Footprints of the Dead (Tom Gabriel #1)

by Tim Ellis

Mabel never smiled. In all the time he’d been in the apartment, Mabel’s face had remained impassive.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He slid the gun under the pillow. “Yes?”

  The door opened. Rae stuck her head through the gap. “I’ve made breakfast.”

  “Burnt toast?”

  “Take it or leave it. Who were you talking to?”

  “Myself.”

  Opening the door fully, she edged into the room barefooted. She had on a pair of boxer shorts and a lilac-colored, sleeveless vest that left nothing to his imagination. “There are dead people in here, aren’t there?”

  “One or two.”

  “I don’t know how you can sleep at night.”

  “Did you sleep okay?”

  “Once I finally dozed off,” she said, sitting on the end of his bed.

  “Well, there are three dead people living in that utility room.”

  She scrutinized his face. “Liar. You’re just trying to frighten me.”

  “The dead can’t hurt you. There’s certainly no reason to be frightened of them.”

  “What about ghosts, ghouls and things?”

  “Still nothing to be frightened of.”

  “Are you coming for breakfast?”

  “Once you get the hell out of my bedroom, so I can put some clothes on.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re embarrassed about all that saggy skin and stuff.”

  “Don’t be shy, tell it like it is.”

  She grinned.

  After she’d left, he slid out of bed and shrugged into his dressing gown. Carrie had said he needed to find the missing children. He wasn’t really looking for them, he was looking for Mercy Hebb. Maybe . . . if he found the children, he’d find Mercy. And he had to protect the butterfly. Well, there wasn’t anything cryptic about that.

  He sauntered into the kitchen and said, “No coffee?”

  “I thought I’d leave that to you.”

  “Good decision. If the toast is anything to go by, you’d have wasted my expensive coffee.”

  “Always good to find a grateful customer.”

  “Anyway, you don’t have to make breakfast while you’re staying here. I go to the hotel restaurant. I have my own table. They know just what I like and how I like it.”

  “Okay. We have to go to the police station after that, don’t we?”

  “I’m afraid so. If we don’t, Mona will hunt us down.”

  “Is it all right if I have a shower?”

  “Of course it is. I need to have at least two cups of coffee before I can face the day, so you take a shower. I’ll get mine afterwards. Then we’ll have a proper breakfast in the restaurant, and mosey on down to the station.”

  “Maybe we should let the police handle it from now on?”

  “Can’t do that. You and those children are my responsibility now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I say.”

  ***

  After breakfast, he drove Rae to the station.

  Mona’s face was like a sour grapefruit. “I thought you said you’d bring her first thing in the morning, not halfway through the afternoon.”

  “I could have brought her at eight o’clock this morning, and you’d still have found something to complain about, Mona.”

  “Probably.” She called over the new man – Matt Morgan – whom he’d seen last night and said to him, “Take her to look at the mug shots, and I want an accurate statement of what happened last night.”

  Rae looked at him.

  “Go on, you’ll be all right.”

  After she’d gone he said to Mona, “How are you this morning?”

  “No better for seeing you. And don’t think I don’t know that you’ll carry on looking for that reporter regardless of what I say. But let me tell you here and now that if I catch you, I’ll lock you up and charge you with obstructing a police investigation.”

  “I thought we were friends, Mona.”

  “Yes, we were friends, and we still could be friends if you go back to being retired. But if you keep doing what I know you’re doing. then we’re going to fall out big time.”

  He pointed to a row of chairs by the wall. “I’ll sit over there, shall I?”

  “Good idea. Stay out of my way.”

  He couldn’t blame Mona for being the way she was with him. If he was in her shoes he’d probably be exactly the same. Life as a detective was hard enough without having to second-guess a civilian retiree on an investigation. He couldn’t stop now though, Carrie had made sure of that. “Protect the butterfly and find the children” – those were her instructions, and he’d always done what Carrie had said.

  Who was the second man? Rae had caught a glimpse of him, which made them both targets. No doubt the second killer would be back. What about the telephone number? If he’d still been working here, he could have got someone to check it out, but he didn’t still work here. All he could do was phone the number, but what would that tell him? He could imagine different scenarios:

  “Fred’s Autos on King Street. How can I help?”

  But they probably wouldn’t say any of that. It would be more like:

  “Yeah?”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “You tell me, you rang the number.”

  Or:

  “Yeah?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  No, if he rang the number, he’d probably scare them off. He needed to find out who and where another way. Maybe Rae could do something with that tablet she had.

  Then there was the address book. They needed to go through that page by page. There was a lot of telephone numbers in there as well.

  Maybe he should leave it to Mona. He was a dinosaur, as Harry and Rae had said. The pace of technology had left him behind. He’d only just got the hang of the telephone. He felt inadequate, ill-equipped to face what lay before him. He’d been happy before Gretchen Hebb had knocked on his door. He should have directed her to the police station and closed the door in her face. Now, there had been two deaths, he had no door on his apartment, he’d fallen out with his ex-partner, and he had a butterfly trapped in a net.

  “Mona?”

  “I’m trying to work here.”

  “Apparently, I require three people to vouch for me when I apply for my PI’s license. Will you be one of them?”

  “You’ve got a nerve. So, you’re going ahead with it?”

  He walked over and sat by her desk.

  “When I lost Carrie, my life was over. I didn’t see any point in working just for the sake of it. Trouble was, I loved my job as well as Carrie. So, I had to cope with a double loss . . .”

  “Come back then. I’m the Detective Commander now, but I’ll let you make the tea.”

  “Very kind, but it’s been too long. I’m too old, too out of touch, and too long in the tooth to put up with the political and bureaucratic shit again. So, I’m gonna be a PI and see where that takes me. Will you vouch for me?”

  “For old time’s sake, but what I said before still holds – you get in my way, and I’ll find a nice dark cell for you to live out your old age.”

  “Thanks, Mona. Will you warn the Chief he’ll get a request as well?”

  “You’re outstaying your welcome.”

  He wandered back to the row of chairs and sat down. Best get the PI and gun application forms in. If he was gonna do it, he’d better do it right – as the song went.

  He’d have to get Rae onto those encrypted files. Had the twelve-year-old decrypted them yet? And what about the computer code on the Post-it Note – what was that all about? Was it even connected to the missing children? Yeah, he and Rae had some work to do. And best not forget about his other job. If he kept disappearing for days on end, he’d find himself without anywhere to live.

  Chapter Seven

  Detective Morgan kept Rae for over two hours, and when he brought her out, Tom could see she wasn’t happy.


  Once they were outside, she said, “I’m never going in there again. He kept asking me the same questions over and over again. I thought I was going to die of boredom.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they do. I suppose I should have warned you that they’d do that. It’s to try and trip you up. People who lie forget their lies and get confused. Did you recognize anybody from the mug shots?”

  “Do I look stupid? No need to answer that. I recognized him all right, but I wasn’t going to say.”

  He couldn’t really blame her. He hadn’t told Mona about the same two men he’d seen at Billy Hall’s in the first place. Maybe if he had, the killer would still be alive.

  “Well, it’s over now, and we’ve got our own things to do. Climb in. I just want to check something out.’

  While he was dozing in the station, a stray thought had jumped into his head. He walked around the SUV and looked underneath. Eventually he found a magnetic transmitter under the nearside rear wheel arch.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and held it up.

  “A bug?” she said.

  “That’s how those two killers knew where we were going all day yesterday.” He tossed it out of the window into the street to be crushed by the wheels of a passing car.

  “Now they know that we know,” she said.

  “I think after you killed one of them last night, they have a pretty good idea that we know they’re interested in us now anyway.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Okay, we’ll go to City Hall first, I have two application forms to hand in.”

  She smiled. “Ya gonna do it?”

  “Yes, I’m going to do it.”

  Pulling the two crumpled forms out of her rucksack, she said, “Ya need to sign on the dotted line.”

  He ran his eyes over the completed boxes. “You know more about me than I do.” He signed and dated both forms, and passed them back to her.

  “You seem less grumpier today.”

  Once he’d pulled into a gap in the traffic, he said, “I get days like that, but they’re getting fewer and fewer, and shorter and shorter. It always comes back, you know. The doctors say that there’s no hope for me. Before too long, I’ll be the grumpiest person in the whole of Florida, America, maybe the whole world.”

  Rae laughed. “You’re crazy.”

  “They tell me going crazy is one of the symptoms.”

  It wasn’t far to City Hall, which was housed in a small part of the Lightner Museum. The building hadn’t always been a museum though. It used to be the Hotel Alcazar, which was built in 1887 in the Spanish Renaissance-style. Tom remembered when he and Carrie brought Misty and Sara to the museum a long time ago – when Carrie had been alive, and they’d been a happy family. Inside, Otto C. Lightner had stored his American Victoriana. The girls had been amazed at the stuffed exotic birds, the Egyptian mummy, a golden elephant with the world on its back, and a shrunken head.

  “You want to stay here?” he asked her when he’d parked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She came in with him. He could see she was nervous about being left on her own again. Until he got to the bottom of this case, it appeared as though he had two shadows. This case! All of a sudden it was a case. In the space of twenty-four hours, it had metamorphosed from a favor into a case.

  At the reception he was directed to Room 17 along the ground floor corridor.

  The door was ajar.

  He pushed it open and stepped inside. It was no different from a thousand other offices with overflowing filing cabinets, mounds of paper, stacks of files, shelves of regulations, and a gatekeeper guarding the opening to hell.

  “You got no manners?” a woman said looking up from reading a piece of paper on her desk. Her grey hair was plaited into a ponytail, and there was enough of it to fill two mattresses. The hair looked heavy and had probably pulled her face into a permanent scowl.

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  “You will be if you don’t go out and knock like normal people.”

  “Oh.” He backtracked, pulled the door shut on himself, and knocked.

  There was no answer.

  He knocked again.

  “I heard you the first time, Mister. You think I’m deaf? You think I’m sitting here waiting for you to knock? You think I got nothing else better to do than wait for people with no manners to barge into my office?”

  Rae giggled behind her hand.

  He pushed the door open.

  “Did I say come in?”

  He was beginning to wish he’d never retired. If he’d still been on the force, he would have arrested her for obstructing a police investigation, thrown her in the cells with the prostitutes from the harbor area, and let her get a taste of how life really was.

  He stepped back out and pulled the door shut again.

  “You may as well come in now seeing as you can’t wait for me to say come in.”

  No wonder so many public officials are murdered, he thought. He pushed the door open again, stepped inside, and waited patiently in front of her desk. He’d learned how things went around here now.

  Her name was Luisa Beer, and this was her domain. If you didn’t follow her rules, you were on the highway to hell. She could make your application forms disappear into the sulphur pits very easily. They’d become lost for eternity, or even longer.

  She held her hand out, but didn’t look up.

  He slipped the forms into her cloven hoof.

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find these on a rubbish pile?”

  “No.” He could have said more, but he knew if he did, he’d end up in a padded cell at the psychiatric hospital.

  After checking that each part had been completed to her grim satisfaction, she said, “The next compliance examination is on Monday morning at ten thirty in Room 8 on the opposite side of the corridor – make sure you’re there, and don’t be late.”

  “When will I hear about my licenses?”

  “Oh, this afternoon, I guess. Yes, we’ll rush these through for you, you being an ex-policeman and all. Let’s forget the rules, forget the letters of recommendation, forget the scrutiny committee . . . In fact, why don’t I just tell you now, and then you can . . . ?”

  “One week? Two weeks? A month?”

  She shouted to the head of a non-existent queue behind him. “Next.”

  He guessed it would take as long as it took. “Thank you for your help,” he said and made sure to shut the door as they left.

  “She was funny,” Rae said.

  “Hilarious,” he agreed. “I couldn’t stop laughing.”

  It was quarter to one.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked her.

  “I guess you are.”

  “Being retired is hungry work.”

  They walked along the road to the Moments Cafe. There was an intense-looking young man playing Sinatra songs on a baby grand piano, the floor was dark wood, and the chairs were hard.

  Rae ordered the potato skins stuffed with Jack and cheddar, bacon, spring onion, and a sour cream dip. He had the tomato bruschetta drenched in parsley, grated Romano, and shaved Parmesan.

  He took a mouthful. “Have you checked your emails?”

  “If ya hadn’t noticed, I’ve been kinda busy.” She pulled out the tablet and switched it on.

  “You can eat your lunch first, if you want.”

  “Very kind.”

  The waitress came over and filled their mugs up with coffee. She had short, red hair, a purple polo-shirt, and a painted-on smile.

  He realized that if it wasn’t for Rae and her tablet, and the knowledge she possessed of technology, he wouldn’t have got off first base. He was a dinosaur. A creature from another age trying to adapt in an unfamiliar world – adapt or perish – that’s what they said, but hadn’t the dinosaurs already perished?

  “Yeah, got ‘em. That girl is good. Two documents here. One is a purchase receipt for an a
bstract oil painting called ‘The Smile’ by Archer Cranbourne for $25,000 . . .”

  “Is it made of gold?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Does it say who bought it?”

  “No, but we can go to the art gallery and easily find out, I suppose.”

  “Which art gallery?”

  “The Antonio de Natali Gallery on Columbus Street.”

  “Okay. What about the other document?”

  “It’s a scanned copy of a torn page from a book of accounts.”

  He took a drink of coffee while he waited.

  “Nothing more,” Rae said. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s all there is.”

  “Who do the accounts belong to?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “What’s been bought or sold?”

  She turned the tablet towards him. “Take a look.”

  He peered at the screen. Where the date should have been, there was a jagged edge – the page had been torn from an accounts book. Details of the income and expenditure appeared to be in some form of code. The income started with two letters and ended with two numbers: AZ78, BG93, KL40, and so on. Expenditure was the other way round: 62YG, 21MD, 69LA. With each, – a sum between $25,000 and $45,000 – was recorded. There were brought-forward figures at the top, and carried-forward figures at the bottom. Whatever was going through these accounts was significant.

  His first thought was money laundering. The purchase of a painting and a coded accounts book were indicative of dirty money. If he’d still been on the force, he might have been able to ask someone, but he wasn’t. He had to stop thinking like a police detective. There was no backup to call on, no experts to ask for advice, no forensic analysts to put the evidence under an electron microscope, and nobody to pick up the slack. He was on his own – except for Rae with her tablet – and he had to start thinking and doing things differently – adapt or perish.

  “What do you think?”

  “Me?”

  “Have you got no thoughts?”

  “Mafia.”

  “My thoughts as well.”

  Rae smiled. “Really?”

  “Yes, really. There’s one problem.”

  “Oh?”