As he talked, he thought about Quinn tracking him down and making this connection with Gloria. What else did Quinn know and what would she tell this woman? Right now Gloria was basking in the newfound intimacy of what Beaufort had convinced her was a common enemy. She would believe the lie because she wouldn’t want to imagine where the truth might lead. But what would happen if he had judged Gloria wrong? That business about challenging him and how he spent his time, having his own friends and ignoring hers. Was she respecting him enough? If not, one of them would have to go, and that would be complicated. Complicated if he had to find another place to live.
Complicated if Gloria didn’t show up for work.
Thirty
The Miata was still under warranty so I took it in the next day, with Carlo following behind in his old Volvo. The Volvo had lost its AC some years before, and I was grateful this was the winter so he wouldn’t bake all the way down to the dealership near the Tucson Mall and both of us bake all the way back if I had to leave the car there. The brakes didn’t fail again, but tired as he was after being up late on Kitt Peak, he still insisted on coming.
They weren’t busy, so while the mechanics checked out the car we waited in one of those smelly waiting rooms that apologizes with bad coffee and grimy televisions you can’t turn off because they’re mounted high up on the wall as if they fear you’ll run off with them, or worse, change the channel.
When they called my name Carlo and I both went to the repair window, where I anticipated hearing what was wrong, but the guy who managed the customer service desk said the brakes checked out okay. The name on his shirt said HAL.
“But they failed, Hal,” I said.
“They’re fine,” he assured me, his face with the expression of a cabinet nominee at a confirmation hearing.
“I was driving down from Kitt Peak and they went out. Do you understand? No brakes. Nada. I could have been killed.”
Hal gave Carlo a How do we put up with this? look. “Lady, it’s like being a doctor. If you come in and tell me you passed out and I do a brain scan and don’t see anything, what can I do?”
“The brakes failed,” I said.
Carlo added, “False equivalence.” Which made both Hal and me look at him like he wasn’t helping.
“Maybe you just did something wrong,” Hal said thoughtfully, rubbing at his face with the back of his knuckles the way men do when they have facial hair, which Hal did not. “Or maybe you had a plastic water bottle wedged under the brake pedal. That happens sometimes. And then you panic.”
“I don’t panic,” I said. “And I know how to drive very well. And there was no water bottle in the car.”
“That will be eighty-nine dollars for the diagnostic,” he said, having run out of logic.
“Fuck you,” I said, at the same loss.
“Come on, lady,” he said. “I’m not a mechanic, I just do the paperwork. Don’t give me a hard time.”
“Then let me talk to the mechanic.”
He gave Carlo another put-upon look, but Carlo just smiled. So Hal left and brought back a guy wiping his hands on a greasy towel like they always do. He must have been warned, because he didn’t meet my eyes, at least not in a consistent kind of way.
“Hi, Phil,” I started, reading his name on his shirt and not wanting to startle him.
“Hi,” he said.
“You checked my brakes?”
“Yes,” he said, cautiously, as if it was a trick question and answering wrong might set me off somehow.
“And there was nothing wrong with them?”
Phil glanced at Hal. “Nothing,” he said.
“They failed on an eight percent incline coming down Kitt Peak. Then I got to the bottom of the mountain and they worked fine. They haven’t stopped working since yesterday, driving around town.”
Phil shook his head sadly, as in, what a strange and complex world it is. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anything out of him with his boss giving him the stink eye. Said boss tried to get me to pay for the diagnostic again, and I tossed the paper back at him, saying they hadn’t diagnosed shit and besides, the car was under warranty.
I said, “Now, Phil, given that I’m a really experienced high-speed driver, and the floor mat wasn’t wedged against the brake or anything like that … are you ready for this next question?”
Phil nodded.
“Under what circumstances could brakes give out on a car that’s less than a year old?”
Phil gave it all his thought. He looked to the right and the left. Then he looked straight at me like he’d just remembered the answer to the test question. Then he shook his head no.
“Come on,” I said. “Tell me whatever you’re thinking no matter how crazy it feels.”
Phil said, “The only thing I can think of is that someone could send an SMS message using the OBD II dongle.”
I vaguely knew that he was talking computer jargon, but I never had much to do with the guys in the internet crime division unless it had to do with distributing pornography. So Phil’s words made about as much sense as listening to someone say nick-nack-paddy-wack-give-a-dog-a-bone. Hal could see it on my face and smirked, thinking the old lady would now go quietly.
I stood my ground and said, “OBD stands for—”
“On-Board Diagnostics.”
“And SMS—”
“Short Message Service.”
“As in sending some sort of wireless message. Like text messaging.”
Phil said, “That’s correct.”
I didn’t need to ask what a dongle was because I had enough information to figure out that with all the computer software they install in cars these days, it’s possible for someone to hack wirelessly into your braking system and put it temporarily out of order.
I said this.
Phil acknowledged that was what he was getting at.
“Ma’am,” Hal started. “Are you going to say that someone hacked into your car intentionally and disabled your brakes?”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “But you might. You’re going to call the manufacturer and find out if there have been any recalls for this reason. And then you’re going to call me to bring the car back in and check to see whether the on-board diagnostic computer registers such hacking.”
I left Hal glaring at Phil, waiting for me to be out of earshot so he could start yelling about lawsuits. Poor Phil.
Now, if my job hadn’t made me sort of a suspicious person to begin with—not talking paranoia—I would have ignored this angle, simply hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. As it was, I thought about the other car that had been on the road down the mountain with me, the only person within a mile, a driver who could have been the one to put my brakes out of commission temporarily. Who drove off in a hurry when he thought I was getting out of my car. Who was that man?
With the evidence in hand, that someone had staged a burglary at my house looking for some information … the strong possibility that someone had tried to kill me on the mountain … I could only reach the conclusion that someone was after me.
After me. Goddammit, isn’t that the conclusion anyone would come to?
Thirty–one
They didn’t have everything that I needed at Home Depot, so I ordered the rest online and had it shipped two-day. I also made an appointment with a company that could replace the windows in the back of the house with unbreakable ones.
Because I had my contacts but no control over priority, it also took that long to get a callback from David Weiss. Weiss was a forensic psychologist who would retire from the profiling division of the FBI in another year or so. We had those nicknames for each other that can only develop when you’ve known another person for decades. He called me Stinger.
“Hey, Sigmund,” I said.
Turns out it was a clean print, and it wasn’t Gloria Bentham’s.
“I was able to have the print you sent me run against IAFIS,” he said without preamble, how’s life and all that. That’s how Weiss is
, not high on the emotional intelligence spectrum.
“Anything interesting?”
“It matches to the booking print of a Jeremiah Beaufort. Precisely three bookings, as a matter of fact. He was one of those poor shmucks who were part of the Three Strikes and Life deal that Clinton signed during the war on drugs.”
“So what’s he doing out of prison?”
“That new thing they were doing for nonviolent criminals with overlong sentences. He was commuted and released.”
“Are you able to track him to Tucson?”
“His current whereabouts are undetermined. All I can say is that he was released a little more than three months ago from Mississippi State Correctional Facility. I did a superficial check on him and find him operating under the radar, no record of him buying a plane ticket or anything big. No car. Not even a credit card. Which makes one wonder what he’s doing that he doesn’t want to be found. Now tell me. What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time, my old buddy? And what will you do for intel after I retire?”
“Where was he charged those three times?”
“Let’s see. We got one in Mississippi … the first two were in Florida. So he was operating in the Southeast. I realize you worked for the Florida Bureau office for a while, but you were never involved in drug trafficking investigations. And he doesn’t seem worth your time. He’s a very petty criminal, nothing violent. Seriously, Stinger, what do you have to do with this man?”
“I don’t know. I only know he’s now in Tucson, living somewhere within walking distance of our house. He made casual contact with Carlo first, and has been working himself into our favor like a regular con artist. I questioned my instincts at first, but with what you’ve said about him I don’t think his showing up is a coincidence, or that he’s just your garden variety con. Stuff has happened, a burglary, what may have been attempted murder.”
“Murder. Who?”
“I think he’s after me. I just have to find out why. Where in Florida was he picked up?”
“Hm, offshore between Tampa and Sarasota. That was the second time in Florida. The first time was just on a small possessions charge, but at that time you could get five years. The second he was suspected of already dropping off his load of cocaine he’d gotten from a boat coming in through the Gulf. But he didn’t get a longer sentence that time because all they found was some residue in his boat. Three years that time.” Weiss moved on to something he did not already know. “So tell me, how is everything by you? Has your psychopathic niece tried to poison the dogs again?”
Weiss had been of moderate assistance when I thought Gemma-Kate was trying to kill me a while ago. At the time he was convinced of it, and it was partly his fault I nearly died, but you don’t hold things like that against old friends. “Gemma-Kate is doing fine, keeping up with her classwork, and I told you I’m certain that poisoning thing was just an accident. She’s actually been helpful with this Beaufort, trying to profile him.”
“As in ‘it takes a killer to catch a killer’?” he asked.
“Stop. She says she’s never killed anyone. At least not for fun, and only if they truly had it coming. At least not in a long time,” I joked back.
“All in the family,” Weiss said, and it stopped being a joke. “Did you know that forty percent of our behavior is genetically determined?”
I considered bantering, but the Beaufort thing was more interesting.
“One more thing,” I said. “Where was Beaufort born?”
“Pascagoula, Mississippi.”
“That’s funny, he told Carlo he was baptized in Kansas City.”
“That could happen. People move around.”
“Maybe not. In those days a good Catholic had a baby baptized within the first week so they wouldn’t end up in limbo if they died. I doubt they would have rushed him from Mississippi to Kansas for a baptism.”
We exchanged a few more pleasantries about budget cuts and politically motivated layoffs, who was still there. We didn’t say any names because you never knew when calls were being recorded. It went something like:
“Mr. Manhattan?”
“Gone.”
“Good, he was a dick. What about Rising Star?”
“Still rising and with considerable power. She’s with Homeland Security now, connections to the TSA. Not a big enough fish to get on anyone’s sonar for termination. It doesn’t hurt that she was always good at keeping her opinions to herself.”
“Plus that’s one department they won’t be defunding any time soon. Tell her I said hi.”
“Are you serious? She wouldn’t want me to know that you know her.”
Then we lied about how swell it would be to see each other again, and hung up.
With his prison record it was easy to find his mug shot; make that plural because of his several arrests. In shot after shot I could see him aging from his middle twenties to late thirties, and confirm my guy was Jeremiah Beaufort. After that it got harder. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any trail after he left prison three months before. No credit cards, no bank accounts. As Weiss said, this was a man who was flying under the radar, cash only, which made me wonder how much of it he had and how he got it.
His birth certificate corroborated Weiss’s finding that he was from Pascagoula, Mississippi, but records were scanty when I tried to access his background there. I kept coming up with one of those messages: Removed from public view in accordance with restrictions of Mississippi Privacy Act. There was something there they didn’t want me to see, probably a document that mentioned a juvenile.
What did you do, Jeremiah Beaufort? Or what was done to you?
Only the last drug charge was brought in Mississippi. The first two were in Florida, before the drug wars started in earnest and the entire Florida coastline was open for business. When things got hot there he must have moved up the coast before he was snagged the third time and put in for what everyone would have assumed was life. As far as any violent crimes were concerned, he was clean.
Jeremiah Beaufort may have been good in the drug racket. Maybe he thought he was smart, because he managed to avoid the greater charges for which he was guilty. The investigative report had him as a suspect for running cocaine from Nicaragua by boat to the Florida Keys. He was in charge of the operation after the lead guy, a Guatemalan, was “lost in a boating accident,” and Beaufort could have amassed a tidy fortune that nobody was ever able to locate in any offshore account. But in actuality it was no harder, and maybe it was easier, to ply this trade in the seventies. Millions of tons got through, hundreds of dealers were never caught. The investigators could never prove the major deals, and settled for getting him twice on possession and once on selling a couple of ounces. But in the end it didn’t matter, he still got life.
So Jeremiah Beaufort would consider himself a criminal mastermind. But here’s the thing that doesn’t take a professional profiler to deduce:
A smart guy doesn’t get caught three times.
Hunting a smart professional is like playing chess. There are certain prescribed moves you can predict more often than not. But dealing with someone who thinks he’s smarter than he is, well, that guy is more like sitting down with someone to play chess, and he starts playing Candy Land, and you can’t call him a jerk and walk away, because he’ll kill you. He doesn’t know that killing someone in law enforcement, retired or not, is a stupid move, and should be avoided.
No, of all the possible chess moves you might expect from a seasoned pro, all you can be certain of is that the stupid criminal will do something else because he doesn’t know any better. And that is liable to get you dead, or someone else who you really don’t want dead.
But all that said, just because someone is a crook doesn’t mean they’re after me, necessarily. Could be he was a scumbag low-life, a mooch, and an abuser, but that didn’t mean he was after me. Him running into us, that could just be a co-inky-dink.
* * *
I mounted the motion detecto
rs in the front and back entryways while Carlo was at another meeting with Elias Manwaring and the science professor whose name I couldn’t remember. This was good because Carlo would have offered to help and he is not really as good as I am with either ladders or power tools.
I tested the motion detectors, which came equipped not only with football stadium lights guaranteed to illuminate the front and back yards for twenty-five feet out and to the sides, but also were connected to a closed circuit camera. This might sound high tech, but it’s no more than parents are using with nanny cams. Everything was working. I was not content, closing the barn door after the cow … but no use crying over … I managed to stop my mother’s platitudes from ganging up on me before I went any further.
All the outdoor stuff was battery powered, but electrical wiring, I must admit, is not among my gifts. Luckily someone was available to come out the same day and install the indoor security. His ringing the doorbell set off the pugs, who bounced their bodies sideways against the screen door. When I answered the door he shouted over their barking, “I probably shouldn’t mention this, but you couldn’t have better security than these guys.”
“These guys? They’re pugs. Who’s afraid of pugs?”
“There are too many houses without dogs to take any chance going into one with. They might alert the neighbors. They might be small but they still have teeth. On top of that, you have two of them.”
I didn’t bother to tell him that we’d already been broken into and they hadn’t helped much that day. For the first time I wondered why not. Probably because the house is so well insulated the neighbors wouldn’t hear the dogs barking, I thought first. Then I thought, so why didn’t it deter the vandals, thieves, punks, whatever they were, the way the alarm guy said they would? Then I thought, who knew us and the pugs well enough not to leave the house alone and go to one without dogs, where there was no chance of being attacked?
We Were Killers Once Page 16