The Silent Hour

by Michael Koryta

  "Remember, there are plenty of other ways they could have had contact. Face-to-face, through an associate, e-mails, other phones. All I'm saying is let's not rule Kenny out of the mix entirely. He around—"

  "No."

  "Gone home—"

  "No. He's in the field."

  "In the field, you say— Doing what—"

  "I have no clue."

  Excuse me—

  I told him about the message and said it was the only thing I'd heard from him all day. He responded, as expected, by reaming me for letting Ken head off into unknown avenues of investigation. My patience wasn't strong enough to take it today.

  "I'm not his caretaker, Graham. I don't know the guy any better than you do, and if you want somebody monitoring him, you better get an officer on it. Last night, I told him I was done. That it was time to back off. If he doesn't do that, it's your problem, not mine."

  The words sounded childish, petulant, and that only contributed to my growing anger. It had been directed at Ken originally, for cutting me out, now at Graham for blaming me for that, and only built after I hung up the phone. Another hour passed before I finally forced myself to admit that another emotion was bubbling beneath the surface: fear. I was beginning to hear the first drumbeats of dread. Where was Ken—

  In the next hour, I called his cell six times and got voice mail every time. I left two messages, then called his hotel and asked to be put through to the room. Again, just rings and a voice mail option.

  At twenty till five, I got in my truck and drove to his hotel, went up to room 712 and pounded on the door. No answer. I took the elevator back down to the lobby, stood in the corner, and looked the reception desk over. Two clerks working, one male and one female. I'd talked to a guy on the phone, which meant he'd be more sensitive to Ken's name. Ken had been there a few days, and there was a chance both of the clerks knew him by now, but it was a big hotel, busy, and I thought I'd take a chance. I waited until the guy took a phone call, then approached the woman with a rapid step, feigning great annoyance, and told her I'd locked my keycard in the room.

  "Okay, sir, if you could tell me—"

  "Room 712, the name is Merriman."

  "All right, 712… I've got it. Now, can I see some ID—"

  I gave her my best look of condescending patience, as if I were dealing with a child, and said, "Um, I'm locked out, remember—"

  She stared at me.

  "Wallet's in the room," I said. "I was just running down the hall to get some ice."

  No ice bucket in hand, but she didn't seem likely to notice that or care.

  "Well, I would have no way of knowing that, would I—" Snippy now, offended. She looked down at the computer screen, then over at her co-worker, who was still talking on the phone.

  "I'll just scan you another one, I lung on." She grabbed a blank keycard, ran it through the scanner, hit a few keys, and passed it over. I thanked her and went back to the elevator, rose up to the seventh floor, and walked back to stand in front of the closed door to 712.

  I knocked again, just in case. Nothing. Then I slid the key in, waited for the green light to flick on, and pushed the door open.

  The so-called living room was in front of me, the bedroom beyond it, with the little kitchen jammed in between. Nothing seemed out of place—no corpse on the bed, no blood splatters on the walls.

  Ken's suitcase remained, a pair of pants and a sport coat draped over it. Tossed there casually, the way you would if you knew you were coming back soon. The air-conditioning was humming away even though it wasn't much past seventy outside, turning the room into an icebox. I let the door swing shut, stepped into the cold room, and made a quick circuit through it, looking for anything noteworthy and finding nothing. Housekeeping had already made a pass through—the bed was made and the bathroom cleaned, with fresh towels and soap out. If anything had gone wrong in this room, word would have been out long before I conned my way into a keycard.

  I saw a charging cord trailing from the bedside table to a wall outlet, and that made me wonder if he could have left his cell phone behind in the room, explaining why he hadn't answered. I took my phone out and called his number, waiting hopefully as it began to ring, thinking I might hear it in the room. There was nothing, though.

  As I stood there amid his things, I began to feel intrusive. I had no right to be there, not just from the hotel's point of view but also from Ken's. He'd been gone a few hours, that was all. Hadn't returned my calls yet. That hardly gave me justification to break into his room and go through his things. Now that I was in here, away from Graham's suspicions and Harrison's questions and the collision those things had with my faith in Ken, the sense of urgency faded a bit. He'd turn up soon, and then I'd have to admit that I'd done this and hope he'd be more amused than angry. It would be an embarrassing moment for me. Right then, though, I was looking forward to that embarrassment. By the time I could feel shame over my actions, he'd be back.

  I walked out of the bedroom and back toward the door, then stopped in the living room and looked down at the coffee table. His laptop sat there, closed but with a blinking green light indicating it was still on. There was a blank CD in a clear plastic case on top of the computer. I leaned over and picked it up, read the scrawled Peter Case, CTB written with a black marker across the disc. "Cold Trail Blues." The song he'd promised to burn me, his surveillance song.

  I put the CD into my pocket. Even the guilt I was feeling about breaking into his room didn't give me pause. I don't know why that was. Maybe it was just that I knew the CD was for me. Maybe it was something darker and more instinctive. Either way, I took it.

  I'm glad that I did.

  The day faded to evening, and I went back to my apartment and called Amy, asked her to come by. She picked up some Chinese takeout on the way, and while we ate that together I told her about Graham's call and Ken being MIA. She put her fork down and looked at the clock, and her forehead creased with worry lines.

  "He's not obligated to call, Amy. He's not our kid, staying out past curfew."

  It was forced nonchalance, though, and she knew it.

  "You could call someone else, ask if they've heard from him," Amy said.

  "Who— His ex-wife—"

  That silenced the conversation, but it shouldn't have, because the idea wasn't bad. His ex-wife did hear something before me, when she was called as next of kin and notified that Ken Merriman's body had been found in one of the Metroparks with two small-caliber bullet wounds, one through his heart and one through his forehead.

  The ex-wife heard first, and she gave the police my name. Apparently Ken had spoken of me to his daughter. It was eleven thirty when the phone rang. I was sitting on the couch with my arm around Amy, trying without success to focus on the TV, and for a few seconds before I got to the phone I was sure it would be Ken. They were a pleasant few seconds.

  I wish I could have them back.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Where his life ended, the police weren't sure. They knew only where the body had been found, and at four o'clock in the morning, long after I'd widened their eyes with my list of possible suspects, I stood there alone in the dark.

  Ken Merriman's corpse had been discovered on a short but steep hill near the edge of the tree line in Mill Stream Run Reservation, snagged in a thicket of undergrowth that was full and green with late-spring enthusiasm. There was honeysuckle nearby, the sweet cloying scent pushed at me by a breeze that rose and fell like long rollers breaking on an empty beach. The breeze was warmer than the still air, and damp, a messenger sent ahead with promises of rain.

  At the top of the hill and beyond the tree line, a small field ran across a parking lot. A walking and bike path snaked away from the lot, a silver thread in the darkness. No cars were in the lot but mine, and no traces of police activity remained. The body had been found at eight that evening, and the Metroparks Rangers who interviewed me said they thought it was found soon after it was dumped
. Twenty, thirty minutes earlier and they might've had an eyewitness.

  Instead, there'd been only the discovery, made by two brothers from Berea who'd ridden their bikes down past the YMCA camp with a glow-in-the-dark football. The police had the football now, because one end of its neon green body carried a crimson smear. The kids had tossed it into the woods, where it took one good bounce into the thicket and landed directly on Ken's body. Throw got away from him, the older brother, who was fourteen, told the police. Then he started to cry.

  Maybe I'd come down here to cry myself. Or maybe to rage and swear. Maybe I thought Ken Merriman would speak to me somehow, that alone in the dark in the place where his blood had drained into the earth and then gone dry under the wind I'd be able to feel his presence, understand something about his end and find direction for the justice this required.

  None of that happened. I didn't scream, I didn't weep, I didn't hear any voices of dead men. Instead I smelled the honeysuckle and felt that warm, ebbing breeze and wished that I'd turned Ken away the night he arrived from Pennsylvania.

  Where had he gone, what had he done, who had he provoked— Why was his body out here in the brambles instead of mine— We'd worked side by side on this since he'd arrived in Cleveland, right up until those last twenty-four hours when I sat at the office waiting on him to show up and he'd gone out and gotten killed.

  What did you do, Ken— What button did you push, what thread did you pull—

  There would be no answers here, nothing but wind sounds and sorrow, but I stayed anyhow. When my legs got tired I sat on the top of the hill and stared into the shadows and did not turn when the occasional car passed, disrupting the silence and throwing harsh white light into the trees.

  We're going to see this thing to the end, Lincoln. Twelve years I've been waiting for that.

  That's what he'd told me at the start, sitting in my truck with one hand on the door handle, ready to go up to the hotel room where he would upend his last night alive, sleeping alone with a too-loud air conditioner blasting away beside him. I'd responded by telling him… what had I said— That we might not get there. Something to that effect, some warning that all the effort might yield no result. He'd shaken his head.

  Not this time. No, I've got a feeling about it.

  My anger rose with the dawn. As the shadows around me changed from shades of dark to patterns of gray and then golden light, I noticed my jaw had begun to ache from the force of my clenched, grinding teeth. I'd had thoughts of Ken earlier in the night, but now he was gone, and Dominic Sanabria and Parker Harrison filled my mind in his stead.

  They had done this. I didn't know who had put the bullets through Ken's heart and forehead, didn't know whose hands had carried him from the trunk of a car and released him at the top of this hill, but I knew who'd put it all in motion. I'd seen them personally, looked into their faces and heard their words, and now the intimacy of that filled me with anger that spread like steam. They had left me alive. They had killed Ken Merriman and yet they had left me alive, and in that action their regard for me was clear—they viewed me as impotent. Of course I would accuse them, of course I would come at them with all the resources I could muster. They knew this, and they did not care.

  Harrison had told me to step aside before harm was done. That had not been a wild notion, clearly. He'd warned me, and then he'd reached for the phone and called Dominic Sanabria, and a day later Ken—who had not gone home, who had not heeded the warning—was dead.

  Harrison had answers.

  It was time to get them.

  I was close to Old Brooklyn, and that was important, because Harrison left early for work. I didn't know what cemetery employed him, and I didn't want to take the time to find out. The MetroParks Rangers who'd drawn Ken's homicide would surely be looking for Harrison this morning, and I didn't want to follow in on their heels. By then it would probably be too late. The good fortune I had was that they'd been alarmed by all of the information I'd shared. The stories about Sanabria and Harrison and Bertoli had overwhelmed them, and I knew when they finally released me that they'd take a few hours to talk to Graham and others, working to confirm my claims, before they moved in on people with mob ties and murder convictions. I had a window this morning. It was going to be small and closing fast, but I had a window.

  By the time I got to Harrison's apartment it was nearly six, and the soft predawn light was giving way to a deep red sunrise, the sort of that age-old sailor's caution. I'd cut it close—almost too close. I was pulling into the parking lot when the door to Harrison's apartment opened and he stepped out. He was wearing jeans and one of those tan work coats favored by farmers, with a thin knit cap pulled over his head. He wouldn't need the jacket and the cap—the day was dawning hot and humid—but he was probably used to chill early morning hours, and he wouldn't yet know of the weather change. He hadn't spent the night sitting in the woods above a body-dump scene.

  Harrison didn't look up at my truck as he shut the door and turned to lock it. I pulled in at an angle a few doors down from him, leaving the truck across three parking spaces as I threw it in park and stepped out without bothering to cut the engine. Only then, as he put his key back in his pocket and turned from the door, did he look toward the headlights of my truck. When he saw me his face registered first surprise, then concern, and he said, "What happened—" just as I reached him, grabbed fistfuls of his coat, and pushed him against his own door.

  When I left the truck I'd intended to say something immediately, shout in his face, but when I caught him and slammed him against the door I didn't speak at all, wanting instead to just stare into his eyes and see what I saw there. It was only a few seconds of silence as I held him pinned by his shoulders, but what I saw added coal to those fires of anger. His face held secrets. I could no longer tolerate the secrets.

  "He's dead, you piece of shit."

  "Ken—" he said, and the sound of the name leaving his lips, the way he wanted confirmation of it, was too much for me. I lifted him off the door and then slammed him back into it, maybe three times, maybe four, and when he finally made a move to resist I stepped sideways and sent him spinning off the sidewalk and into the hood of the closest car.

  He hit it hard, his ribs catching the bulk of the fall, and when he righted himself and turned back to me I saw a new Parker Harrison. He stood with a wide stance, balanced and ready to move in any direction, and took two steps toward me with his hands raised and no hint of fear or uncertainty in his eyes. He was coming to do harm, coming with violence and confidence, and as I stepped off the sidewalk to meet him I wasn't at all sure that I could win this encounter, knew in a flash of recognition that he had been places and seen things that I had not, and that it was the sort of experience that might well make my advantage in size irrelevant.

  That new Harrison lasted only those two steps, though. He brought himself up short as I approached, and there was a moment of hesitation before he moved backward. To a spectator it might have appeared he was giving way to me, but I knew it wasn't that. He didn't fear me at all. Not physically. For a few seconds he'd been sure he could take me and ready to do it. The latter aspect had passed. The former had not.

  "What happened—" he said, circling away from me as I continued to pursue him, back on the sidewalk now.

  "Somebody killed him, and you know who, you son of a bitch."

  "I don't."

  "Harrison—"

  "I didn't want this," he said. "Lincoln, I did not want this. When I told you to leave it alone, this is what I wanted to avoid."

  "What do you know—" I shouted it and was dimly aware of a light going on in the apartment beside Harrison's.

  He didn't answer, moving backward in short, shuffling steps.

  "This is what you wanted to avoid— How did you know it would happen— Stop lying and say what you know!"

  We were beside his apartment now, and I punctuated the last shout by pounding my first into his door.

  "You called Sanabria,"
I said. "You told me to quit, and then you called him. Didn't even wait until I was out of the parking lot. Why—"

  "How do you know that—"

  "Answer the question!"

  "You'll have to ask him."

  I almost went for him again. Almost gave up the questions and came at him swinging. It was close for a second, but I held back. My hands were trembling at my sides.

  "Did Sanabria have you kill him, or did somebody else do it this time—"

  "I haven't killed anyone."

  "Did fifteen years in prison for shoplifting—"

  "That's got nothing to do—"

  "It doesn't— You're a murderer."

  The muscles in his jaw flexed, his eyes going flat.

  "You killed Joshua Cantrell," I said. "Didn't you—"

  "No."

  "Bullshit. Somebody else gave him a Shawnee burial—"

  "I didn't kill-"

  "Bullshit!" As I moved toward him, the door to the apartment next door opened and a young woman in a pink robe stepped out and pointed a gun at me.

  "Stop it," she said. The voice was weak, but the gun was strong. A compact Kahr 9 mm, and though her voice shook, the gun didn't do much bouncing, just stayed trained on my chest.

  "I called the police," she said. "You can wait for them, or you can leave."

  Parker Harrison said, "Kelly, go inside. I'm sorry."

  She didn't move. Behind her, the door was open, and somewhere in the apartment a child was crying. This woman, who looked maybe twenty-five, was wearing a pink robe and standing barefoot on the sidewalk and was pointing a gun at me while her child cried in their home.

  I said, "There's going to be a lot of police here in the next few days, ma'am. They're coming for him, not me."

  Neither she nor Harrison responded.

  "Do you know he's a murderer—" I said. "Do you know that he killed a man with a knife—"

  She said, "Please leave," and now the gun had started to tremble.