Get Busy Dying (Roy Ballard Mysteries)

by Ben Rehder

  “You realize what you are suggesting is majorly illegal?” I said.

  “Of course. But we have to go over there anyway to get the tracker, so...”

  I’ve never seen a more fuck-it-all expression on her face.

  I said, “You understand that trespassing is peanuts compared to breaking and entering?”

  “I’m aware of that fact,” she said. “We wouldn’t take anything or compromise the police investigation in any way.”

  “Searching the land and the tank outside of McDade was questionable, but this...”

  “I know.”

  She had to know which way I’d go. I’m not a patient man, and my impatience often manifests itself as a tendency to take risks or stupid shortcuts. It’ll probably bite me in the ass someday. I was hoping it wouldn’t be today.

  “If we’re gonna do it,” I said, “we’d better do it now.”

  36

  We drove past the Gentrys’ driveway. Reconnaissance, but we couldn’t see much through the trees. The tracker told us that Erin’s car was back home again.

  “You nervous?” I asked Mia.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Of course I’m nervous. I get nervous when I drive through a yellow light. What if Boz is there? Or whoever was driving the car?”

  “Had to be Boz,” I said. “Can’t imagine he’s still there, though. He wouldn’t murder his wife, then go home and hang around—not a man who was already on the run.”

  “But how would he have left? On foot?”

  “I seem to recall that he owned a motorcycle. Wouldn’t surprise me if he took off on that.”

  Mia did not appear convinced.

  “I’ll do it alone if you want me to,” I said.

  “Nope. One of us needs to be the lookout. Besides, it was my idea.”

  She found a place to turn around. I was glad it was a weekday in a quiet, semi-rural area. We hadn’t passed another vehicle—or seen another human being—since we’d turned off Bee Caves Road.

  The plan was simple.

  Drive right up to the house as if we belonged there—like we’d come by to question Erin again. Hope to find a door or window unlocked. Then walk right in, as bold as you please. But we’d decided we wouldn’t force our way in. That might throw the investigators in the wrong direction if they saw signs of a burglary.

  When we reached the driveway the second time, Mia turned in. The caliche driveway wouldn’t hold tire tracks, so that was a plus. We wouldn’t leave tracks or ruin any existing tracks.

  When we were halfway up the driveway, I could see Erin’s Ford Focus. Mia stopped in the same spot where I had parked on my previous two visits. We immediately exited the van and headed toward the door.

  “In and out,” I said quietly.

  “I know, I know.”

  No sign of anyone inside the house. Fortunately, the dog was not barking yet. But if he barked, so be it. I doubted that would raise any red flags for anyone within earshot. They had to be used to it by now.

  Mia led the way up the steps and onto the porch. She rapped on the door with her knuckles. We waited fifteen seconds. Mia rapped again—more firmly this time. Still nothing. Mia banged very hard on the door. Not a peep. I reached out and tried the doorknob.

  Yes.

  Unlocked. I swung the door open.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  The place was silent.

  “Erin?” I said. “Boz? Anybody?”

  Dead quiet.

  We both stepped inside, our senses on full alert. I closed the door, and then we waited another minute. Not a sound other than the humming of the refrigerator. We waited another full minute, and then I said, “Let’s do it.”

  We’d decided that the search itself would be based around the answer to one question: Which single item is more likely than any other to reveal valuable information about a person’s daily activities, deepest secrets, desires, and fantasies?

  Some people might say it’s a person’s cell phone, and I think that day is coming, but for now, in my opinion, it’s still the computer.

  That’s where a married guy hides his porn.

  Or where a married woman hides her online purchases.

  Or where a married couple intent on committing insurance fraud would leave behind traces of their scheme.

  So we’d decided to forget everything else in the house and focus on finding Erin’s computer. I knew she had a computer, because I’d noticed an Internet dish on her roof during my earlier visits. While I was searching, Mia would simply stand by the front windows and keep watch. If anyone pulled in or came up the drive on foot, we would quickly abandon the search and step back onto the porch, using the excuse that the door had been wide open when we’d arrived.

  My search took less than thirty seconds. I found a Mac on a desk inside a small bedroom that functioned as a study. The screen saver was an ever-changing collage of various snapshots, mostly of Erin and Boz.

  I woke the screen up and got busy. This wouldn’t take long, because I wasn’t going to sift through her emails, documents, and photos right now. There wasn’t time for that. Instead, I took the shorter, more intelligent route. I copied the entire hard drive, using an expensive high-speed cloner I’d bought at the electronics store. Amazingly fast.

  Then we wiped any fingerprints we’d left and got the hell out of there, only stopping briefly outside for me to slide under the Ford Focus and grab the GPS tracker.

  Blackie must’ve woken up, because he began to bark as we got back in the van.

  We went to Mia’s house. The smoky smell had dissipated quite a bit even since the afternoon before, when I installed the surveillance system. I was beat, and I could tell that Mia was, too. Long night. Going to be a long day, most likely. We had a hard drive to dig through.

  “Want something to eat?” Mia asked.

  We were sprawled on either end of her couch, taking a break. It was still early—only eight-thirty—but the Lee County Sheriff’s Office would already be bustling with activity.

  “Not really. Not right now. But don’t let me stop you.”

  “No, I’m all right. Roy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there any chance you’re wrong?”

  “Always, but about what specifically?”

  “Any chance it wasn’t Erin in the tank?” she said.

  I shook my head. “It was her.”

  Mia’s lips were tight and her face seemed paler than normal. Maybe it was just the lighting. She said, “It just seemed wrong to leave her there. I struggled with that.”

  “I know. So did I. But the sheriff will recover the body, and then they’ll catch whoever put her in that tank. We did the right thing.”

  We had her television tuned to a local channel with the sound down, and the radio dialed to an AM news/talk station. We’d know as soon as any news broke.

  “How will they go about it?” Mia asked. “Same way you did?”

  “I’m not real sure,” I said. “They might drag the tank, but I suspect they’ll send in a diver, or maybe a couple of divers. I don’t know if they’ll be able to see in that water during the daytime, but even if they can’t, it won’t take them long to find her.”

  We sat quietly for several minutes.

  Mia said, “Hey, what if the sheriff’s secretary is on vacation?”

  That thought left me cold for a moment. Then I said, “I imagine there’d be a temp in there for the week.”

  Mia nodded.

  We went quiet again. After a few minutes, my eyelids began to droop.

  Mia said, “When they listen to that voicemail—and then they contact Ruelas—he’s going to know it was us. Who else would it be?”

  I had already thought of that. I knew it when I mentioned his name in the voicemail, but I wanted the Lee County sheriff to know what he was dealing with as quickly as possible. Ruelas could fill in a lot of blanks. They could work together. I would wager that Ruelas was a lot more cooperative with fellow law-enforcement offic
ers than he was with me, and I couldn’t blame him for that.

  “Doesn’t really matter,” I said. “They can’t prove it was us. If they contact us, we won’t answer any questions. Besides, regardless of the message I left, Ruelas would suspect that it was us anyway. At lunch the other day, he guessed that I had a tracker on Erin’s car.”

  “Did you admit it?”

  “Hell, no. But he’ll assume we did, and that that’s how we found her, so he’ll keep his mouth shut about it, because it’s in his own best interest. Goes back to that admissibility thing.”

  Mia chuckled. “If it was any other cop but Ruelas, I’d say you’re being a cynic. But you’re probably right.”

  That was followed by a long stretch of silence, and then I opened my eyes, realizing that I had dozed off for several minutes. Mia was curled up on her half of the couch and her eyes were closed. Her breathing pattern told me she was asleep.

  I grabbed one of the throw pillows and stretched out on the floor. I lay there, just thinking.

  Where in the holy hell was Boz Gentry? The truth is, it’s almost impossible for anyone to fake his or her own death and get away with it, even in the short term. There is always somebody else who knows the truth, and that person eventually breaks. Or, like Erin and maybe Tyler Lutz, they get killed before they break.

  I found myself hoping again that the body in the tank wouldn’t be Erin. I liked her, to be honest. She wasn’t the warmest young woman one might encounter, but at least she was authentic. I wondered what she was like in a normal situation—say, meeting for happy hour, as opposed to being grilled from all sides about possible involvement in her husband’s stupid scheme.

  I kicked my shoes off and closed my eyes.

  Shelley was standing in a corner, watching and nodding, as Erin had a set of pliers buried in my mouth, preparing to pull a molar. I knew I was dreaming, but that didn’t make it seem any less real.

  “Just get a good hold on it and yank,” Shelley said. “Don’t worry—he won’t feel a thing.”

  But I would feel it. I could tell that the drugs hadn’t taken effect yet. This was going to be horrible, but I didn’t have the ability to sit up and object. I couldn’t move.

  “He’s scared,” Erin said somewhat apprehensively. “I can see it in his eyes.”

  “Nonsense,” Shelley said. “He won’t even remember it.”

  Now Erin put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, saying, “Roy?” She was testing to see if I could respond. “Roy?”

  And then I began to come out of it, remembering that I was sleeping on the floor of Mia’s living room. That would be Mia’s hand on my shoulder, gently waking me—but it wasn’t. There was no hand at all, and no voice murmuring my name. I opened my eyes and I was alone. The couch was empty. Mia must’ve woken and gone into her bedroom or some other part of the house.

  I slowly sat up, trying to clear my head. I glanced at the clock and was surprised to see that three hours had gone by. The radio was turned off now. But the TV was still on, with the volume down.

  And I froze when I saw the face on the screen. A driver’s license photo. They’d found Erin Gentry’s body.

  37

  I grabbed the remote and turned up the volume, while simultaneously shouting for Mia. She came from the hallway that led to her bedroom, her hair ruffled from sleep, and I wordlessly pointed toward the TV, where a reporter was now standing along a stretch of road—recognizable to me even though I’d never seen it in the daylight—and melodramatically addressing the camera.

  “— are not saying how long the body has been in the tank or how they knew to look for it at this location. One thing we do know: Erin Gentry’s friends and family members are mourning the loss of this young woman—and wondering if her death has anything to do with the alleged fatality of her husband, Boz Gentry, last month in a car accident. That case is still under investigation by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, and it took a strange twist just three days ago, when Tyler Lutz—the Dripping Springs insurance agent who provided Boz Gentry’s life insurance policy—was stabbed to death in his home by an unidentified assailant. At this point, there are still lots of questions, and not many answers.”

  They cut to a taped interview with an older uniformed man identified by a caption as the county sheriff.

  “We’re in the early stages of the investigation and have been in touch with several other law enforcement agencies in the area. Meanwhile, if anyone has any information, we would really appreciate it if they would give us a call.”

  Someone off camera—a reporter—asked a question that was not audible.

  “No,” the sheriff said, “the landowner is not a suspect. He allowed us out here without a warrant, and he has no connection with the deceased whatsoever. What we have here is a piece of property that is used as a day lease for dove hunters, which means there have been hundreds of people out here in just the past few years. All of them are familiar with the property itself, and with the proximity of the tank to the road.”

  Dove hunting. That explained the shotgun shell I had seen in the mud last night. Boz Gentry was a hunter. So was Alex Albeck and most of Gentry’s other friends. I didn’t know much about dove hunting, but I knew that the agricultural flatlands east of Austin were good dove hunting territory.

  Had Boz Gentry hunted that property before? I was pretty sure landowners were required to keep lease records. There would probably be a paper trail that would answer that question. I had a feeling that the answer was yes, and that when Boz had needed a place to dispose of Erin’s body, the tank had come to mind.

  When the news report ended, Mia repeated what she had said last night. “We should have followed the car. That’s my fault.”

  “It is not. We both made the decision. We assumed Erin was driving the car. How could we have known what was really happening? Besides, if we had followed the car, we probably wouldn’t have found the body. That tank is more than 200 yards from the road, and the tracks would’ve been gone. We would have driven out there and found nothing.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was still staring at the TV.

  “Mia?”

  Now she looked at me.

  “Second-guessing yourself is a waste of time,” I said. “Take it from an old pro. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.”

  I grinned, just to make her grin back, and she did.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said.

  “You hungry yet?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, then what say we take a look at that hard drive?”

  I am admittedly weak in the area of computer forensics, and by “weak” I mean that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is not a skill I employ often in my line of work. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t search the cloned version of Erin Gentry’s hard drive in a sensible, methodical fashion. I had all day. Literally. And the next day. And the day after.

  And Mia would be helping, because we made a second copy of Erin’s hard drive for Mia to explore. She was working on her desktop computer in her home office, while I set up on her couch with my laptop.

  What to do first? Start with the obvious. Browser history, of course. Erin’s preferences were set to maintain her history going back a full year, which was convenient. I started on the date of Boz’s “death” and went backward from there. I spent a solid hour checking the websites Erin—or anyone else using the computer—had visited.

  Tedious doesn’t begin to cover it.

  Erin liked to browse a lot of online shops. Hundreds of them. Clothing. Shoes. Purses. Home furnishings. A lot of high-end stuff. She appeared to spend hours every day just surfing. This seemed to be as true eleven months ago as it was one month before Boz Gentry disappeared. It wasn’t new behavior, so she wasn’t necessarily browsing with the thoughts of a big financial windfall in her future. If she had ever visited a single website that discussed insurance fraud, her history didn’t show it.

  Emails were next.

  There weren’
t as many as I would have guessed. Maybe she was more of a texter. I scanned a bunch of them until my eyeballs were tired. Then I used the search bar to hunt for keywords, such as “insurance,” “fraud,” and “Lutz.” There were plenty of emails back and forth between friends and family members discussing the situation—not just the alleged accident and Boz’s “death,” but the denial of benefits and the resulting police investigation. But not a trace of anything that might reveal a conspiracy, or even a one-person crime on Boz’s part. And no discussion of Boz’s affair with Candice or Erin’s affair with Tyler Lutz. Didn’t mean much. She could have deleted incriminating emails immediately after she sent or received them.

  “How’s it going in there?” I called out.

  “Glad we don’t do this every day,” Mia called back.

  It went on from there. There are thousands of places on a computer where a person can hide a file or folder. And I’m pretty sure there are software programs that can hide those items in such a way that a guy like me could never find them. Or a person could leave a folder in plain view, but use password protection strong enough that it would take an expert to gain access.

  Would Erin do that? Would she have known how? She didn’t strike me as a tech-savvy power user. What about Boz? I hadn’t seen any indication that he regularly used that particular computer.

  At about two o’clock, Mia said, “Just sent you an email. A photo.”

  “Pornography?” I asked as my laptop dinged with an incoming mail.

  “Ha. Pretty close.”

  I clicked the email and took a look. “Yowser.”

  It was a selfie of Tyler Lutz and Erin Gentry on a speedboat. You could only see Tyler’s face and bare shoulders, but Erin was several feet behind him, lounging, stomach down, on the front deck of the boat in a thong bikini and no top.

  “Is this the only one you’ve found like this?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “In the Mail Downloads folder.”