I reached into my wallet and took out a twenty. He had his hand out to take it. As I put it in his hand I saw movement at his wrist. I glanced at the spot, not sure of what I’d seen.
A long, red, fleshy vine appeared.
It coiled around his wrist and then moved toward my hand, snakelike and dangerous.
I yanked my hand back, the twenty falling to the floor.
“Hey man, not cool!” the driver said.
But I wasn’t listening. I groped for the door handle and tumbled out of the backseat, backing away from the cab in shock and horror.
The cab driver got out, gave me a long, disgusted glare, then got the twenty from the backseat and shut the door. “Asshole,” he said. Then he got behind the wheel and took off, leaving me under the buttery yellow glow of a street lamp that hummed like a bug zapper.
I stood there, trembling, wondering if I was losing my mind.
It sure felt like it.
My chest felt tight and it was hard to breathe. I closed my eyes and willed myself to calm down. It hurt, but I drew in two deep breaths, and then two more. The tightness in my chest cleared a little, and so did my head.
You need a drink, I thought, and just as quickly blocked that thought from my head. That was the last thing I needed.
I didn’t need a drink. I needed to think.
I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the Limbus, Inc. business card again. One of the edges had darkened and turned soft where I’d held it with tear-stained fingers.
The name Gary Harper was still clear as a bell.
I didn’t believe Robinson for a second when he said Limbus was on the level, and while I couldn’t see any reason why they would want my family dead, I knew that if I was going to get any answers and have any chance of putting my head back together, I was going to have to follow the only lead I had. Whoever this Gary Harper was, he was going to be my guide down the rabbit hole.
But first I had to find him.
And that meant becoming a policeman again.
*
Unless there’s an officer-involved shooting or some other high-profile event going on, the Homicide Office is dead in the middle of the night. Once the daylight detectives end their shifts around 6 p.m., all the hustle and bustle moves across the hall to the Night Utility Detectives’ Office. I glanced into their office on my way in and saw at once they were busy. They had officers and witnesses and suspects at practically every cubicle, which was good for me. There was nothing wrong with me coming in off hours to look into cases, but still, it would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody.
I sat at my desk and fired up my computer. My first online stop was the San Antonio Police Department’s Master Name File. Anybody who’s had dealings with the SAPD in the last forty-five years, regardless of the reason, is in the Master Name File. So I typed in Gary Harper and got exactly what I expected, about thirty hits, the earliest of which dated from July, 1974. The software also gave names that were phonetically similar to the search parameters, so I got another one hundred sixteen Gerald Harpers, George Harpers, and Garner Harpers added on to the end of my list.
“This is stupid,” I said, and pushed the keyboard away.
Without a date of birth or an address or a particular incident, how was I supposed to figure which of these guys was the right Gary Harper? With all Robinson’s talk of Limbus, Inc. finding the right man to do the job, I’d just assumed the man they were looking for was located somewhere in the San Antonio area, but now I realized that might not be the case. Hell, he could be from anywhere.
Still, it seemed logical to start locally and exhaust those leads before going elsewhere, so I went to the kitchenette, made myself some coffee, and got busy going through names and their reason for contact, trying to see if something stood out.
Nothing really did.
Three of the men made it into the MNF as witnesses, and I thought maybe I’d find something there. After all, Robinson had confided in me that time was of the essence in finding this guy, and that others were looking for him who wouldn’t worry themselves with obeying the law to do it. I thought witness tampering, maybe.
But that was a dead end. All three of the cases were for small-time misdemeanors that had already been adjudicated and the sentences long since served. Minor league dope and forgery cases that didn’t merit a second look.
The search was going nowhere.
I sat back in my chair and thought about where to look next. All the logical openings seemed closed, and the information I did have was so vague as to be practically useless. What I needed was more information. I needed some context. Without it, I’d have better luck finding this Gary Harper guy by throwing a dart at the phone book.
But there was always a way to dig deeper. My years as a homicide detective have taught me that. In our investigations, when you don’t have a suspect to research, you research the victim. The closest I had to a victim in this case was Officer Robinson, so I turned my attention on him.
The first time I looked Officer Robinson up, I was only interested in figuring out who he was, and if he was really a cop. As a result, I’d only searched the city’s employee databases. Now that I was looking at him as part of my investigation, I turned to the case file for the crash that caused his death. I kept coming back to what Robinson said about Limbus, Inc. having a knack for finding the right man to do the job. Maybe that meant Robinson was also the right man for recruiting me. Maybe he was chosen for the same reason I was.
Whatever that was.
Homicide shares an office with the guys from the Traffic Investigations Detail and our open historical cases are kept in the same file room. Police car crashes and fatality accidents are kept separate from the other case files in the Traffic Section, and I had little trouble finding Robinson’s file. It was about eight inches thick, which surprised me until I remembered that back in 1997 we were still working with print copies of nearly everything. These days so much information is stored digitally that an average physical case file consists of little more than a few handwritten evidence receipts. But Robinson’s file had a print copy of everything the Traffic boys had generated during their investigation, and I took it all back to my desk and started wading through it.
The top page was a Pending Further Investigation report written by a detective named Randall Fehrenbach. I didn’t know Fehrenbach personally, but I knew of him. In the seventeen years since writing this report, he’d promoted to the rank of lieutenant and was put in charge of the Research and Planning Division before retiring a few years back. He had a reputation for being smart and thorough, well suited for the number crunching that was the bread and butter of the Research and Planning Division, and the case file in front of me was proof that the reputation was well deserved. His narrative of the crash and the subsequent investigation was exhaustive in detail, and the hand-rendered scale diagram of the crash that took Officer Robinson’s life looked like something an architect would have drafted.
From the narrative section of his report, I learned that Officer Robinson was passing through the intersection of Spencer and Grissom on his way to a burglars-in-action call, when he was T-boned by a green Dodge Diplomat. The Dodge hit the rear door on the driver’s side of Officer Robinson’s Crown Victoria, sending it into a spin that led to a series of barrel rolls. Fehrenbach’s calculations put Officer Robinson’s speed at about eighty miles per hour at the time of the crash, and the photos of his car wrapped around a telephone pole were about what I would expect from a crash at that speed.
But then I saw something that made me forget all about the photos and the diagrams and the speed calculations.
The Dodge that hit Officer Robinson’s car was disabled during the crash.
The driver ran from the wreckage to a nearby subdivision, where he disappeared.
The Dodge had paper dealer plates on it, and Fehrenbach was able to trace the Dodge back to a used car lot several miles from the crash site.
And the name on the point of sale was Gary Harper.
*
During most investigations there comes a tipping point, a moment when you feel things starting to come together. The big picture suddenly makes sense. Your pulse quickens. Your skin is flush with heat. You can’t stop smiling and licking your lips. You develop the focus of a hawk about ready to dive toward its prey.
I used to live for that moment.
I was feeling that tipping point now for the first time since Sheryl and the kids died, and it felt good. It felt really good.
Until I realized that it couldn’t be that easy. After all, if Fehrenbach had located this Gary Harper guy, I would have found a record of him when I searched under that name in the Master Name File. He would have stood out from the others from the start.
I read deeper into the Robinson file and soon found out why he was missing from the Master Name File.
Apparently, Gary Harper didn’t exist.
Witnesses reported seeing a white male, slender build, blond hair, about seventeen years of age, fleeing from the crash scene. The owner of the used car lot reported selling the green Dodge to a kid that matched that description. The kid said his name was Gary Harper, and he’d signed a bill of sale under that name.
But it was a fake name.
The case file included all of Fehrenbach’s 2057s, the five-by-eight cards detectives in the SAPD used to use to record all phone calls, status updates, meetings, interviews and evidence processing they performed during the course of an investigation, and from those I could tell he’d exhausted every lead available to him. He’d even gone to several area high schools and looked through old yearbooks hoping to find his suspect. But in the end he’d come up empty-handed.
I glanced at my computer screen and coughed in surprise. It was nearly 6:30 in the morning. I’d been at this all night. Steve, my supervisor, usually arrived in the office about thirty minutes before roll call, which meant he would be walking in the door any moment.
I didn’t need him to find me here.
That would not be good.
I hurriedly scooped up the case file, tucked it under my arm, and ran out the back door that led to the detectives’ section of the parking lot. I managed to make it to my car without anybody seeing me and set the case file on the passenger seat.
I let out a long breath and looked at myself in the rearview mirror.
The bloodshot eyes of a lost and hollow man stared back at me.
I’d been up all night. I needed sleep. I was a mess. I should have been exhausted, but I wasn’t. I felt jittery and tense, like I’d had too much coffee. For the first time in a long time, I was hungry. I had leads in hand and enough brick walls in my way to wake my need to break something. But I still needed more information.
What I needed was to talk with retired Lieutenant Fehrenbach.
Of course it was just now 6:30 a.m. I couldn’t call him before sun up. That wouldn’t be cool. So I leaned the driver’s seat back, took out my iPhone, and asked Siri to wake me up at 8:15 a.m.
That done, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
*
One of the scariest statistics cops live with is the knowledge that over half of them will die within five years of retirement.
It’s not hard to count the reasons why. Thirty-three years of working a cop’s long hours, rarely getting enough sleep, will do a body in. So too will getting banged up in fights and torn up jumping fences. Spend hours out of every day sitting in a police car and the blood clots will form. Three decades of fast food eaten off the dashboard doesn’t help either.
But the thing that does most cops in faster than all the rest of it is entirely mental. When you spend a lifetime wearing a badge, you learn to see yourself as synonymous with the mission behind that badge. You become the job. You live for the camaraderie, the friendships, and the sense of purpose that comes with wearing the uniform. Hobbies fall by the wayside. Wives get frustrated and lonely and walk out. Children become alienated and resentful. And for a long time you tell yourself that you’re strong as an ox, and that you’re feeding on the stress and the emotional isolation, rather than the other way around.
But then comes retirement, and you go from working nearly every damn day to waking up, showering, shaving, and getting dressed, only to face a day that is a desert of nothing to do.
Those who once loved you are gone, and those who once worked alongside you are still on the job, still slogging away. They have no time for an old man with nothing to do.
You’re still part of the family, but the feeling of being kicked to the curb and passed by leads to a bitter and terrible loneliness.
Five years of feeling like that is a long time.
Randall Fehrenbach had retired three years earlier, and as bad as it sounds, I was hoping to use those feelings to my advantage. I was hoping he’d jump at the chance to get back into one of his old cases.
“Is this Lieutenant Fehrenbach?” I asked him over the phone.
He sighed. “This is Randall Fehrenbach. I haven’t been Lieutenant Fehrenbach in a few years. Who is this?”
“Detective Alan Becker, with SAPD Homicide. Do you have a moment to talk with me, sir?”
“Well, I was gonna spend the day clipping my nails and waiting on a bowel movement, but I guess I can spare a few minutes. Whatcha got?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Sir, I’m looking into the hit-and-run case that took the life of Officer Robinson back in 1997. You were the lead detective on that one, weren’t you?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Worked that case for nearly three years before I had to give it up. Why are you looking into it now?”
“Well, it’s not the case itself, actually. It’s the suspect you developed, Gary Harper. That name has come up in one of my other cases.”
“Gary Harper is a made up name,” he said.
“Yes sir, I know that. I read through your 2057s. You were thorough. I just can’t figure out how anyone could buy a car without showing any ID or insurance or any of the rest of it. How did the owner of the dealership explain that?”
“He didn’t have to,” Fehrenbach said. “Things were different back then. Even if the dealership had been an upscale one, and believe me, this one wasn’t, our suspect wouldn’t have needed anything more than cash to buy that car. I was lucky to get what I did from the guy who owned the place.”
“Was the place dirty?”
He laughed. “You mean were they crooked?”
“Yeah.”
“No, not crooked. At least not in any sort of organized way. It was just a fly-by-night kind of place, you know? And my god, you should have seen the owner. He was so fat he looked like Jabba the Hutt. Every time I talked to him, he was wearing the same sweat-soaked clothes. And he had these two young guys who ran around the place and did everything for him. It was weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Just, you know, creepy. They weren’t related to him or anything, but they waited on him hand and foot. It was just creepy.”
“I read that you went to some area high schools. Nothing came of that?”
“No,” he said. “We even canvassed the neighborhood he disappeared into and came up with nothing. Of course, that area was out in the county back in those days, so for a lot of the searching we had to rely on County to do it.”
“Do you think they might have missed something?”
“No,” he said, but it came out slow. “I don’t know. Maybe. There was a cop involved, so they were honor bound to be thorough.”
“But you sound doubtful,” I said.
“The County used to be the big deal around these parts. How long you been on?”
“Seventeen years, sir.”
He grunted. “Well, you’re probably too young to remember this, but when I first started, we didn’t have any patrol sectors outside of Loop 410. The city was a lot smaller then, both geographically and in terms of resources. If we wanted anything, a helicopter, a dog team, we had to
ask the County to let us use theirs. But by the time I’d promoted to detective, things had really started to change. The city was starting to grow, and annexing County land everywhere you looked. There was a lot of animosity on the County side, a lot of jealously. You know what I mean? For ten years we gobbled up everything they thought was theirs without so much as saying please, put a lot of their guys out of work. And then this mess happens and all of the sudden we come to them with our hats in our hands. You kind of see what the scene was like back then?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What it amounted to was that I didn’t have full access to their records. They made me work for every piece of red tape I cut. Typical interagency crap.”
“I can see that. You think there are any loose ends?”
He laughed again. “I’m sure of it.”
That was what I wanted to hear. “Well, listen, would you like another crack at it? I’ve got the case file with me. Want to meet me for breakfast? Tommy’s is still in business. We could meet there. Spread the case file out on the table. Get deep into it.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Hell yeah, I’d love that. I can be there in about twenty minutes.”
“Cool. See you there. You got my number from the caller ID, right?”
“Is this your cell?”
“Nobody uses a landline these days.”
“Great,” he said, with just the faintest note of sarcasm. “This ought to be fun.”
“I hope so. Maybe the old dog can teach this new dog some tricks.”
“Yeah, we’ll see,” he said.
*
Tommy’s was a taco house about eight blocks south of the old Police Headquarters. Back when I first promoted to detective, it was one of the regular restaurants on our breakfast circuit. It serves good, old-fashioned Jalisco cuisine—menudo, picadillo, barbacoa, carne guisada—all the basics. There were times in my early days as a detective when you’d walk into the place and it’d be jam packed, but there’d only be a handful of people in the place who weren’t cops. Auto Theft would take up one table, Arson another, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office Command Staff still another. Homicide, Narcotics, Financial Crimes, Robbery: you’d see them all there. We used to joke that if someone dropped a bomb on Tommy’s during breakfast, they could wipe out nearly every detective in San Antonio.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 16