The Ten-Mile Trials (15 page)

‘Did she do her imitation of how they talk? The bad-suit guys? Did she do that for Ricky?'

‘Yes. Ricky said he wasn't sure.'

‘Ray – now
I
feel like I'm making it up – but you seem to think our bad-suit guys are connected some way to the Mad Russians in Phoenix?'

‘I'm starting to buy into that idea. Yes.'

‘But then – I know this keeps getting crazier – is it also possible they're the ones who shot the John Doe in the grow garage? Is that what you're thinking?'

He shrugged. ‘I'm beginning to think anything's possible.'

‘Well, but— The same four guys doing all this bad stuff at once? Burglaries and murder, corrupt deals with pawnbrokers, and two or three access points into the drug business? It sounds too . . . busy.'

‘We don't really know how many of them are here. Or what their connections are. Lately it seems as if Big Crime is morphing into something that looks like Big Turf Battle.'

‘Kind of like Walgreens putting up stores on all the good corners?'

‘I hadn't thought of it that way, but actually that seems to be what's happening on the Mexican border. Big gangs, cartels, putting markers down. My corner. Yeah.'

‘Rutherford's not big enough to support that size operation. Why are they here?'

‘Well – go back to the Walgreens example. They often build on corners and hang on even when the neighborhoods they expect to fit into aren't going to get built for four or five years.'

‘Jeez, are drug dealers as rich as Walgreens now?'

‘Well, they're not playing by corporate rules, remember – they can do very creative bridge financing. Amos Healy says some of the Mexicans out there in Phoenix are bankrolling their drug start-ups by doing kidnappings first. They grab people and torture them, put them on the phone with their relatives and let them scream and beg for help. Then the bad guys go collect the money and drop their half-dead victims by the roadside. Amos said we should be grateful if they're only doing burglaries here.'

‘OK, I'm grateful. How are we going to prove any of this?'

‘Catch them at it,' Kevin said, ‘and squeeze their balls.'

‘You know,' Ray said, frowning out my window, which was too high and small for him to see anything but sky, ‘it's too damn bad you didn't have a wire on Winnie when you sent her into Reddi-Kash to hock the gold stuff.'

‘Yeah, well, that's easy to say in hindsight,' Kevin said. ‘We didn't know she was going to find these funny-talking guys and their cell phones. I just wanted her to find out if I should yank the license on that pawnshop when I was ready.'

‘Which you certainly can, but now we don't want you to,' I said.

‘What I'm thinking is if we had a recording of those guys, we could play it for Ricky,' Ray said. ‘If he'd say for sure the bad-suit guys were the ones who threw him downstairs, we'd be pretty sure they were also the ones that hocked the dolls, right?'

‘Better still,' I said, ‘we could play it for Gloria Funk. If
she
recognized the voices we'd have our murderers.'

‘Well,' Kevin said, ‘you know I do still have my grandmother's watch.'

‘You don't have to do this,' I told Winnie again, after lunch. ‘If you're not comfortable with it, you should say so.' But with a detective on either side of her looking at her as if she held the keys to the entire justice system, it wasn't exactly a value-neutral question.

She didn't seem apprehensive. Although to tell the truth, a lot of the time it's hard as hell to tell what Winnie does feel. At that moment, I thought she just looked like somebody deciding what to have for lunch. She sat with her small feet not quite touching the floor, considering. After a few seconds she said, ‘I think I should wear different clothes.'

‘Oh? I thought what you had on before was very . . . effective,' Kevin said.

‘Something a little more businesslike,' she said, staring into the middle distance, essentially talking to herself. ‘Like I'm getting ready to do something and there's no more time for fooling around. The navy blue suit with the mini-skirt, I think. Red platforms. Pearls.'

‘Whatever you think,' Kevin said, looking more and more dazzled.

I met Ray's eyes and saw that he shared my unease. Were the two of them having too much fun with this? ‘Winnie,' I said, ‘remember, that guy in the grow garage is still dead.'

‘I know. I'll be careful. How do I work the . . . um . . . recording device?'

Ray sent her home to change clothes first and then took her to the Emergency Response Unit to get wired up. Their lone female member was not on duty that day, so Ray came back and got Rosie to help Winnie with the taping. After half an hour, they came out of the bathroom insisting that the wire was firmly secured somewhere under her skimpy little suit. Rosie, who seemed greatly cheered by working with Winnie, showed me proudly how she'd sewn a tiny camera into the flap of Winnie's shoulder bag.

Winnie tucked Grandma Evjan's precious diamond watch into the bag next to her Glock and her shield, and headed out again for the pawnshop. I didn't see her go, because by then Kevin had sent Chris Deaver and Julie Rider into my office to tell me what they'd learned about the people who serviced the burglarized houses.

‘We talked to ten home owners whose houses have been robbed,' Chris said. ‘What showed up was that all of them routinely use the services of one of two companies.' I leaned forward, listening. Everything about Chris Deaver is soft – his voice, his hands, his well-fed middle spilling over his belt. Part of his effectiveness on the street is that strangers take him for a nice, harmless dork. The shark elements in his nature never surface till they're needed.

‘The first one's Home Cleaners. It's just what it says it is, a company that employs teams of workers to clean houses. Most of their personnel have been with them for years, they say, and their client list is also very stable. But they service six of the ten houses that have been ransacked in the last two months, so we have to think there could be something going on there.

‘The big surprise is that the second one is Aarsvold Yard & Garden. Who'd a thunk it, huh? Must have planted half the trees and hedges in Rutherford, haven't they? But it turns up on the list of service firms at seven of the ten households.'

‘Oh, but I can't believe Aarsvold's would be involved in any funny business,' I said. ‘Do you buy that, Kevin?'

‘Well, I'd love to pin
something
on the geniuses who built that abortion around Silver Lake,' Kevin said.

‘The No-Fly Zone?' Chris chuckled. ‘You can't blame Ole for that. He just built what he was told to build. He told me, ‘The city fathers wanted the geese dispersed, and a job's a job.'

What had started as a rest-stop on the Canada goose flyway had evolved, over many years of unintended consequences, into an enormous year-round population of freeloading geese swarming all over a sweet little man-made lake, fighting and feeding and fornicating, killing the grass and paving the shore with excrement. The birds were a source of pride and pleasure to a lot of people and in time showed up in advertising brochures and the names of athletic teams, but finally the city had to face the fact that, while a few geese look pretty on a lake, a vast honking swarm of them is a pestilential mess. So Rutherford paid Aarsvold Yard & Garden to build two fences around Silver Lake, plant grass between them, string wire between the fences, and then hang strips of tinfoil from the wire to flutter and scare away the geese. Some of the geese did fly away, and others dispersed up and down the river, leaving us to ponder the fact that while too many geese on a lake are ugly, a forty-foot-wide strip of silvery, fluttering no-goose-land is not a thing of beauty, either.

I didn't want to let the birdshit jokes get started, so I said quickly, ‘You must have other candidates besides Aarsvolds, don't you?'

‘Not really. All the other firms people mentioned just turn up once or twice. But Home Cleaners service six of these houses, and Aarsvolds do regular work at seven.'

‘Obviously there's some overlap,' Julie Rider said. Yin to Chris Deaver's Yang, she looks as buffed up, sharp and disciplined as he is disheveled and mumbling. They almost always work as a team, and it remains one of the wonders of the department how well that arrangement works. ‘Three of the houses use both services. Including the latest break-in, the Andersons.'

‘Hell you say! But that's the only one so far that's included an assault, right?'

‘Right. And that was just an accident, I guess – the kid came home when he wasn't expected. In that way it doesn't fit the pattern at all, and we thought about throwing it out of the sample, but—' Julie looked pensive.

‘Why would you throw it out?'

‘Because at all the others their intelligence seems to have been so good. In every other house on this list, they seemed to know exactly when they could go in safely.'

‘And it almost has to be from occasional help like this, right?' I said. ‘Nobody has full-time servants any more – not in Rutherford, anyway.'

‘That's right,' Julie said. ‘These thieves can't be getting calls like “OK he's gone, you can come in now.” So that's the other thing we've started asking people – where did you go that day?'

‘And it turns out,' Chris said, ‘that's exactly the kind of information they're getting tipped off on – regular hair appointments, or a golf game that's always played on Tuesday. Just the kind of thing occasional helpers could become aware of.'

‘At first we thought it was too far-fetched,' Julie said, ‘that they couldn't have that much information. But it's so consistent – Kevin's told you, hasn't he, Jake, how quickly they get in and out?'

‘Everybody's told me that – slicker than snot, Gary says.'

Julie winced. ‘Yes, well, that's . . . precise enough.' She loves the puzzle-solving aspect of her job, and the community service, but finds the gritty parts taxing.

‘So, in the end, what made you decide to keep the Anderson house in the sample?'

‘Because the way they went about the burglary does match the others. Nothing disturbed in the house, and the items they took – an iPod, two BlackBerrys, a Picasso print, a clock in a dome . . . very focused. No trashing.'

‘I see,' I said. ‘Well. Are you ready to start your employee interviews?'

‘Just about,' Chris said. ‘We had our first talks with management just before lunch.'

Julie cleared her throat. ‘To put it mildly, that did not go well. They both treated us to tirades about how long they've been providing reliable services in this town. They say they have very stable staffs because they pay top dollar.'

‘Which is still a pretty low dollar,' I said. ‘I worked my way through school in service industries and I well remember the pay scale. And there's a certain level of turnover that they can never beat – some employees stay forever, but a lot of beginners hop from job to job. I do want to say, about Ole Aarsvold, that he's always struck me as the boss I'd want if I worked in yards and gardens.'

‘Yeah, I like Ole too,' Chris said, ‘but boy, I tell you, he's sure got his neck bowed right now.'

‘What, is he giving you grief about sharing personnel lists?'

‘They both are. They're talking to their attorneys,' Chris said, ‘about what they have to do.'

‘Don't listen to any of that bullshit. I know what they have to do and so do they.' I gave them my close approximation of the Frank McCafferty stare that says, “Grow a hide!”. Frank's stare alone can shrink an objection from a rant to a whimper – he doesn't have to say a cross word. I know I'm not there yet, but you have to practice when you get the chance. ‘Tell them to quit tap-dancing,' I said, ‘and hand over the damn lists.'

The two of them filed out of my office, and as I watched them go I admitted to myself that, while I was demanding a firm stance from Chris and Julie, I was letting Rosie Doyle stonewall me. I'd been given a direct order by the chief: to compensate for the shortage of staff and lack of training funds during the current emergency, insist that everybody share expertise and information. But I had given in to Rosie's reluctance to ask Bo for help – after Bo himself had offered it! I'd get one of those grow-a-hide looks myself if Frank found out.

I called Ray and asked him, ‘Did Rosie tell you about the trouble she's having tracking the meth supplies from the house on Marvin Street?'

‘What? No.'

‘Find her, will you, and the two of you come see me? I think it's time again,' I said, ‘that we maximize our assets and check our priorities.'

‘Oh, Jesus.' He was in my doorway, though, in three minutes, with a wire-haired, rebellious-looking Rosie by his side.

‘Sit,' I said. ‘Rosie, tell Ray what you told me this morning.' She didn't want to – she opened and closed her mouth a couple of times before anything came out, but I just kept nodding my head till she talked. I monitored her report, sending her back once when she left out the conversation with the Board of Health.

‘Now, Ray,' I said when she finished, ‘tell Rosie what your man Amos said in Phoenix, because she never heard any of that.'

‘About the Mad Russians, you mean?'

‘And the rumors about other cities . . . that stuff.' He told her about the kidnappings in Phoenix and the Walgreens concept as it related to thuggery in our time.

‘OK,' I said, when he finished, ‘have you both put that new information in the daily journal we're keeping?