Signature Kill (7 page)

Behr let Breslau weigh the merits of his offer for a minute.

“Look, let’s say I personally don’t have a problem with you seeing the file …” Breslau said. “I also can’t be in a position, if asked, where I have to answer that I gave it to
you
. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Behr said. He thought for a moment about where this left him, and if there was another way he could get a look at it. But Breslau provided it.

“You know Ken Bannon?” Breslau asked. “He’s a former, like you.”

Behr knew the name. Bannon had been a detective years back. But he didn’t know him personally.

“No,” Behr said.

“What about Don Fallon?” Breslau asked. Behr thought he recognized the name of a former lieutenant who’d gone into private work. And he got where Breslau was going.

“Nope,” Behr said. “What about Gene Sasso? He was my old training officer.” It was the second time he’d thought of him within a few days.

“Oh, so
he’s
the one we all have to thank …”

“Right.”

“Well, him I know,” Breslau said. “Now, see, he’s an ex-cop—a friend of the department—who I wouldn’t have any trouble giving a file to for a consult. For help. What he does with it, within reason, is up to him.”

Behr nodded. He had a conduit to the information now.

“So I’ll give you Northwestway Park, and we get a gold star with the Gibbons family.”

Behr nodded. “Am I going to find anything useful in the file?”

Breslau shrugged. “She was taken apart with bladed instruments—”

“Medical grade?”

“Not quite. And power tools,” Breslau said.

Behr took a drink and allowed that to settle for a moment.

“Any perp DNA recovered?” Behr wondered.

“Nada,” Breslau said.

“Any chance I can check my girl’s DNA against the victim’s?”

Breslau looked at him. “Sure, just have the next of kin sign a release.”

“Thanks.”

“Man, we’re so at sea on this Northwestway deal, even
you
can’t fuck it up any worse for us.” Behr knew there was some derision coming his way, and there it was. It was just the way cops spoke to each other.

“Am I supposed to say ‘thank you’ to that?” Behr asked.

“If you do, I’ll say ‘you’re welcome,’ ” Breslau said. “Anything else you think you need?” He sounded like he was joking, but Behr wasn’t.

“Matter of fact—”

“Oh, Jesus—”

“How about related cases? Missing persons, similar settings, similar MOs.”

Breslau turned directly toward Behr before he spoke. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Do I look like a comedian?”

“Not a funny one,” Breslau said. “What do you want with ancillary cases?”

“A slay like Northwestway may not be an isolated type of deal,” Behr said. “Maybe there’s something in another case that relates to mine. C’mon, man, I need it, and I’ll feed you anything real that I find.”

The IMPD lieutenant sat there and swilled his beer and looked miserable. “Christmas is coming, Breslau. I’ll put a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in your stocking.”

“I don’t drink Scotch. Why did I even come here tonight?” Breslau blew out a long, weary breath and Behr knew he had him. “Check with Sasso tomorrow and knock yourself out.”

“I’ll do my best,” Behr said.

“Please do,” Breslau said. “When
you
get in the way shit happens.”

Breslau raised his bottle and Behr touched it with his pint glass. They drained their beers. A highlight played on the flat screens above the bar—a Mavs power forward dunked hard over his counterpart on the Pacers. The partisan crowd roared.

“I’m getting out of here before I start shooting people,” Breslau said, standing and gathering his envelope.

“I’m walking out right next to you,” Behr said, getting up. “I got this.” He put money on the bar and they left.

As they split off in different directions, Behr called after Breslau.

“What was missing?”

“Huh?” Breslau paused.

“In Northwestway. You said most of her was there. What was missing?”

“Some parts that made her a woman,” Breslau said, and continued on into the night.

“Mr. Behr,” Kerry Gibbons said as she exited her house and saw him. “Didn’t expect to see you for a while.”

“Frank, please,” he said,

It was a cold morning, and the ground he’d walked across was as hard underfoot as the grim mission he was on.

“Frank. Do you have some information?”

“No, ma’am. Like I said, it’ll be quite some time, most likely, before I do. That’s
if
I do,” Behr said.

“Then what do you need? Think I told you everything already and I got to get Katie to her program,” she said. The young girl appeared next to her grandmother, all bundled up in a coat and scarf.

“Something I should have asked for the first time I was here: I could use a DNA sample on your daughter, and permission to check it against unidentified bodies.”

“Oh, dear,” Kerry Gibbons said.

“Or barring that, one on you and the little girl to crossmatch. It could be an old toothbrush, a pillowcase that we could recover some hairs off of, a sports mouthpiece, a razor, a whistle—anything with saliva on it. I don’t suppose her doctor might have an old blood sample?” Behr wondered.

“Okay,” she said, “wait here for a minute.” Kerry Gibbons disappeared back inside the house for a moment, leaving Behr alone with
the little girl. She ran over to her jungle gym and stood at the base of the slide.

“Lift up,” Katie said, looking at Behr. He took it to mean she wanted to go down the slide, and he picked her up and set her at the top for a quick trip down.

“Whee,” the girl said, as if by rote, without much joy in her voice. “Again.”

Behr obliged. He looked at the girl’s pale white skin, her raisin eyes, her runny nose. Losing her mother was a tough deal, but having her grandmother was a break in her favor. She was starting out somewhere close to even, and Behr wondered where she’d end up.

It was the fourth or fifth time down the slide when Kerry Gibbons emerged from the house. “Here you go,” she said, extending a Ziploc bag that held a blue plastic Goody hairbrush pretty well covered with blond strands. “That’s my daughter’s. Probably some of mine and Katie’s in there too. But like you said …”

“It should work,” Behr said. Then he had her sign the standard release he’d printed out.

“Any way I can get that back after the test?” Kerry Gibbons asked. “It was hers after all.”

“Sure,” Behr said.

“Did you end up finding that Jonesy?” the woman wondered.

“Yes, Jonesy’s been found,” Behr said. Her eyebrows rose in interest at this, but his tone discouraged further questions, and she didn’t ask any.

“Well …” she said.

“Oh, one other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m getting some pretty good courtesy extended from the police, so it’d be good if you ran any further inquiries into the case through me,” Behr said.

Kerry Gibbons took his measure with eyes that seemed to know all the angles, and when she was done she must’ve arrived at an acceptable sum. “Okay, Frank,” she said. “Will do. You’re my investigator.”

“Should I drop you right fucking now and save the run up?” asked Gene Sasso, the stocky and now bald owner and bartender of the Trough.

Sasso was not happy to see him. In case Behr missed the scowl on his face, Sasso reached under the bar and came up with a sawed-off baseball bat to make the point doubly clear.

Behr hadn’t been to the bar, in fact hadn’t seen Sasso, in close to seven years. He’d last been there in the middle of a period of heavy drinking, self-disgust, and all-around antisocial behavior. Behr had gone from rowdy-patron status, beyond old-friend-in-a-bad-way dispensation, and had even careened past oh-no-it’s-him-again standing.

“Not here for any trouble, Gene,” Behr assured him. He didn’t think Sasso really meant to hit him, but he wasn’t completely sure. Somewhere in the no-man’s-land of his mid-fifties, Sasso was still strong-looking and had a beard going that helped cover the ravages of countless late nights, first as a cop, then as a tavern owner.

“You never come for any, but the shit manages to show up just the same when you’re around,” Sasso said. “All six of my pool cues ended up broken last time you were in. Same for a bunch of my customers.”

“That was a long time ago. And
I
didn’t break ’em all,” Behr said.

“I’m counting the last three that got busted over your back. And
then there’s that …” Sasso pointed at a badly patched piece of drywall between the doors to the men’s and ladies’ rooms.

“Some of your clientele are real assholes, what can I tell you. Didn’t I pay for the damage?” Behr wondered.

Sasso just looked at him, and Behr supposed the answer was no. Not that anyone would notice. At the time the Trough had opened, it looked like the interior wasn’t quite finished, and it hadn’t made any progress since, although that had been nearly ten years ago. The place currently sported a thin crowd of day drinkers seated along the dozen mismatched stools that lined the bar. The assortment of battered tables and chairs was unoccupied, as was a pool table that almost shined because the felt was worn to the slate.

After a moment, Sasso stowed the bat and reached into his shirt pocket for a flash drive, which he held up.

“How you got a world-beater like Breslau to give you this, I’ll never know,” Sasso said.

“My charm is underrated,” Behr answered.

“Charm? Fuckin’ please,” Sasso said, and almost smiled despite himself. He’d always had a soft spot for Behr, even back when Behr was a complete newbie and they’d first been paired up. They’d spent countless nights cruising the streets of what used to be referred to as the “Spaghetti Bowl”—the place where a bunch of interstates and main thoroughfares twisted together. They mopped up blood and hauled in DWIs, barroom brawlers, and wannabe gangsters. And while they rode, Sasso kept up that steady patter of “rules to live by.” Like
“The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get,”
and
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

“What do you want with it anyway?” Sasso asked, putting the drive on the bar top. “Shouldn’t you stick to the neck brace and rusty zipper cases?”

“Probably.”

“Department wouldn’t give you the files directly?”

Behr shook his head.

“So you figured ‘use your old T.O.’?”

“Yeah,” Behr said, “I know you keep good ties.”

“Yes,
I
do. Because people—regular people—keep up friendships, relationships, warm human contact.”

“Uh-huh,” Behr said.

“Like I tried to do with you, long after you gave it up.”

“I didn’t give it up,” Behr said. “It just … went.”

Back after his first son had just died, Behr seemed to systematically burn down everything around him. He hoped that time was past.

“I wouldn’t wish what happened to you on my worst enemy. But it’s been a while now, Frank. I gave you all the space you asked for, and then some. And you had plenty of chances to come find me, buy me a drink, and make things right. Instead you did what you did, you let a quarter of a lifetime go by, and now you show up for this.” Sasso put a finger on the flash drive and slid it across the bar.

“Thank you,” Behr said, taking it. “And I get it, Gene. I’ll come buy you that drink one day.”

Sasso nodded, and Behr, not knowing what else to say, left.

Nothing like the smell of formaldehyde in the morning
, Frank Behr thought to himself as he entered the brown brick building that housed the coroner’s office, though the place didn’t smell
only
like formaldehyde. Truth was it smelled like overcooked ground beef.

“How are you? Frank Behr to see Jean Gannon,” Behr said to the middle-aged woman sitting at the reception desk. He hadn’t been in touch with his friend Jean, a forensic pathologist for the city, in a while and it’d be good to catch up in person before he asked for her help. Behr had a small sack of chocolate truffles and a few airplane-size bottles of Grand Marnier in one coat pocket, the bag holding the hairbrush in the other. It was his custom to bring Jean gifts when she was doing him off-the-books favors. The fact that he had clearance on this one didn’t stop him from keeping up the tradition.

“Jean’s not here,” the receptionist told him.

“Not here as in out getting a coffee, or not at work today?” Behr wondered, glancing at the trophy case across the lobby that held macabre souvenirs of past deaths—a piece of plastic a child had choked on, a length of rebar that had impaled a construction worker, a paper-like hood of dried facial skin, including the nose, of a burn victim. Morgue workers had a specialized sense of humor.

“Not here at all anymore,” she answered. “Jean took early retirement a few months ago and left the office.”

“What?” Behr uttered. He wasn’t surprised often, but this got him. Jean had loved her work. The sense of time moving by was a
blow to him. Then there was the fact he no longer had a connection in the coroner’s office.

“I know,” the receptionist said, then rolled her chair to a bulletin board and took down a business card. “Here,” she said, passing it to him. “This is where she’s working now.”

The card read: Scanlon Brothers, Mortuary and Funeral Home.

“Here,” Behr said, placing the chocolates and Grand Marnier on the desk.

“What’s that for?” the receptionist asked.

“That’s for you,” Behr said.

“Thanks!” She smiled. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Frank Behr …” he said, and leaned in for some small talk. The receptionist was a long way from a forensic pathologist he had history with, but he had to start somewhere.

Next stop was the Indianapolis–Marion County Forensic Services Agency—otherwise known as the place that did DNA testing. It shared a building down on South Alabama with the jail. He was there to drop the hairbrush, which he produced along with his license and the release form when he got to the buttoned-down-looking young clerk.