by Fred Limberg
“You’ve been a big help, David.”
“Is it important? I mean, that Karen was checking him out? Do they know each other?” Ray chuckled. “See, I told you all kinds of things would start banging around in your head. Seriously, son, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“David, there’s one more thing we need from you.”
“Sure, whatever.”
“I’m going to give you my cell number.” Tony started writing while he talked. “I want you to call me if Sean starts moving his stuff out or if you see or hear anything…I don’t know…strange.”
David Hong flashed a broad toothy smile. “Davie Hong, agent XXL is on the case, dude.” He gave the detectives a sloppy Boy Scout salute. Ray winced at that. This was serious…serious as death.
“David.” Tony leaned over, scowling.
“This is cool. Like when you were undercover, right Tony? Seriously man, you can count on me. I can do this.”
Tony was behind the wheel. He and Ray were making their way back to headquarters and the squad room. Notes needed to be entered into the crime file, interviews needed to be logged, and they hadn’t checked in with Carol Offord all day.
“Do you think the kid’s solid?” Ray was studying his notebook, ignoring the mysterious mid-afternoon backup on the interstate. He was trying to make sense of Hong’s observations, asking himself question after question, trying to make a link. Had Stuckey simply been into the video game or was he pointedly ignoring Karen Hewes? If he recognized her and was snubbing her, what did that mean? And what was it the kid said, Karen was ‘scoping him out’? Did she just then recognize him? From LA? From whatever happened that night in the bar?
Tony snatched the mic off the dashboard and spoke into it. “Delta-14, repeat last.”
Ray was in the bad habit of tuning out the ongoing chatter on the radio. Tony, on the other hand, was not far removed from being on patrol and was able to keep an awareness of the various crimes and misdemeanors being reported and dispatched in a corner of his consciousness.
“10-30 at 1396 Milton.”
“That’s the Hewes’ address,” Tony said before keying the mic again. “Delta-14 en-route.”
“Copy Delta-14.” The dispatcher replied dryly. Tony toggled the grille lights and siren. Ray reached for the roof light on the seat between them.
“Silent alarm, right?” Ray wasn’t as up on all of the codes as Tony. The siren squawked. Cars and trucks jerked right and left, trying to clear a path for the police car on the packed highway. Tony set his sights on the nearest off ramp and threaded through the meager haphazard path he had to work with.
Once off the interstate Tony set a course for the Hewes’ house and backed off the siren. It wasn’t far. They pulled up behind a K-9 unit that had just arrived. Tony was out of the car first.
“De Luca, I thought you left all this behind.” Officer Carl Younger was an old acquaintance of Tony’s, not really a friend, but they had been at many crime scenes together over the years. Bankston joined them by the K-9 unit, eyeing the big shepherd in the back seat warily. The big black dog was alert and intense but not barking.
“This house—people we have something going with live here.”
“How do you want to do it?” Younger was deferring to the gold badge, letting the detectives decide how to proceed. That and he recognized Ray Bankston…Sergeant Ray Bankston.
“Get a unit in the alley and watch the front. Ray and I’ll see what’s up.”
Carl got the big shepherd out of the car while talking urgently into the mic clipped to his shoulder. He took up station at the front of the house. Ray and Tony headed around the side, through a low chain link gate to the side door to get a look in the back yard.
The house was quiet. There was no one in the yard. The side door was closed and the shade drawn. A patrol car skidded to a stop in the alley behind the fence, next to the Hewes’ garage. Tony trotted over to speak with the officer, to tell him to keep an eye out and both ears open and that he and Ray were going in.
When the shepherd barked Tony whipped his head toward the house. Ray was shaking his head, telling him silently that it wasn’t anything to worry about. Tony strode over to join Ray at the side of the back door. Ray looked calm but his pistol was out, held down by his thigh. Tony stepped to the right side of the door. Ray took position on the left. Tony nodded to him before he rapped on the door frame loudly.
“Mrs. Hewes? Karen? “ Tony shouted. There was no answer. He rapped again. “Mrs. Hewes? It’s Detective de Luca.”
There was a storm door with a lever latch. Tony signaled to Ray to grab it when he pulled it open. Just as Tony reached for the knob the door opened about six inches. Karen peered out, first seeing Ray holding the storm door open with one hand and a matte black pistol in his other, and Tony, his hand still reaching for the knob.
“Jesus!” Karen jerked the door wider and jumped back. Tony edged around, stuck his head in the doorway and scanned the room.
“Are you okay?” He took a cautious step inside, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. “Are you alone?”
Karen didn’t know what to do with her hands. She brushed back her hair, wrung them in front of her, and finally wrapped her arms around her torso under her chest.
“Did you set off the alarm?”
She nodded her head forcefully. “And I called 9-1-1.” She was a little breathless. Tony looked around for her husband. “There was someone out there.” She pointed toward the back yard.
“In the yard?”
“Yes.” She was still pointing, jabbing her finger toward the window over the sink. “In the yard. A man.” Tony heard footsteps behind him, and a scraping sound. Gary Hewes was crouched in the archway to the dining room, swaying unsteadily. He had a rifle in his hands.
“Whoa! Shit!” Tony held his hands up shoulder high. His face was set, serious and frowning. “Gary, put that god-damned thing down. NOW!”
Gary Hewes looked worse than he had that morning. He was grayer and tired looking, even more wretched and wasted than before. He looked confused and uncertain. He held the rifle, a scoped Remington it looked like to Tony, at port arms. He didn’t look like he had the strength left to shoulder the weapon.
“What’s going on? Karen?” Tony walked over to him and gently took the gun from his hands. Gary relinquished it willingly, as if it had been a burden too heavy to carry in his weakened condition. “What the hell’s going on?” She went over to help him, propped him up, and guided him to a chair.
“There was someone in the back yard, sneaking around.”
“Did he try the door?” Ray moved closer. The pistol had disappeared, exchanged for his notepad.
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“Did you recognize him?” Ray worked hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“No.”
“Sometimes the neighbor kids will cut through the yard,” Gary offered blearily. “After school. Saves ’em a block or two.”
“It wasn’t a neighbor kid!” Karen barked.
“Did you get a good look at him? Can you describe him?” Ray had his pen poised, waiting while Karen wrung her hands some more and looked toward the window.
“He was maybe five ten or eleven. Jeans. Hooded sweatshirt. Gray or tannish colored. The hood was up.”
“Anything else?”
“He was white, I could tell that, but I didn’t get a good look at his face. And he had a scraggly sort of beard.” Ray made the notation, wondering how she could identify his race but not his face.
Karen looked up hopefully at the two detectives. Ray assured her she did fine, that it was a good description and excused himself and Tony for a minute. He said they needed to talk to the officers outside. They left Karen and Gary anxiously huddled together at the big oak table.
“Pretty good description.” Tony had a skeptical look on his face, a mirror of Ray’s.
“Yeah…of Sean Stuckey.”
“What the hell
is going on here, Ray?”
Standing at the side of the house Bankston could see two squad cars in front and two in the alley. He had some bodies to work with, and a big black German shepherd.
“I’m going to get these guys working the neighborhood. I want you to go back inside and gently…gently, get her to give you another description. Find out how long before she saw this dude before she triggered the alarm. Find out if Typhoid Gary saw anything or heard anything, but I doubt he did. And make him lock up that damn rifle.”
Ray turned and headed for the cops in front first. He wanted that dog to start working. Maybe Stuckey had been in the yard. The guy was going to need another alibi in any case. Ray hoped that for once it would be a good one.
Sean Stuckey was out of passes and there were no get-out-of-jail cards on the table.
Chapter 29
“The funeral’s day after tomorrow.”
Carol Offord was driving. Ray shared the front seat with her. Tony and Jonny Kumpula were lounging in the back as they sped south on I-35. They were headed toward Austin, Minnesota, the home of Spam.
Kumpula loved Spam. By the time they passed the massive Cabelas complex outside Faribault he had told them much more than they ever wanted to know about the ubiquitous lunch meat and given them a half dozen recipes that none would ever dare try.
Carol was trying to get their heads into the case. They were heading for a house in the farmlands outside of the small city to meet with Darcy DuPree. She filled them in on the guy and her history with him.
Darcy didn’t like people much. Darcy liked pornography. Carol knew Darcy from a case she had been involved with nearly five years previous. DuPree was famous for trading porn on the internet. He collected still and video images from all over the world. While tracing the recipients of a particularly nasty and illegal kiddie porn broker, Carol ran across Darcy’s computer address and eventually Darcy himself.
Darcy was deathly afraid of child pornography. He had nearly been convicted of trafficking twice. He beat the rap both times by handing over both the images and the distributors, helping the Sex Crimes Unit in setting up a sting.
Dupree might have presided over a warped and disgusting Smithsonian-worthy porn collection, but when the cops came calling he turned into a very cooperative snitch. Carol told them she had contacted him seeking episodes of the ‘Ur MoM is so Hott’ series while Ray and Tony were working the leads.
He had them…all but one. He repeatedly made a point of telling her he didn’t have the last episode, the one where the underage boys were involved, but he seemed to know a hell of a lot about it.
Carol was surprised that any of that last episode’s footage was available, that it even existed. The set had been raided. The whole operation had been shut down. Darcy assured her it was out there but he didn’t have it. She proposed buying copies. Darcy laughed. He said he wanted ‘tit for tat’, and giggled when he said ‘tit’. Darcy disgusted Carol Offord.
This was where Kumpula entered the picture. Carol was crying in her beer, at The Red Door, having a drink with Kump and a few others the night before. She was complaining that this Darcy character had some clips she desperately needed and would only trade for something he didn’t have yet. Kumpula looked sheepish when he told her he might be able to help.
She got Darcy on the phone with Kump and a tentative deal was struck. Darcy wouldn’t hand over the ‘Ur MoM’ episodes until the senior evidence tech proved he had what he said he did. When she quizzed Kumpula about what he was trading he just smiled and said, “You don’t want to know.”
“Are you going?” Carol asked Ray, back in the moment now, referring to the funeral. He nodded.
“I wonder if our pal Stuckey will be there.” Tony said. He was planning to go too.
Kumpula fiddled with an electronic device in his hands. “Turn left on 46.” It was a GPS unit. They were driving through flat vast oceans of brown corn. Some had been harvested but much remained. Combines and pickers plodded through many of the fields, stopping now and then to blow bushels of yellow gold into ramshackle trucks. The stake trucks with peeling faded paint jobs, many with round ancient fenders, were testaments to the thriftiness and the mechanical skills of the farmers that kept the relics running.
“Let’s hope so. You never did run him down last night.” Ray still wanted to hear what Stuckey’s alibi was for yesterday afternoon at around 4:00, when Karen Hewes saw a mysterious man in her back yard.
“Stop the car.” Tony tapped Carol on the shoulder and made her jump. The scenery had changed and as she slowed and finally stopped the car on the narrow two-lane blacktop everyone looked around. Tony climbed out first. The others followed.
They were in the middle of a sprawling wind farm, surrounded by immense electricity generating windmills. Each gigantic structure pointed obediently in the same direction. Three bladed propellers, each easily ninety feet long, spun at the same speed—not in sync with each other, the machines weren’t aligned, but at the identical loping patient gait. It was as if the earth was whispering. It was hypnotic.
“Cool, huh?” Tony was grinning. He slowly turned around as he looked at the machines and said, “I don’t know why, but every time I see a herd of these things it makes me think of dinosaurs.”
“You know what? You’re right,” Kumpula said and slapped him on the back.
Darcy DuPree’s house was almost a half-mile off the tar road, an old farmstead surrounded by remnant towering elms. A caved-in barn and a rusted machine shed lay in ruins nearby. Tony pointed out three separate satellite dishes mounted on the gambrel roof. They waited in the car for a minute to see if any dogs patrolled the dismal brown yard.
DuPree didn’t answer the door right away despite Tony’s insistent knocking. A mean October wind raced over the harvested cornfields unchecked and found every gap in their clothing, used it to chill and irritate the four of them. Tony was using his fist like a hammer, making enough racket to rouse a dead man when DuPree finally opened the door.
“Yes?” Dupree was a tall man, easily six and a half feet tall, with flowing silver hair combed back and tamed with shiny oil that gave it a ropy texture. He wore rectangular black framed glasses. The lenses were so thick they made his eyes look grotesquely large. He had a thin build and was dressed in a blue satin jacket, sporting a colorful ascot. He would have been a handsome, older man except for the cartoonish eyes. Dupree answered the door as if he hadn’t been expecting them.
“Mr. Dupree?” Tony had his gold badge out and ready. Carol put a hand on his arm, keeping it down and out of sight.
“Hello Darcy,” Carol said, a forced insincere smile stuck on her face.
“Miss Carol.” Dupree had a squeaky whiny voice that didn’t match his patrician looks and a pronounced southern accent. He extended a slender, pinkish, long-fingered hand. Tony noticed Carol kept her gloves on when she allowed Dupree to take it. He also noticed that the tall man’s gaze never left Carol’s breasts. She was wearing a turtleneck under a bulky sweater but Dupree was staring as if she were naked.
“This is Detective de Luca, Sergeant Bankston, and our senior evidence technician, Mr. Kumpula.” She was brusque and businesslike with the introductions. “You spoke with Mr. Kumpula.”
“Please, please come in.” Dupree held the door wide and gestured. Carol shifted to Tony’s side, away from DuPree, and hugged his arm close when they passed him.
The living room was nothing short of elegant, a complete and shocking contrast to the dilapidated, decaying exterior of the old farmhouse. There were carved tables and fringed lampshades, red velvet covered chairs and a long upholstered sofa with dark wood lion’s heads on the arms. A small fire crackled behind a gleaming brass screen.
“Please, sit.” He made another sweeping gesture with his arm. “May I offer some refreshment?” Dupree was acting the perfect southern gentleman but looking only at Carol’s chest and backside, as if he were appraising a painting or piece of sculpture. Ray picked up on his
staring. His face was set in a frown, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. He projected an anger and displeasure he did not want Darcy DuPree to miss.
“Nice place.” Kumpula had a Stan Laurel smile working. Ray knew it was masking Jonny’s cataloging, that the evidence tech was taking everything in and filing it. He was paying particular attention to a room visible down the hall while DuPree was leering at Carol. A half open door revealed banks of computer equipment. Tiny yellowish lights blinked randomly on the stacked servers.
“Thanks, but we’re good.” Tony looked from Carol to Ray and back to Dupree. “We’re good.”
“Very well then, on to business I suppose.” Dupree settled deeply into a plush plum colored chair and stuck a cigarette into an ivory holder. Tony and Ray sat across from him, tense, on the edge of the sofa. Carol remained standing, arms crossed over her chest.
“I believe I have something you want and you, sir,” he turned to Kumpula, “have something I have long sought.”
Carol desperately wanted to know what Kumpula was bartering with the old pervert but Jonny, still hiding behind his idiot grin, wasn’t letting on.
“You realize the quality isn’t so good. It was originally on 16 millimeter film and not professionally done.” He took a CD case from his side pocket. DuPree’s cartoon eyes got even larger and the pink tip of his tongue was visible at the corner of his mouth.
“Oh yes. Oh yes. May I ask how you came to have a copy?” Dupree snubbed out the cigarette and leaned forward.
“That’s not important.”
“But I must be sure…”
Kumpula stood and interrupted Dupree. He waved the CD case toward the hallway and the room full of computers and said, “Let’s take a peek. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” Kumpula’s smile faltered when DuPree giggled.
“Oh I like that.” DuPree stood, wringing his hands together. “I’ll show you mine.” He giggled again and led Kumpula down the hallway. Jonny looked back once, and he wasn’t smiling. In fact, he looked a little bit scared.
“This is just creepy,” Tony said to Carol once Dupree and Kumpula were out of earshot.