IF SHE RAN

by Blake Pierce

  Kate had used countless different security interfaces before so learning this one was rather simple. The set-up was only one screen, one view, but it was from the right edge of the property, taking in nearly the entire parking lot. The manager had brought her back to 5:30—six minutes before the so-called Adam Smith had checked into Room 202. Kate fast-forwarded through the next few minutes, stopping whenever she saw a car park in the lot. There were two that parked in front of the motel between 5:30 and 5:36. One was a man dressed in a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks. Another looked to be a mother and her young daughter, aged ten or so. Other than those two occurrences, there was nothing. She went back to the 5:30 mark and watched the entire thing again, this time at regular speed. She thought maybe someone had simply walked up. But after watching the footage, all she saw was a stray shadow that seemed to pass beneath the camera’s angle. It could have been a person, she just wasn’t sure.

  Kate walked back out of the office, joining the manager back behind the desk. On the other side of the lobby, a policeman was interviewing the clerk in the hoodie—the man Kate had spoken to when she’d come in to get the key.

  “Excuse me,” Kate said as she walked toward the manager. “On the footage, I see a mother and daughter pair and then a single man that park, get out of their cars, and come into the office. I never see the man that I found upstairs. Can you check your logs and see how many people did indeed check in in those six minutes?”

  “I’ve got it up right here,” she said, pointing to her laptop. “I figured that would be the next thing you ask. There were three rooms that were checked into during that time. Two of those rooms were the mother and daughter and the single man. The third was Adam Smith.”

  “Did you check him in?”

  “I did.”

  “Can you describe him for me?”

  The manager took a moment to think back, shrugging. “Nothing special about him, really. Mid-fifties, I guess. Slight scruff on his face but not really a beard. Plain hair. Nothing special.”

  Kate nodded. She was describing Malcolm Z. Beringer to a tee. “Do you know if he was carrying anything?”

  “I didn’t take notice, honestly. I don’t recall anything.”

  Kate stood there a moment, thinking. A man like Beringer would know to be aware of security cameras wherever he went. She wondered if he had parked somewhere nearby and walked to the motel, perhaps coming up along the side and walking very closely along the exterior walls. If he’d come in from the left side of the building, this would have just barely put him out of range of the security camera.

  But the question still remained, even if he managed to get into the motel undetected by the cameras: who had he met with and how did they get in unseen as well? Did they go in with Beringer? If both parties were being careful, that was the most likely scenario.

  She thanked the manager for her assistance and then headed back outside. The little makeshift base had mostly broken up. A few officers remained by a single car while another was upstairs along the breezeway, standing guard by the door. Kate assumed that Detective Pritchard had already left to take the laptop from Beringer’s apartment. She made her way upstairs, the man by the door nodding to her and stepping aside.

  “We’re okay to the call the coroner now,” she told him. “I think the body has told us just about everything it’s going to tell us.”

  “Sure,” the officer said and headed down to join the others.

  Kate opened the door to Room 202 and stepped inside again. She retraced her steps from before, observing the room as slowly and as methodically as possible. The manager said she had not seen whether or not Beringer had been carrying a suitcase or bag and as far as Kate could tell, he had not. There was no luggage of any kind in the room.

  She stood by the door, taking the size and dimensions of the room in. She looked to the TV and the small dresser it sat on. She looked to the bed and…

  She paused there. She had noticed the sheets had been slightly unmade the first time she had looked the room over but now they seemed a little more relevant. The untidy nature of the sheets indicated that someone had done more than simply sit there. The bottom sheet was pulled tight and the top sheet—what passed for a comforter at the Comfort Inn, apparently—had been pushed hard to the left. It might seem flimsy to most but as far as she was concerned, that was evidence of a struggle. And that meant that Zeus Beringer had not simply walked blindly into the room and had someone unload on him. There had indeed been some sort of meeting before he was killed. Kate kept going back to the four shots, scattered almost randomly, and was certain the killer had been someone who was not a pro.

  If we find out who killed him, that’s going to lead to all the right answers, she thought. And even though there were no hard solid links, her gut told her that at the bottom of it all would be the answers she was looking for in the Jack Tucker case.

  Now, as Pritchard was looking into the laptop and the gun was being run for prints, there was nothing for her to do but wait.

  ***

  Once the coroner arrived, Kate drove to the local precinct to see what she could do to help expedite the process. As she made her way to the front desk, her phone went off in her pocket. As she answered it, she snuck a glance at the time and was surprised to see that it was already nearing eleven o’clock. She wasn’t tired at all now, sensing that there were answers on the horizon.

  She was delighted to see that it was DeMarco. “Hey, DeMarco. You didn’t get caught assisting me, did you?”

  “No. And I’m actually calling to let you know that I’m about to get on yet another plane and head to New York. It seems Duran doesn’t quite trust you and wants me to watch after you.”

  “So you’ll be my babysitter?”

  “I know you mean that as a joke, but he’s really pissed, Kate.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “Anyway, I also wanted to let you know that we’ve still got a team working on the cell phone records. However, we did manage to already get a criminal record on one Malcolm Zeus Beringer. He’s a bad dude, that’s for sure—or, was, I guess. A few B and E’s from a young age, two stints in minimum security for basic brawls. Busted about fifteen years ago for carrying an unregistered weapon. He was the suspect in a murder that took place in Albany five years ago but there was never enough evidence to convict.”

  “Any word on what the unregistered weapon was?”

  “A plain everyday nine millimeter. Nothing special. Anything moving there?”

  “Detective Pritchard is looking into the laptop I found in Beringer’s apartment. I think that and the cell phone records are going to be our best bet.” She then took a moment to fill DeMarco in on the state of the body and the room—as well as the discovery of the Ruger just beneath the edge of the bed.

  “Yeah, it sounds like a match,” DeMarco said. “Just know this: if you’ve solved this thing by the time I get there, I’ll consider this a wasted trip.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration.” Her phone dinged at her while it was held to her ear. She took it away from her ear, glanced at it, and saw that it was a text from Duran. Cellphone records complete, it read. Check your e-mail.

  “Gotta go, DeMarco. Duran just texted. Beringer’s cell phone records are on the way.”

  “Good luck with that. See you soon.”

  They ended the call and Kate walked quickly to the primary front desk in the lobby. Behind the woman at the desk, the precinct was buzzing lightly with pre-midnight activity.

  “Can I help you?” the woman at the dispatch desk asked.

  “Yes,” she said, showing her ID. “I’m Special Agent Wise, working homicide with Detective Pritchard. I have some documents I need to print out from my phone and need access to a printer.”

  “One moment.”

  The woman picked up her landline and buzzed someone elsewhere in the precinct. While she waited, Kate did as Duran had instructed. She pulled up her email on her phone and found a new mail w
ith an attachment, straight for Duran’s account. She opened the mail, then the PDF attachment, and waited as it loaded.

  “Agent Wise?” the woman at the dispatch desk said. “Right this way.”

  And with that, Kate was led down the hall and toward a small private office. The dispatch worker handed her over to a tech operator in charge of the dispatch network and had her up and running within five minutes, right down to a loaner laptop.

  She smiled for just a moment, as a memory of Michael surfaced in her head. He’d always teased her about how when she got really down to the grit and nails of a case, she seemed to have the demeanor and hard-set attitude of all of those New York detectives that were all over primetime TV. And now here she was, working out of an office in a New York City precinct. If there was a heaven, and Kate was of the opinion that there just might be, she hoped he was getting a good glimpse of this.

  It was just the bit of motivation she needed as she pulled the cell phone records up on the precinct’s borrowed laptop and dove further into whatever secrets Zeus had been hiding.

  Secrets she hoped would help her to close not only the Tucker case, but the Nobilini case, thus finally closing a very open scar on her career.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It took her less than fifteen minutes to understand that the phone records may prove to be worthless and yet another ten to feel all but confident that they had been a waste of time. As she finished looking over them, fully prepared to pull at least a handful of very weak leads from it, there was a knock at the door. She looked up and saw Pritchard standing there.

  “You got a sec?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He entered the room and, without another seat to take, simply stood against the wall and showed her the laptop under his arm—the same laptop she had seen when she had been looking through Beringer’s apartment.

  “All the laptop tells us is that Beringer had a soft spot for Asian pornography. While his history does show recent visits to Craigslist, his email history shows that it was to partake in the NYC singles ads. But here’s another thing. He’s got the Tor browser downloaded on his computer. He went to some fairly decent lengths to hide it, but it’s there.”

  “Tor…that’s dark web stuff, right?”

  “Yeah. Tor is the most popular darknet software out there. And naturally, because of the way it works, we’re going to have a really hard time figuring out what sort of sites he was visiting.” He chuckled and pointed at her. “That’s usually where you and your bureau friends come in handy.”

  “Is having the software enough to safely say that Beringer was a hitman?”

  “In a perfect world, sure. But you have to realize that the dark web is very accessible these days. Any curious thirteen-year-old can get on just to look around. There’s a whole movement of YouTube people going on just to snoop around and film it. So no…having a darknet browser isn’t enough for us to make that assumption. But between the evidence we have, including the exact same gun used to kill Jack Tucker, plus the fact that he visited the darknet with some regularity…I’d say it’s enough to continue looking into him.”

  “So is that it?”

  “Yes. How about you? Any luck with the cell phone data?”

  She shrugged and showed him the printouts. “He only made two calls today. One was to his brother in Florida. And you can see on the records that it’s a call he made at least once a week. The other call I had to actually call myself to see who it was. Turns out it’s just a garage in the Bronx. They were obviously closed when I called, so I may go by tomorrow just to make sure it’s legit.”

  Pritchard nodded, folding his arms over his chest. “How close did you come to wrapping the Nobilini case when you were originally on it?” he asked.

  “Not close at all,” she said. “There were no leads, not even a single clue at all outside of knowing the make and model of gun used.”

  “With this Beringer break, do you feel any closer to solving this one?”

  “I just don’t know,” she said. “I feel like it’s moving forward but every single lead I get only takes me to another hopeful moment that, in the end, becomes nothing more than a number to a garage or your darknet software.”

  “It’s tricky,” he said. “Knowing that there has to be some answer at the end of it all but having everything presented to you be so basic and boring.”

  “Yes, it’s certainly no—”

  She stopped here, struck by that word once again. Boring.

  Only this time, when the word sped across her brain, she was able to snag it. Before, whenever she’d heard it and thought it meant something, it would get away from here, nothing more than a fuzzy idea with no real edges or substance. But this time she not only snagged it, but she focused on it.

  “Agent Wise?”

  She ignored Pritchard’s voice, slowly sitting up in her chair and putting all of her attention on the memory that came to her. She gave a small smile of frustration as she fully understood the memory and what it would mean.

  Another case. Yet another case in her past…only this was much farther back than Frank Nobilini or Alvin Carpenter. How long ago had it been, anyway? It felt like another life.

  “Twenty years or more,” she said out loud, answering her own question.

  “Excuse me?” Pritchard said.

  “Sorry. Talking to myself. Detective Pritchard, I’m so sorry, but could you give me some privacy? I have an idea I want to run with and if I don’t get to it now…”

  “Say no more,” he said, opening the door. “I know how it feels. I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.”

  With that, he closed the door as he left, leaving Kate alone with her thoughts. She turned toward the laptop and used her cell phone to place a call to the bureau resource desk for the second time in the last few days. She was pretty sure the voice that answered on the other end was the woman that had assisted her the first time.

  She gave her badge number and location and then, knowing that she’d be in for a long night, requested assistance to remotely and securely access the bureau’s database.

  ***

  The case had occurred twenty-four years ago, when Kate had only been three years deep into her career as an agent with the FBI. She could remember the case well enough, a triple homicide in Georgia, but the names were still muddied by both time and the unreliability of human memory. Therefore, it took her a while to find the case she was looking for. When she opened up the first file, it was like being slapped in the face by her past. The case was old enough to where the only digital files on it were scanned documents and notes, many of which had been written in her own, much younger, hand.

  The first victim had been a man named Jimmy Keenan and then, shortly after, his brother and best friend. The investigation had lasted about three days and in the end, the murderer had turned out to be Keenan’s wife. When asked why she found it necessary to kill her husband, the answer had been simple enough, albeit a little sad and depressing.

  Kate read through it all as she sat at the desk, looking at a scanned picture of the wife’s testimony, typed up almost twenty-five years ago.

  “Married for sixteen years, and you know what the most exciting moment has been for me over the last five of them? The nights when he goes out and plays poker with his friends. That lets me stay at home and do whatever the hell I want, watch whatever I want. He used to be fun and exciting and he couldn’t keep his hands off of me. But lately…he just got very routine. Very boring. Just boring, boring, boring. And when he accused me of not ever wanting to do anything fun…I snapped.

  Then, later on further down the testimony, she went on:

  “Do you know what it’s like to hope day after day that the person you married might resurface? He’d complain sometimes that this wasn’t the life he wanted—not the life he’d envisioned for himself. But he never did anything about it. He just sat in it. But I couldn’t do that. Could not live that fucking boring life. God, what a fucking bore he
was there at the end. You know what? I take back what I said earlier. The most exciting part of the last five years was slamming those hedge clippers into the side of his head.”

  She had then gone on to kill his brother, mainly because he was visiting and out in their garage when she had killed her husband. The best friend, she’d said later, was because he’d attempted to rape her during a Christmas party early in her marriage and when she’d told her husband, he hadn’t believed her.

  Kate read her testimony twice. Boring. Boring.

  How many people had she spoken to who had described Jack Tucker in that same way?

  It might be a stretch, but it felt right…in the same way it had felt right to look into Malcolm Zeus Beringer.

  The mere idea of Missy Tucker killing her husband seemed absolutely ridiculous. Sure, she did not know the woman on a personal level, but she had seen all kinds of grief during her career—both genuine and staged. And Missy had been an absolute wreck.

  Ah, but maybe there are things about her husband she was blind to in her grief, she thought. A few days removed, maybe she’ll be able to offer something more…

  It was worth a shot. Besides…the Zeus Beringer link was looking to come up at a dead end. What other options did she have?

  She sighed, sat back in her chair, and read through the old testimony one more time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Kate met DeMarco at the airport at 5:45 after catching a few hours of sleep at a hotel near the precinct. She filled DeMarco in on everything she had learned since they last spoke, ending it all with the speculations she’d had after revisiting the files from the case in Georgia twenty-four years ago. She did it while fighting off grogginess. Yes, she could spar in a boxing ring and work as a well-rounded agent, but one thing age was not being kind to her about was in regards to sleep. After fifty-five, she apparently needed at least a solid six hours.