The Innocent: The New Ryan Lock Novel (18 page)

Laird did. Lock let go of his wrist. ‘If I wanted to harm you, it would already have happened. Now, what do you know about who killed Tromso?’

‘Shaw?’ said Laird. ‘You think it was Shaw?’

Lock walked across to the credenza and flicked on a lamp. He wanted to get a good look at Laird’s face. He sat down opposite Laird. ‘No, it wasn’t Shaw. Whoever did this was a professional. A pro sniper, not a pro baller. Almost certainly someone with military experience. You have any idea who that might be?’

‘This has all gotten completely out of hand,’ Laird said.

‘Y’think?’ said Lock, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

Laird slumped forward at his desk. His head was in his hands. ‘You don’t understand the pressure I’ve been under. If this got out …’

His fingernails digging into the palms of his hands to stop himself exploding, Lock studied the curious specimen of humanity sitting across from him. What he really wanted to do was throw Laird and his five-hundred-dollar suit through the window. ‘“If this got out” — what?’ he said. ‘Your college’s reputation would be dragged through the mud? You’d lose money? You’d be fired? Listen to me, Chancellor, we’re beyond all that now. A man’s family has been killed because he was trying to tell the truth. And you’d already tried to pay him off. Was it you, Chancellor? Did you ask Tromso to go kill the Shaw family? How deep are you in?’

Either the shock on Laird’s face was genuine or he was one hell of an actor. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You think a man in my position would countenance something like that? I offered Coach Shaw that deal to prevent any …’ He trailed off.

The idea of throwing Laird out of the window was starting to gain fresh appeal to Lock. Not that Laird knew it, but he was lucky it was him he was dealing with and not Ty. Ty would have killed him by now. There was no doubt in Lock’s mind about that.

Lock bent over so that he was in Laird’s face. ‘To prevent any what?’

Laird swallowed hard. ‘When I was made aware of Aubrey Becker’s activities, I banned him from campus and handed over the investigation to the relevant authorities. I did what I was required to do.’

‘Required’, thought Lock. A nice neat word. The kind of word an attorney would use. Of course, what it meant in reality was that Laird had done the bare minimum to get the whole mess off his neat mahogany desk.

‘And I’m sure they’ll give you a chocolate medal. Now, I’m going ask you again. To prevent what?’

Laird looked at Lock. Their eyes met. There was a little steel in Laird’s expression now. ‘Aubrey was the governor’s brother. A scandal like this … the stakes were high. I was trying to protect Coach Shaw. It’s hardly my fault that he couldn’t be persuaded.’

Lock snapped. He grabbed Laird by the throat, and began to squeeze, increasing the pressure slowly, making sure he had the man’s full attention. ‘Listen to me, you sanctimonious paper-pushing asshole, you are going to tell me everything you know about this. You understand? And if you don’t, then this college is going to have one more dead body when I walk out of here.’

Ty pulled up to the Becker house. The gates were closed, and he doubted there was anyone inside to open them. He got out and checked the mailbox. It was full. He separated the real mail from the junk, jammed the junk back in, and tossed the real mail onto the passenger seat. He got back into the car and drove down the road a few hundred yards. He nudged off road, and left the Chevy Blazer hidden from passing traffic by a stand of trees.

He hiked his way to the house. The drapes were still closed from the night of the murders. The front door was locked. He walked round to the back of the property, smashed a glass panel in an external door and let himself in. The alarm had been switched off.

Ty took off his shoes and walked through the house. There was still dried blood in the front hallway where Gretchen and Aubrey Becker had met their end. In the dining room, their final meal lay on the plates. Green mold had already started to form on a basket of bread in the middle of the table. This crime scene didn’t trouble him, or give rise to any strong emotions, not in the way that seeing Malik’s house had.

He walked back into the hall, and climbed the staircase, with its family portraits of the Becker clan. It didn’t look like a child molester’s house, but Ty wasn’t exactly sure what would. Guys like Becker hid in plain sight. The higher their profile, the less likely it was that people would assume they had anything to hide.

The real puzzle for Ty was Becker’s wife, Gretchen. She must have known on some level that the interest her husband took in young boys was abnormal. Even if she hadn’t witnessed anything directly, surely she would have had her suspicions. Maybe that was where Becker’s money came in. For her to turn in her husband she would have stood to lose a lot, assuming the inevitable civil suits from victims, as well as her status in the community.

At the top of the stairs, Ty stopped and listened. Satisfied that he was on his own, he moved into the master bedroom. He checked through closets and drawers, taking his time, trying to ensure he didn’t miss anything. He wasn’t surprised that Becker didn’t have a gun safe, or a firearm of any description. It spoke of the man’s arrogance that he didn’t appear to have worried about his own safety.

He moved methodically through the rooms. The master bedroom had a large en-suite. Apart from a prescription bottle of Viagra, which made Ty shudder, there was nothing of interest. It was the same for the three guest bedrooms. He left Aubrey Becker’s study until last.

It was almost as large as the master bedroom. The walls were wood-paneled, and the carpet, a red and green plaid pattern, looked as if it had been bought in a country-club closing down sale. There was a green leather chesterfield next to the window, and a large desk surrounded by bookshelves. Apart from the usual leather-bound classics, there was one shelf devoted to photography, and another of books about sailing. The ass end of Minnesota struck Ty as a strange place to settle for a man interested in boats, but there were lakes, he guessed.

On the desk was a large computer screen. Ty would have laid good money that if there was anything incriminating about Becker it was here. He followed the cable running from the monitor to the tower. As he bent, he saw wires trailing where the hard drive had been ripped out. A couple of the screws from where the casing had been removed were lying on the carpet. Becker could have done it himself when things had begun to go south, or it might have been removed by a third party later on. There was no way of knowing.

Ty went back to the books. On one of the lower shelves he noticed a high school yearbook. It dated back to the 1960s. He pulled it out and flicked through, finding a suitably pompous-looking teenage Aubrey Becker dressed in a suit and tie. He didn’t look all that different from the more recent pictures of him and his wife in silver frames on the desk. The guy looked like he’d born and died middle-aged.

Ty put the yearbook back on the shelf, and worked his way through the rest of the titles, hoping to turn up other personal stuff. He was out of luck. The yearbook was as personal an item as there was in Becker’s study. The hard drive was a likely treasure trove, but that had either been destroyed or spirited away to save the Becker dynasty any further embarrassment.

The esteemed chancellor’s office reeked of the vomit he’d deposited in the trash can under his desk after Lock had cut off his air supply for long enough to get his attention. The blinds were still closed. Laird was half slumped over his desk. He didn’t look any better for having got it all off his chest. Neither had Lock learned much more than he and Ty already either knew or suspected.

Laird had been at the college for a little under six years. He’d transferred from an institution in Indiana where he had driven some serious growth in student numbers and alumni contributions via an ambitious football program. The college at Harrisburg had signed him on to perform the same magic here. Leading the appointments committee had been none other than Aubrey Becker.

‘It makes it more than a little awkward when you start to suspect that the man to whom you owe your job is less than savory,’ he’d told Lock.

There had been nothing specific connecting Aubrey Becker to anything criminal. Becker used the campus as his own private fiefdom, and was often seen with teenage boys. The story was that, as he and Gretchen couldn’t have children, this was his way of compensating for a fatherly instinct. Not everyone bought it, including Laird, but there had only been rumors. If complaints had been made, they had not reached Laird’s desk.

Lock wasn’t sure he believed that part. But he did know that a man like Laird was hardly going to start screaming, ‘Child molester!’ and pointing the finger at a man like Becker without something more than suspicious behavior and rumors.

It was only when Malik had raised the alarm, then wouldn’t let it go that he’d taken action. He’d kicked it down to Tromso to investigate and banned Becker from the campus in the interim. That had led to the threat of legal action from Becker’s attorneys in Minneapolis. ‘But I held firm,’ he said to Lock.

‘Yeah, you’re a regular hero,’ Lock told him. ‘So what else?’

‘There was no else. It was being investigated.’

Lock had to fight the sneer from his voice. ‘By Tromso? Why didn’t you contact someone in Minneapolis?’

It was Laird’s turn to smirk. ‘Are you forgetting the part about Aubrey’s brother being governor? What good would it have done? I was hoping that by banning him from campus it would scare him enough to stop him doing whatever he was doing.’

‘By which you mean raping kids.’

That wiped the smug grin from Laird’s face. ‘I didn’t have the details.’

‘So why not go out of state? Call the FBI.’

Laird spread his hands out of the desk. ‘Even if I had, they would have had to wait while the ongoing investigation came to some sort of conclusion. Tromso told me that if he did find evidence he would hand it to a special prosecutor.’

‘And you believed him?’ said Lock. ‘You know he burned the Shaw home to the ground, right?’

Laird blanched. ‘No, I most certainly did not.’

‘My partner watched him go in with a can of gasoline. Getting rid of the evidence.’

‘You think Tromso killed them? That’s preposterous.’

Lock stared hard at Laird. ‘He lied about everything connected to the crime scene in his report. Must have realized it wasn’t going to stand up. We have pictures to prove that his version of what went down was pure fantasy.’

Lock could see the cogs turning in Laird’s mind. Every logical pathway led to how he could extricate himself and limit the damage to the college. ‘Then if he did that, and he’s dead, and so is Aubrey Becker …’

‘You’re in the clear? That what you’re thinking, Chancellor?’

As Lock stood up, Laird flinched. He really was a pitiful sight, thought Lock. A man who thought only in terms of public perceptions and balance sheets. A man who didn’t care about the damage that might have been done to those left behind, or the pain of Becker’s victims, not to mention how he’d placed Malik Shaw’s family in danger, and pretty much signed their death warrant, by not doing the right thing. Even though Lock knew none of that would stand up in a court of law — Laird had dotted his
i
s and crossed his
t
s — it was still how any decent person would see it.

‘Not me,’ said Laird. ‘The institution.’

The intercom on Laird’s desk buzzed. ‘May I?’ he asked Lock.

Lock nodded for him to go ahead. ‘Just don’t say anything silly,’ he said, his hand falling to the butt of his SIG Sauer to emphasize just what a bad idea it would be.

‘Yes,’ said Laird.

‘Officer Svenson is on her way up to see you.’

Lock knew a cue to get the hell out of Dodge when he heard one. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure that this is over. Malik Shaw didn’t kill Tromso and the other person they found.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’ said Laird.

‘Because I was with him,’ said Lock. He stopped at the door, and nodded toward the windows. ‘I’d keep your blinds closed, and your eyes open, Chancellor. I’ve a feeling this thing still has a ways to go.’

The attic was dark and dusty. Head bowed, Ty crawled through the clutter, using a flashlight he’d found in the kitchen. After he’d got through searching the office, he’d tried to think of where else someone like Aubrey Becker would hide something he didn’t want the world to see.

Not that Ty knew if there was anything. But while he was there, he figured he might as well go over every inch of the property. There was something else that had lodged in his mind. A story Lock had told him about his time in the British Royal Military Police in Germany. It had been an investigation into a serial predator similar to Becker, and the evidence that had sent the man to jail had been carefully stored in his attic. It made sense. It was a place that a casual visitor was hardly likely to stumble into. Plus the house had no basement so that left this as a storage area.

Ty worked his way methodically through the piles of boxes. Most of it seemed to be soft furnishings, drapes and pillows that he figured had been placed there by Gretchen Becker. At the bottom of one stack, he came across some old files. Maybe this was it. He pulled the box out, took off the lid and began to go through the papers but nothing leaped out at him.

At the very bottom he found a pile of old magazines. Gay porn, and some old naturist stuff from the 1960s, the kind that had families. He didn’t dwell on it. He took a quick look at the covers and threw them back into the box. Knowing what he did about Becker’s appetites, it made his skin crawl.

He wasn’t going to find anything there that would tell him something they didn’t already know. He climbed back down the attic ladder and stood in the hallway. He checked back through the rooms. He grabbed the yearbook from Becker’s office and took one final look. The young Becker stared back at him, no hint of what he was to become. Ty closed it again, but took it with him. Downstairs he combed through a papers caddy in the kitchen, retrieving some itemized cellular phone bills for both Aubrey and Gretchen. Lock could give them to Salas and see what he came up with.