Camouflage (Nameless Detective Mysteries)

by Bill Pronzini

  They’d set up another room-rental scam in Spokane, operating under aliases. A spooked victim had blown that one up, too, and again they’d managed to slip away and disappear. Likely that was when they’d headed for California and hatched their plan to steal new identities and not take any more chances on being caught by disposing of their fleeced marks. The real Roxanne Lorraine McManus and the real Jane Carson may have been their first two murder victims, each chosen as much because of the resemblance factor as for the profit motive. Odds were that no one would ever know exactly what had happened to the genuine McManus and Carson. Or to the remains of the pair’s elderly prey prior to Rose O’Day.

  Neither Pulaski nor Boyle had confessed to any of the crimes. They weren’t talking to the police, the media, apparently not even to their public defenders. A couple of homicidal sphinxes. Didn’t matter, though. There was more than enough hard evidence on the Chileno Valley property and in the Dogpatch house to convict them. In one of the boxes stored in the barn the police discovered more than fifty thousand dollars in cash and active bankbooks belonging to Rose O’Day, Gregory Pappas, and one other victim. The police also found a .32-caliber Beretta that later matched the slug the coroner removed from David Virden’s skull.

  When the forensic people got everything sorted out, the body count in that cistern was five—two men, three women. Virden had died of a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, no doubt on his second visit to the house; the stain on the living-room floor proved to be his blood, confirming that that was where he’d been caught off-guard and shot. The other four had been fed lethal doses of prussic acid. None could be positively identified because nothing was found anywhere for their bone-marrow DNA to be matched to.

  I’m not much of a believer in the death penalty, as either a method of punishment or a deterrent, but when it comes to savagely cold-blooded mass murderers the law-and-order principles by which I’ve lived most of my life tend to outweigh my humanitarian sensibilites. I’ve only dealt with truly evil individuals a few times in my life; Pulaski and Boyle were right down there with the worst. If the DA decided to try them for multiple homicide with special circumstances, nobody would get much of an argument from me. All I’d have to do was think of their elderly victims, of what I saw and smelled inside that well house, and I might even say lethal injection was letting Pulaski and Boyle off easy.

  * * *

  For me, the hardest part of the aftermath was telling Judith LoPresti what had happened to her fiancé. Tamara offered to do it, but she’s young and not always as tactful as she might be. The task was mine, lousy and painful as it was. I’d had to do it before, under even grimmer circumstances: telling Emily of her mother’s murder three and a half years ago.

  Ms. LoPresti took it pretty well. Better than most—no tears, no drama. Strong woman, the type who would do her grieving in private. Her abiding faith was the foundation of her strength. It seems to me that people who are deeply religious have an edge on the rest of us, not necessarily because it makes them better human beings but because it allows them to cope with pain and suffering on a different level of perception. Life must be a whole lot simpler and easier to take when you believe without question in God and His mercy.

  * * *

  A couple of nights later, as Kerry and I were getting ready for bed:

  “I’ve been thinking about your suggestion at dinner the other night,” I said, “that we should buy a second home.”

  “And?”

  “Decided it’s a good idea.”

  “You didn’t seem very enthusiastic then. What changed your mind?”

  “Well, as you pointed out, we can afford it and it’ll give us a push to get out of the city more often.”

  “Are those the only reasons?”

  “No. I’m getting too old to keep dealing with dark-side crap like finding bunches of bodies and going up against killer dogs. Damn Virden case has been giving me nightmares.”

  “Does that mean you’re thinking of retiring again?”

  “Again?”

  “Well, you’ve been back on a full-time work schedule the past year, haven’t you? Unretired?”

  “True enough. And it’s time I got off the merry-go-round.”

  “Off for good?”

  I hedged on that. “I’ve been at it too long not to want to keep a hand in as long as I can. But there’s no reason I can’t cut back to the original plan—one or two days a week at the agency, no more. Tamara can put Alex Chavez on full-time—he’s earned it and then some—to take over the bulk of my workload.”

  “You really think you can stick to the plan this time?”

  “Pretty sure. A second home would help, someplace far enough away from the city to remove temptation.”

  “Where you could go by yourself if you felt like it, not just with Emily and me.”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking along those lines.…”

  “Why not? You’ll have a lot more free time than either of us, at least for a while.”

  “What would I do stuck out in the wilderness by myself?”

  “There’s no reason we have to buy wilderness property,” Kerry said. “And there are plenty of things you could find to do no matter what the location. Fishing and boating, for instance. You used to do both by yourself. Any reason you couldn’t take them up again?”

  I admitted there wasn’t.

  “So we’ll look for a cabin or a cottage on or near a lake or river. We could even start the hunt this coming weekend, if you’re really game.”

  Fishing, boating, quiet days and quiet nights in the country with and without the family. Genuine semiretirement. The idea was a lot more appealing now than it had been when I’d first made up my mind.

  “I’m game,” I said. “The sooner the better.”

  “NAMELESS DETECTIVE” MYSTERIES BY BILL PRONZINI

  Camouflage

  Betrayers

  Schemers

  Fever

  Savages

  Mourners

  Nightcrawlers

  Scenarios (collection)

  Spook

  Bleeders

  Crazybone

  Boobytrap

  Illusions

  Sentinels

  Spadework (collection)

  Hardcase

  Demons

  Epitaphs

  Quarry

  Breakdown

  Jackpot

  Shackles

  Deadfall

  Bones

  Double (with Marcia Muller)

  Nightshades

  Quicksilver

  Casefile (collection)

  Bindlestiff

  Dragonfire

  Scattershot

  Hoodwink

  Labyrinth

  Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

  Blowback

  Undercurrent

  The Vanished

  The Snatch

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  CAMOUFLAGE: A NAMELESS DETECTIVE NOVEL

  Copyright © 2011 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge® eBook

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2564-8

  First Edition: June 2011

  eISBN 978-1-4299-7572-8

  First Forge eBook Edition: June 2011

 

 

 
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