by Lee Goodman
I felt the realization in my veins and then in the prickle of my skin. I felt it in scattered bits, then the bits became a stone that stuck in the middle of my chest. I couldn’t breathe for a second.
I took my phone to Janis’s desk. “Can you help me print this picture?”
Janis got me set up. I printed the picture and quickly ripped it in half, right down between the two women. “Who is this?” I asked Janis, showing her one half of the picture.
“Your wife, of course.”
I took it to Upton. “It’s Tina,” he said.
Tina had worked in this office. She was known to everybody here, and everyone I asked identified her in the photo. But they didn’t identify her. The picture I showed around was Lydia. Lydia, a younger version of Tina: Tina the way she’d looked five years ago, pre-marriage, pre-childbirth. Anybody might have mistaken them, but especially someone who knew Tina only before she’d acquired that ineffable look of motherhood and maturity, before lines of character and worry and sun exposure began to surface in the predictable spots around her face.
The conference room at the FBI is a cheery place. It has a big skylight. Upton was there with me; Isler and Sabin and Philbin, too. The two halves of the Tina and Lydia photograph were on the table.
“So if you’re right,” Philbin said, “if it was a case of mistaken identity and your wife was the target, who would want to kill her?”
“You know the federal prison out at Ellisville?” I said. “It’s full of people who would love to kill her.”
Upton said, “Tina specialized in gangs and drug prosecutions and crimes against children. Mostly it’s little guys, users and losers, and the last thing they want when they’re sprung is any new problems with the man. But a few are megalomaniacs who take it all real personal.”
“You got any names?” Sabin asked.
“I’ve got every case she worked on.” I waved the list Janis had printed for me. “We can go through it a name at a time. Cross off the ones still inside. Focus on the ones who are out and have a history of violence.”
Tina walked into the room. Chip had sent over an agent to pick her up at her office. There were half a dozen empty chairs around the table, and she picked the one next to me. I slid the list to her. Without hesitation, she flipped through and found the name she wanted. Tony Smeltzer.
“This guy would be my first choice,” she said. “But I assumed he was still inside. Corrections is supposed to inform me when he’s released. You remember him, Nick? He’s the one who screamed at me in the courtroom, said he was coming after me when he got out. We all just figured someone had slipped him some angel dust in lockup and that he was high as a kite during trial.”
“But if he’s still inside . . .”
“He isn’t,” Chip said. Chip was typing on his laptop as we talked. “It says here he successfully appealed his sentence, shortening it by five years. And that he did every day of the shortened sentence, so he was released outright. No parole.”
“When was he released?” I asked.
“Last January.”
The timing was right. The guy had taken a few months to get on his feet and up to speed on Tina’s whereabouts and habits. Then he’d made his move.
“Tell us about him,” Chip said to Tina.
“Drug case,” Tina said. “We didn’t know where he fit in—whether he was running his own enterprise or working for someone else.”
“He was suspected in a couple of killings,” Isler said. “Vicious jobs, but unfortunately, we couldn’t find anything solid. We took him down in a drug sting, but things went wonky, and we could only make a case on possession. He did seven years.”
“Tell us about the threats,” Chip said.
“He was a surly son of a bitch,” Tina said. “You could feel the rage. He wanted to testify, and his lawyer couldn’t dissuade him. He really hurt himself, opened the door to all kinds of shit: priors and even some domestic dirt. I went at him hard on cross. He almost lost it a couple of times. Then he really went berserk during my closing. He’d given me so much to work with that I was going on and on about what a worthless piece of shit he was, and he finally came out of the chair. Guards jumped on him before he did any damage, but the whole time he was screaming how he was going to kill me and kill the people who testified against him, blah blah blah. Like I say, he seemed to be on PCP.”
“Tony Smeltzer,” Chip said. “Last known address is over in Rivertown.”
“What I remember best,” Tina said, “after he was restrained, after he calmed down and the jury delivered its verdict, they were taking him out and he looked right at me and said, ‘You’ll be hearing from me.’ That’s what gave me the willies.”
“What does he look like?” Sabin asked.
“He looks sinister,” Tina said.
“Sinister how?”
“Kind of round and hunched over. And creepy eyes that seem to bulge even though they’re always half closed.”
“I’ll have a picture in a minute,” Chip said.
“I remember him,” I said. “I remember wondering if he had a spine problem or something, because his neck seemed to come from his body frontward instead of upward. Kind of vulturelike.”
“It says here that Mr. Smeltzer was mostly a good boy in prison,” Chip said, reading info from the computer. “He was involved in the prison ministry and doing correspondence classes in . . . um . . . here it is . . . business administration. But they put him on suicide watch a lot.”
“So what do we do about this?” I said. “It’s almost four months since Lydia was killed. Is he lying low before trying again, or is he not our guy?”
“Let’s pick him up and find out,” Isler said.
“Can I go back to work?” Tina asked.
Nobody answered at first, then Chip picked up the phone and arranged for a female agent to keep Tina company back at her office. “Just till we have him in custody,” Chip said.
The meeting broke up. Philbin and Sabin got up to leave. “Are either of you guys going back to trooper headquarters?” Isler asked them.
“I am,” Philbin said.
“Great. I need you to bring something over there for me. Come on down to the evidence room.”
Philbin left with Isler. I rode with Chip to Tony Smeltzer’s apartment building. Since the guy was a murder suspect, and since he was also believed to have intended the murder of a former federal prosecutor—namely my wife—we took a SWAT team. The address in Rivertown was a dilapidated apartment house. The downstairs hallway was dark. It smelled of piss and cigarette smoke, and it seemed to vibrate with rap blasting from one of the ground-level apartments. The bulb was burned out in the stairway. I heard a child crying. There was no elevator. Smeltzer’s apartment was on the second floor. The team trotted up the stairs and spread out in the hallway, covering the exits. Chip had a Kevlar vest, like the SWAT guys, though he didn’t have the helmet and assault rifle. I had a vest on, too, and I had my Glock, and I felt that at any second someone was going to tell me to knock it off and go back to my office, where I belonged. Sabin and Philbin had tagged along, but this was a federal operation now, so they waited outside. Chip walked past the artillery-clad SWATs and, standing to one side, knocked on the apartment door.
“Tony Smeltzer, FBI. Open the door.”
The lock clicked. Everyone stood ready.
The door opened. The SWATs tumbled into the apartment. I heard a scream. Then a little later I heard “Clear.” Chip walked in. After a minute or two, I followed him.
Chip was questioning a woman. She stood in the room with a child on her hip. She was Caucasian and slender and wore an embroidered T-shirt and jeans. She looked at us all with curious eyes, concerned but not terrified. “If you’d called ahead, I’d have made fresh coffee,” she said. She wasn’t hostile, but not friendly, either. She was the way you’d expect someone to be when five heavily armed, Kevlar-clad commandos drop in and take up positions around the living room. “Smeltzer?” she said.
“Yes, I believe that was his name. You’d have to ask the landlord. I never met him.”
The room was nice. It had a futon couch and an IKEA dining table. The radio was on. I heard classical music.
“. . . moved in on August first,” the woman was saying.
I noticed a tall bamboo plant in a raku pot near the window.
“AmeriCorps,” she said. “My husband’s a nurse.”
“Were any of Smeltzer’s things still here?” Chip asked.
“No, the place was clean.”
I looked out the window into an alley. Young kids were down there playing. A couple of mothers stood watching.
“No, we love it here,” the woman said. “We love the vibrancy, the diversity.”
Chip handed her his card.
“Very exciting,” the woman said. “I’ve never been swarmed by a SWAT team before.”
We all left. The commandos piled back into their van and drove off.
“All dressed up and no place to go,” I said.
Chip and Isler ignored me. They were both on their cell phones. I pulled mine out, too, and called Upton with the update. Then I called Tina. “Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Just fine,” she said. “I have my new best friend here: Agent Agnew from Augusta. I’ve tried to put her to work reading trial transcripts, but she—”
“Dammit, Tina, take this seriously.”
“I am serious,” Tina said. “Her name is Agnew, and she’s from Augusta. And, Nickie, the guy has had nearly four months since he killed Lyd. I’m not expecting him this afternoon.”
“What about Barnaby?”
“We don’t think he’d be a target,” Tina said, “but Captain Dorsey sent a statie over to guard him at the day care.”
We hung up. Chip dropped me back at my office.
Tina called me around four-thirty in the afternoon. “They still haven’t found the guy,” she said. “He seems to have gone missing right about the time Lyd was killed. Chip doesn’t want me to go home till they find him.”
“Gee,” I said, “by the sheerest of coincidences, I have some extra room at my place, if you need somewhere to stay.”
“It was nice to see you today,” she said. Her voice signaled sincerity through its absence of inflection—businesslike: just the facts.
“So?”
“So let’s give it more time to work. It’s working. I’m more relaxed . . .”
“. . . despite having a psychopath after you.”
She laughed. “So, sticking with our plan . . .”
“Our plan?”
“Okay, my plan—thought maybe I could co-opt you—sticking with my plan, I’ll go stay at Henry’s. Is that okay?”
I wanted to rebel. I could have wailed and pleaded and maybe guilt-tripped her into coming to stay at Friendly City Executive Suites (Day, Week, Month). She was vulnerable. I could have prevailed, but she’d have resented it.
“Henry’s,” I said. “Sure, the poor guy would probably love the company. Besides, it’s really your sister’s place, isn’t it? So it seems appropriate.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” she said.
Chip called me just before five to say they hadn’t found Smeltzer. It was looking like the guy had gone invisible.
“What about Lydia?” I asked. “Have you found any real evidence that Smeltzer was the shooter?”
“Nothing actually pointing to him, but we haven’t found anything to exclude him, either. And not finding a way to exclude him is almost the same as implicating him.”
“It is?”
“Definitely. Give me ten names at random, good guys or bad guys or names from the phone book. And give me a crime. By the end of the day, assuming none of the names is the perp, we can usually find a way to exclude all of them. So in a case like this, where we have good reasons for suspecting a guy to begin with, and he coincidentally goes missing right about the time of the crime, and the Bureau can’t seem to locate the guy in a whole afternoon of looking, I’d say the chance that he’s our perp hovers in the hundred percent range.”
“Okay. Now what?”
“Well, since our suspicion of him as Lydia’s killer has gone biospheric—”
“. . . Stratospheric.”
“—I’d say we need to take the threat against Tina pretty goddamn serious.”
CHAPTER 28
Over the next few days the Bureau remained unable to locate Tony Smeltzer. Chip and I drove up to Ellisville Max to interview his former cellmate.
Like Smeltzer, the cellmate was in on narcotics charges. He turned out to be nondescript: white, fortyish, plain. Chip did the preliminaries, explaining to the guy why we were there. “So we’re not looking for anything incriminating,” Chip said, “we’re just trying to get a feel for Tony, to assess whether he might present a danger.”
“Oh. I see.”
“For example, did Tony Smeltzer ever talk about his trial?”
“I can’t say that he did.”
“Or about the prosecutor?”
“No. I can’t say that he did.”
“Did Tony Smeltzer talk about places he liked? Other parts of the country—places where he had connections?”
“No. No, I can’t say that he did.”
“Friends on the outside?”
“Nope.”
“Did he get any mail?”
“I really wouldn’t know about that.”
“Visitors?”
“Not that I heard of.”
“A girl on the outside?”
“I can’t really say.”
It went on like this for some time. Finally, Chip said, “Is there anything you can tell us?”
The cellmate thought a few seconds, then said, “His shoulder hurts him sometimes.”
“His shoulder?”
“It got broke in a motorcycle accident. It’s lower than the other one. Like this.” The cellmate stood and let one shoulder droop, the arm hanging limp. “Made him walk kind of sideways.”
“Well, that’s something,” Chip said. “Thank you. Is there anything else?”
“No. Can’t say that there is.”
Chip and I left. I said, “That was a god-awful waste of time.”
“Do you think so?” Chip asked.
“Don’t you?”
“I thought it was valuable. I learned a ton.”
If Chip had been anybody else, I’d have thought he was joking. But he isn’t one for irony. “Learned what?” I asked.
“I learned that Mr. Smeltzer is able to command fear and/or respect. That he’s a serious person.”
“Serious how?”
“Think about it,” Chip said. “The guy was willing to tell us that Smeltzer has a broken shoulder, but nothing about his actual behavior. Obviously, the guy wasn’t going to tell us anything important about Smeltzer. He could have said, like, Smeltzer loved watching football, or Smeltzer read novels, or Smeltzer loved to go fishing. But no. The only thing the cellmate would comment on was physical description. It tells me that saying anything about who Smeltzer really is, how he acts, what he likes or hates, is off-limits—no matter how unimportant it seems.”
“Okay. So what does this mean?” I said.
“I’m not a profiler, right? But what I see is a guy who is good at controlling his environment and controlling his image. He’s in charge, and people aren’t likely to cross him.”
“And?”
“And so he takes things pretty seriously. I’d say he definitely could have held on to a bit of homicidal rage for the past seven years.”
Morning. At the office, everything felt relatively normal until I settled in at my desk and the phone rang. It was Tina. “I guess things have calmed down,” she said. “But they’re still not sure if it was him last night.”
“If what was him? If he was who?”
“The prowler.”
I waited.
“Are you telling me you didn’t hear about it?”
“About what? What prowler?”
<
br /> “Oh my God. No wonder you didn’t come over. I thought you were just being you: roaming the village with a torch instead of coming over to be with me. Henry got up in the night to go to the bathroom and he saw somebody in the backyard. He woke Agent Agnew, and she got on her radio, and next thing you know, there were cops and agents everywhere.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said.
“Like I said, Nick, I thought—”
“You have my son with you. You’re my wife and you have my son, and you didn’t even bother checking in with me?”
Tina hesitated a few seconds, and then laughed. “I thought the same of you. I couldn’t believe you hadn’t bothered to come touch base with me.”
I was silent.
“Nick?”
“Goddammit,” I yelled. “If you were living with me, I wouldn’t have to touch base, would I?”
“Nick, calm down, I—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. I don’t . . . You don’t . . . Don’t even think about telling me to calm down.”
“Nickie, relax, it’s okay . . .”
“Go to hell,” I shouted. I slammed the phone down. My office door was open. I got up and slammed it, shaking the wall, maybe the whole room. I wished I were at home instead of my office, because I wanted to smash something: some plates, maybe, or put my foot through a wall or window. I wanted to rampage. At the office, my options were limited. I picked up Tina’s picture, a five-by-seven behind glass in a fancy frame, and threw it against the wall. Broken glass went everywhere. I stood in the middle of the room, panting. There was a knock on the door.
“Nick, you okay, buddy?” Upton said.
“Fine. Go away.”
“Okay. I’ll check back.”
I picked Tina’s photo out of the wreckage. It was torn, but I flattened it on the desk and taped up the tear on the back, where it wouldn’t show.
CHAPTER 29