Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  “Wait, wait, stop it there,” I said. “Can you go back?”

  “Yeah, hang on.”

  Bobby Ray monkeyed with the footage until he got it to the right spot, then set it at normal speed. The blur had been a van with a decal on the side, backing down my driveway.

  “What did it say on the side?” I asked.

  “Dunno. Let me see if I can get it when it came in.”

  He kept rolling the footage back until he reached 1:01 p.m., which was when the truck had arrived.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Let me pause it.”

  He brought the van back on the screen, then froze it there, allowing me to make out the words.

  A1 Valley Plumbing

  Bonded * Licensed * Free Estimates

  “When you have a drip, we drop everything.”

  (800) GET VALLEY

  It looked like a perfectly legitimate service van, except for one small detail.

  I hadn’t called a plumber.

  SIXTEEN

  Amy Kaye had been playing this out in her head ever since the idea first occurred to her during that restless time after two a.m.

  It had been rattling around in there during General District Court, through the arraignments, the speeders, and the drunks. It had even been somewhere in her mind when she got the surprise that was seeing Melanie Barrick’s name on the docket for a bond hearing relating to assault charges.

  Now here was the conversation she had been mentally preparing for all day.

  “All right, Amy,” a sheriff’s deputy said. “We’ve got Warren Plotz waiting for you in the conference room.”

  “Great,” Amy said, already walking away from the detective’s bullpen at the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office, where she had been bantering with one of the investigators. “Did he give you any trouble?”

  “Not a bit. We told him it was voluntary and he practically leapt in the car. He seemed pretty excited about it, actually.”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  This was her middle-of-the-night brainstorm: She wasn’t about to approach Warren Plotz head-on about the two-decade string of unsolved sexual assaults in which he was now the primary suspect. There was too great a chance he’d spook and run.

  But she still wanted to size the guy up, to look him in the eye and see what she was dealing with. Maybe she’d catch him in a lie or two she could use against him later. Maybe she’d even get more than that, if he fell into the trap she had planned for him.

  And Melanie Barrick, of all people, had given her the perfect excuse to be able to come at him—not head-on, but from the side.

  “Mr. Plotz,” she said as she entered the conference room. “Thank you so much for coming in. I’m Amy Kaye with the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.”

  In person, he was the same slightly stocky guy she had seen on Facebook. The douchebag aviator glasses were perched atop his brown hair. He wore the chunky watch on his left wrist.

  Otherwise, she was seeing how he could have eluded so many women’s description. He had no scars, no tattoos, nothing unusual about his size or shape that stood out. It was almost like he went out of his way to be average.

  She gave him what she felt was a professionally appropriate smile and a firm handshake.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said easily.

  “Pick a seat, any seat,” she said casually. She wanted this whole thing to feel as informal as possible. He sat at the end of the table. She sat across from him and placed a blank legal pad in front of her. Then she tilted back in the chair.

  Again, casual. According to Virginia statute, he didn’t need to know about the digital recorder she had just started.

  “So, I’m sure you’ve heard about the raid on Melanie Barrick and what was found in her house?”

  “Everyone in the valley’s heard, I think,” he confirmed.

  “Right. So, as you’ve probably already guessed, we’re investigating Ms. Barrick’s role in what appears to be a major drug distribution conspiracy. At this point, we’re trying to get a full picture of her activities. I really appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Sure.”

  And then Amy coughed. Just once. She wanted to start slow.

  “Anyhow, how long has Ms. Barrick been employed with Diamond Trucking?”

  “Uhh, it’s prolly been, like, three, four years now? I’d have to check with my bookkeeper.”

  Amy jotted this down on the legal pad. What she didn’t write down—but certainly noted in her mind—was that he hadn’t said “the” bookkeeper or “our” bookkeeper. It was “my” bookkeeper.

  He was insecure but trying to make himself seem more important. Just like a power-reassurance rapist would.

  “And what is her position there?” she asked.

  “She’s a dispatcher.”

  “So . . . she tells the trucks where to go, where to pick up their next load, that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah. That sort of thing.”

  “That means she has a lot of interaction with all your drivers. She knows all of them, talks to them all regularly?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Right,” Amy said, nodding. Then she added, as if it were an afterthought: “Oh, I should also probably ask you, what’s your position at the company?”

  “Uh, I guess you’d call me vice president.”

  Amy was sure no one called him anything of the sort. But again, it was worth noting.

  “And how long have you been employed with Diamond?”

  “It’s my family’s company, so I basically grew up there.”

  “A long time, then,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve always worked on the administrative side?”

  “Naw, I was on the road for a lot of years. I felt like it’d be good experience to learn the business from the ground up, you know?”

  “Oh, that’s smart,” Amy said. “So when did you shift to the office?”

  “Uhh, I’d say twenty eleven, twenty twelve, something like that,” he said.

  Bingo. It was just as Daphne Hasper said: Warren Plotz got off the road right around the time the whispering rapist stepped up the frequency of his attacks. And now she had him saying it on a recording.

  Amy coughed again. Twice, this time. She didn’t want to oversell it. “Excuse me,” she said.

  Then she resumed: “Would you say Ms. Barrick has been a good employee? Punctual? Reliable?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she always did the job. She just always acted like she was better than everyone else; like, you know, she was just lowering herself to work there. My dad, he was all into her, because she went to UVA. . . . I guess you could say he had an old-man crush on her.”

  “I can understand that,” Amy said, trying to sound objective. Then she tossed out some bait, to see if he would rise to it: “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

  Plotz didn’t bite. “Not my type. I like ’em with a little more meat on their bones.”

  He grinned at her. His eyes darted up and down Amy’s body, which was full-figured. She had to suppress a shudder.

  She should have known he’d be too cagey to indicate he was attracted to one of his victims. He was so relaxed, sitting there in the sheriff’s conference room, gabbing easily with the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney.

  “So your dad liked her,” Amy said. “But you didn’t.”

  “Yeah. To be honest, none of this surprises me. I always thought she was hiding something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess it was drugs, obviously.”

  With that, Amy launched into a coughing fit, this time going at it until she was sure she was a bit red in the face. />
  “You know what? I’m sorry, I think I need a soda or something,” she said, then tossed in: “You want one?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Crap.

  “You sure? My treat. Come on, it’s not every day I offer to buy a guy a drink,” she said, adding a wink.

  Amy, the woman with a little meat on her bones, couldn’t believe she was flirting with a suspected rapist. Anything to get the job done.

  And it worked.

  “Uh, all right,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “They got Sprite?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right back.”

  Amy rose from her seat and left the room. She found herself breathing a little hard as she went to the vending machine. This was the part she had been thinking about since the small hours of the morning. And it was working out the way she hoped.

  She got Sprite for him, Coke Zero for herself. Then she returned to the conference room and slid the can in front of him. Like, you know, no big deal.

  Then she sat, cracked open her soda, and took a long drink.

  “Ahh,” she said. “That hit the spot.”

  Plotz didn’t touch his.

  Damn. She put her Coke Zero down next to her legal pad, then continued.

  “So you thought Ms. Barrick was hiding something.”

  “Right.”

  “Did she ever attempt to sell you drugs?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Did she ever try to sell drugs to any of your other employees?”

  “Not that I know of. But I’ll definitely ask.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now, this next question is . . . I know it might be a little difficult for you, given that this is a family business. But as you know, an eighteen-wheeler is a pretty big piece of real estate. There have been many documented cases of truckers using them to smuggle drugs around the country. We’re looking into the theory that’s what was happening here. Do you think it’s possible Ms. Barrick’s supplier is one of your drivers?”

  This actually wasn’t a theory at all. She just wanted to make Plotz feel thirsty.

  He grimaced. “I don’t know. Our guys, they’re pretty clean. They’re family men, for the most part. And a lot of them have been with us for ten, twenty, thirty years. They’re not the sort to go around doing something like that.”

  “Still, think hard. You have a lot of drivers, do you not?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s not one that might try to make a little something extra on the side? Maybe someone who didn’t come from around here, who might have connections elsewhere—especially in Texas or Florida. A lot of cocaine enters the country in those two places.”

  He stared off at the wall for a moment. Then, finally, Amy got what she was waiting for. He reached for the Sprite, popped the top, and took a long sip.

  As he took it away from his mouth, Amy could see a small strand of saliva—brimming with DNA—stretching from his lips to the can.

  SEVENTEEN

  After he loaded the pertinent computer file onto a thumb drive for me, Bobby Ray asked if I wanted to stay for a beer.

  I politely declined, making noises about how I still needed to tidy up after the deputies’ rampage through our house.

  What I really wanted to do was figure out who was behind A1 Valley Plumbing and what prompted that person to bring poison up my driveway and into my life.

  He persisted, but my references to government overreach eventually triggered his sympathy. He led me out with assurances that if I required his services again, all I needed to do was ask.

  I now felt silly for having built Bobby Ray into a menace. Yes, he was a crackpot who shunned basic housekeeping, liked pornography, and kept a large cache of weapons—all choices I wouldn’t necessarily condone or make for myself. But he was also a friendly man who was willing to help a neighbor in need. It turned out the basket of deplorables wasn’t as irredeemable as some might make it seem.

  Walking back toward my place, I remembered I was still locked out. It would be a few hours before Ben got home. But this now struck me as an excellent opportunity to simulate the first obstacle that would have faced the A1 Valley plumber after he reached the top of my driveway.

  How hard was it to break into our house? It had been constructed in the 1950s, a more guileless time when doors and windows were not made as impregnable as they are now. We also didn’t have a security system.

  Still, the front door handle was locked. That was pickable for someone with the right tools. But we also had a deadbolt. I didn’t think the A1 Valley plumber could have overcome that without leaving major damage to the door.

  Then I moved on to the window to the left of the front door and was immediately stunned.

  It wasn’t locked. How was that possible? Had we really been that careless? Or had the mystery plumber jimmied it open and then left it that way in case he felt like coming back?

  There was no way to tell. I slid it open and climbed into the house, just as anyone else with a mild amount of dexterity could have done. I closed it and locked it behind myself.

  As much out of frightened curiosity as anything, I then went around to look at all the other windows. They were all locked. But obviously it only took one.

  Once I completed my sweep, I sat down on the couch with my aging laptop and plugged “A1 Valley Plumbing” into Google.

  The first hit was a plumber out in Ohio, though it had a different name. There was also an “A1 Plumbing” in California that might or might not still have been in operation.

  Next I tried “A1 Valley Plumbing Staunton, VA.” This led to a variety of pages offering to connect me with plumbing services, most of them weird aggregating sites that were clearly run by algorithms and just missed in their attempts to seem like they had been written by humans.

  Then I tried Angie’s List. And Yelp. And a domain registry search. And the State Corporation Commission. I went with different combinations of words, even different spellings. In every instance, none of what returned to me remotely matched.

  As far as the combined knowledge of the world wide web was concerned, an enterprise known as A1 Valley Plumbing did not do business anywhere, and certainly not within the state of Virginia.

  It was clearly a fraud, a company that existed on a decal and nowhere else.

  Confirming my suspicion, I dialed the 800-number listed on the side. I was soon connected to an adult entertainment line.

  That made it official. To borrow Teddy’s phrasing, someone was messing with me.

  Merely allowing the thought to take root made me feel like I must have been suffering from some paranoid fantasy. I took enough psychology at UVA to know that people with persecution complexes are usually suffering from either schizophrenia or extreme narcissism.

  And yet there it was, bizarre but true, as plain as the video I had just seen.

  Thinking about that footage made me want to watch it again. I plugged Bobby Ray’s thumb drive into my laptop and saved the file onto my desktop. I clicked it, and before long the van was driving up my driveway. Then, sixteen minutes later—most of which I fast-forwarded through—the van was backing down my driveway.

  Up, then down. Up, then down. I played it backward and forward. I played it in real time and slo-mo. I freeze-framed it so I could study it more carefully. Bobby Ray’s home-cooked system wasn’t very high resolution. When I zoomed in on it for a closer look, all I got were big, blobby pixels that quickly became indistinguishable as discrete lines or objects.

  The angle wasn’t helping me either. Bobby Ray hadn’t been trying to capture my driveway, just his own side lawn. I couldn’t see the top of the van, nor the front, nor the back.

  So no license plate. And the only look at the driver was a fleeting glimpse from the side. He appeared to be an angular white
man with a buzz cut.

  But he did have one distinguishing feature: a scar running along the side of his head. You couldn’t really tell where it started, but once it crossed into his scalp, it stood out as this thin, vivid white line where the hair refused to grow.

  Who was he? Why had he felt the need to obliterate my life?

  And how could I find him? Surely, a man with a scar that distinctive would be memorable. But what if he wasn’t from around here and had already gone back to wherever he came from?

  I ran the footage back and forth until I got the best picture of him I could, then grabbed a screenshot and emailed it to Teddy. If this plumber was someone involved in the drug world—and he had to be if he had access to a half kilo of cocaine, right?—then there was a chance Teddy, with his checkered youth, might have bumped across the guy.

  Who knows? If he turned out to be a real lowlife, maybe my deficient lawyer, Mr. Honeysickle—or whatever his name was—would actually start trying to defend me.

  “Do you know this man?” I wrote in my message to Teddy. “I think this is who broke into my house and planted the drugs there.”

  I watched the video a few more times until I decided I had seen it enough to know I hadn’t missed anything. I needed to get a grip on myself. I also, after three long days of accumulating sweat and grime, needed a shower.

  Like a lot of people, I think well in the shower. There’s something about it—the soothing feeling of water striking skin, the warm haze of the air, the ritual of cleansing—that helps eliminate the noise of the world to focus instead on the signals that are trying to break through.

  It was in that calming environment that I again asked myself the question: Why? Why had this nefarious, scar-headed faux plumber come up my driveway? What was so important or significant about me that made me worth this much effort?

  I was stumped. I wasn’t a threat to anyone. Framing me as a drug dealer and getting me tossed in jail didn’t make anyone’s life better. Who needed me out of the picture that badly? What did I have that was even worth taking?