Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  “Oh. That.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Which, to be honest, I’m a little surprised about, since this is the first I’ve heard of it. Especially seeing as how often I’ve heard from you these last days about everything else.”

  “It had nothing to do with my brother’s murder.”

  “Okay.” She tapped her paper cup with a forefinger. “You want to tell me about it anyway?”

  “It’s not relevant.”

  “Humor me, Mr. Day.”

  “Owen.”

  “Humor me, Owen.”

  So I did. I told her everything – everything but Tiny, and my suspicion that it connected to him.

  “And the truck?”

  “That was all your guy’s thinking. I’m not ruling it out. But the truth is, the truck was an old beater. It was leaking something in the driveway before the fire. So it could have been completely natural.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said. She was carrying a folder. Now, she pulled a printed page from it. “The fire investigator found evidence of accelerants. A lot of accelerants.” She tapped a few relevant portions of the report. “Gasoline and acetone. A lot of gasoline, all throughout the interior.”

  I studied the report. The language was professional and technical, but her summary had been accurate. The truck had taken a gasoline bath before it went up in flames.

  “Someone lit that truck on fire, Owen. Now, normally, we’d look at the owner first, especially for an older vehicle. A vehicle with leaks and whatnot. Nine times out of ten, it’s insurance fraud.”

  “Jason doesn’t have insurance,” I said.

  “I know. Which is a problem on its own. But, it simplifies things: no insurance, no insurance fraud.”

  I nodded. “Exactly.”

  “And it’s not technically a crime to burn a truck on your own property, or with the property owner’s permission.”

  “Jason didn’t burn his truck. It was a shit box, but it was his only shit box. He’s got no way to get around now.”

  She went on like she hadn’t heard me. “Of course, it is a problem if you burn your truck and damage someone’s property. Especially if they turn around and file a claim with their homeowner’s insurance.

  “Now we’re talking arson. And, if the truck was burned with the homeowner’s permission, we’re back to possible insurance fraud again.”

  “Jason didn’t burn the truck,” I said again.

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not. Why would I?”

  “I have no idea. But you see the problem? Someone burned the truck. Either it was Rathe, with your say-so, in which case you both misled the fire investigator – a crime, by the way. Or it was Rathe without your say-so, and he misled the investigator – so we’re back in arson territory again. Or a third party; possibly the Nursery Rhyme Killer.

  “But you’re insistent it can’t be him. So help me out here, Owen. Tell me what I’m missing. Because as far as I can see, either we need to look at the possibility that you’re our killer’s next target; or I need to tell the fire investigator he needs to look closer at you and Jason.”

  She was trying to rattle me into spilling the beans. I knew that. They couldn’t pin the fire on us because we hadn’t done it, and we didn’t stand to benefit from doing so. We had no motive.

  Anyway, if they’d been serious, it would have been the fire investigator and not a homicide detective talking to me.

  “Look, Detective, you know it wasn’t us.”

  “Do I?”

  I tapped the page. “You’ve got his report. You can see when the fire started. I was nowhere near the truck at the time, and neither was Jason. And yes, I’ve got a witness. She goes by the name of Clark. Andrea Clark. I was talking to her over coffee. And apparently over-stirring my drink.”

  “Matcha,” she said with a smile. “And technically, he estimates the fire might have started after that.”

  “Yeah. I was on the way to my sister-in-law’s house, to pick up Jason’s effects. I’ve got a witness to that, too. Andrea Clark again. Smart lady. Very observant, good memory. She can tell you how many times you stir your coffee. I’m sure she can remember the reason I left.”

  “I know the reason you gave me for leaving,” she said.

  I half-laughed and half-snorted. “What? You think I had him fake text messages so we could run home to torch the truck, and then race off just to come back again and pretend to be surprised? For what? To establish a half-assed alibi with you?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I don’t. But you’re being awfully cagey about it. You seem awfully sure it has nothing to do with the Nursery Rhyme Killer. I want to know why.”

  I thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Okay. Because I know who did it. Or, I think I do.”

  She blinked. “You do?”

  “Yeah. And no, I didn’t ask them to. Neither did Jason.”

  “So it is arson.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the investigator?”

  “Because I had no idea it was anything more than an accident until about ten minutes ago.” I gestured to the report. “Until you told me.”

  “You suspected yesterday.”

  “Suspected. I didn’t know.”

  She considered, then nodded. “Okay. So who was it?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Mr. Day, we’re talking about a crime, and a murder investigation.”

  “It has nothing to do with the investigation.”

  “That’s my call to make, not yours.”

  I sighed and popped the lid off my coffee. I stirred it absently. Three times. Then I took a sip. “Okay,” I said. “If I tell you, and you agree – that it has nothing to do with the case – what happens?”

  “I’m here about the murder investigation. Nothing else.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” I wouldn’t name names or admit to anything. I believed her when she said the killings were as far as her interests extended. But she was still a cop. So I kept it brief.

  “Jason borrowed money from a guy. I don’t know his name. It doesn’t matter anyway. He missed some payments. The guy sent another guy to encourage Jason.

  “Me and the other guy had words. It didn’t go his way. But then Jason paid, and the first guy – the boss – called it a done deal. So I think the second guy might have a grudge, on account of the…words.”

  She listened and shook her head. “You’ve got to talk to the investigator.”

  “Why? I’ve got no proof. It’s just a theory. And I’m not pressing charges. Jason’s not looking to press charges. I’ll pay for the siding myself. As far as he’s concerned, he can close the case.”

  “Why? Jesus. Because next time it could be your house. Because he already broke into your house.”

  “I don’t know that. Your guy still has to run the prints.”

  “He did.” She pulled out another page. “There were no prints but your own. A few smudges that could indicate someone wearing gloves touched the surfaces. But the guy covered his tracks well.”

  “Really?” I suppose I’d made the same mistake Tiny had made: underestimating my opponent.

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, we don’t know if it was the same guy.”

  “Why would you want to protect this guy, Owen?”

  “I don’t give a shit about this guy, Detective. But if I start naming names and I’m wrong, I’ve just pissed off a lot of people I don’t want pissed off at me.”

  “And if you’re right?”

  “If I’m right, maybe he’ll smarten up. Maybe he’ll pick up a hobby or find someone else to harass.”

  “And if he doesn’t? He doesn’t sound like the knitting club kind. Are you going to have another ‘talk’?”

  I smiled. “Of course not, Detective. If it’s him, he’s clearly not in a conversational frame of mind. I’ll do the responsible thing and call you.”

  “It could be too late.”

/>   “It won’t be.” Then, though, I decided to change the subject. I was done talking about Tiny. I’d played ball. Now I wanted something in return. “But either way, I think you’ll agree it has nothing to do with the Nursery Rhyme Killer.”

  She nodded. “It looks that way, yes.”

  “So do you have any leads? Since we know it’s not Myslinski.”

  “We don’t know that,” she said quickly. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  I snorted. “You already told me it wasn’t him, Detective.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did when you said I might be the ‘next’ victim. Myslinski’s in custody. He’s going away for a long time. If he’s the Nursery Rhyme Killer, there is no next victim.”

  She smiled again. A long, thoughtful smile. “That text you sent me, saying he wasn’t the Nursery Rhyme Killer. Why did you send that?”

  “Because my brother’s killer is still out there.”

  She pulled a face. The same kind of exasperated face Jason had made a few times these past days. “Not why did you hit the send button. I mean, what made you think that he’s still out there?”

  So I explained my reasoning, laying it out the same way I had for Jason. She listened and nodded, and said nothing until I wrapped up.

  “You’re not wrong. I probably shouldn’t say that, but it’s going to be news soon enough. And you seem to have figured it out anyway. He’s not the Nursery Rhyme Killer.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Yeah, but there’s more you don’t know. He left evidence all over the scene, and took evidence with him. Fingerprints on the weapon, blood on his clothes and in his hair and in his car. He washed up, of course. But he missed spots.

  “And he wrote the note himself.”

  “No genius, that’s for sure.”

  “No.”

  “So what happened? Why the note?”

  “She caught him talking to another girl. They had a big fight. She said she was leaving. He grabbed a piece of décor – some kind of Asian warrior fengshui statue. Clocked her in the back of the head three times.

  “Realized he was going to prison for a long time. Panicked. Packed his own stuff and got ready to run. Then remembered the Nursery Rhyme Killings, and figured he could piggyback off them. Spent fifteen minutes on his phone, pulling up articles – and yes, we’ve got his search history.

  “Wrote the note. Tried to wipe his fingerprints off the murder weapon. Missed a lot of them. Left in a hurry. Got spotted by two of his neighbors in the process. Waited four hours, came back and pretended to be shocked.”

  “He told you this?”

  She nodded. “We got a confession as soon as he realized the note wasn’t going to fly.”

  We talked through my ideas about the nursery rhymes. She had news for me on that front too. Angela Martinez’s grandmother had had no life insurance policy. But Martinez was listed as one of her heirs, to an inheritance worth just over a quarter of a million dollars.

  Which seemed close enough to me. If the killer thought foul play had been involved, would it really matter if the quarter of a million dollars came through an insurance policy or a straight inheritance?

  “That’s what I thought,” Clark agreed. “At first. But Martinez wasn’t the only heir.”

  Which still seemed plausible to me. People had killed for less than two hundred and fifty thousand divided a few ways.

  But usually not thirty-eight ways. Which is how Angela’s grandmother had divided her belongings: thirty-eight ways, between eight children, four in-laws, and a whopping twenty-six grandkids.

  Nor had she divided it evenly. An even split would have given everyone six thousand, five hundred, seventy-eight dollars and some change. She left the grandkids five thousand apiece, and everyone else ten.

  “People have killed for less than five grand,” I pointed out.

  “But usually not people like Angela Martinez.”

  She wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t know what else the link could be. I’d exhausted every angle I could think of.

  She had other things to discuss, though. Andy’s body had been released to the funeral home. The full report wasn’t yet available, but at least funeral prep could begin.

  She seemed surprised that I didn’t already know that. “Your sister-in-law said she’d tell you.”

  “I don’t think we’re speaking, at the moment.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “If I knew, Detective, I’d tell you.”

  “But you’re still talking to the brother?”

  “Don’t ask me why on that one either.”

  She laughed and shrugged. “Alright. At any rate, I do have one more question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The investigation boards at your place. What the hell are you up to, Owen?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She’d said it in the same even, conversational tones she’d been using throughout our talk. So it took me a second to catch up with the sudden shift.

  “I’m not up to anything, Detective.”

  “Really?” She pulled a third page from her folder: this one, a photograph. A photograph of my office. “What’s this, then?”

  “My office.”

  She tapped the investigation boards all over it, one after the other. Dozens of them. “And these?”

  “My private property.” I knew where she’d got the picture, of course: the cop who showed up when I reported the break in. I was kicking myself for that, now. If I had taken a few seconds to think things through, I could have figured it out on my own.

  Without my business winding up on the nosy detective’s desk.

  “Owen,” she said again, “what are you up to here?”

  “What does it look like, Detective?”

  “A cop’s office, maybe, if they were working cases from the past hundred years. But you’re not a cop. A serial killer’s lair, maybe?”

  I snorted. “You think I killed all these people?”

  “No. I know you didn’t.” She tapped a few of the boards. “Some of them died before you were born. Some of them died when you were in diapers.”

  “So then what do you care what I’m doing?”

  “Owen, my guy was so worried by what he saw that he ran the cases. To make sure we weren’t dealing with a serial killer.”

  “Too bad he didn’t put some of that initiative into actual crimes, instead of harassing law-abiding citizens. Then maybe there wouldn’t be so many cold cases waiting to be solved.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked for the third time.

  I thought about telling her it was none of her business. Because it wasn’t. I hadn’t broken any laws. It wasn’t illegal to try to solve cold cases from afar. But she was the investigating detective in my brother’s death. I couldn’t afford to piss her off.

  So I told her. “I try to solve cold cases in my spare time.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s kind of a weird preoccupation, isn’t it?”

  “Everyone needs a hobby.”

  “And murder is yours?”

  “Solving it, yes.”

  “So you’re what? An amateur detective?”

  “No. I have an algorithm. Something I developed in the army, to predict terrorist movements and attacks. Only that was real time. Now I use it to sort out the past.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Are you using it to find your brother’s killer.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  I don’t think she believed me. “Why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t have enough data. It’s predictive based off past patterns. I’d need more data points to approach any kind of accuracy.”

  “More data points…you mean, more deaths?”

  I nodded. “So, I’m hoping you can wrap this up before my algorithm would be useful.” I didn’t add that she’d have a better chance of doing that if she
stopped wasting time on me. But it definitely ran through my mind.

  “So what? You were in some kind of military intelligence?”

  I nodded. “Army. For a while.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But you’re not anymore?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you still working on it?”

  “I told you. It’s a hobby.”

  “It’s a strange hobby.”

  “That’s not a crime, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not just a hobby. It’s a kind of…professional interest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was in the army. Our job was killing people. Legally, and infrequently as possible. But ultimately, that’s what it all gets down to: killing first, killing fast, and living to kill again. I know something about it, professionally.”

  “So what? Now you study killing?” She sounded extremely skeptical.

  “Why not? There are people who spend their entire career studying what makes people want to kill. Your career is figuring out who killed people.

  “My hobby – my interest – is the intersection of both. What are the signs someone will kill – and how can we transform that ex post facto knowledge into a predictive behavior model?”

  “So, some kind of program to detect killers before they kill?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That seems like a tall order.”

  “Yes.”

  “Science fiction, even.”

  “Most science fact was science fiction first. But I’m not talking about Robocop here, or Skynet, or anything like that. No rise of the machines, or AI overlords. I’m talking about something we already have, right now. You use a cellphone, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “You get ads for things you haven’t even searched for, right? Things you’ve been thinking about or talking about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Pattern analysis. Predictive behavior modeling. It’s not science fiction, Detective. It’s here, right now. Big Data uses it every day, all around us.”

  “There’s a big difference between trying to sell me something and pegging me as a murderer.”

  “Of course. But it’s the same principle.”

  She shook her head. “We’re talking complexities that are off the charts. There’s no way.”