Collateral Damage

by Austin S. Camacho

  Janet turned just enough to smile a thank you toward Cindy as she sipped her wine. “Here’s the site I was looking for,” she said. Hannibal saw the words “License Plates of the World” and checked the URL: http://danshiki.oit.gatech.edu/~iadt3mk/index.html. Way too complex to try to remember.

  “Bookmark that, will you Janet?”

  “Will do,” she said. “Now, we’re assuming the car you’re after is registered in the U.S., right?”

  “Yeah,” Hannibal said, sipping his wine. Cindy had chosen a fruity white wine that he knew would lighten his spirits. “So let’s start looking. There’s only fifty of them.”

  Janet tapped a few keys and a group of plates came into view. “I guess alphabetically is as good a way to approach it as any, eh?” she said. “Here’s Alabama.”

  “Nope, way too light,” Hannibal said. “The plate we’re looking for is dark, maybe a real dark blue, with white letters.”

  “And the first three characters are numbers, right?” Janet added, tapping more keys. “Alabama always has a letter in the first three. Alaska’s next.”

  Cindy squirmed down into Hannibal’s lap, getting comfortable. “So did Doc Roberts say what got Dean into the hospital?”

  “Oh yeah,” Hannibal said, kissing her forehead just because it was within reach. “Dean discovered his father’s mutilated body.”

  “Oh God,” Cindy said, moaning as if she herself had seen something awful.

  “He and his dad had been alone in the house. His mother came over but Dean didn’t go to greet her I guess. From another room he heard them arguing, apparently about finalizing their divorce.”

  Janet skipped Alaska, which starts with three letters, and Arizona, which has a light blue plate. “Kids don’t go near when that’s going on,” she said.

  “Roberts says he heard her leave,” Hannibal said, hugging Cindy to his chest. “Then the door opens again, in Dean’s words, like she forgot something.”

  Janet skipped past Arkansas, California and Colorado for color or number combination mismatches. “Maybe she was just getting up her courage.”

  Hannibal wondered if Janet was projecting her own feelings. “For whatever reasons, the next thing Dean heard was a grunt, then something heavy falling to the floor. Then the door slams again.”

  Cindy emptied her wine glass while watching the monitor. “Hey what about Connecticut?”

  Hannibal leaned forward. “Dark blue, light letters, three numbers a dot then three letters. That could be it!”

  “I’ll bookmark this page too, and move on,” Janet said. “So then this kid walks out and finds his father dead, right?”

  Hannibal gave a grim nod. “I’m afraid so. Terrible thing for a boy that age.”

  “You lost your dad when you were even younger,” Cindy commented. She refilled glasses while Janet flipped past Delaware and the District of Columbia, plates they were all familiar with, and glanced at Florida and Georgia plates which were the wrong colors.

  “That was different,” Hannibal said. “I lost my dad to a faceless enemy a thousand miles away. And I didn’t have to see him dead.”

  Janet never turned from the monitor. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa all failed to match Hannibal’s description. “That’s a terrible thing, but does it make him an eyewitness?”

  “That’s kind of where the story gets muddy,” Hannibal said. “Bea told me he never actually saw his mother in the house. But he testified she was there to please his aunt. That probably explains some of his guilt.”

  Cindy resumed her seat. “Sure. He thinks he’s the reason his mother’s in jail.”

  Hannibal watched license plates flash across the computer screen over her hair: Kansas was a loser.

  “What about Kentucky?” Janet asked. “The numbers. Fairly dark at the top.”

  Hannibal leaned in close. “No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember a dot. A dot after the first three numbers. And Doctor Roberts admitted Dean thinks he’s responsible for a lot, including his father’s death and Oscar Peters’.

  Cindy kissed his neck. “You think the two murders are connected somehow, don’t you?”

  Louisiana, Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts were the wrong color. Michigan could have been it, but the plate started with three letters instead of numbers. “Connected? Well let’s see. Stabbings both times. In the victim’s living room at night both times. Knife gone both times. Men in Dean Edwards’ life both times. Dean finds the body both times. Yeah, I’d say they might be connected.”

  Janet fanned past the next five states. Hannibal was momentarily distracted because Cindy pressed her mouth against his and he was enjoying the sweetness of the wine mingled with her kiss.

  “Hey cut that out you two,” Janet said with a grin. “How about this one, Hannibal?”

  Hannibal pulled himself free of Cindy’s embrace and stared hard at the monitor. The license plate was cobalt blue with three numbers and three letters separated by a dot. The raised characters were silver, with a reflective quality Hannibal recognized. That and a number of subtle visual cues he couldn’t name made his heart quicken beyond what the wine and Cindy’s kiss could do.

  “That’s it,” he said softly. “Now we know what state the real killer drove in from.”

  -12-

  WEDNESDAY

  Silver Spring was a community in search of an identity. Like its sister communities

  Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Hannibal thought of it as a growth on the northern skin of Washington, growing up into Maryland, technically independent but too close to call a suburb. Coming in off the capitol Beltway, a driver slid into these cities and could never know he had crossed over into The District if not for signs indicating a change.

  Hannibal had a couple of errands to attend to in Silver Spring, which is tucked into that three or four mile space between the Beltway and the District. In that narrow space it graded rather quickly from affluent suburb to inner city business district as it merged with the narrow dirty streets of Washington. So almost as soon as he was off the highway Hannibal was turning right into an older neighborhood, older but still proud and, to the extent it could be, exclusive. In many ways the neighborhood reminded him of the woman he was here to see, Ursula Voss.

  Janet Ingersoll had verified that this year’s Nevada license plates held three numbers followed by three letters, not counting vanity plates and special plates of course. She promised to check the Nevada motor vehicle database today and give him a printout showing which of the seventeen thousand possible combinations starting with 902 were currently issued in Nevada. In the meantime, he had little to go on to help solve Oscar’s murder. So he decided that he would try to find out more about the death of Dean’s father. Ursula was the most likely source of information there.

  On the telephone, Ursula told him her office was in her home and that she could give him a few minutes if he came fairly early. Less than an hour after that call, Hannibal pulled up in front of Ursula’s house and set his parking brake. The large brick structure was probably forty years old. He’d bet Ursula bought it new at a time when the idea that it would one day be worth a quarter million dollars would have raised a laugh. And he was sure she had lived there ever since. Despite the bay window, the porch was reminiscent of the one on the front of Oscar’s house.

  Hannibal tightened his gloves before he rang the bell. When Ursula opened the door she was wearing a blue flowered dress that could have come off the same rack as the one she had on the day before. A pair of reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck.

  “I’m quite busy Mister Jones,” she said after they exchanged good mornings. “Believe it or not, the tax season’s already underway for us accountants.”

  “I won’t take up too much of your time,” Hannibal said. He took one step over the threshold and stopped. A wave of deja vu struck him and it took him a moment to sort it out. The room was more broad than deep, with a fireplace in the far wall which looked as if it had not been used in dec
ades. Vaulted ceilings kept the room cool and imparted the slightest echo. But it was the decor that struck him. Oscar Peters might just as likely have picked this flowered wallpaper, only different from his in color. The sparse furniture was placed in analogous positions. The standing lamp in the corner, even the drapes on the windows were similar in style to what Oscar had in his house. Hannibal’s eyes dropped to a particular point on the floor. It was a hardwood floor, just like the floor in that other house where Oscar Peters stretched out in front of the door at that exact place and let the blood out of his body.

  “That’s the spot,” Ursula said with ancient hatred. “That’s where Dean found Grant. Is that what you came to see?”

  “No ma’am,” Hannibal said, backing toward the living room sofa. “But it does help me understand what happened to Dean.”

  “And just what does that mean?” Ursula asked in a sharp tone, settling into the love seat, positioned kitty corner to the sofa.

  He meant he saw Dean as a man standing just one step over the knife-edge line separating sanity from madness. He imagined Dean opening the door to that house decorated so much like the house he grew up in and looking down and seeing a dead man lying, for all practical purposes, where his father was that night, his body positioned as his father had been, with all the blood spilled in the same pattern on the hardwood floor.

  “Nothing, Miss Voss,” Hannibal said, forcing the image out of his mind. “I just let my imagination run away with me there for a minute.”

  “Well let’s get down to business,” Ursula said, pulling a silver cigarette case from her purse. “What did you need to see me about?”

  “Actually I came to ask you for a favor, something I didn’t want to broach on the telephone.” Hannibal had expected the offer of coffee or tea but clearly this woman did not intend to make his visit any longer than necessary.

  “I see,” Ursula said, touching the flame from a silver lighter to her cigarette and inhaling deeply. “Unless it will help my nephew somehow, I hardly see why I would be doing you a favor.”

  Hannibal had little motivation to play softball with this hardened woman. “I’ve been hired to try to help him, and I wouldn’t ask anything of you outside that context. But after you told Thompson where he was, I couldn’t be sure how much you cared about Dean yourself.”

  Ursula leaned back as if he had hit her. “What? What makes you think I told him?”

  “Please Miss Voss. Only a handful of people knew Dean was hospitalized, and none of us had any motivation to inform the police of his whereabouts. But then, Thompson didn’t tell you it was his case, did he?”

  “Stan Thompson and I go back a long way, Mister Jones,” Ursula said. “Since he’s working in Virginia now, I figured he could tell me just what kind of trouble my nephew was in. I needed to know what that murdering whore had gotten my poor Dean into. And no, he didn’t tell me he was involved with the case.” She forced the last sentence through clenched teeth.

  “Ahh, Bea must have told you his mother had visited him. I take it you didn’t like her very much, even before Dean’s father died.”

  “That woman was white trash from the beginning. The kind of white trash you find in the hills in West Virginia.” Ursula spoke through a cloud of smoke and Hannibal could almost see the venom dripping off this black widow’s fangs. “Poor Grant was seduced by her wanton body, but we could all see through her. He married her against our will.”

  “Our will?”

  “The whole family was against it,” Ursula said, filling her lungs with smoke again. When she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth, lipstick clung to the filter like a bloodstain. “Wasn’t long before they were arguing violently. Grant, he was too gentle a soul for that and she just ran over him. When he finally came to his senses he and little Dean moved in here. He was the spitting image of the little brother I helped raise, not a drop of his mother’s violent blood in him. That cold-blooded murderess.”

  She had no way of knowing Hannibal had looked into Francis Edwards’ china blue eyes himself, and failed to find a murderess there. “Odd for a cold-blooded murderess to be on the street in ten years, eh?”

  “That trial was a travesty,” Ursula said. “Manslaughter they gave her, not a murder conviction. Her lying trickster lawyer Walt Young convinced those idiots it was a crime committed, let’s see, in the ‘heat of passion,’ I believe is the exact legal term he used.”

  “And just how did he manage that?”

  Here Ursula leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He convinced those sheep on the jury that Grant had another woman. As if my brother would have strayed, even from that lowlife, before his divorce was settled. She admitted she came to the house that night because she got the final papers and was trying to talk him out of it. If only I’d been home. Dean heard them arguing about the divorce. Poor Grant finally stuck to his guns about something and she...she...and poor Dean had to see it.”

  Hannibal wondered why he was not inclined to comfort this woman. “Yes, and Dean told a court that he saw his mother with the knife.”

  “Yes, that’s right. If he hadn’t that whore might have gone free.”

  “So I gather,” Hannibal said. “But Dean now says he didn’t see his mother at all. He lied, Miss Voss, to please the grownups, he says.”

  The drapes were parted, and the blinds threw prison stripes across Ursula’s form. Her mouth held firm but her eyes moved down and for a moment Hannibal let her stew in the silence. When she finally spoke she had left the past behind. “I’m a busy woman, Mister Jones. What did you come here for?”

  “I gather you and Thompson are old friends,” Hannibal said with an edge in his voice. “You wouldn’t have called him otherwise. He thinks he’s got his killer, Miss Voss, but I think he’s wrong. I saw a man running from the victim’s house just before we found the body. But I need time to find him. All I want is for you to ask your good friend the police detective to back off Dean for a few days. Give me time to find the real killer.”

  When she looked up at him he saw indecision on her face so he pressed harder. “You know he’ll accept anything as evidence to prove a shaky case. Give me a chance to find the truth.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  -13-

  The Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club wasn't far from Ursula Voss' home, just off Forest Glen Road. The practice field behind it was a vast space of sparse grass bordered by closely planted oaks whose denuded branches swayed gently, sweeping the underside of the clouds above. Hannibal sometimes wondered why trees planted in a line often seemed to stop at an agreed upon height, forming a clean line at the top.

  The man waiting for Hannibal near the goal post stood with his hands deep in the pockets of a black windbreaker. Hannibal didn't recognize the logo on the jacket, sort of an orange claw striking from under the word “Predators.” The man inside the jacket flashed a bright smile from the middle of a very dark, round face. Even at a distance, he seemed too pleasant to be a football coach.

  “Thank you for meeting me here, Mr. Lee,” Hannibal said, offering a hand.

  “No problem, I've got to be here tonight to run the practice anyway. And please call me George.” The man had a strong handshake that challenged Hannibal to match it. “Now you said you wanted to talk about one of my boys, Ingersoll. Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’m involved in a dispute with his wife,” Hannibal said. “She has asked me to advise her. But if I'm going to be fair I need to know a little more about Isaac.” Lee would probably think Hannibal was a lawyer, which was fine for now.

  Lee nodded and started walking toward the sidelines. “He hit her didn't he?”

  Hannibal followed, enjoying the quiet of the unused field. “I understand he has a problem with his temper. Is that your experience?”

  Lee laughed, turning along the sideline and strolling slowly down field. “Yeah, he's a hothead. But he's a hell of a guy to have on the line. The Predators wouldn't do nearly as well without him. I
just wish he wasn't such a sore loser.”

  “I'm surprised he's even on a semi-pro team like the Predators,” Hannibal said. “I mean, if a guy's too violent for the Redskins, he must be downright dangerous.”

  Lee stopped at the thirty-yard line, turning an eye toward Hannibal's face. “Is that what he told you?”

  “That's what she told me.”

  Lee shook his face at the ground. “Well that's probably what he told her. Too violent? Not sure if that’s even possible. Mister, Ingersoll was cut from the Redskins for the same reason guys usually get cut. He just wasn't good enough. The fact that he didn't get along with most of the guys, well, that was just an added incentive to show him the door.”

  “So is this the usual next step? Drop down to a semi-pro team?”

  Lee turned again, stepping farther away from the street, into the private peace of the football practice field. “Sometimes. If you can play at all, you can usually get a spot somewhere, like the Diamond League where we play.”

  Hannibal looked to the side and imagined Isaac Ingersoll crashing through a line of defenders, racing down the field to crush a quarterback. It would certainly be where he felt most alive, most at home. “I guess a guy like him just needs to play.”

  “Lot of the big guys do,” Lee agreed. “I just hope he comes up with his dues, or else I can’t even allow him to practice with us tonight.”

  The grass must have been mown just that day, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass bringing a gentle smile to Hannibal’s face. “Dues? Is he getting fined for something?”

  Lee spun at the fifty-yard line, one foot erasing the chalk line as he did so. “You don't know a damn thing about football, do you?” Hannibal snapped back, startled by Lee's sudden burst of energy. “You’re looking to get money out of him for the wife, is that it? You come down here thinking Ingersoll’s getting paid for playing.”