by Mason Cross
The attendant was a teenage girl, probably not much older than Adeline Connor had been when she disappeared. She sat behind the counter with a bored expression on her face, seeming to stare right through me. She had blond hair with a streak of turquoise dye through it which looked out of place with the red polyester uniform top.
I paid with cash as usual, and she made change and handed it back to me without meeting my eyes, as though the action hadn’t roused her out of sleep mode. Bored and going through the motions: a good sign.
“I wonder if you could help me,” I said, cutting her off as she recited the amount of change and told me to have a good day.
Her green eyes snapped into focus at the deviation from the script and she smiled. “Sure, what’s up?”
“I’m looking for some information about the shooting a few weeks back, did you hear about that?”
She nodded quickly. “Oh yeah. Did you know the guy came in here right before it happened?”
“You were on shift when it happened?”
Headshake. “I was here in the morning when the cops came by. I saw them all set up down there on my way in, wondered what had happened. I guessed some kind of accident. That’s a really bad intersection, people jump the lights all the time. One time I saw a car go straight into the side of a bus.”
“I’ll make sure I look both ways. So did the police speak to you?”
“They asked me a bunch of questions and then they talked to Brenda.”
“Brenda?”
“My manager. They took our security footage.” She pointed at the small camera that was mounted on top of the display cabinet behind her, aiming directly at my face. “I don’t think it did them much good though. Hey, did they get the guy? Are you with them? The police I mean?”
“No,” I said. “The man who was killed was working for my client, and I was just wondering what happened.”
“Oh, okay. Well it was a carjacking. Did you know the guy?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Well, I’m sorry. It’s tough when someone you work with dies. Roberto, the guy who was on weekend nights here? I mean, he didn’t die, but he had some really bad infection. He was in the hospital. Maybe he did die actually, he never came back.”
I steered her back to the death I was interested in. “So who was working when Mr. Wheeler came in that night?”
“That was Mal.”
“Did Mal speak to the police too?”
“Yes, but he couldn’t tell them any more than what was on the tape. The guy came in, paid for gas and bought a bottle of Mountain Dew and a pack of Twinkies, said goodnight and then he was gone.” She stopped and thought about it. “Isn’t that wild? You can be buying Twinkies one minute and dead the next.”
“It’s wild,” I agreed. I took out the sketches David Connor had made of Adeline and the man with the tattoos and placed them on the counter. “You recognize either of these two people, by any chance?”
She didn’t, but she did like the guy’s tattoo.
Five minutes later I found the intersection where Walter Wheeler had been shot. There was a warehouse on one side of the street, a gravel lot with a hamburger stand on the other side, looking directly onto the set of traffic lights where it had happened. I pulled into the lot and got out, taking a look at the scene. There were no cameras in range, and the shooting had happened at night with no witnesses, so the investigators had had to piece together what had happened from Wheeler’s last known location and where his body had been found. A gang of kids had come by about a half hour after Wheeler had left the gas station and found his body lying half on the sidewalk, half on the road at the set of lights. After looking very closely at the kids and ruling them out, the Atlanta PD had decided Wheeler’s death was probably exactly what it looked like: a heat-of-the-moment homicide carried out in the commission of a carjacking.
The simplest explanation is the best. I was hearing that a lot lately.
Wheeler’s car had turned up a hell of a lot faster than Eric Salter’s had done in Bethany. It had been found six hours later, burned out behind a furniture wholesaler.
The investigation was still open, but this long after that fact it was unlikely it would ever be closed unless somebody confessed, or somebody who knew something cut a deal. I knew that by now, weeks later, it would be on the back burner. There would be no great pressure on the homicide team to go the extra mile, not when there were undoubtedly fresher cases to work. Wheeler had strayed into a bad part of town and gotten unlucky. It happens.
So why did something not sit right with me about it?
Perhaps it was the fresh memory of the scene where Salter’s car had been found yesterday. The circumstances of Wheeler’s death: a vehicle, night-time, a stranger, a shooting death. The echoes were hard to ignore.
The light was at green and traffic was moving freely through the intersection. Even at this time of day, it wasn’t a busy road. It was easy to believe there had been no witnesses after dark. A good spot for a carjacking, if the perpetrator had even put that much thought into it.
I turned away from the road and walked up toward the hamburger stand. The guy in the window was watching me as I approached. He had bushy curly black hair and a little mustache. He was overweight, his beefy arms folded on the counter. There was a tattoo of a grinning skull with a bullet between its teeth on one of them.
“Afternoon,” I said. He tipped a finger to the side of his forehead to acknowledge me and straightened up a little. I ordered a cheeseburger and a soda.
He turned away from me and started arranging the components on the griddle: a patty, some chopped onions. He took a pre-sliced bun from a plastic bag full of them and rested it beside the griddle, ready to heat it when the burger was almost ready. He turned back to me, and looked past me to the intersection. “You here about the shooting?”
I didn’t say anything, just gave him a questioning look.
“You were staring right at the spot where they found the body. Nothing to see now.”
I glanced back at the road. “Did you see anything then?”
He shook his head. “Close at ten. Excitement was all over by the morning. You know the guy or something?”
“No, but we had the same client.”
“That right?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact, I’m in town to finish his job.”
“What’s that?”
“Looking for someone.”
“You a cop?”
“No. This was more of a family thing.”
“Gotcha.”
He folded his arms again and I saw the grinning skull again. It gave me an idea.
“I like the tattoo. You get it done locally?”
“If Baghdad counts as local.”
“No kidding,” I said. “When were you there?”
His eyes narrowed. “Iraqi Freedom, ’03 to ’04. You were there?”
“Mosul, later on.”
“Infantry?”
“Not exactly.”
He grinned knowingly and shook his head. “One of those.”
I reached into my jacket and took out Connor’s sketch of the tattoo. I unfolded it and showed him.
“Since you’re a man who knows his ink, you ever see one like this before?” I thought about giving him the sketch of the face as well but stopped myself, deciding it would be better to let him focus on the image.
He took the sheet of paper from my hand. He paused to brush a sprinkling of corn dust out of the way with the side of his big right hand, and put it down on the brushed steel surface of the counter, smoothing out the folds.
“Nice lines. This done from life?”
“Memory.”
“Your work?”
I shook my head. “My client.”
“He’s talented.”
He stared at i
t for a while and then passed it back to me. “I would remember that if I had seen it, you’re right.”
I folded it and put it back in my jacket. “That’s okay, it was a long shot. But maybe you can still help me. If somebody was looking to get a design like this done around here, where would he go?”
He turned back to the griddle before answering, his internal culinary clock alerting him to a more important matter. He flipped the burger over and added a slice of cheese, then scooped the onions onto the bottom of the bun, added salad, the burger, and finally the lid of the bun. He wrapped it in foil and handed it to me with a napkin.
“Terry’s on Peachtree Street, or Ink Spot down by Ormewood Park.”
I thanked the big man and went back to the car and ate quickly, facing the spot Walter Wheeler had breathed his last.
It was still a long shot, based on a long chain of ifs.
If the girl Connor had seen had really been Adeline. If she knew the guy with the tattoo. If he had gotten it done in Atlanta. If it had been recent enough that anyone would remember at the tattoo shop. A lot of ifs. I reached into the back and took my laptop out of the bag. I brought up the map of Atlanta, onto which I had plotted the various points I wanted to check out. There were four of them: the gas station, the intersection where I was currently, the place Connor had seen Adeline, and the address of the Atlanta PD’s Homicide division.
I looked up the two tattoo places the guy at the burger stand had mentioned and added them to the list.
26
Isabella Green
Isabella awoke at five-thirty, though not by choice.
She didn’t generally dream, not since the counseling when she was younger. The counsellor’s name had been Caroline. Caroline had been nice. Eager to help, and easy to fool into thinking she was doing so.
On the occasion she did dream, or could remember it at any rate, it tended to be an unpleasant experience. So it was this time. She started awake in a cold sweat. It was raining outside. Not raining hard, though, not as hard as that night.
She gave up on sleep and went for her usual morning run early, trying to force the visuals to the back of her mind as her feet pounded the road. Blood, rain, a mangled car. Her father’s casket at the funeral. On normal days, when she slept through until her alarm, she detested losing a half hour in bed. But the routine of running every day was important to her. Had been for years, but even more so recently. On the rare occasions she missed a morning run, she felt tense and angry all day.
After she got home and showered, she got into her car and drove down the hill to the station. There wasn’t even the light traffic Bethany got on weekdays, so she had time to pick up a bagel and a decaf latte at the Peach Tree and still make it to the station at five minutes to seven, parking in the empty spot beside one of the department cars.
The sun still wasn’t up yet. The clocks had gone back at the start of November, and the darkness in the morning was still new enough to be a novelty. Isabella knew she would hate it by January. She sipped the last of the coffee and thought about which route she would take for the morning patrol. One thing she knew for sure, she would be avoiding the Devil Mountain road after that dream.
She put the images from her dream in the locked box and thought about something else instead. Carter Blake. She didn’t know what it was about him. It certainly wasn’t that he reminded her of Dan, her ex of a couple of years.
Blake was different from Dan, in temperament as well as physically. He had the air of knowing exactly what he was doing, but at the same time not taking life too seriously. He had a slighter build than Dan, but there was a grace to the way he moved, like each muscle was perfectly calibrated.
Isabella hadn’t intended to talk to him for as long as she had, but once they had gotten started, it was so easy to keep talking. Hell, he had even talked her halfway into the possibility that David Connor’s bullshit story was worth looking into. If she didn’t know better, she would be curious about exactly what Connor had seen down in Atlanta herself. Scratch that – she already was curious.
Blake had planned to go there today. Isabella switched the coffee cup to her right hand and looked at her watch. If he had left early, he would be there by now.
27
Carter Blake
Detective Correra, the surviving investigator from the Devil Mountain taskforce in 2002 to 2003 was still working. I found his name in several news reports relating to homicide investigations. He hadn’t investigated the Wheeler killing, but there were a lot of other cases he had closed since 2003. He was based at Atlanta PD’s Zone 5 office, about eight miles east of the place Wheeler had been killed. On the way, I made a stop at a coffee shop down the street called Bean & Berry.
Correra’s office was small, and looked out on a busy urban plaza. There was a desk and two chairs. There were a couple of framed certificates from the City of Atlanta on the wall, flanking a wedding picture of a younger Correra and the woman I assumed was his wife.
Correra had an amused look on his face as he closed the door behind us. He was black, slim, in his fifties, with close-cropped hair and glasses. He wore a dark suit with a tie that was a dull gold color.
“I would tell you you’ve asked for the wrong detective out there, but I don’t think you did. You’re not just here to talk about Wheeler.”
“Good guess.” I put the box of pastries I had brought down on the desk and offered him one of the go-cup coffees. He raised an eyebrow and took it from me, nodding approvingly after a sip.
“You make a better impression than Wheeler did, I’ll give you that. But I’m not telling you anything about the case. This buys you five minutes of my time, and maybe a little more politeness in my inevitable refusal to bend over and let you pillage our records.”
“Then Wheeler came by to see you?”
“He did. You’re another PI?” He opened the box, perused the options, and selected a cinnamon whirl. “You looking into Wheeler, or Wheeler’s case?”
“A little of both, I guess.” I held a hand out. “Carter Blake. I’m not a PI.”
He transferred the cinnamon whirl to his other hand and shook. “I like you more already. What’s your story?”
“I’m a locating consultant.” I hate that term, but it sounds almost like a real job. “Wheeler’s client hired me.”
“‘Locating consultant,’” he repeated, enunciating each syllable.
“I find people who don’t want to be found.”
“Sounds like a PI.”
“When did Wheeler come to see you?”
“The day he died. Now, I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but …”
“He was kind of a jerk?”
“That’s right. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was what got him killed.”
“How much did he tell you about the job?”
“Not a lot. He said he was looking for somebody and it was related to Devil Mountain. I still get this every so often. More when an anniversary comes around, but I guess nothing really goes away on the internet these days. Most of them don’t get past the front desk.”
“I’m honored.”
“I was feeling generous today. And hungry.” He sat back and cast his mind back a few weeks. “Wheeler was cagey, all he wanted to do was ask questions. It took me a couple of minutes to work out he was different from the usual amateur investigators.”
“Because he wasn’t looking for the killer,” I said.
Correra said nothing.
“He was looking for one of the victims. Adeline Connor. The last one. They never found her remains, but she was declared dead along with Eric Salter and Arlo Green.”
“I remember her. Makes it worse, when you don’t find them.”
“Adeline’s brother is my client. He thinks she’s still alive.”
He shook his head. “Just because they don’t find a body does
n’t mean they’re not dead.”
“How certain were you?”
“As certain as you can be without a body.”
I sat back in the chair and considered. Wheeler had really misjudged this guy. He had told him nothing, and that was the exact wrong way to go about getting any sort of cooperation from a cop like Correra. So I took the opposite approach.
I talked him through everything I knew. How Connor had seen what he thought was his sister one day, and become obsessed with finding her. I told him that the local cops in Bethany were even less keen than he was to dig up old bones. I gave him my take: I didn’t believe Connor was delusional or blinded by grief. From talking to people who knew him, he had been as sure as everyone else that his sister was dead, right up until he saw her. That certainty was enough to convince me that it was worth looking into.
Correra was sitting back in his seat. He had finished the pastry and his fingers were steepled under his chin. “I guess anything’s possible,” he said. “Maybe Wheeler would have told me some of this if I hadn’t kicked him out.” He looked down at the legal pad on which he had been scribbling the occasional note as I talked. “So he thinks he saw her more than two months ago, from the window of a moving bus, outside of Turner Field, talking to a guy with a tattoo.” He raised his eyes from the page. “That’s not a lot to go on. Even for a person locator.”
I produced the sketches. First the portraits of Adeline and the mystery man, then the close-up of the tattoo. “How about this?”
He examined it. “Better. If this is accurate.”
“He has a good eye. I’m going to try some of the local shops. I was recommended Terry’s or Ink Spot.”
“Not a bad idea. I have a better one, though.”
I took a donut from the box and took a bite out of it. “I was hoping you might.”
Correra told me to go get a coffee and he would meet me when he had something. I took out a blank card, wrote my cell number on it and gave it to him. In contrast to Deputy Green, he took it without comment. I didn’t know how long it would be before he called me, so I took a drive down to the place David Connor had apparently seen his sister.