Footprints of the Dead (Tom Gabriel #1)

by Tim Ellis

  “We’d better stay in here for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “The light in the corridor is still on.”

  “I need to pee.”

  He sat down with his back against the cold metal of the door. “That’s not something I need to know.”

  “Don’t think I’m going to pee in here while you’re watching.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  “How long do we have to wait?”

  “Have you got any string in that bag?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can see how long it is.”

  “Have you ever thought about stand-up?”

  “Do you think I’d be a success?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Has the light gone off yet?”

  He leaned forward. The door opened, and light speared through the crack.

  “Does that answer your question?”

  “I suppose.”

  ***

  Monday, September 17

  It wasn’t until quarter past midnight that the light in the corridor went out. While they’d been sitting in the room, intermittent banging and scraping had told them that there were still people in the basement, but because of the steel door, they’d been unable to decipher what the sounds were. At one point, they heard a noise similar to a metal rolling door on the back of a truck closing.

  While they were sitting on the floor waiting, Rae took out her tablet again, brought up Chapter 493 of the Florida Statutes, and helped him to review for the exam in the morning.

  “I need to find a toilet,” Rae said when they were standing in the corridor.

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I don’t think that question needs an answer.”

  “Be careful then.”

  She headed toward the stairs.

  He switched the corridor lights back on. What the hell were gallery employees doing here past midnight? Were they gallery employees? He was making the assumption that they were, but they might not have been.

  As he strode to the far end of the corridor where he’d seen the two men arguing, he tried all the doors – every one of them was locked. There was a door with a ramp in the far wall, which looked as though it led outside.

  Not helpful. He had the jimmy with him, but he didn’t really want to start forcing doors. First, he’d see if he could find the keys.

  He headed toward the stairs and met Rae coming the other way.

  “Did you find one?” he asked her.

  “You bet.”

  “Let’s go upstairs. All the doors down here are locked.”

  “You could have said that before.”

  “I didn’t know before.”

  “This being an art gallery and all, I’m surprised they don’t have security guards, CCTV, and –”

  “Crap!”

  “What?”

  They’d stopped halfway up the stairs, and she turned to stare at him.

  He was getting really sloppy. “I should have checked when we were in the gallery.”

  “But we’re not in the gallery now, are we?”

  He sighed. “Of course not! They probably won’t have any of those security measures in this part of the building.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Rae said, carrying on up the stairs.

  “Keep your eyes open for small, red flashing lights high up,” he said.

  “CCTV cameras?”

  “And movement detectors.”

  “Okay.”

  The first door they tried was unlocked. Moonlight shone through the windows. The room appeared to be an open-plan office. There were five desks with chairs, computers, and a bank of four filing cabinets on the left side of the room against the wall.

  Although the moonlight allowed them to see the shapes inside the room, it didn’t provide enough light for anything else.

  He wanted to switch the light on, but it was too risky. What he needed was a flashlight.

  “Look what I’ve found,” Rae said, shining a powerful beam in his face.

  Covering his eyes he said, “Thanks for that.”

  “Sorry.”

  He took the flashlight from her.

  They made their way through the room from desk to desk, but there was nothing of interest.

  “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “You have no idea, do you?”

  “I will when I find it.”

  “Great.”

  The next door had Manager – Virginia Moran painted on the outside. It was locked. He jimmied it. There was no time for niceties anymore. It was twenty past one.

  There was a key safe on the wall. He jimmied that as well. Helpfully, there was a floor diagram. The basement door keys were tagged B1–B13. He took them all.

  “Let’s go back down to the basement.”

  In the basement, the very last room they went in contained some interesting items. There were three camp beds with blankets that appeared to have been recently used. An assortment of boys’ and girls’ clothing – t-shirts, jeans, shorts, dresses and underwear – and a pink backpack containing a diary with a pony on the front stuffed between the wall and an old wood cupboard.

  Tom opened the diary to the inside cover, which showed the girl’s name, age, and address: Katherine Everett, age eight and three-quarters, who lived at 1547 Cherokee Ranch Road, Holly Ridge, 32117. He put it on the floor in front of the backpack. “Take a photograph,” he said.

  Rae took out her tablet and switched it on again. “Katherine Everett isn’t one of the twenty missing children, is she?”

  “No.”

  “So, why am I taking a photograph?”

  “I have a funny feeling.”

  She took the photograph.

  “Take more pictures of the camp beds and the clothing,” he directed her.

  “You don’t think . . . ?”

  “I don’t think anything yet. All I know is that we’re in the basement of an art gallery, and we’re investigating the disappearance of twenty children. We find a room with three camp beds inside, an assortment of children’s clothing, and a backpack and diary belonging to an eight-year-old girl. What should I think?”

  “That maybe there’s a link to the missing children?”

  “We have a series of links. First, there’s the ninety-second telephone call between the gallery and Oscar Gilbert. Then there’s a second link between Gilbert and Osip Lemontov, and a third link between Lemontov and Mercy Hebb, who was investigating the missing children and has now disappeared. We call that an evidential chain.”

  Rae finished taking the photographs, and sat down on one of the camp beds with the tablet on her knee.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have an idea.” She typed in: Katherine Everett missing, but no report of a missing girl by that name appeared. “No, that didn’t work.” She picked up the diary and flicked through the pages. “No wonder, the last entry is dated July 4, 2001.”

  “Independence day ten years ago.”

  “Listen . . .

  “Dear Diary, Mom and me are going to the carnival today. Jack Reisner will be there. Maybe he’ll kiss me again like he did at school. I think – maybe in a year – I’m going to marry him.

  “. . . How sad is that?”

  Tom grunted. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Katherine Everett may very well be twenty-one now – the same age as you – and still living at home with her mum. She might have come here to the gallery for a visit with her mom, and this bag and diary are lost property.”

  Rae made a clucking noise with her mouth. “I never thought of that.”

  “She might very well have married Jack Reisner when she was nine years old and have ten screaming kids now. So, let’s not jump into the pool of conclusions until we know exactly what happened.”

  “Ya got to admit though, it looks
suspicious.”

  “The only thing I have to admit is that it’s late, I’m tired, and we should go. Put the diary in your bag. We’ll go and visit Katherine’s mom and find out what happened to her daughter and why the backpack and diary are here.”

  He used the thirteenth key to open the door at the end of the corridor that led outside. They had to walk all the way round the building to get to the car park, and his Dodge was the only vehicle there.

  As they drove back to the hotel, Rae said, “Ya know, if Katherine Everett went missing on Independence Day in 2001, that means we’re not looking at twenty missing children over five years, we’re looking at God knows how many children over twenty-one years or longer.”

  He didn’t reply. He’d done the calculations, and it was something he didn’t want to think about while he was tired.

  ***

  He woke up with no idea where he was. Mabel was standing on the right side of the bed staring at him. Rae was on the left.

  “I’ve been shaking you for ages.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know if you old people can remember things from one day to the next, but you have an exam at City Hall in half an hour.”

  He sat upright. “Half an hour! We’ll never make it. Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

  “Excuse me, do I look like an alarm clock? I’ve only just woken up myself. You’re a grown up now. It’s your responsibility to get yourself up for school.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “You haven’t got time for breakfast.”

  “I can’t do an exam without breakfast.”

  “Okay. Well, you need to ring that woman and let her know you ain’t coming in to take that exam and ask her when you can take it again.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I will be.”

  “Get out, so I can get dressed then.”

  She turned to go. “Thanks for waking me up, Rae. Oh, you’re welcome, Tom. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Rae. Neither do I, Tom.”

  “And put some coffee on,” he called after her.

  “I don’t recall applying for the job as your maid,” he heard her shout through the closed door.

  He looked at his watch. It was just coming up to five past ten. It took ten minutes to drive to City Hall. He had fifteen minutes to get ready. God, he hated being late for anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been late – probably when he’d been at the university – if then. He threw some clothes on, swilled his face in the bathroom, and drank two mugs of coffee.

  There was a traffic snarl-up. He was three minutes late. Satan’s little helper – Luisa Beer – was just closing the door.

  “Just in time,” he said.

  She stood in front of the closed door like a rock that had formed over millennia.

  “I don’t think so. You’ll see that the door is closed. That means you’re late. Late people aren’t ‘just in time’ as you so quaintly put it: they’re late. Late people don’t get past Luisa Beer under any circumstances. I recall you . . . you’re that ex-policeman with no manners. Someone who thinks he can barge into working people’s offices, ride rough-shod over their feelings, and do as he damn well pleases.”

  He tried to shoulder past her to open the door, but she leaned into him like a defensive tackle.

  “Carry on, Mister. I’ll just call security, and then you’ll never be allowed in this building again. Any ideas about you getting a PI’s license you can forget.”

  Rae pushed herself between the two of them.

  “Look, Mrs. Beer,” she said in a voice that could have been poured straight into a treacle jar and sold to people on vacation. “Mr. Gabriel is trying to find twenty missing children. He needs his PI’s license to do that. Please let him in, so that he can take the examination.”

  “You think I don’t have a heart? You think I don’t care about missing children?”

  “I didn’t say that. Would a hundred dollars open that door?”

  “Oh, so after everything else has failed, you decide to try and bribe me.” She opened her mouth as if she were about to call for security.

  “Two hundred?”

  “Make it four hundred, and that door might very well open on its own.”

  Rae looked at Tom.

  He nodded.

  Luisa Beer opened the door.

  He went inside. There was no one in there except an old man who was the adjudicator.

  He turned to tell Luisa Beer exactly what he thought of her, but the door closed in his face.

  “You must be Thomas Gabriel,” the old man said. “I’ve been waiting for you. Take a seat, and we’ll get this show on the road.”

  Sighing, Tom sat down at a desk. He’d been out of the game for far too long.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “How was it?” Rae asked him when he came out of the examination room fifty minutes later.

  “It went okay.” He looked around for Luisa Beer. “Where’s Lucifer’s little helper?”

  Rae was sitting cross-legged on a bench with her tablet on her knee, and grinned. “Gone back to her office. She said for you to bring the four hundred bucks along just as soon as you’re ready.”

  “I bet she did. The bitch. I should report her for taking a bribe.”

  “Then you’d never get your license, and don’t forget it was me who offered it, and you who agreed to it.”

  He had to go to the bank again. Because it was Monday morning there was a line, and it took him three quarters of an hour to do the round trip. He had to get four hundred dollars for Satan, and another five hundred for Jane Cooper. He was being fleeced. Just because he was old and decrepit, people were taking advantage of him, relieving him of his hard-earned savings, bleeding him dry. If he’d had any sense, he’d have called the cops.

  Having learned his lesson, he knocked on Luisa Beer’s door and waited. While he waited, he imagined bursting into her office like an avenging angel, grabbing her by the throat, holding her against the wall, and making her sign his PI’s licence.

  Instead, he shuffled his feet like a naughty schoolboy for about three minutes, until her voice slithered through the cracks in the old wooden door.

  “Come.”

  He entered and handed over the money.

  “How nice,” she said. “A charitable donation.” She took the money and slipped it into her handbag.

  His mouth opened of its own accord.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  Turning on his heel, he left. His final act of defiance was to leave her door open.

  “We have to meet Jane Cooper in an hour,” Rae said to him when he reached reception.

  It was five past one.

  The devil had stolen his morning.

  “I have to eat.”

  “I just knew you were going to say that.”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out. I’ve had no breakfast, and it’s lunchtime.”

  “You seem a bit grumpy today.”

  “Only a bit?”

  He decided to drive to Saragossa Street first and parked around the corner from the Java Internet Cafe on Cordova Street. There was enough time to eat before meeting with Jane Cooper’s alter ego – one half of Bactrian – so they walked round to the mall and went in Doctor Moreau’s Diner.

  “Strange name,” Tom said.

  “You’ve never read the book The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells?”

  “Not that I recall. I’ve never been much of a reader.”

  “Beats me what you do with your downtime.”

  “What downtime?”

  Tom had the all-day brunch, considering he’d missed breakfast, and it was his favorite meal of the day. Rae had the veggie burger with a side order of chili cheese fries.

  “I didn’t know you were a vegetarian,” he said to Rae.

  “I’m not.”

  “Keep the coffee coming,” he said to the waitress as she was filling his second mug.

  She smiled, but
her eyes were vacant.

  After the meal, they met with Jane Cooper outside the Internet cafe.

  She passed Rae a handful of paper and then directed her grasping hand toward Tom. “Two hundred and fifty please.”

  He was about to give her the whole five hundred, but then stopped himself. “That’s not our agreement.”

  “You can give me the five hundred if you like, but I only want two fifty.”

  His eyes closed to slits. “Why?”

  “Oscar Gilbert is not very nice. I hope he dies a horrible death all alone in a very dark place. So, I’m happy to do the work for half price.”

  He wasn’t going to quibble, and gave her two fifty. “What’s it about?”

  “Gilbert has three computers: one at work, one at home, and a secret one.”

  “What do you mean ‘a secret one’?” Rae asked.

  Tom was quite happy to leave all the talk of computers and Internet activity to Rae. He wouldn’t have had the first idea about what questions to ask.

  “He’s tried to keep it clean, so that there’s nothing on the computer that ties it to him, but he used one of his own credit cards to buy something about two months ago, and that’s stored in memory – it’s his, all right. He logs onto the computer as JerryQ – whether that means anything, I don’t know. He spends a lot of his time on child porn sites and has a computer full of illegal pictures and videos.”

  “And that’s all in the paperwork?” Tom asked.

  “Yes. I’ve been thorough, made annotations. It’s all there.”

  “What about his emails?”

  “He has two accounts – one as himself, and one as a number – 15. They’re in the paperwork, but the emails he sends and receives as number 15 don’t make a lot of sense . . . to me anyway. They might to you, but I’ll leave you to look through them. You know where I am if you’ve got any questions or you want me to do anything else.”

  Tom made a raspberry noise with his lips.

  Jane smiled. “I won’t charge you so much next time. Returning customers always get cheaper rates.”