Delivering Death: A Novel (Riley Spartz) (21 page)

Agent Jax had questions of his own: When do you think you’ll see this man again? Where does he live? What type of vehicle does he drive?

I didn’t have useful answers, except when he asked if I knew of anything David Johnson had touched. “Something that might leave usable fingerprints?”

Our lunch table would have been long wiped clean. The door handle to the restaurant would be sullied with prints from other customers. But then I remembered him briefly holding my cell phone, and how he’d touched the screen to magnify the painting. The picture would still have been too small to read the account numbers, but I had no doubt that’s what he’d been attempting. I’d used my phone since then, but there was always a chance a legible impression of him might still exist.

“You can dust for prints,” I said. “But I want to watch.”

I didn’t want the feds accessing my emails or contact numbers. My phone was my phone. My fingerprints were also mine,
but I agreed to let them compare and eliminate them from any others on the device. Ends up, they found a thumbprint that didn’t belong to me. All we could do was wait as the print was run against the 450 million fingerprints in the FBI’s criminal database.

I
t was official. David Johnson was Jack Clemens. The print on my phone matched his arrest fingerprints.

Surveillance video from a street camera across from the restaurant yielded a face who resembled the sketch. I confirmed him as the man I knew as David Johnson.

Bryce and I were eager to broadcast the name and photo and launch a manhunt. But the feds wanted to keep quiet.

“He’ll just go underground again with a different identity once he hears his cover’s blown,” Agent Jax said. “Our best chance of catching him is by letting him claim the fish painting.”

“You mean using it for bait?” I asked, pleased at the pun.

I made the phone call. The cell number he had given me was turned off so my message went straight to voicemail.

“Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you, David. Call me to finalize our deal with the fish painting. Name a time and place. This time, I’ll pick up the tab.”

David had always phoned me at the station through our switchboard. He didn’t have my direct desk line or cell phone number because I hadn’t wanted him pestering me. I waited at my desk for the phone to ring, certain he’d want to be in touch as soon as possible. But when it did, it wasn’t the caller I was expecting.

“The police were just here,” a woman said, speaking fast. “And
it didn’t go so well. I’m hoping maybe you can help. I’ve been watching your stories on the news for years, but I never thought I’d be calling you.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My husband was Jack Clemens’s barber. And I fear he was the man killed in prison.”

A
s he waited outside Riley’s house, Jack recalled Lloyd Martin making a call to his own former home and giving him one last trim around the ears, just a few days before he would surrender to federal authorities. They were both defeated men. One couldn’t beat prison; the other couldn’t beat cancer.

“This is good-bye,” Lloyd said. “I’ll be dead long before you get out. The worst part is leaving Gina stuck with all my debts.”

Jack had been reading the
Week
newsmagazine just before Lloyd had arrived and remembered a brief mention about wealthy Chinese lawbreakers using substitutes to serve prison sentences. As he watched his and Lloyd’s reflections in the mirror, he took a gamble. “Maybe there’s a way you could leave her a nest egg.”

Within minutes, Lloyd had decided to sell what was left of his life. He’d sworn off betting, but he liked these odds better than the guarantee of being both dead and broke in less than a year.

“We’ll need new looks,” he said, appraising their appearances with his barber’s eye. “First me.”

Lloyd unbound his graying ponytail, picked up a pair of scissors, and gave himself the same corporate haircut he’d been giving Jack for years. Then he applied the same shade of coloring
that kept his client looking younger than his fifty-four years.

Side by side, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, they might not have passed for twins, but with blue eyes and similar height and build, they looked enough like brothers that the caper might work.

“You next,” Lloyd said, turning to his new dopplegänger. “Relax.”

With a clipper, he trimmed Jack’s hair close to his scalp. Adding shaving cream and producing a razor, Jack was soon bald. “Meet the new you.” Lloyd instructed him to grow a beard and cover his blue eyes with brown contact lenses.

“Oh, one last thing.” He put some alcohol on a cotton ball and picked up a needle.

Jack protected his ear with one hand. He might be ruthless regarding money, but he was a baby when it came to physical pain. “Do I really have to do this?”

“I’m afraid so,” Lloyd said. “You need to leave your banking image behind. My best protection is looking like you. Your best protection is not looking like you.”

So Lloyd had pierced Jack’s ear.

Jack stopped fixating on that jolt of pain from the past and returned to the moment. He was fingering a small amethyst earring belonging to Riley Spartz. He’d taken it as a souvenir from the meager jewelry box in her bedroom and inserted it in his earlobe in place of his gold one for good luck.

He’d followed her home after their first meeting just because he could. The next day he’d driven by the small bungalow when he knew she was at work to scout out the Minneapolis neighborhood. Lake Nokomis was near, so there was enough foot traffic that he wouldn’t attract suspicion if he parked a few blocks away. Now he had tired of negotiating and had decided to play art thief.

He never planned to physically steal the picture. It was far too cumbersome to carry, and too memorable if a witness happened to notice him. He merely wanted the information hidden in the map.

The break-in was easy. He kicked in the window of a back-porch door, shielded by a tall hedge. There was no alarm, and no dog.

But no painting either.

T
he address Gina Martin had given me was a large and uninspired apartment building in Eden Prairie, south of Minneapolis. It stood in the middle of a giant parking lot set back from the highway, surrounded by a retail complex with a grocery store, pharmacy, and gas station.

Malik came along. He hadn’t wanted to, but I promised he could take a nap in the van while I met with Gina. He’d developed a talent of being able to sleep anytime, anyplace while working as a military photographer. As the father of two young children, it served him well.

“I’ll phone you when it’s time to bring the camera upstairs. I’ll do a meet and greet first.”

I buzzed Gina’s unit from the lobby, but she was so slow to answer that I wondered whether she’d changed her mind. But the security door eventually unlocked, and I stepped onto the elevator to the fourth floor. Down the hall, her apartment door stood open.

I stuck my head in, and she urged me to come in and join her at the kitchen table where a teapot sat with two cups and saucers. A walker with tennis balls taped to the front legs stood nearby on a worn carpet. The place was a mess, but I pretended not to notice the open drawers, clothing draped across furniture, and books on the floor.

I immediately poured us each hot tea because she was less likely to ask me to leave if I was still sipping a cup.

Gina’s hands trembled as she removed a picture from her wallet and showed me a man with shoulder-length hair. “This was my husband. Handsome, huh?”

“He doesn’t look much like Inmate 16780-59.”

“But it’s Lloyd,” she assured me, unfolding a newspaper with the mug shot of the fake Jack.

I had to admit, the man’s eyes and nose looked similar in each photo. “So what was the deal he worked out to serve Jack’s time?”

“I’m not exactly sure. I wasn’t in on it.”

“You didn’t know he was in prison?” I asked.

“Not until the media started reporting that a man had been killed behind bars while posing as Jack Clemens.”

“So where did you think your husband was?”

“That’s complicated,” she said.

Lloyd Martin had once run a high-end hair salon for men and women. He even made home and office calls to a few wealthy clients, including Jack.

“Jack was a good tipper,” Gina said. “But Lloyd was more than his barber—they were also friends.”

I had no problem believing that. My own experience taught me that it was easy to develop an intimate relationship with someone who touches you, even if just to trim your bangs each month. When physical boundaries come down, so does discretion. My own hairdresser knew secrets about me no one else did.

“When times were flush, Lloyd mortgaged us to the hilt to lease a building in a trendy neighborhood for his salon,” she said. “To clear a profit, he needed his best clients to come in every six weeks for color, cut, style—the full works.”

When the economy tanked, Gina lost her government communications job and no one else was hiring. She started shampooing
customers’ hair and training to do manicures. After their health insurance ran out, she developed Parkinson’s disease. Her hands shook too much to work with customers, so she helped out by answering the phone.

“By then the recession was even worse,” she said. “Lloyd’s regulars stopped being regular, stretching out the time between appointments. Many stopped getting facials and buying designer shampoo products. Some moved to cheaper salons. One started dying her hair at home in the sink. Lloyd couldn’t pay the rent.”

He lost the lease. Their home went into foreclosure and bankruptcy was next. Desperate, Lloyd rented a chair in a franchise salon—the ultimate humiliation. He’d gone from cutting some of the best-known hair in Minneapolis to hoping for a walk-in cut from a college student or a mom with two kids. Bills piled up while he frequented casinos, hoping for a big score.

Their life hit bottom when he was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer a couple of months ago. The doctors didn’t mince the prognosis. He had one year at most. Lloyd might not have looked like a walking dead man, but he was.

Gina came home one day and found a briefcase with a note on the kitchen table. “It said he didn’t want me to go through the agony of watching him die, and that I was not to look for him, or contact the cops. He was rejecting a long painful death and was going off to kill himself.”

“Do you still have the note?” I asked.

“The police took it.”

“So you called them when he disappeared?”

“No, they just showed up today. Someone else must have tipped them, maybe from his doctor’s office. The police brought a search warrant and tore the place apart. That’s why it looks so bad. They think I was in on the plan. I’m worried they’ll come back and arrest me.”

“Why do they think you were involved?”

She handed me the search warrant affidavit and I flipped to the back page where it listed the items seized:

1. Medical records

2. Photographs of Lloyd Martin

3. Suicide note signed Lloyd Martin

4. Bank account statements

5. Briefcase containing $75,000 cash

“Seems like a lot of cash to have around the house,” I said.

She pointed to a corner closet where coats and shoes were in disarray. “They found the money Lloyd left behind with the note. Because his cancer was fatal, he wrote that he had qualified for an early payout from his life insurance. I was surprised because I thought he’d cashed out the policy long ago. I figured it must be gambling winnings he was saving up to help me after he passed away.”

“So you kept quiet and kept his money while your husband went off to kill himself.” She didn’t come across as very sympathetic in her version of the story.

“I know it looks bad, but I’m a victim. That’s why I want to get my story out first, before the police do. Now I figure the cash was his payoff for taking Jack’s place in prison.”

“Did Lloyd take anything with him? A car?”

“Just one thing was missing. He took a gun.”

That certainly lent some authenticity to his suicide threat. “What kind?”

“A .38 caliber revolver.”

“I figured by the time I got home and found the note,” she continued, “it was already too late. I kept waiting for the police to come to my door and tell me he was dead. But I didn’t expect it to happen like this.”

I phoned Malik to bring the camera upstairs. As he set up, I wrote the news in my mind.

((RILEY CU))
CHANNEL 3 HAS LEARNED THE IDENTITY OF THE MAN IMPERSONATING JACK CLEMENS IN PRISON.

I texted the line to Ozzie with a note saying I had tonight’s lead story.

T
he air was cold inside my house and my living room had been ransacked, but not by cops executing any search warrant. The law would have come in the front door and left a receipt. I was fairly sure the intruder was gone, but I climbed back in my car, locked the doors, and called 911 to report a burglary.

“Could you please send an officer to do a walk-through with me?”

A squad was there within minutes. Nothing obvious appeared missing. The bathroom had been throughly searched—the contents of my medicine cabinet and vanity drawers strewn across the floor.

“Looking for prescription drugs, I’d guess,” the officer said. “Did you have any painkillers?”

I shook my head. The pain of loneliness couldn’t be stemmed by Vicodin or oxycodone.

The shelves in my study had been cleared, and even though the floor was carpeted, at least two of my vintage books, including Agatha Christie’s
Thirteen at Dinner
, had chips in their spines. At least they weren’t first editions.

“You’re lucky they didn’t completely trash the place.” The officer started writing his break-in report. “Anything missing? Thieves like guns. Did you have any guns hidden behind the books?”

“No guns.” My deceased husband, a state patrol officer, had owned a Glock. I’d kept it close for a while, but later decided I was safer without it handy.

One item was gone from my bedroom. “I keep a tablet computer by my bed. That seems to be missing.”