Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  “Because of course he did vanish. The day of his trial came up, and he was nowhere to be found. He hadn’t confided in anyone. His parents were deceased and he had no siblings. His friends, such as he had, turned out to be not very close friends. None of them could give us a clue. His lawyer was baffled.

  “The search for Darrell Malone went nowhere. His car turned up in Newark, sold for cash to a private buyer. There were sightings in Baltimore that never panned out. Then, a few weeks ago, he was spotted at a discount store here in Ann Arbor—the Value Mart on Oak Valley Drive. He bought a shovel and some other items there, and the cashier thought he looked familiar. Her name is Allison Wick and she grew up in Nossos and went to high school with Malone. When she saw him at the Value Mart, he gave her a false name, but the encounter stayed with her and later on she realized who he was.

  “She had no idea he was a fugitive, but the next time she talked to her sister she mentioned seeing him. The sister knew his story and got in touch with the Nossos police. It was a slim lead and people in the department weren’t inclined to act on it. It had been years since they’d thought about Darrell Malone. But one of my friends in the department mentioned it to me, because he knew I had worked on the Malone case.

  “I decided to drive out here and see what I could discover. Blame it on the fact that I’ve been retired for two years now and have already had my fill of fishing and golf. I arrived here on Friday and drove around, walked through downtown. It struck me as the kind of place Malone would like; it reminded me of Nossos. That didn’t bring me any closer to finding him. The name I had for him was the one he had given to the cashier—Ted Carmady. But that didn’t lead me anywhere. I didn’t pay much attention to the news, though I gather you’ve had some excitement here in the past couple weeks. I didn’t connect Malone with that. If I was going to find him at all, I expected to find him living a quiet, anonymous life. I’ve spent the last three days driving around to engineering firms, on the theory that Malone might have gone back to what he knew. I must have shown his picture at every firm between here and Detroit. Then today I picked up a newspaper and saw his face on the front page. And here I am.”

  At home that night Elizabeth read up on the killing of Jimmy Wade Peltier by Darrell Malone. She had a copy of the case file, transmitted by fax from the Nossos P.D. She sat on the sofa with a pillow at her back, a quilt over her legs, and sorted through the pages. There were autopsy pictures of Peltier, gruesome even in their grainy fax versions. She tucked them away when Sarah came over to see what she was reading.

  She had struggled a little over whether to tell her daughter what she had learned about David Loogan, but now she gave the girl a bare-bones account of Loogan’s crime. Sarah listened, staring all the while at the young Loogan in the mug shot.

  “We ought to help him,” she said when Elizabeth came to the end of the story. “It sounds like Jimmy Peltier had it coming.”

  “I’ll do what I can for him,” Elizabeth said. “But there’s nothing for you to do. If he comes here, you’re not to let him in.”

  “I don’t think he’ll come here.”

  “I don’t either. But if he does, call 911. Then call me. And keep the doors locked.”

  Sarah gave her an impatient look. “The doors are always locked.”

  “Then we won’t have any trouble. Promise me you’ll do what I’ve asked you.”

  “I promise,” said Sarah firmly. “But I’m not going to be afraid of David Loogan.”

  The case file included a copy of Denham’s notes on his conversation with the cashier Allison Wick. Elizabeth underlined the alias Loogan had used with Wick: Ted Carmady. He had used the same name when he talked to Sean Wrentmore’s neighbor, Delia Ross. Elizabeth wondered if the name held some significance. She thought of calling Denham to ask him about it. He was still in town; she had his cell phone number and the number of his hotel. But his notes were thorough and she reasoned that if he had any insights about the alias he would have recorded them.

  She didn’t know how long Denham would be in town. Owen McCaleb had talked to the man’s former chief at the Nossos P.D.—a woman who, according to McCaleb, sounded like “a tough old dame” on the phone. She had given Denham her endorsement.

  “She says he’s solid,” McCaleb told Elizabeth. “Reliable, a team player. A little restless. She thinks he wasn’t ready to retire, but their department rules encouraged it. He won’t be any trouble, she says, but if he is we should send him packing. It sounds like he wants to stick around, see what happens with Loogan.”

  Putting the case file aside, Elizabeth got up and fixed herself a cup of tea. When she came back she dug through her notes and found Nathan Hideaway’s number. On an impulse she dialed it, and when he answered she said, “I hope I’m not calling too late.”

  “Detective,” Hideaway said. “Not at all. It’s a pleasure to hear from you.”

  “I have a question. Does the name Ted Carmady mean anything to you?”

  She listened to his breathing. “Let me think,” he said. “I believe that’s a literary reference. In some of Raymond Chandler’s early short stories, the protagonist was named Ted Carmady.”

  “I see.”

  “I wonder, does this have something to do with our friend Mr. Loogan?”

  She answered him in a half-amused tone. “I really shouldn’t say. Police business. Thanks for your help.”

  “How awfully enigmatic. Very well. Good night, Detective.”

  Sipping tea, Elizabeth wondered how attached Loogan might be to the name Ted Carmady. Would he be careless enough to register at a hotel under that name? It might be worth checking around. She made a note to put Alice Marrowicz on it in the morning.

  She picked up the phone again and dialed Loogan’s number, knowing he wouldn’t answer. His phone would be turned off. Even if he did answer, she wasn’t sure what she would say. Should she let him know what she had learned about his past? She had discussed the matter with McCaleb and the others after the briefing. They had agreed that they should keep Loogan’s history from the press for the time being. But as for how to handle him, McCaleb had told Elizabeth to use her discretion. She was the one in contact with the man; she would have to make the decision.

  But she wouldn’t have to make it yet. She got Loogan’s voice mail and left a message asking him to call, then finished her tea, and went up to bed.

  Chapter 29

  ON FRIDAY MORNING ELIZABETH PUT ASIDE THE FILE ON THE KILLING of Jimmy Wade Peltier. She had not yet heard from Loogan, and she thought about leaving him another message, but decided against it. He would call her when he was ready.

  Loogan was a distraction, she thought. What she needed was to start over, to return to the beginning. From a drawer of her desk in the squad room, she took out a sheet of paper and a pencil. In the middle of the page she wrote Tom Kristoll’s name and the date of his death: October 23. But that was not the beginning. If Loogan and Laura Kristoll were to be believed, Sean Wrentmore had died on October 7.

  She wrote Wrentmore’s name and date above Tom Kristoll’s. Below Kristoll’s, she added two more names: Adrian Tully, October 31; Michael Beccanti, November 3.

  In the space between Wrentmore and Kristoll, she added: Valerie Calnero visits Wrentmore’s storage unit; Calnero sends blackmail letter to Tom Kristoll.

  She filled in some other details at the top of the page: Wrentmore writes novel—Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men. Tom Kristoll edits Wrentmore’s manuscript. But Wrentmore’s death was the key event. Everything that followed was connected to it somehow. If she understood Sean Wrentmore, she could understand the rest.

  She believed Loogan when he told her that Wrentmore was dead. But she had more than Loogan’s word. Traces of blood had been recovered from between the floorboards in Tom Kristoll’s study—Laura Kristoll and her lawyer had consented to the search.

  They had also consented to a search of the woods around the Kristolls’ house. Ron Wintergreen had gone in first wit
h a police dog; afterward, cadets from the academy had trudged through the woods in a widening spiral. But no remains had been found, no signs of a grave.

  Wrentmore’s family lived in Dayton. Carter Shan had driven down Wednesday afternoon to meet with them, returning on Thursday morning. Wrentmore’s father had died when he was young. His mother had remarried. Her second husband worked as a carpet salesman, and they had two daughters together, both in their early twenties, both still living at home.

  None of them had heard from Wrentmore in the past eight weeks. They were used to long silences from him. Wrentmore’s mother, a heavy woman with graying hair, was at first bewildered when Shan related Laura Kristoll’s account of her son’s death. Later she broke down in sobs. Her daughters did what they could to soothe her. Eventually they took her upstairs and got her to lie down.

  The woman’s husband questioned Shan in weary tones. Would it do any good if he drove up to Ann Arbor? Maybe he could help search for Sean’s grave. He thought he should be doing something. Shan discouraged him gently and left him with the promise that he would be in touch if there were any developments.

  Now, on Friday morning, as Elizabeth sat at her desk penciling in the details of her timeline, Shan sat across from her sorting through Wrentmore’s mail. Wrentmore’s neighbor had turned over stacks of it: mostly junk, a few bills, some magazines, a form-letter rejection from a literary agent who thanked him for submitting a sample chapter from his novel.

  Shan looked up from the mail and said, “How much do you think Gray Streets pays when they publish a story?”

  Elizabeth tapped her pencil on the desktop. “I don’t know. I imagine it’s not much.”

  “Wrentmore published stories in there, right? But it’s safe to say he didn’t make a living that way.”

  “Right.”

  “And his opus, his twelve-hundred-page novel, that was a bust. So it would be fair to describe Sean Wrentmore as a failed writer.”

  “I suppose it depends on your standards,” Elizabeth said. “Tom Kristoll thought he was good.”

  “He may have been brilliant,” said Shan. “He may have been a neglected genius. Literarily. But financially, he was a dud. You’d expect a guy like that to be living in a garret, suffering for his art. But Wrentmore owned a condo.”

  “Maybe his family helped him out.”

  “They didn’t. They were in the dark about the condo. They had his address, of course, but they assumed he was renting. Last they knew, he had a job at a bookstore.”

  Elizabeth got out her notebook, found the notes on her conversation with Delia Ross. “Wrentmore told his neighbor he made a living selling used books on the Internet.”

  “But we didn’t find a ton of books at his condo,” said Shan. “Just his personal collection. There were books in his storage unit, but if he were selling them—”

  “If he were selling them, it would be all wrong. He’d have to drive out to the storage unit every time he needed to fill an order.” Elizabeth closed the cover of her notebook. “Where was Wrentmore’s money coming from?”

  Shan held up Wrentmore’s bank statement. “There’s only one deposit for the whole month. Five thousand dollars. Direct deposit from something called InnMan, Limited.”

  He picked up his phone and Elizabeth listened as he flirted with a teller at Wrentmore’s bank. InnMan turned out to be an abbreviation for Innocent Man. The direct deposits occurred monthly and went back several years, though the amount had increased over time: from four thousand to forty-five hundred to five thousand.

  Shan’s second call was to the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He learned that Innocent Man was a single-owner limited liability company—with Sean Wrentmore as the single owner. The same call netted him the name of the lawyer who had filed the company’s articles of organization.

  As Shan hung up the phone, Elizabeth already had the yellow pages open.

  “Who’s driving?” he asked her.

  She found the lawyer’s address. “It’s close,” she said. “We can walk.”

  Todd Barstow, Esquire, had a soft, unanimated face. His forehead was unlined, his pale blond hair slicked back, immobile. The walls of his office were paneled in dark wood and the carpet was tan, and the suit he wore was a shade of brown that fell somewhere between the walls and the carpet.

  He held three stapled pages in his thin fingers and his lips drew tight together as he read them. The pages were Laura Kristoll’s statement on the death of Sean Wrentmore. Elizabeth and Shan sat silently until he was finished with them.

  He laid the pages on his desk and said, “I agreed to talk to you only out of courtesy, and with great reluctance.”

  “We appreciate that,” Elizabeth said. “The courtesy.”

  “Not the reluctance,” added Shan.

  “This document”—Barstow pointed to the statement—“is hearsay. Mrs. Kristoll relates events described to her by her late husband. Yet you’re asking me to take it as evidence of Mr. Wrentmore’s death. I’m not inclined to. Do you have any other evidence? Physical evidence?”

  Shan nodded. “We have a blood sample from the floor of the Kristolls’ study. The blood type is the same as Sean Wrentmore’s.”

  “That’s far from conclusive,” said Barstow.

  Elizabeth watched a spider crawl along the rim of the lawyer’s in-box.

  She said, “We also have a statement from a friend of Tom Kristoll’s—a man named David Loogan—saying that he helped dispose of Sean Wrentmore’s body.”

  “Would this be the David Loogan whose picture was on the front page of the News yesterday, the David Loogan currently being sought in connection with another homicide?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then he’s hardly a reliable witness.”

  The spider found the edge of the desk and began to descend.

  Elizabeth said, “Do you have reason to believe that Sean Wrentmore is alive, Mr. Barstow?”

  “You’ve given me no solid reason to believe he’s dead.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to him?” asked Shan.

  “Several weeks ago, I’m sure. Eight weeks? Twelve? Something on that order. But that’s not unusual. We have no need to be in constant contact.”

  “Well, his neighbors haven’t seen him for a month,” said Shan. “His parents haven’t spoken to him for longer than that.”

  “Sean Wrentmore is a competent adult. He can come and go as he likes, and doesn’t have to answer to his parents.” Barstow held up his open palms. “But let’s leave that aside. You believe he’s dead. I have no knowledge of his alleged death. There’s nothing helpful I could tell you.”

  Shan shifted in his chair. “What can you tell us about Innocent Man, Limited?”

  “I can tell you nothing at all about Innocent Man, Limited,” said Barstow.

  “You prepared the paperwork that created the company. It’s a matter of public record.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What sort of work does Innocent Man do?”

  The lawyer’s small mouth made a frown. “Mr. Wrentmore is my client. I’m not at liberty to discuss these matters.”

  “The paperwork describes it as a consulting firm,” Shan said.

  “Then you can be sure that’s what it is.”

  “What sort of consulting did Sean Wrentmore do? Who did he consult with?”

  “I’ve already said I’m not going to discuss my client’s business.”

  “Innocent Man paid Sean Wrentmore five thousand dollars a month. Where did that money come from?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Elizabeth broke in. “Did any of it come from Tom Kristoll?”

  Barstow’s face was unreadable. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Elizabeth got out of her chair and crossed to the room’s lone window. The blinds were thick with dust and cobwebs.

  She said, “Mr. Barstow, are you aware that Sean Wrentmore has been renting a storage unit for t
he last five years?”

  He looked at her blankly. “No.”

  “So you have no idea what he might have kept in that storage unit?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it’s just a coincidence—that he formed a company and started renting a storage unit at about the same time?”

  “What else would it be?”

  “Are you aware of any relationship between Wrentmore and a woman named Valerie Calnero?”

  “I’m not privy to Mr. Wrentmore’s personal relationships.”

  “What if I told you that after he died—”

  “Allegedly died.”

  “After he died, Valerie Calnero took something from his storage unit. And shortly after that, she attempted to blackmail Tom Kristoll.”

  Barstow shot her a condescending look. “In that case, I would say that this Calnero woman is in need of a lawyer. But I fail to see how her actions reflect on Mr. Wrentmore.”

  “I’m sure you can look at it from our point of view,” said Shan. “Sean Wrentmore has this mysterious company, and an unexplained income. Then if we toss in the idea of blackmail—”

  “You should be careful what you toss in,” Barstow said sharply. “Do you have evidence that Mr. Wrentmore is guilty of blackmail, or any other crime?”

  Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “No. And we’d like to be able to eliminate it as a possibility, so we can move on to other matters.”

  Barstow rose behind the desk, picked up Laura Kristoll’s statement, and held it out. “You should move on then,” he said. “Mr. Wrentmore’s income is from entirely legitimate sources. You have my assurance.”

  Shan was silent on the elevator and through the lobby of Barstow’s building. When they hit the street he said, “Well, if we have his assurance . . .”