A Tooth for a Tooth

by Ben Rehder

  Fairly certain. She was sharp, but “fairly certain” wasn’t good enough.

  “How far away would you say you were from the window?”

  “Oh, it’s probably at least fifty yards, but I was using binoculars. I bought some that morning.”

  “Okay, and then what happened?”

  “You’re not eating your cookie,” she said. “You should eat your cookie.”

  I took a bite just to appease her, but damn, that was a tasty cookie, and I’m sure I made a face that showed how much I enjoyed it.

  She nodded, satisfied, and said, “Well, as I said before, I wasn’t sure what I should do, so I thought about it for a while, and then I parked in the driveway and marched right up to the door and knocked. Nobody answered, so I knocked again, and then again, but whoever was inside wouldn’t answer. That says something right there, doesn’t it? And when I left, I noticed that the blinds were drawn in the window where I’d seen the woman before. They were open when I went up to knock.” I was shaking my head, amazed, so she said, “What?”

  “You are incredible,” I said. Which was true, even if the woman in the house wasn’t Brandi Sloan.

  “So I did okay?”

  “Okay? You did better than a lot of cops I know. But go on. Tell me what happened next. Did you see the woman again?”

  “I knew that my one sighting wasn’t actual confirmation—I didn’t know it was her—so, again, I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I decided I needed to think like Brandi Sloan. Would she come out of the house at some point? I didn’t think there was much chance of that—unless I could make her nervous enough to move. So I—”

  She suddenly began to giggle. I waited with all the patience I could muster.

  She said, “So I went up to the door and knocked again, and I began to call out for Mildred. I knew Brandi—or the woman inside—could hear me, but she didn’t answer, of course. So then I went back to my car and waited for Ingrid to get home, and as she pulled into the driveway, I followed her.”

  “You are actually making my palms sweat, Doris,” I said.

  “Then I must be telling the story well,” she said. “Shall I continue?”

  “Please do.”

  “I greeted Ingrid when she got out of her car, and then I pretended to be a dotty old woman who was looking for her sister Mildred. I told her I was positive I’d seen Mildred through one of the windows.”

  “Oh, man,” I said.

  “She said nobody else lived there, but I was very persistent about it, and I asked if I could go inside, knowing full well the answer would be no, which it was.”

  Her ruse reminded me of some of the tricks Mia and I pulled when necessary. The beauty of it was that if Brandi was inside the home, Ingrid Sloan wouldn’t risk calling the police or any sort of social service agency.

  “How did she react?” I said.

  “I have no doubt she thoroughly bought my little act, and she was patient, but ultimately she asked me to run along and not come back. But I did go back the next day—that was yesterday—when Ingrid was gone. I knocked on the door and shouted for Mildred. That appears to have done the trick, because Ingrid closed up shop early and came home within the hour. She asked me to leave again, and I did. Well, to make a long story short, although it’s too late for that, I found a good hiding spot down the road a ways and then waited for Ingrid to leave again. She did, just thirty minutes later. I followed at a distance and I was glad I was driving such a common type of car. I couldn’t see anyone else in Ingrid’s car, but my theory was that Brandi was lying down on the back seat, and Ingrid was taking her to a motel or somewhere else to stay for a few days until the nutty woman stopped coming around.”

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “Here,” Doris said quite simply.

  “Here?” I said.

  “Brandi Sloan is staying in the cabin behind this one.”

  31

  I had to resist the urge to get up and peek out the rear windows.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Doris said. “When she got out of Ingrid’s car, just as I suspected, and made a dash for the cabin. But I wasn’t able to get a good photo.”

  “But you did get a photo?”

  “Several, on burst mode,” she said as she pulled her phone from her pocket. She found the photos and passed the phone to me. They were all blurry and the woman in them, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, may or may not have been Brandi Sloan. But who else would Ingrid Sloan be hustling from her house to a rented cabin?

  “Did they see you?” I asked.

  “I was very careful,” Doris said.

  “But did they see you?” I said.

  “I can’t guarantee they didn’t, but I saw no indication that they did.”

  “So after Ingrid moved her over here, what? You rented a cabin?”

  “Exactly. And I said I liked the look of number five, because I didn’t want them to put me right next door or in a cabin with a clear view from mine to hers. There are a lot of trees behind this cabin that separate it from Brandi’s cabin, but I can see her porch fairly well from the window in the kitchen.”

  “And she hasn’t come out since yesterday?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “Has Ingrid come back? Or anyone else?”

  “Not that I’ve seen. If a car parked in front, I’d be able to see that, too, and probably hear the doors closing.”

  She munched on another cookie and let me think for a moment. At this point, I was as confident as she was that Brandi Sloan was in that cabin. Who else would it be? What else would explain Ingrid Sloan’s secret houseguest?

  I stood and went to the rear window of the small kitchen area, where I tilted the mini-blinds and peeked out. She was right. You couldn’t see much, but you could see bits and pieces through the trees of the cabin behind her, including the porch and front door. This cabin was an ideal location for surveillance.

  “So what were you doing in Ingrid’s shop an hour ago?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, she recognized you.”

  “I told her that some of my medications had been interacting in an odd manner and creating some unclear thoughts, and I said I was sorry for having bothered her.”

  “How did she react?”

  “We had a good laugh, but the relief on her face was unmistakable. She had probably been worrying that I was going to keep coming back.”

  “Or you were going to call the cops and say she was keeping your sister captive.”

  “Exactly. Think she’ll move Brandi back to her place now?”

  “Good chance, I’d say. Maybe tomorrow or the next day. She won’t want to rush after you freaked her out.”

  Doris nodded.

  Perhaps she hadn’t done everything exactly as I would have done it, but everything appeared to have worked, and why argue with success?

  I quietly let out a sigh.

  Doris had been so forthcoming with everything she’d learned, I owed it to her to do the same. I turned back toward her and leaned backward against the countertop.

  “There’s something I need to tell you about Brent,” I said.

  Right about the same time, as I learned later, Mia was leaving the house to do some surveillance on the subject of her new case. This meant she drove her Chevy Tahoe rather than her 1968 Mustang fastback. That car alone turns heads, but when you put her behind the wheel, it’s a wonder it doesn’t make the six o’clock news. A local beauty goes for a drive in a classic car. The story right after this break.

  The Tahoe, on the other hand, blended right in with the traffic, and the tinted windows provided concealment.

  So why, just five minutes after getting on MoPac and going north, did she feel like she was being tailed? White Ch
evy truck, fifty yards back and three vehicles behind. Of course, I’d told her that Damon Tate drove a white Chevy, and I’d given her the license plate number, but she couldn’t make it out at this distance.

  She exited at 45th Street just to see what the truck would do. It followed. One vehicle—a purple hatchback—separated them.

  Mia went east. So did the hatchback. And the white truck.

  Could be a coincidence. There were literally thousands of white Chevy trucks on the road in Austin. Try to take a five-minute drive without seeing several and you’ll fail.

  She came to a four-way stop and turned north on Shoal Creek Boulevard. She was now in a residential area, so she had a good excuse to move slowly and see if the Chevy would keep following.

  Glancing in her mirror, she saw the purple hatchback reach the stop sign, then proceed further eastward. Then the white truck appeared. Mia was tempted to pull to the curb and wait—force his hand—but she didn’t want the driver of the truck to know she’d spotted him.

  Then she realized a Jeep had just backed into the street in front of her, and she had to jam her brakes to keep from smashing into it. The driver gave an apologetic wave, then gunned it.

  Mia caught her breath. Then looked back and did not see the truck. It had continued east, same as the hatchback. Now she did pull over to the curb, because she was more rattled than she’d realized. She had a .38 Special riding in a holster on her hip, and she found herself placing her right hand on it for reassurance.

  Now she remembered that there was no reason to wonder if that had been Damon Tate’s truck; she could know for certain. She opened the tracker app on her phone and checked his truck’s location.

  It was two blocks away on 45th Street.

  That son of a bitch.

  She remained parked there at the curb and watched the app until Tate’s truck was a mile away. Then she proceeded back to MoPac and continued north.

  I wish she’d called me right then and told me what had happened, but she chose not to, because I was 600 miles away and she didn’t want to worry me.

  I can tell you it isn’t pleasant to snatch away a worried mother’s last shred of hope that her missing son might still be alive. That’s what I had to do, and I did it, telling Doris everything Mia and I had learned from our conversation with Lennox Armbruster, including the recorded conversation between Joe Jankowski and Brandi Sloan.

  I was concerned that Doris might still refuse to believe that Brent was really dead, but as I spoke, I could see the acceptance settling over her face once and for all.

  When I was done, she just began to nod slowly, staring toward the window behind me. Eventually she said, “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I wish I could have told you sooner,” I said. “In this business, you can’t always—”

  “No,” she said. “It’s okay. I knew already. I might not have wanted to believe it, but I knew.”

  “I’m very sorry, Doris.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was enough light coming through the window behind me that I noticed her eyes welling up.

  Then she asked the obvious question—“Why don’t we tell the police?”—and I had to explain why that wouldn’t work, because Armbruster would deny everything. When I told her about the threat toward Armbruster’s nephew, Doris agreed that we couldn’t risk it.

  At the moment, she looked small and defeated.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked.

  “How about a hug? And then I think the two of us should sit here, drink another bourbon and Coke, and figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  What we’re going to do next? I almost laughed.

  Instead, I did what anyone would do in this situation. I gave her a hug and mixed her a fresh drink. Then we sat and talked some more. The conversation meandered for quite some time.

  She told me about Brent when he was a little boy. The way he loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and liked to dress as Leonardo at Halloween. He played Little League baseball for a few seasons but didn’t really excel at it. He just wasn’t a natural athlete. Wasn’t much of a student, either, but he was good at making friends. Unfortunately, during middle school, he began to make the wrong kind of friends. He began to smoke and drink and cut class. Stayed out late. It was a textbook case of a troubled teenager. Doris knew that, too, and she tried so hard to get him back on track, but nothing worked.

  Brent managed to graduate high school, and within weeks he moved out, only to be arrested within a month for possession of cocaine. Doris and her husband bailed him out. Looking back, she wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. He didn’t seem to learn anything from the experience.

  It went on from there. Highs and lows. Moments when Brent seemed like he might grow out of it…but didn’t. More arrests. Long periods when Doris wouldn’t hear from him.

  I sat there quietly and let her unload all of it, and I felt honored to be the one who could do that for her.

  She finished her drink. I finished mine.

  “That woman,” Doris said, pointing toward the rear window and Brandi’s cabin beyond, “knows who killed him. Agreed?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “The question is, how do we find out what she knows?” Doris asked.

  “Not just that, but it has to be admissible in court later,” I said.

  Doris nodded and remained quiet for a moment, thinking. “Think her sister knows what happened?”

  “Unless they have an unusually tight bond, I’d say no chance. I’d say Brandi made up a story explaining why she had to run. Same with her parents.”

  “I can’t imagine a young woman carrying around such horrible information and not wanting to unburden herself,” Doris said. “I’m assuming we shouldn’t just walk over there right now and try to ask her. She wouldn’t answer the door, and even if she did, she wouldn’t talk. Right?”

  “I seriously doubt it, and we’d be tipping our hand. She’d take off again and I bet we’d never find her a second time. I mean you. You wouldn’t find her a second time.”

  “Got lucky,” Doris said.

  “Hell if you did,” I said. “You did some great work. Beat me here, didn’t you? And I’m a professional. You totally kicked my ass. Now I’m second-guessing my career choice. You’ve brought shame to my—”

  “Okay,” she said. “You’ve made your point. I accept your compliment. But as smart as we both are, I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Well, then, stand back and give me room, because you’re about to see how a paid professional does it,” I said.

  “I can hardly wait,” she said.

  32

  “Sometimes I find it helpful to run back through everything I know,” I said. “Sort of summarize the case to make sure I’m not forgetting anything, and to make sure everything fits with what we know.”

  “That might help me keep everything straight,” she said.

  I found a sheet of stationary with the Idle Hours logo on it and wrote the high points of the case.

  —Brent tried a scam, but it failed.

  —Jankowski pressed charges.

  —Brent said he had a way out of the problem, but he went missing.

  —Lennox Armbruster stole Jankowski’s dash cam.

  —He overheard Jankowski on phone talking about a body.

  —Brandi Sloan was in the SUV. Having affair with Jankowski?

  —Lennox began to blackmail Jankowski.

  —Jankowski paid at first, until he could ID Lennox.

  —He tried to intimidate Lennox at Randall’s parking lot, then hit him with car.

  —Simultaneously, Damon Tate broke into Lennox’s apartment, got dash cam and laptop.

  —Lennox has no other copy of the file from the dash c
am.

  —I got involved, so Jankowski sent Damon Tate after me.

  —Lennox pressures Brandi at her house. She tells Jankowski.

  —Tate brothers try to shoot Lennox on MoPac. He crashes.

  —Brandi goes on the run, maybe fearing for her life.

  —Jankowski threatens Lennox in hospital.

  —Doris brilliantly finds Brandi in Ruidoso.

  “And that brings us to the present moment,” I said.

  “It all makes sense,” Doris said, “but there are still several holes.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Like who actually killed Brent? Was it one or both of the Tates, as you surmised earlier? Was it Brandi? Or somebody else we don’t even know about?”

  “All good questions. And I’m still wondering what Brent meant when he said he had a way out of the problem with Jankowski.”

  “Did you ask his friends if they knew anything?” Doris asked.

  “Yes, several.”

  “They were cooperative?”

  “Yeah, most of them. A couple didn’t call me back, but some did. One guy named Raul was really chatty.”

  “Raul called you back? That surprises me.”

  “Why?”

  “Brent told me they’d had a falling out and hadn’t spoken for a long time. I only put him on the list because they had known each other for so long. What’s that look on your face?”

  “Raul didn’t say anything about a falling out to me. In fact, he said he texted Brent the day after he went missing. And Brent had texted him two days earlier.”

  Doris was frowning now. “Why would Brent lie to me about that? Or did Raul lie to you?”

  I thought about it for a moment.