and he don’ do a damn-damn thing.”

The woman was practically violent in her assertions. Behr tried to peek into the house and learn something of value while she ranted, which was difficult for two reasons: the first was her size—she filled almost every inch of the doorframe—and the second was the mess inside. The living room was like an interior version of the yard.

Behr didn’t even bother with his “assessor with a potential reduction in property tax” gambit. Instead he retreated and found an inconspicuous vantage point down the block from which to monitor
the house. Proper discipline on a stakeout required engine off, windows closed, no music. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a protocol that was best followed. Cops and Treasury agents with windows down and radios on had been rewarded with bullets in the back of the head. A closed window didn’t offer much protection, maybe bullet deflection at best, but it was better than a muzzle pressed against the temple. It got bitter cold in the car before long, but it beat extreme heat.

After he’d spent the bulk of forty-eight hours on the sit, less three thirty-minute breaks to say hello to Susan and Trevor, use the bathroom, and reload on sandwiches and water, Behr had to admit Jones wasn’t home. He’d also had ample opportunity to feel foolish about the case itself and did his best to push these thoughts from his head.

At one point the woman went out, piloting a beat-to-shit Honda Odyssey from the cluttered one-car detached garage, apparently on a shopping trip with the kids. Behr considered making entry to the house but decided against it. He had nothing concrete to look for, and he didn’t feel like getting arrested or contending with the dog. The woman and kids returned an hour later with a bunch of bags from Target. Sometimes patience was the only thing that worked, and every time Behr lost his he pictured his son, and that kept him rooted to his spot.

It was almost dark on the second day when he was rewarded. A matte black F350 rolled up, and getting out of the passenger seat was a tree trunk dressed in work pants, boots, and a Dickies jacket. Behr checked the mug shot he’d sat with for two days. It was Jonesy. And unfortunately Jonesy had not been sloughing off when it came to the gym time. He moved around the truck to the driver’s side with surprising dexterity and slapped five with the driver, who took off in a spray of loose gravel as Jonesy headed for his house. Behr watched him go in and waited five minutes. Cutting off a man before he’d seen his wife and kids, causing him to wonder if they were okay or had been hassled, didn’t seem like a good idea. The mangy dog followed him inside too, and that was a plus.

After the requisite time had passed, Behr got out of his car,
though he left his key in the ignition and the door leaning closed but not shut. He’d knocked on enough strange doors to know it was wise to be prepared for a hasty retreat. He also grabbed a can of pepper spray out of the glove box, not sure if he was thinking of the dog or Jonesy, then passed through the rusty gate and up the two steps to the house’s battered front door.

“Yeah?” Jonesy said, the word loaded with distrust, when he opened the front door, leaving only a heavy screen door between them.

Before Behr had a chance to answer, the common-law wife spoke from inside the house. “I already told him you don’ do nothing.”