“We will kill your woman.”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“You will bring the money to this place I have given you, or we will kill your woman. You will be there by midnight, or we will slice your woman’s head with a butcher’s knife.”
“I will find you.” My heart hammered in my chest. Ben walked in the door carrying his mother’s suitcase and wearing a smile big enough to eat his face.
“You will beg to die,” I said.
Wendy walked in the door, surveyed the crowd, spread her arms, and asked, “What now?”
“Midnight, Mr. Hardin.” Khan hung up.
“The call originated at the Fairlane Motel, Telegraph Road, Dearborn Heights, Room Ten,” Matty told her telephone.
Ben brushed by to take the suitcase to the bedroom, leaving a trail of muddy sock prints. I caught Wendy at the top of the stairs for a hug and a kiss.
“Yuck,” said Wendy. “You’ve been drinking beer.”
20
WENDY, HER FACE ASHEN, fingered her butterfly pendant through the evidence bag. She said, “Karen wore this last night.”
“Karen Smith?” asked Matty.
“Yes,” said Wendy, her eyes glazed and her voice distant.
“What happened?” I asked.
Matty Svenson snapped out her cell phone and punched a number on the autodialer.
Wendy laid the bag on the table. “You know Karen,” she said. Wendy made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “She ‘hooked up.’ Some guy with an East Indian accent. She says she’s having an international phase.”
“Karen Smith,” Matty said into her cell phone. “Her picture and prints are in the informant file. Hold on a second.” Matty dug an envelope from her purse and spread out the pictures she’d shown me in the parking lot at my office.
“That one,” said Wendy, pegging a picture with her finger.
Matty turned the picture over. “The man who abducted Karen Smith is Arul Khan. He’ll be carrying ID that says he’s Emir Ganu. … We’re still at the Hardin residence.”
“I left her the room key,” said Wendy. “She said she had a ride. I expected her to call if it didn’t work out, but I wanted to get back home because Daniel was home for spring break.”
“Where’s Karen’s luggage?” I asked.
“Still in the motel room when I left,” said Wendy. “I haven’t seen her since last night.”
“Weren’t you worried about her?” asked Matty.
“I’ve been worried about Karen since I met her,” said Wendy. “But I couldn’t hang around Holland and wait for her latest tryst to burn itself out.”
“If I have to be in Dearborn Heights by midnight, I need to be on the way ten minutes ago,” I said.
Agent Azzara clamped his eyes on me and slid the headset off to dangle around his neck. “You have this money?”
“I have a suitcase and some telephone books,” I said.
“What money?” asked Wendy.
“The money Manny smuggled in Karen’s suitcase,” I said.
“Manny got that,” said Wendy. “We left it in the house when we ran for our lives.”
Agent Azzara nodded and slipped the headset back in place. He said, “The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is taking down the door.”
• • •
Matty and Agent Azzara drifted outside to talk privately. When they returned, Matty said, “I hate to have to tell you this. Amed Khan said that Karen is dead. He said he dropped her body off the Bell Isle Bridge in Detroit.”
Wendy buried her face in her hands. “Oh, my God.”
I said, “He’s lying.”
“They believe him in Detroit,” said Agent Azzara. He closed the lid on his equipment case and added, “They’re arranging to drag the river. They want to recover her body before it washes into Lake St. Clair.”
Wendy turned and rested her forehead on my shoulder, her hands still on her face. “He’s not the one who lured Karen away,” I said. “She could be shacked up somewhere and have no idea what’s going on.”
“I doubt that,” said Matty. “They couldn’t risk her making some casual telephone call.”
“I think the point was to get the money,” I said. “If they just wanted to kill her, they could’ve dropped her and left the body where it fell.”
“We’re pulling out,” said Matty.
“By the way,” said Agent Azzara. “Do you have an answering service?”
Wendy pulled her hands from her face and slid her arms around me. “Wendy has an answering machine for Silk City Surveys,” I said.
“No,” said Azzara, and waved a hand. “Like a service that answers from another location. Not here in the house.”
“Nothing like that,” I said.
“You have a second drop on the line,” he said. “If you don’t have a service, your telephone is tapped.”
“I’ve been wrestling with the state police over one of my cases,” I said. “Could be them. The detective’s name is Archer Flynt. He works out of the attorney general’s office.”
“Great,” said Azzara. He shook his head.
“We have one lead in the Detroit area,” I said. “The Arab woman who tried to run me off the road when Manny was after Karen on Twenty-eighth Street.”
“Probably nothing,” said Matty. “We can’t investigate every woman who wears a head scarf. Maybe she just had her hair up.”
“She tried to run me into oncoming traffic,” I said.
“You said she was talking on the telephone,” said Matty.
“So you don’t care if I look into her?” I asked.
Wendy, her eyes red and wet, said, “I’m going with you.”
“Waste of time,” said Matty, and walked down the steps with Agent Azzara. At the door she said, “You have my cell number.”
“Yes,” I said.
“There’ll be two agents assigned here. They’ll park in the yard and probably want to use your facilities.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “We’ll keep the coffee on.”
“I wouldn’t count on them for more than a couple days. You find anything in Detroit, you call me first,” said Matty.
• • •
Wendy wouldn’t leave for Southfield until Daniel got home, which worked out well because we needed to use Daniel’s car—both of ours were toasted. The Arab woman we needed to investigate had seen them both on Twenty-eighth Street the day she tried to run me off the road.
“How do we know the boys’ll be safe?” asked Wendy.
“I told you to stay with them,” I said as I turned off the Beltline, west onto 1-196 toward Holland, Michigan.
“Shouldn’t we be going straight to Southfield?” asked Wendy.
“I want to pick up Karen’s luggage,” I said. “FBI may already have it. If not, they’ll be after it in the morning.”
“What’s so important about her luggage?”
“I want to see if there’s money in it.”
“We should have brought the boys,” said Wendy. “They could have stayed with my mother in Garden City.”
“Manny blew himself up. Two of the four Khan brothers are accounted for, as is the father. I can’t believe he was stupid enough to call me from his motel room and then wait there to get scooped up by the FBI.”
“Could be he hadn’t lost his innocence to a lifetime of TV cop shows,” said Wendy.
“They should have watched Khan until he led them to Karen.”
“If you’re right, and Karen doesn’t know what’s going on, Khan could have placed a call and had her killed,” said Wendy.
“I don’t think the FBI wants Karen back as much as they want to have a long talk with Amed Khan.”
“I don’t see going to Holland,” said Wendy. “Karen didn’t have any money. I had to lend her money for the dancers.”
Thankful for the darkness, I tried for abject innocence. “What dancers, hon?”
Wendy dug into her purse, found a cigarette, and took h
er time lighting up. After a puff she exhaled, “Oh, you know damn good and well.”
I tried a saccharine “What?”
“I figured it out after we got there.” I could hear Wendy flicking her fingernails against her thumbnail one at a time. “There’s no way Pacific Casualty was going to pass over you to give me a job using your equipment.”
“Have a good time?”
“It was a job,” said Wendy. “I got a half hour of tape the first night and a half hour the second. That’s fifty-five more minutes than you can get the court to watch.”
“So you got paid to ogle nubile young men?”
“You’re on thin ice, buster,” said Wendy.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But did you have a good time?”
Wendy smacked my shoulder with her left hand. After a moment she said, “Yeah, I had a good time. I’ve never seen a room full of women act like that.”
“See anything new on the menu?”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone mean and snotty. She flicked ashes out the window.
“Really?”
“Nothing I’d give up our life, our home, and our boys for.”
“But I don’t think that way?”
“Men divorce their wives all the time so they can marry younger women,” said Wendy, trying to cover a break in her voice.
“And you think I’d do that?” I gripped her hand gently, but she pulled away.
“Men do it,” she said. “They can.”
“You’re the only woman in my life. The only woman who has ever been in my life. I can’t imagine my life without you.”
Wendy made tissues appear like magic. She wiped her eyes, then my cheek. When she was done she took my hand on the seat.
• • •
I held up a triangular patch of red satin, basically a Post-it Note with strings, and said, “By God, that girl does own underwear. What do you call this? A slingback?”
“A slingback is a shoe, darlin’,” said Wendy. “That’s a thong.”
I held it up to my face and said, “Looks like an eye patch with a chin strap.”
“Gimme that,” said Wendy. She snatched the garment and tucked the panties into an elastic pouch inside the suitcase.
I spread out another item with my finger. “This is neat,” I said, “all lace. Your green ones are like that.”
“Boy shorts,” said Wendy.
“Sexier if it had a better name,” I said.
Wendy slammed the lid on Karen’s suitcase. I had to count my fingers. “There’s no money in there.”
“There should have been.”
Wendy snapped down the clasps on the suitcase. “How do you figure?”
“I don’t have the money. You don’t have the money. They don’t have the money. That leaves Karen.”
“Manny has the money,” said Wendy.
“Manny blew himself up,” I said and started for the door of the motel room with the suitcase. “If I had a suitcase full of money, I could think of slower and more entertaining methods of self-destruction.”
“Exactly,” said Wendy, lingering behind.
“Now what?”
“I’m getting the soap and shampoo,” said Wendy. “We paid for it.”
“C’mon,” I said. “It’s three hours to Southfield, and I want to nose out the bowling alley before we start.”
“I think we should get some sleep here,” said Wendy.
“If we take turns driving, we can get a nap in the car.”
“How do you know this Arab woman in Southfield has information?” asked Wendy. “Matty said it was nothing.”
“It’s all that we have. The woman drove all the way from Southfield to run interference for Manny when they made their first try for Karen on Twenty-eighth Street.”
Wendy shook her head.
“Let’s go over to the bowling alley.”
“We can walk from here,” said Wendy.
We cut across the parking lot. Behind the Waffle House, we found the dusty Lincoln that had waylaid me on my morning trot with Rusty. Two bullet holes punctuated the windshield. Blood on the seat and the steering wheel had dried to a rusty brown. The keys dangled from the ignition.
“Anywhere but Holland, and this car would already be gone,” I said. We walked to the back of the car. No license plate.
Wendy smacked my arm.
“You hit me,” I said.
“You smell that?” asked Wendy. “Sure wasn’t me.”
Two large handprints made divots in the dust caked on top of the trunk lid. I sniffed the keyhole, jerked myself upright, and had to shake my head to dissipate the smell.
“What is it?”
I dragged Wendy toward the light of the restaurant with one hand and hit the autodial number for Matty Svenson on my cell phone with the other. “Someone’s in the trunk,” I said. “And they are very, very dead.”
“Stop!” said Wendy. I turned to face her, and she patted my chest with her free hand. “We have to get Karen out of there. What if she’s still alive?”
“Whoever’s in that trunk is dead,” I said. I got Matty’s voice mail and left the details.
“You said Khan lied,” said Wendy. “You said Khan wouldn’t kill her because he wanted the money.”
“Khan said he dropped Karen’s body in the Detroit River,” I said. “The only sure bet is that he can’t tell a straight story. Khan had to believe he could get the money. He hung around the motel until he got scooped up.” I nudged Wendy into the restaurant and found a booth equipped with a day-old newspaper.
“We have to do something,” said Wendy. “If Karen’s dead, there’s no point in going to Detroit. If it’s not her,” Wendy’s voice broke and her eyes glistened, “we’re wasting time.”
“You wanted to spend the night,” I said.
“Somebody’s dead out there,” said Wendy.
“Let’s give Matty ten or fifteen minutes. If we don’t hear from her, we’ll call the local cops. They’ll be out here like a shot. Twenty minutes is all I’m asking.” I gave her the front page of the newspaper. I took the sports section. “If that’s not Karen, we don’t want to contaminate the scene with fingerprints, fibers, or Rusty’s hair from our clothes.”
From behind the counter the waitress yelled, “Coffee?”
“One tea, one coffee,” I said.
“I have to use the restroom,” said Wendy. She gathered her purse and left the booth as the waitress brought the drinks.
“Breakfast?” asked the waitress.
“Just the drinks for now.”
“Sure thing, darlin’,” she said and gave me a wink. “Sit here as long as you need to. Best not to drive until you and the missus feel up to it.” She left.
Midnight had come and gone, but as I sat hoping Wendy and I didn’t look that haggard, Wendy slid into the booth, wiping her blanched face with tissue. “It’s not Karen,” she said.
“Let’s go,” I said, just loud enough for her to hear. I left the check and the sawbuck at the cash register. Dealing with the police over the body would probably waste an entire day. We headed southeast on M-40, the plan being to catch 131 south to 1-94 and then head east to the Detroit area. “Who was it?”
“Man with a beard,” said Wendy.
“Anybody we know?”
“Hard to tell,” said Wendy. “Someone tied a rope around his neck and twisted it tight with a tire iron. His face was—oh, God!—all blue and bloated with the eyes bulging and the tongue out. He might have been at Karen’s house with Manny.”
“You leave any prints?”
“I keep a pair of socks in my purse,” said Wendy.
“Socks?”
“I only carry gloves in the winter.”
I patted Wendy’s hand on the seat. I’ve seen her produce Band-Aids, cheese crackers, and wet washcloths in ziplock bags when needed. If she’d pulled a Boeing airliner out of her purse, my surprise wouldn’t have lasted long.
“How do flies get in the trunk?” she a
sked and started to gag. I pulled off the road.
• • •
Special Agents Matty Svenson and Amad Azzara got a bonus with the body—a diary. The mortal remains in the trunk of the Lincoln belonged to Ahmad Saada, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Matty and Azzara recovered the diary from his Cherry Street flat.
I didn’t learn about it until Agent Azzara read passages from it at an American Society for Industrial Security seminar. “Terrorists: A Criminal Mind—Not a Muslim Mind.”
The diary revealed that a peculiarity of the U.S. tax code had brought Ahmad Saada to western Michigan. Businesses started by immigrants operate income tax-free for the first five years. Just before Ahmad’s twenty-third birthday, it became his turn to own his uncle’s convenience store. He abandoned his sporadic employment of running guns and explosives into the Gaza Strip and flew to the United States on a tourist visa. For five years, he signed the tax returns, worked from open to close, slept in the storeroom, and prepared his meals on a hot plate. Amad earned three hundred dollars a month, which his uncle sent to Amad’s father in Egypt to care for Amad’s wife and daughter—once his travel expenses had been repaid.
Just before Ahmad’s twenty-eighth birthday, it became his cousin Ali’s turn to own the business. Ahmad’s uncle delivered Ahmad to a bus stop to seek his fortunes, armed with his clothing and a Koran in a straw suitcase.
The Koran gave Ahmad great comfort. He praised Allah for granting him the wisdom to daily mark a few cash register tape sales as errors and pocket the money. He now had over a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills safely filed in the pages of his Koran.
Ahmad found a storefront mosque to his liking, one without the gaggle of chattering women and children that was the fashion here in the United States, and fell in with a group of men impressed by his youthful flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood, men who were also eager for him to invest his money. “Sell a kilo of cannabis, and you can earn a thousand dollars. If they catch you, you go to jail. Sell a kilo of music CDs, and you earn three thousand dollars. If they catch you, they take away your CDs, and the next day you order more.”
Ahmad soon found himself distributing counterfeit brand-name watches, handbags, and clothing, along with bootleg CDs and movies, to retailers who sold phony chic at bargain prices. The products were offshore—Indonesian copies of Chinese knockoffs—and all sales were strictly cash.
Dead Bang Page 19