The Sniper's Wife (14 page)
He tapped the pager clipped to his belt. “Batteries died. I just noticed it. There was a schedule change and Willy’s hearing was moved to today. He’s back on the street. So much for keeping tabs on him.” He gave them both a resigned smile. “I guess Murphy’s lurking as usual.”
They were back in the precinct house, back in the interview room, away from everyone else. Over the intervening hours, the initial bond between the two older men had solidified, and it was clear that Ward Ogden, given his elite status, was going to exploit it by keeping Joe and Sammie inside the loop, even though standard department protocol decreed otherwise. It was a development the two Vermont cops weren’t about to tamper with. Whatever Ogden suggested at this point, they would do if they wanted to stick around.
Not that he’d been in any way domineering. In fact, up to now, while they’d been waiting for confirmations from CSU, Ogden had been putting his house in order, changing the status of this erstwhile “groundball investigation” to a homicide, reorganizing his schedule, clearing up or delegating some of his cases, and otherwise giving himself more room to move. Sammie and Joe had used the opportunity to study Mary’s file more carefully and to take notes on what obvious avenues of investigation to pursue.
Now, however, there was a knock on the door and a uniformed officer stepped in to hand Ogden an envelope. After waiting for the young man to leave, Ogden opened the envelope and consulted its contents.
“Fax from CSU,” he said. “They agree with our scenario. The fire escape was recently oiled, the grate over the basement window tampered with, and the heating control was cranked way up within the last few days, they say here, ‘enough to have caused considerable discomfort within the apartment,’ and then returned to normal. They also confirm the metal shavings you found, Joe, are consistent with what a key cutter produces, but that’s as far as they’ll stick their necks out. Oh,” he added, rereading the document before handing it over. “They also checked the window sash and found a recently killed spider along the groove, complete with torn web, indicating the window had been raised.”
Joe Gunther tapped the case file with his finger. “We were going over the responding officer’s report,” he said, “and noticed that the old lady next door who called 911 mentioned how hot she’d been two nights previous to that. If you’re right about how thin the walls are in that place, it could be Mary’s apartment heat bled through to the neighbor’s. That and the dated birth control pill dispenser give us a pretty good fix on the time of death.”
Ogden glanced at the calendar on the wall. “Which would make it Tuesday night. By the way, I also called the morgue and told them to run a few extra tests on the body—fingernail scrapings, vaginal swabs, whatever they don’t do for routine overdoses. Lucky thing Willy appeared when he did, or I would have released the body.”
The dinosaur stood up and began pacing the tiny room, obviously building up steam. “Okay,” he announced, “we’re behind the eight ball on this, so some things’ll be too cold to pursue. That still leaves us a ton to do. Some you can help with, others you’ll have to stay away from. Most of the latter involves using the computers here, dealing with people like DMV, Social Security, Welfare, and others, or getting subpoenas for things like Mary’s luds.”
“What’re those?” Sammie asked.
His answer came rapid-fire: “Her local phone calls, the ones that don’t appear in the bill. Stands for ‘local usage detail.’ ” He went back to thinking out loud. “Basically, we have three major areas of concentration: the technical, like forensics, those phone records, and the Metro cards; the internal, which means talking to the drug unit and combing through every nook and cranny in our files for any and all past arrests and whether anyone in Mary’s building is on parole or has a record or ever filed a complaint with us; and the external, which covers everything from talking to her neighbors, friends, and co-workers, to dropping by local pawnshops in case something stolen was sold, to checking with the Homeless Outreach project to see what bums, if any, might have seen someone coming or going from the building that night. And that’s just to begin with, unless something falls into our laps.”
He snapped his fingers suddenly. “And we need to check the building’s trash compactor. I noticed a trash chute on her floor. It should still be full—there’s been a garbage strike all week.”
“What can we do?” Joe asked.
Ogden stopped pacing. “Honestly? One of my biggest concerns is Kunkle. You know him, you know his style and habits. You could help me by finding him as fast as possible. I seriously doubt he’s taking Circle Line tours or visiting the museums.”
He placed his hands on the back of his chair to emphasize what he said next. “If he knows what we know, he’s going to want to set things right. I don’t blame him, but it could cause us all a world of hurt, including getting himself killed or screwing up the case so much that we can’t nail the guy responsible.”
Neither Joe nor Sammie doubted the likelihood of either possibility. They knew what Willy was like when he got his teeth into something.
“Get him off the street,” Ogden reemphasized.
Gunther nodded once. “You got it.”
W
illy let Riley take the lead. They were in a high-rise— a cast-off, damaged monument to urban renewal, the likes of which dotted the city’s landscape like smallpox. Cereal-box-shaped buildings with small windows often covered with plywood, overlooking abandoned concrete playgrounds that had only nestled children in the architect’s imagination. The hard, open approaches to the building had been littered and devoid of life, with fragments of shattered glass that crunched underfoot. In the shadows beyond the harsh and sporadic lighting of the few still-functioning arc lamps, they’d heard people moving about, and the sounds of threatening murmurs. It had made Willy think of the jungle again, but not brought him back to it, for while this battlefield was just as ominous, it remained strange and remote—a wilderness cast in steel and brick, inhabited by warriors without hope or goal.
Riley had marched into it all with careful but confident familiarity, his long coat open, his hands empty and swinging by his sides, but exuding the message that Willy knew to be true, that he was carrying his shotgun in a sling under his arm. Riley was on familiar ground and accordingly prepared.
Now they were inside the building, surrounded by the turbulence of neglect and anger. The stench of urine and rot permeated the air, the walls and floor were scarred, broken, and stained, and as covered with scrawled insignia as the interior of a jail cell. Distant screams and shouting echoed down the sepia-lit hallways.
They took the stairs, Riley not even bothering to see if the elevator worked, not just because it probably didn’t, but also because elevators were dead-end boxes from which escape in a crisis was highly unlikely.
Several flights up, in a corridor similar to the one they’d entered, Riley turned right and strode an enormous distance, still not reaching the end, but coming to a door that was open by just a crack.
Instinctively, Riley flattened himself against the wall to one side of the door, as Willy did opposite him. Both men had their weapons out, all pretense at discretion gone.
Riley tapped on the door with his shotgun barrel. “Yo, Nate. You in there? It’s Riley.”
The sounds around them continued. The silence from inside the apartment did the same. Willy saw down the hall another door open slightly and then immediately close, followed by the loud click of a lock falling to.
“Nate. Come to the door.”
After another pause, Riley used his gun to push the door back on its hinges, but remained out of sight. A small amount of light fell out onto the floor.
Riley made eye contact with Willy, held up three fingers, motioned to the right and left, and then folded each finger back into his fist in an inaudible countdown. At zero, they both swung through the door, Willy cutting to the right and Riley to the left. There they froze, ready to fire from crouching positions, but confronted only with a single shabby, empty room that looked like a tornado had recently ripped through it.
Again, communicating with hand signals, the two men spread out and checked the closet, behind and beneath the furniture, and looked into the bathroom. Nate wasn’t home.
Willy holstered his pistol and closed the front door for privacy’s sake. “He always this tidy or are we supposed to read something here?” he asked.
Riley was standing in the middle of the room. “Nah. This has been tossed something good.”
Out of habit, Willy began poking around, looking for anything that might clarify what had happened. “What else did Nate say to you last time you saw him?” he asked rhetorically.
But Riley wasn’t interested. “Gee, he told me he was going to get killed and who was going to do it. Must’ve slipped my mind.”
Willy stared at him. “What’s your problem? We don’t even know he’s been hurt.”
Riley looked at him contemptuously. “Oh, right. They’re holding him for ransom—his life for the Rolls. What the fuck you think was going to happen, asking him to poke his nose into drug business? You might as well have pulled the trigger yourself, the way I see it.”
Willy’s instinctive, angry denial was entirely fueled by guilt. “The way you see it is your problem. I came to him asking advice. Is it my fault he thought he owed me?”
Riley clenched his fist in frustration, and for a split second Willy wasn’t sure the big man might not take a swing at him, which Willy would not have ducked. But then he turned on his heel, walked to the cracked window, and stared out at the night sky, letting out a heavy sigh after a long hesitation.
“He saw you as a turning point,” he said, speaking to his own reflection in the glass. “Used to call you his crossroads. I been hearing about you for years, like you were some goddamn saint.”
He turned to face Willy. “Then you show up, some half-nuts, scrawny cripple, and you get him screwed to the wall in no time flat. If that’s what saints do, I’d just as soon pass.”
Willy had nothing to say.
Riley seemed to pick up on the emotional riot occurring behind the silence, though, and reluctantly tried easing him off the hook. “I guess you’re right,” he admitted. “Nate was a big boy, and he knew how to stay out of trouble. You’re just the only one I can blame.”
Willy was looking at the floor, lost in thought. At that, he glanced up. “I’m good for it,” he said.
But Riley wasn’t having that, either. He slipped his shotgun back under his coat and turned on a few more lights. “Wallow all you want. I’d just as soon nail the asshole who did this. And if we’re lucky, there’s something around here that might give us a lead.”
Joe Gunther stepped off the commuter train onto the platform and looked around. Across the parking lot, the village of Mount Kisco, New York, spread out to the right and left, a bustling, upscale, redbrick town with a seemingly bulletproof look of security about it. Most of the cars he saw going past were the rolling equivalent of a year’s salary.
“Wow,” Sammie muttered. “Suburbia.”
“High-end suburbia. Big distinction.”
“And Bob Kunkle can afford to live here? Must be doing all right.”
“He doesn’t live here, Sam. He works here.”
“Ah, right,” she said. “Big distinction number two.”
They crossed the parking lot, squinting against the bright morning sun. The train trip north had been leisurely and pleasant, since they’d been running against the commuter flow, and the village seemed equally peaceful, temporarily empty of most of its high-power residents. Gunther was struck with how, even in these modern times, most of the people he saw shopping or strolling along the street were wealthy-looking women, the only men being shopkeepers, a road crew, or the odd man in uniform, from a cop to a UPS driver. It was like taking a trip back to the fifties, albeit accompanied by a herd of modern SUVs.
“His store’s on the main drag,” Gunther explained, heading that way. “When I phoned him last night, he said to look for a London wannabe.”
“I take it from that he’s not the owner,” Sammie commented.
“Manager,” Joe explained briefly.
They found it easily enough, not just from the sign, but in fact from its faux-Brit aspirations. Crossing the threshold, he and Sammie were embraced by the smell of wood oil, rich wool, and the faint odor of pipe tobacco, although Gunther couldn’t swear that last part wasn’t his imagination.
“How are you?” asked a young man in an immaculate pin-stripe suit, silk tie, and a shirt with French cuffs.
“We’re fine. We’re here to see Bob Kunkle.”
“Of course. Please wait here a moment. I’ll go fetch him. Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Joe Gunther.”
“I’ll be right back,” he announced unctuously, and slid soundlessly off toward the rear of the store.
“There’s an eligible man for you, Sam,” Joe said. “Once you were done with him, you could park him in the closet till next time.”
Sammie was already wandering around the place, giving the fabric a feel and ogling the price tags. “Can you believe this stuff?”
A shadow emerged from the gloom at the back and another perfectly dressed man, older than the first, stepped forward, looking like a modern-day English butler, complete with vest and elegantly rounded stomach.
“Mr. Gunther? I’m Robert Kunkle.”
With the younger salesman lurking in the distance, Joe introduced Sammie by name alone.
But Kunkle caught his meaning and suggested, “Why don’t we talk somewhere more private?”
He led them down the length of the store, but not to his office. He’d taken his brother back there years before when he’d dropped by for a visit, and Bob had never forgotten the look in Willy’s eyes at the contrast between the ancient, feudal glow of the sales area and the fluorescentlit concrete gulag where Bob tallied the books. It had revealed more to Bob about the discomfort between the siblings than words ever could have, and wasn’t something he wanted to repeat, even with total strangers.
He ushered them instead into a changing area designed to make his customers feel like English lords. Along with the standard dais surrounded by mirrors, there were leather armchairs, side tables, reading material, a wall of unread books with fancy leather bindings, and a silver tea set on a sideboard. The lighting was tasteful and intimate, and the rug deep enough to tickle your ankles.
Bob invited them to sit, which they all did, before asking, “Is Willy all right?”
“We think so,” Gunther answered matter-of-factly. “That’s one of the reasons we’re here. Have you heard from him?”
Bob nodded. “A few days ago. We met near where our mom lives. He told me about Mary. What a shock.”
Sammie was comfortable enough being away from the city and the odd kind of diplomacy they’d been practicing there to speak up as she might have back home. “What was the reason for your meeting? You two aren’t all that close, are you?”
Gunther looked at her in surprise, thinking her approach had been overly direct, but it had the right effect on Bob. He laughed sadly. “Yeah, you could say that. I’ve had enemies I spend more time with.” He paused briefly and then answered the question. “He wanted to know what I could tell him about Mary.”
“Why would you know about her?” she asked.
“She started calling about six months ago. I don’t know how Willy knew that, but he wanted to know why. I told him I thought she was just reaching out after cleaning herself up—and wanting to know how he was doing. I wasn’t very helpful, I’m afraid. After he told me she’d died, I got angry at him and the conversation sort of ended.”
“As brother’s go,” Joe Gunther commented, “he must be a little high-maintenance.”
Again, Bob let out a short laugh. “You kidding? He’s no maintenance at all. It’s his way or the highway, and you get to do all the lifting.” He ran his palm across his bald pate in exasperation. “I can’t blame him, though. When it came time to hand out the bad luck, Willy was first in line. I don’t know that I could’ve dealt with half the shit he has. I mean, I know he’s a pain and a bully, but he’s a real straight shooter, you know? Mary’s dead by her own hand, from what he told me, but he’s still going to find out why. It’s just his way.”
“Is that what he told you?” Sammie asked.
Bob looked over at her but didn’t seem to have heard. “He hasn’t talked to our mom in years, he’s insulting to my wife, and he’s never even met my kids, but if I were in a jam, he’s the one I’d want to come after me. He’s like a bulldog that way.”
Sammie smiled at the description. Over the last several days, she’d done her best to keep her own emotions to one side, being Joe’s faithful sidekick and Willy’s steady colleague. But she loved Willy Kunkle, and was being torn apart by what he was going through, and it was all she could do not to cross the room and give his brother a hug. He’d fallen under Willy’s truly bizarre charm just as she and Joe Gunther had. Either that or only they had recognized the value of not heeding his tremendous ability to reject people. In point of fact, Bob’s sketch of Willy’s stubborn tenacity alone might as well have been used on Joe Gunther, and, now that she thought of it, herself as well.
“Did he say anything at all that might help us find him?” she asked.
He gave her a hapless expression.
Gunther cleared his throat softly. “Bob, you said Willy questioned you about Mary. What
had
she been up to?”
“Basically putting her life back together. She got a job at a drug rehab place near her home called the Re-Coop and she was trying to put some money away.”
“She was taking birth control pills,” Sammie said. “You know why?”
Bob flushed red. “I didn’t ask her things like that.”
“What about right after she and Willy broke up?” Gunther asked. “Were you in touch with her then?”
“A little bit, at first. She was hurt and confused, and pretty frightened. Willy really went over the top with her, I guess. She told me he’d hit her, just once, but that was enough. He was in a pretty bad way back then, drinking hard and acting strange. I heard later it might’ve been posttraumatic stress disorder or something—maybe had to do with what he did in Vietnam. But he never talked about that, and I was always too scared to ask.”
Sammie understood what he meant. The Willy she knew was further from the edge, but that particular topic was still hypersensitive. “What was she up to down here?” she asked him.
“Escaping, I guess is the best way to describe it, although I had my doubts she knew what she was doing. If I was in her condition, the last place I’d come to start over would be New York. Unless you have someone to turn to, it can be the loneliest place on earth.”
“Was there a someone?”
“Eventually, yeah. His name was Andy Liptak—an old war buddy of Willy’s. I only met him once, and he seemed nice enough, but I guess he had other things on his mind than taking care of Mary. He was out to make a buck, and I think she kind of drifted off, in a way. You know, got into things she shouldn’t have.”
“You mean the drugs?”
“Well, yeah. Once she started with them, it was like Willy had been with the booze. Kind of ironic, when you think about it. That she ended up like he’d been. Anyhow, she and Andy broke up. No surprise there.”
