Friendly Fire (16 page)

Dooley stepped into the hallway, leaving Pam standing at the base of the stairs. “The shooter who took out the second guy stood about where you are now,” he said. “Again, three shell casings, five-five-six, but with different ejector marks.”

“A second gun, then,” Pam said.

“Exactly. And we found that body right about here.” He walked to a spot in front of the second door. “Another perfect triple-tap.”

“What's behind these doors?” Pam asked.

“That first one there, in front of you, is the furnace room. Some food storage, too. This second one”—he opened the door and shined his light inside—“we're not sure what it was for, exactly, but I have an idea. There was a mattress on the floor and it was a DNA farm. Blood, semen, saliva, every body juice you can think of. I don't even want to think of what went on in there.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, trust me. That's not the worst of it.”

Pam was beginning to regret her decision not to look at the photos first. It would have been nice to have some forewarning. Not that she couldn't already figure it out.

Dooley turned the knob on the third door and opened it. He stepped aside so she could see into it. Her MagLite revealed an empty rectangular room, maybe ten by seven, more or less identical to the mattress room, only this one sported a rodent-gnarled braided rug in the middle of the floor. “Ready to see the torture chamber?”

“Not really.” That of course meant yes.

Dooley lifted the rug to reveal an etched square in the concrete. Call it three feet on a side.

“What am I looking at?” Pam asked.

Dooley didn't answer. Instead, he handed his light to Pam and reached back into his gym bag, from which he withdrew two T-shaped metal tools. “When we closed this place up after the investigation, the county attorney was terrified that vandals would somehow lock themselves in the hole, so we removed the handles to the hatch and covered it with the rug. I made these special for you when I heard you were coming.”

“Why not just seal it up permanently?”

He smiled. “Well, probably the most truthful answer is laziness,” he said. “But beyond that, I think I always secretly hoped that the investigation would become active again. Can you hold the light on the hatch?”

Pam sidled into the room to get a better angle, then held the light high for an overhead angle. Dooley bent at the waist, inserted a T tool into each of the two holes that she hadn't seen until he did it. With considerable effort, he lifted the hatch out of the way and slid it off to the side. “There you go,” he said as he stood tall again. “Welcome to Hell.” He reached for his flashlight, and played the beam down the hole. “I swore I'd never go down there again.”

He gathered himself with a deep breath. “Oh, what the hell? Be careful on the ladder. It was rickety eleven years ago.”

Pam watched Dooley descend the vertical ladder, doing her best to illuminate more than just the top of his head. When he was at the bottom, he brought his hand to his nose. “Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.”

Pam could feel the change in the quality of the air as she descended into the hole. It seemed thicker somehow, and it was certainly colder and moister. The smell of the place was unlike anything she'd encountered in the past. Musty, certainly, but there was an organic element to it, not as pungent as a decomposing body, but on the same spectrum. “What is that stench?”

She'd meant the question as a rhetorical one, but Dooley answered it. “I think of it as the smell of evil. This is the place that the original owner had no idea was here, the space the occupants dug out.” The ceiling here couldn't have been six feet higher than the dirt floor.

“We think the decedents kept people down here,” Dooley explained as he knelt on the dirt. He pointed to the far corner with his flashlight beam. “There was a pit over there, used as a toilet. Judging from an analysis of the waste in the bucket, this space housed multiple occupants. The third body was found just about where I'm standing.”

“Another perfect triple-tap?”

“No. This one was a single shot through the forehead. It's hard to tell exactly where the shot came from, but from the location of the casing—same rifle as the one used to kill the one out in the hallway—I figure that the shooter was either on the ladder or at the base of it. This dead guy had his pants down around his ankles.”

Pam's stomach churned. It was entirely possible that she'd just found the limits of her emotional shields.

“For all these reasons,” Dooley said, “I'm ninety-nine percent convinced that what went down here was some kind of a rescue operation. I checked with the State PD and with the FBI, and they didn't claim it, so I guess it was vigilantes or something.”

“Or maybe a rival criminal operation,” Pam said. She wanted to push her own assumptions as much as she wanted to push Dooley's.

Dooley nodded. “Always possible,” he said. “Hell, anything is possible. But I've got to tell you. There can't be more than one or two gang guys in the world who deploy flashbangs and have this kind of marksmanship.”

“What did your investigation turn up on the shooters?”

“Not a lot. Nothing, actually. But to be honest, we didn't press all that hard.”

Pam waited for it.

Dooley prepared with another deep breath, and then winced at the air he inhaled. “You remember that armoire I told you about upstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“It was filled with kids' clothing. One drawer was just underpants. The only reason I'd want to catch the people who killed animals like that would be to shake their hands and buy them a drink.”

Chapter Sixteen

T
he Hilton Garden Inn in Ashland, Ohio, housed a nicer bar than Jonathan had expected. A little brighter than he liked, and a little more plastic, the back wall displayed high-end liquors, and the chairs were reasonably comfortable. He preferred seats with backs like these over the traditional bar stools. Too many years of hard landings and parachute jumps. That shit comes back to haunt you way younger than you think it's going to.

He'd been here for nearly ten minutes, having been alerted by Boxers that Detective Hastings was on her way back to the hotel. Big Guy displaced too much air to attend the kind of meeting that lay ahead, but he was the perfect choice for keeping eyes on Pam Hastings while she toured the house on Wells Road.

The phone call had been short and sweet even by Boxers' standards.

“Okay, Boss, she's on the road to the hotel. She's kinda hot, but keep it in your pants. Uncle Box does not want to have to pull you out of a jail cell. I'm gonna go and try to get laid. Wish me luck.” He hung up. Jonathan worried about his friend's proclivities toward one-nighters, but lo these many years had demonstrated that it made no sense to try and talk him out of the things he liked to do.

Jonathan took a position at the angle of the bar where he could nurse his martini while keeping an eye on the propped-open etched glass doors. After a half hour and a bowlful of bar snacks, he began to wonder if Venice's research might have been wrong. For sure, it was time to order another drink, this time with a tall glass of club soda on the side. He was easily good for three martinis, but not without some sacrifice in agility. He needed to pace himself in case the evening stretched longer than he was expecting.

The second drink touched down on his cardboard coaster at the same moment when Detective Pamela Hastings arrived at the doors. She'd clearly changed clothes—unless LEOs these days wore jeans and T-shirts on duty—and she'd clearly showered—unless it was raining in the elevator. Her hair wasn't wet, exactly, but another minute or two under the hair dryer would not have been wasted. Back in the day, Jonathan's now-deceased ex-wife, Ellen, had told him that when women traveling on business visited hotel bars on business travel, they did everything they could to make themselves look unattractive in order to keep horny dudes from hitting on them. Jonathan had countered that dudes on travel could get horny enough that looks no longer mattered.

In Detective Hastings's case, on this particular night, it seemed clear that she wanted alone time. She chose a seat on the distant corner of the bar, as far away from Jonathan as possible.

He offered up a silent apology to Venice for ever having doubted her. As if to drive the point home, Hastings ordered a Stoli vodka and tonic, exactly as Venice had predicted she would.

Jonathan made eye contact and toasted hello. She returned the gesture with a thin-lipped grimace then made a show of stirring her drink. Jonathan gave her two minutes of peace before making his move.

He slid off of his stool and walked the length of the bar to man the corner perpendicular to Pam's.

“Oh, please, no,” she said with the concomitant eye roll.

“Excuse me?” Jonathan said. The goal of this meeting was to knock her off balance, so he might as well start now.

Pam hitched her shoulders once, relaxed them, then gave Jonathan a condescending glare that he imagined was well practiced. “Look,” she said. “Yes, you're a good-looking guy, but nowhere near as good-looking as you think you are. Major brawn is not my type. I don't care how lonely you are, and there is no part of your body that I wish to see unclothed. I've had a very long day, and what I'd like more than anything else is to be left alone.”

Jonathan smiled. It was his charming smile, he'd been told, the one that Venice said made his super-blue eyes look even bluer. And he said nothing.

Silence unnerved most cops when they were not manipulating it. “What.” She uttered the word as a statement of exasperation, not a question.

“I'm just marveling at the eloquence of that speech, Detective Hastings,” Jonathan said, smile still affixed. “Did you rehearse it, or was it spontaneous?”

He'd intended to startle her, and clearly he'd succeeded. “Do we know each other?”

Jonathan pulled on his drink to buy a few more seconds of silence. “I can't say that we've met, but I certainly know a great deal about you.”

Her mind spun behind her eyes, but she continued to show a good poker face. “And who are you?”

“Call me Smith,” Jonathan said. “Or Jones, if you'd prefer.”

Pam blanched, but just a little—barely enough to demonstrate that Jonathan had scored a point. “If you're from some law enforcement agency, let me see some ID.”

Jonathan changed his smile to something ugly—at once condescending and smug. Pam needed to accept that he was in charge. The flow of information would be entirely one-way.

“I don't have time for this,” Pam said, and she pushed away from the bar.

“You went to King's Park Elementary School,” Jonathan said. “And then on to Lake Braddock Secondary School for grades seven through twelve. Your father had a debilitating stroke when you were seventeen, so you had to abandon your plans to study English literature at NC State and you settled instead for Northern Virginia Community College. That's where you were bitten by the bug for criminal justice. Shall I go on?”

His recitation of Venice's research seemed to stun the detective, paralyze her. The poker face had morphed into a gaping stare.

“We really do need to talk,” Jonathan said. “There will be no flashing of credentials because my identity is irrelevant. That's why Smith or Jones will work equally well. I assure you, however, that I am a good guy, not bad guy, and I have no intention of showing you any unclothed body parts.”

Pam blushed through obvious confusion. “Who are the bad guys?”

“I can't tell you that,” Jonathan replied. He was in large measure playing a bluff here. He needed to know what she knew, and this seemed like the shortest pathway to the goal. “I need to know what you know about the killings on Wells Road.”

“Why don't you ask the Ashland Police Department?”

Jonathan needed to play this part carefully. It was the major hole in his bluff. “Because I'm speaking with you,” he said.

“Why me instead of the original investigators?”

“Because the Ashland case is only a small part of what I'm interested in.”

Pam's gaze bored into him. “What's the other part?”

“I think you know,” Jonathan said. “It's about a fellow you know as John Doe. And a young man you know as Ethan Falk.” He forced a chuckle as a response to what he saw in her face. “If I knew everything about your past, why on earth would you think I wouldn't know about Ethan?”

“What is your involvement in any of this?” Pam asked.

Jonathan took another sip of martini. He let the question hang for dramatic effect, and then he leaned in closer. “My involvement is inconsequential,” he said. “But the facts of the two cases you're looking at are of huge consequence. I come here tonight to make you a deal.”

Pam made a quick waving motion. “Oh, no. I don't have any authority to make deals with unnamed government agencies. And not knowing if you are even telling the truth, I'm not inclined to continue this conversation.” She gathered her things and started for the door again.

“Act in haste,” Jonathan said, “and repent in leisure.” He said it loudly enough to be heard, but he didn't look at her as he said it. The charade was all about him having something that Pam needed. To pull it off, he couldn't look anxious. In the polished brass of the beer tap, he saw a contorted image of the detective paused in the doorway. She stayed there long enough to make Jonathan wonder if he'd misplayed his hand.

Then the image moved, and a shadow arrived at his shoulder. “What deal?” she asked.

Jonathan spun away from her on his stool, and pointed to an unoccupied booth in the far corner of the bar. “Let's talk over there,” he said. “It's a little more private.” He grabbed his drink and led the way, not bothering to look back. When he arrived at the table and turned, there she was. He slid into one of the under-padded bench seats and indicated that she should take the other. “Want another drink?” he asked.

Pam still had not committed to sitting down. “What deal?” she said again.

“We'll talk when you're seated,” Jonathan said. “Really, there's no need to be concerned about me. Besides, you're a cop, and that means you're armed. If I get out of line, you can always shoot me.” He fired off his charming smile again.

Pam looked over her shoulder and appeared to scan the bar. For what, Jonathan wasn't sure, but he appreciated her situational awareness. Finally, she sat on the bench opposite him. She didn't commit to it, though, staying on the very end on the bench, her right arm still in the aisle. Jonathan interpreted the posture as a way to guarantee free access to her firearm. “No more games,” she said.

“Life and death is never a game,” Jonathan said. “The deal is this: I answer a question for you, and you answer a question for me. We'll go back and forth until one of us refuses to answer. The only topic off the table is anything having to do with who I am or where I work. Are you in?”

Pam took her time. “How will I know if you're telling the truth?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I could ask the same of you. There are no guarantees, but at least it's a place to start.”

Pam's glare intensified as she read his face. Jonathan knew she would get nothing. He'd practiced the nothing look for many years. “Okay,” she said, “I've got a question for you.”

Jonathan held up his hand. “I go first,” he said. “And you have my word that I will answer your first question, so long as it is within the parameters I laid out.”

She clearly didn't like it.

“My deal, my rules,” Jonathan said. “Or we can pretend that we never met.”

A sigh. “Okay, go.”

“Ethan Falk has told quite a story. You followed the elements of that story all the way to Ashland, Ohio. Does that mean that you believe him?”

“Should I?”

“A question is not an answer,” Jonathan said. “And I wouldn't waste your first question on one like that. Do you believe Ethan Falk's story?”

Again, Pam took her time answering. “There are elements that ring true, and there are elements that strain credulity.”

Jonathan waited for more.

“On balance, I believe him more than I don't. But events that happened over a decade ago do not justify murdering a man in cold blood.”

“Under the circumstances, how cold could that blood really be?” Jonathan asked.

“That's a second question,” Pam said. “It's my turn. Do you know the true identity of our John Doe?”

Jonathan started to answer, but she held up her hand, as if to stop traffic at an intersection.

“No, let me ask it differently,” she said. “What is the true identity of our John Doe?”

Jonathan smiled. To ask a yes or no question is to invite a single syllable answer. “Nice catch,” he said. “His real name is James Stepahin, and he was everything that Ethan Falk purports him to be. What have you been able to find out about him so far? That's my next question.”

“Absolutely nothing,” Pam said. “How do you know his real identity?”

Jonathan patted the table lightly with both hands. “And there you have it,” he said. “The end of the game. That's the question I won't answer.” He stood without offering his hand. “Good night, Detective Hastings,” he said.