Killer Instinct (40 page)

“You’ve got to get your Accident Recon people over there to look at it again before it’s scrapped.”

“Out of my hands. Out of police custody too.”

“Which tow yard?”

A pause. Kenyon laughed. “Uh-uh. Forget it.”

I tried another approach. “If you search Kurt Semko’s apartment, I’ll bet you find some tubes of something called LME. Liquid Metal Embrittlement agent. Issued to the U.S. Army Special Forces.”

“LME, huh? Well, here’s the problem, see. There’s not going to be any search. No evidence of a crime means no investigation means no search warrant. That’s the way it goes in the real world.”

“He’s got the stuff there. I’ve seen it. That’s your evidence.”

“Let me explain something to you, Mr. Steadman, because you obviously don’t know how the system works. If you want to get a search warrant, you have to get a judge to sign off. The judge isn’t going to sign off unless there’s what you call probable cause.”

“I’ve
seen
the stuff in his apartment.”

A pause. “I don’t know what you saw, but my instinct about you is that you’re an honest fellow. Are you willing to be my informant?”

“Confidential, sure. But not named. No way in hell. Kurt knows people all over. He’d find out. Kurt bugged the room you and I talked in at Entronics, you know. He heard every word we said.”

“Jesus.”

“The guy is dangerous. So you see why I can’t go on the record as your informant.”

“Doesn’t work that way, Mr. Steadman. Judge uses something called the Aguilar-Spinelli test.”

“The who?”

He sighed. “Basically, it means that you can’t issue a search warrant based on plain old hearsay. If the warrant application’s based on information you get from an informant, you’ve either got to list the name publicly or establish a long history of reliability. As a confidential informant. Which obviously you don’t have. Now, if you’re willing to put your name on the search warrant—”

“Forget it. Not going to happen.”

“Then there’s no search warrant.”

“Don’t you want to solve this case?”

“Look here, Mr. Steadman. My hands are tied. As far as the state police goes, there
is
no case anymore. I’m sorry.”

“So Kurt’s just going to get away with this?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Steadman.”

I called directory assistance, got the number for J & A Towing—the company that had towed away Trevor’s car—and gave them a call.

“You have my brother’s Porsche,” I said to the woman who answered the phone.

“Okay?”

“Name is Trevor Allard.”

“Hold on.”

When she got back on, she said, “Hey, looks like we already talked to your brother’s—widow. She said she didn’t want the wreck. She gave us the go-ahead to sell it for scrap.”

“Shit,” I said. “That was my brother’s car.”

“The wife was listed as the next of kin. It’s probably been picked up already. Wish I could help you.”

“Can you find out if it’s been picked up yet? I’m sorry to bother you—it’s just that—well, it was my brother’s car. And if I can salvage anything from it—well, there’s, like, a sentimental value. He really cared about that car.”

“Hold on.”

I waited.

A man picked up. “This is Ed.”

“Ed, my name is—”

But he kept talking. “We followed all the proper procedures, sir. We notified the next of kin, and she authorized us to scrap it. The wreck’s scheduled to be picked up this afternoon by Kuzma Auto Salvage—”

“You still have it?”

“Like I said, it’s scheduled to be picked up.”

“Listen. This is really important to me. What do you get from the salvage company for it?”

“I really couldn’t tell you. That’s worked out between them and us at the time.”

“Ballpark.”

“Could be a hundred, two hundred bucks.”

“I’ll give you three.”

“You really want this wreck, huh?”

“If I can salvage something from it—anything—for my brother’s sake—”

“I don’t think three hundred bucks is going to motivate anyone, know what I’m saying. We got a relationship with this salvage company, and we already sold a bunch of vehicles by weight.”

“Ed, is this your towing company?”

“Sure is.”

“Three hundred to your company, and another three hundred to you personally for expediting this sale.”

He chortled. “That important to you, huh?”

“Do we have a deal? Or do I have to buy it off of Kuzma Auto Salvage, for what I’ll bet will be a fraction of that?”

“It’s a Porsche, you know.”

“A Porsche or a Kia, it’s a heap of steel and aluminum now.”

“Cash?”

“Tow it to my yard in Cambridge, and you’ll get six hundred bucks in cash. Unless that Porsche’s made of titanium, you’re getting a pretty damned good deal.”

He chortled again. “I’ll have one of the guys tow it out to you tomorrow.”

“Today,” I said. “By two o’clock this afternoon. Before I come to my senses.”

56

My comfortable corner chair at Starbucks was still available.

I sent an e-mail to Yoshi Tanaka’s personal e-mail address—it was on the back of his business card, which I kept in my wallet—from
[email protected]
.

“Kurt” wanted to pass on to Yoshi some troubling information he’d discovered about Dick Hardy in the course of a routine security sweep—Hardy’s Hushmail account, the Samurai Trust in the Channel Islands, the trading of Entronics options on the Australian Stock Exchange. “Kurt” wasn’t comfortable reporting this within normal channels in the company, since no one, not even he, the new Director of Corporate Security, would dare take on the powerful CEO of Entronics USA. But he thought Yoshi should know about it. “Kurt” insisted that none of this ever be discussed over the phone or in person. He told Yoshi not to write to him at his Entronics e-mail address.

I hoped Yoshi could read English better than he spoke it.

If Kurt was telling me the truth—and I had no reason to doubt that he really did have the goods on Dick Hardy, since that was what he was good at—then what Hardy was doing was not only illegal, it was basically disgusting.

I was sure the top leadership of Entronics in Tokyo had no idea what he was up to. The Japanese were far too cautious, far too scrupulous, to play that kind of sleazy, low-level game. The games they played were on a far higher level. They’d never tolerate this. They’d get to the bottom of it, confront Hardy, and bounce him out on his ass in a Tokyo minute.

Trevor Allard’s wrecked Porsche was a terrible sight. The front end was so badly crumpled it was almost unrecognizable. The hood stuck way up, the driver’s door was just about off its hinges, both front tires were flat. The undercarriage had been ripped apart. Looking at it, you could see that no one could have possibly survived the crash.

Graham and I stood there, looking at it solemnly.

“My landlord’s going to have a cow,” Graham said. “Did I say you could have it towed here?”

“Yeah. This morning.”

“I must have been asleep. I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

“As soon as you find the damaged part, I’ll have it towed away.”

“And if I don’t find anything?”

I shrugged. “It’ll just have to stay here until you do.”

He wasn’t sure whether I was kidding. “Guess I’d better get to work.”

He got out his toolbox and began dismantling the wreck. After a while, he said, “This is not fun. No wonder they didn’t find anything.”

He removed the front left wheel and poked around in the dark innards of the wheel well. “This one’s fine,” he said. “No ball joint damage here.”

Then he went around to the other wheel and did the same. A few minutes later, he announced, “This one’s fine too.”

“What else could it be?”

“This is a tough one. I hate to say it, but maybe I’m not being fair to the cops. Maybe they really did look.”

I made work phone calls in his backyard while he continued to search through the wreck for another hour and a half.

Finally, he got up. His work gloves were covered in grease. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing. Now I got to get over to Cheepsters.” That was the record store where he worked.

“A little longer,” I pleaded. “Half an hour.”

“Hand me my cell phone and I’ll see if I can trade off an hour now for an hour of bondage later.”

I helped him pull the front hood open—it was so damaged that the electric engine-cover release wouldn’t have opened it even if he’d applied an external battery to the fuse box. But there seemed to be nothing there either.

“Damn, this is frustrating,” he said. He opened the driver’s side door and wriggled into the collapsed front seat. He sat there for a moment. “Speedometer’s stuck at sixty-five,” he said. “They weren’t speeding.”

He pumped the brakes with his foot. “They work fine.”

He turned the steering wheel. “Oh, baby,” he said.

“What?”

“Turns a little too easy. Are the wheels turning?”

I stepped back and looked. “No.”

“This could be the problem. You’re driving on the turnpike at 65 and the road bends, so you steer, but your wheels keep going straight. You’d crash right into the guardrail.”

“What causes that?”

“Could be a couple of things.” He bent down and messed with the wires under the dashboard. With a long wrench, he removed two airbag screws behind the steering wheel. He took a screwdriver to the back side of the steering wheel and removed the airbag unit from the center of the steering wheel, then the airbag connector.

“Air bags didn’t even deploy,” he said. Now, with a wrench, he removed the steering wheel nut and bolt. He yanked at the steering wheel, but it didn’t move. Then he grabbed a rubber mallet from his toolbox and hammered at the steering wheel from behind a few times, then lifted the wheel straight out.

A minute later, I heard him say, “Oh, now, this is weird.”

“What?”

“Check this out.” He pulled out a thin rod about a foot long that had a U-joint at one end. The other end was jagged.

“What’s that?”

“Steering shaft.”

“Smaller than I thought.”

“That’s because it’s only half the steering shaft. This”—he pulled out a matching piece—“is the other half.”

“Broke?”

“These things are made to withstand a hell of a lot of torque. I’ve never seen anything like it. The steel didn’t snap. It looks like it ripped. Like a piece of licorice or something.”

“You should have been a cop,” I said.

On the drive back to work, I called Kenyon.

“State Police, Trooper Sanchez.” Hispanic accent.

I asked for Kenyon.

“I can give you his voice mail, or I can take a message,” Sanchez said in his heavy Hispanic accent. “Unless there’s something I can help you with.”

I didn’t trust him, only because I didn’t know him, hadn’t met him. Didn’t know who he knew.

I asked for Kenyon’s voice mail, and I asked Kenyon to call “Josh Gibson” back on my cell.

Then I called Kate’s cell from mine. She said they’d just arrived at Susie’s house, and that the trip over had gone well. She was taking it easy now.

“We got a call on the voice mail at home from the doctor’s office,” she said. “The amnio results are in, and everything’s totally fine.”

“Are we having a boy or a girl?”

“We told them not to tell us, remember?”

“Oh, right.”

“What’s going on over there—with Kurt.”

I told her I was going to call her back in a few minutes, from another phone, and I explained why.

The Plasma Lab was empty, I knew. I put my fingerprint against the biometric reader. It beeped and let me in.

Somehow, somewhere, an alarm had probably just gone off, and Kurt knew where I was.

I picked up the phone in the corner office, which used to be Phil Rifkin’s, and called Kate on her cell.

“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t want to call you from my office. I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“How so?”

“Sweetie, just listen. I’ve been thinking a lot. And this business about Kurt—I mean, if he’s doing stuff like tapping my phone, that’s one thing. But this—this thing with Trevor’s car—that he’d never do.”

“You don’t think?” She was an excellent actress, and she was playing her part perfectly.

“I don’t. I really don’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s crazy. It’s conspiracy thinking. The state police have examined the car wreck, and there’s nothing there.”

“I think you owe him an apology. You’ll see him at the softball game tonight, right? You should tell him you’re sorry.”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly. “I can’t do that, though. I’ll get grief from him forever.”

The apology thing I wasn’t prepared for. I guess she was improvising. Kurt, I figured, would never have believed me if I told him to his face that I’d decided he was innocent. But it would surprise me if Kurt
weren’t
listening in on this phone call. And he’d only believe I was on the level if he was eavesdropping on me.

Whatever it took.