One Through the Heart (24 page)

‘I’m just trying to get my head around it. Inspector Raveneau called me. That’s where this started for me. He read about our caskets washing up and the skulls and the bones taken. Didn’t he lead you to these men and identify the same body I looked at?’

‘We still want to keep this within the Bureau for a few days.’

‘It was several days. Now it’s a few?’

Coe showed a much different stare. He set his mouth then consciously relaxed it. Terrorists were here to stay and radiation was a big deal and scary, but she had seen and heard enough now to be skeptical of those holding the levers. The 9/11 Commission made recommendations everyone agreed with and no one implemented. So she figured you’ve got to take everything with a grain of salt. They talk one way, but always do something else.

She did think the FBI had done well thwarting several attempts. She admired them for that and Raveneau was right, they’re all we have. But a kid with a melted face and part of his skull looking like a burnt cracker with radioactive material intended for terror in San Francisco stored in a house in her county, really? And the one who picked up on it first and seemed to be figuring it out kept in the dark now, that didn’t work for her. That felt like something she was familiar with and she didn’t like it that Newton was here to help bring her along. He ought to be home looking for the house.

‘I do recognize him and I might be able to get on the phone and come up with a name right here, right now. But I’ll need some space. I need to explain things in a way people can hear them. You might not want to listen in. And then there’s Raveneau.’ She pushed her hair back. She stared back at Coe. ‘You’ve got issues with him that are more important than finding these people.’

‘I resent that.’

‘Of course you do. That’s why I said it.’ She paused before adding, ‘He’s not ever going to do things your way. That’s not him and you know that. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

‘How did he compromise you so fast?’

‘It’s called respect, not compromise. I know the difference.’

‘OK, Jennie, you win. We’ll bring him to Missouri.’

‘That’s the right thing to do.’

They thought she was full of shit. But Jennie didn’t care. ‘I need a place where I can get on a phone and talk,’ she said. She stood.

‘No, you stay here,’ Coe said. ‘This is your room.’ He pointed. ‘That’s your phone. Come on, everybody, out of the room, give her some space.’

R
aveneau missed a call from Sheriff Crawford as he walked into a South San Francisco bar that Hugh Neilley was a part owner of. Hugh owned six percent and that turned out to be enough for him to consider it his space and probably was why he chose here to meet. The bar was Irish-pub themed and you could tell because two walls were painted green and a leprechaun leered above the dingy corridor leading to the rest rooms. He didn’t see Hugh and walked back and used a urinal that held a crumpled cigarette package, chewed gum, and half a dozen cigarette butts.

Then he went back out and looked over Hugh’s investment as he waited. His take was that Hugh was lucky he didn’t own more. The air smelled of rancid fryer oil, stale beer, and the dirty water used to mop the floor. And somewhere in here and not all that long ago was somebody’s vomit. It was humid and the ventilation system was people coming in and out of the front door and right now no one was.

He checked his phone, saw Jennie Crawford had called and tried her back, but didn’t reach her. He left a message and started getting agitated waiting here to have some heart to heart with Hugh that felt contrived. It was a bad day for a four o’clock beer.

When Hugh walked in he waved at Raveneau but headed to the bar and clapped the backs of two daylight drinkers. The afternoon was hot and the fires dominated the flat screen TV over the bar. Hugh wore a black short-sleeved shirt and what got marketed to the middle class as designer jeans. Raveneau couldn’t help but wonder as Hugh walked over if pulling the gun out of the kitchen drawer was staged.

‘I’ll get us two beers. How about Trumer? You like Trumer and we’ve got it on tap.’

‘Trumer is fine.’

Raveneau pulled his phone as Hugh returned to the bar. He read a text from Sheriff Crawford: ‘
Call me as you can.
’

He texted her back: ‘
Call you in forty minutes.
’

‘
I’ll be in the air.
’

He called her as Hugh was paying and starting back with two pint glasses, one in each hand, and the one in his left dripping foam that ran down the glass and through his fingers. He looked at Hugh but listened to her.

‘I helped them put a name on the body this afternoon,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘John Royer. He lives in my county.’

‘Spell it.’

She did. Raveneau wrote it down. ‘How do you know him?’

‘I didn’t say I know him. I know of him. We had an incident he was questioned about. The FBI is planning to search his house tomorrow. Do you want to be there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so. Agent Coe will call you. We had an old man die of exposure when he got locked out of his house late at night during a storm. He was close to ninety, frail and getting a little confused, so everyone thought he’d wandered out and the door closed behind him. His tracks in the snow went out his driveway, then returned and circled around to the back of the house. We thought at first he went out the driveway to go get a neighbor to help and got confused because of driving snow and came back and looked for another unlocked door. The man who found the body was his neighbor across the street, John Royer. That’s how it looked at first and then our detective started to look a little closer and there were some things that didn’t add up.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the old fella never locked his doors. The neighbors who had known him for forty years said everyone knew that. And Royer’s answers were inconsistent and the detective found him odd.’

‘So did I.’

She chuckled at that. ‘The Feds are flying me back now.’

‘I’ll call Coe. I’ll be there tomorrow.’

As Raveneau put his phone away, Hugh asked, ‘New girlfriend?’

‘No, the Missouri Sheriff we returned the skulls to. The Feds flew her out and she’s leaving now.’

‘What’s that about?’

‘It’s about the dead man up on Mount Tam. He may be from her county.’

‘Too bad he didn’t die sooner.’

Hugh took a drink of beer and wiped foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand and as they left the sheriff a tension settled over the table. Raveneau asked how the bar business here was going.

‘Not well,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s another business deal I shouldn’t have gotten into. Did you tell that prick of a contractor that I have issues?’

‘I didn’t tell him much of anything.’ Raveneau took a sip of beer. He thanked Hugh for the beer and then asked, ‘Do you have issues? Should I have told him that?’

‘Fuck you, Ben.’

‘Yeah, fuck me.’

‘The bomb shelter is filled in. It’ll have a garden over it and flowers. That’ll be the end of it, huh, no one else going down there ever. That’ll also be the end of your investigation and getting yourself puffed up about solving what the fuck-up detectives before you couldn’t. I know you haven’t found anything new because Ray Alcott and I didn’t find it and we were a lot closer to it when things happened and probably better than the pair of you.’

‘Is this the heart to heart you wanted to have? You’re going to tell me how fucking good you were?’

Hugh leaned forward on the table and it rocked a little as his big frame weighted it. More beer spilled and his breath crossed the table. ‘I’m seeing a doctor and he says stress may have triggered the gun thing. Money worries have had me upside down. He wants me to cut stress and that means eliminating what I can and one of those is what happened to Ann Coryell. I’ve told you everything I know. I can’t help you any more on that one.’

‘You haven’t helped me, so keep on keeping on.’

‘Are you going to be a jackass this afternoon? Why say something like that? Is my life one big joke to you?’

‘No.’

‘Then why is it every time I turn around you are asking questions about me or undercutting me? Ferranti said he asked you about fake haul tags and you wouldn’t vouch for me.’

‘He told me about the tags and after he did that I wanted to know how he came up with proof that you hired someone to make you some fraudulent tags. He says he’s going to show me.’

‘None of that is any of your business. I’ll deal with him and you keep your nose out of my business.’

‘OK, well, Ferranti says he’s going to show me proof. When he does, what do you want me to do with it? Tear it up, give it to you, threaten Ferranti, what works best?’

‘You’re making a big mistake here with me. You really are. I’m trying to talk to you.’

‘Go ahead and talk.’

Instead he started into a laborious retelling of his need to make the demolition business work coupled with the old saw of his certainty the police pension was going down. He was probably right about that, but others had issued the same warning for years, and it was a little like listening to a Wall Street banker on a Sunday talk show predicting where the economy was going. You knew as a TV viewer that the banker didn’t have a clue. Everyone watching knew and it was like that with Hugh now, except that Hugh had some other goal that required grinding him down first.

‘I want you to call Ferranti and say you talked to me and tags were nothing I did and that I fired my nephew.’

‘You want me to make that call?’

‘I’m asking you as a friend to talk to him. Tell him I’m rebuilding my company without Matt and I apologize for anything Matt did. You, because he knows you know me well and you have no interest in construction.’

‘You’re on your own.’

‘You won’t do that?’

‘No.’

‘I need someone at my back as I get around this problem. I’m not asking you to lie. Matt was my problem.’

‘Your nephew dumped trash off the side of a road, and if he forged tags, deal with that. Ferranti, I gave him the OK to fill the bomb shelter and he’s filled it in and the rest is yours. Go sit down with him.’

‘He fired me. He says he’ll see me in court. He’s not paying what he owes and I need someone to vouch for me. You’re saying you won’t do that?’

‘Vouching for you won’t change anything. Sit down with him and talk it out.’

‘You’re a cold fuck, you know that?’

‘But if you did hire someone to make you fraudulent tags, then I think you should announce your retirement tomorrow.’

‘Get out of my bar, Raveneau. We’re done.’

‘No, we’re not done yet.’ Raveneau picked his phone up off the table. ‘Thanks for the beer. I’ll be in touch.’

R
aveneau changed planes at three thirty in the morning and landed in St Louis at dawn. He picked up the rental and drove for an hour and a half before he called Sheriff Crawford. ‘I’m close.’

‘You need to hurry. We’re out at the house and all that’s keeping the FBI from going in is some equipment. They’re waiting for lead-lined suits and a robot that lives in St Louis.’

‘Is Coe there?’

‘He sure is. He’s standing with a group of agents out on the street. I’m looking at him. We had breakfast together in Cagdill. He ate pork sausage made here and eggs from a farm down the road.’

Raveneau pushed his speed a little as he got off the phone with her, but there probably wasn’t any need. With the possibility of radiation risk the FBI would move cautiously and he wasn’t that far away. He checked the GPS again and drove low hills and treed country and then open flat farm land, river bluffs as he got closer. Then he was just minutes from Royer’s house.

The house had a decorative red-brick skirt and a front face modeled on George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon except much smaller and without any estate to back it up. A detached garage sat off to the left side. Both house and garage were clad with gray-painted wood siding that badly needed repainting. It needed other work as well but its Mount Vernon face said everything was still possible in America.

He parked down the street and talked with Coe and neighbors, several of whom had plenty of opinion about Royer especially now that he was dead. In plain speak he moved here because his wife’s people were from here and he changed considerably after she died of cervical cancer. The cancer was discovered after she and John failed at getting her pregnant. She was twenty-six when she died. He was a young engineer working for a medical technology firm that required him to commute regularly to Chicago. Living here was a concession to his wife and the relatives she had locally, and then she was gone and he still had the house in a down market where selling it wasn’t easy.

A neighbor told Raveneau, ‘He was about as alone as a man can get. He could not accept that she died. My wife tried to get him to take Christ into his heart and she got him to church, but when she went to pick him up the next Sunday he told her it just wasn’t for him. That’s the last time he ever talked to us. He stopped talking to any of the neighbors and I heard he didn’t even talk to his wife’s people.’

Raveneau sat with Jennie in her patrol car. This wasn’t her only problem this morning and she wanted to be near her radio. She talked about John Royer between fielding radio and cell calls.

‘You learned about the wife,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And you saw the car in the garage.’

Raveneau did. The Feds checked for booby traps then activated the garage door opener with a gadget they had. Nothing exploded, the radiation readings were typical background, and there weren’t any skulls, but there was a green Subaru that could be what the young couple had seen.

‘Pretty good chance he’s the one who took them,’ she said. ‘They tell me he was already a loner but became more so, up late at night and secretive, that kind of thing. We ran the vehicle registration and came up with his name, and the description fits what our second witness and her soldier boyfriend saw. Something in there will tie him to the grave robbing.’

Raveneau pointed at the house directly across the street. ‘Is that where the elderly fellow died?’