Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  And I immediately liked what I saw.

  “Is it there?” Mia asked.

  She was temporarily crouched down in the back. No sense in letting The Guy know anyone was working with me.

  “Hell, yeah, it is. Back in a sec.”

  “Be careful.”

  Once again, no cars were coming from either direction. Which was why, as I exited the van and made my way toward the rock camera, which was still resting in the same place I’d put it, I carried my Glock by my side, in plain sight.

  It was a strange moment. I wanted to get away cleanly, without any trouble. No question about that. But there was also a small, irrational part of me that wanted The Guy to pop out from behind a tree so I could draw down on him and start to get some payback. Make him lie facedown in the dirt. Plant a foot on the back of his neck. Make him feel helpless and weak.

  But nothing happened.

  I grabbed the rock camera with my left hand and carried it back to the van, glancing behind me only once. I set the camera on the floorboard and tucked the Glock into the glove compartment, then closed the driver’s door and pulled back onto the pavement.

  When I stopped at the intersection with Circle Drive, Mia returned to the passenger seat and buckled in. She didn’t say anything, but she was beaming. I stuck my fist out and she bumped it.

  “Thanks, pardner,” I said.

  24

  Later, I hovered above Mia and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. I said, “Don’t be nervous. It’ll be a learning experience. We’ll take it nice and slow.”

  I could tell that she was excited. Her face was flushed with anticipation. “I don’t want to screw up.”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t. Just follow my instructions and you’ll be great. Start by inserting the SD card into the card reader, then plug it into the USB slot.”

  She was seated in the chair in front of my laptop in my apartment. I was behind her, guiding her through the process.

  I said, “First thing we’ll do is import the video into iMovie. That’ll take a minute or two, but it plays more smoothly directly from the hard drive, and it’s good to have a back-up.”

  When the video had finished copying, I said, “Now go to the File menu and click ‘New Project.’ Okay, good. See there, at the bottom? That means we have a little more than eight minutes of video to review.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Remember, it’s motion-activated. The camera isn’t shooting all the time. So go ahead and hit Play and let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The video began with me backing the van into Pierce’s driveway. I hopped out, opened the rear doors, and unloaded the dryer. I was impressed with how quickly I got it done.

  Mia said, “Shouldn’t you have put the dryer in place first, then the camera, so you wouldn’t have caught yourself on video?”

  “Well, sure, if I was a seasoned professional and I knew what I was doing.”

  On the screen, I was getting back into the van, just about to drive away.

  “Seriously,” I said, because I didn’t want her to think I was an idiot, “you have a good point. But I figured if anyone noticed me dumping the dryer, I didn’t want them to see me positioning the camera afterward. So, yeah, it wasn’t ideal, but I put the camera in place first.”

  “Makes sense.”

  After I drove away, the dryer was more or less in the center of the screen. To the left of the dryer, several feet out of the shot, was Thomas Springs Road. To the right, visible on the screen, was Brian Pierce’s gate. After a period of inactivity—maybe twenty seconds—the camera turned itself off.

  Nothing happened for the remainder of Saturday.

  At 8:17 A.M. on Sunday morning, the camera activated as the nose of the Jetta entered the screen from the right, coming from Pierce’s house, and stopped at the gate. If I had turned the rock a little bit more clockwise when I had hidden it, we would’ve seen more of the car. But that would’ve meant seeing less of any vehicle that might’ve pulled up on the other side of the gate to enter the property.

  “This is very cool,” Mia said.

  “What, the camera?”

  “The whole thing. I feel like a spy.”

  “That wears off, believe me. Watching normal people go about their daily lives is tremendously boring.”

  “Too bad we can’t make out the license plate.”

  Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. I figured the brown-haired woman who had arrived in the car on Friday was perplexed by what she was seeing in front of her. It was taking her a moment to react. And then she stepped into the frame. She was standing near the front tire of her car, and it appeared that she was holding a cell phone to her left ear. Couldn’t see her face very well at this point. She was wearing different clothes than she had been the previous time I had seen her, which meant she had packed an overnight bag, or she had some clothes at Pierce’s house.

  “Just let it keep playing?” Mia asked.

  “Yeah. Let’s see if she gives us a better view of her face.”

  The woman continued talking for quite some time, and now she was getting quite animated, gesturing toward the dryer on the other side of the gate.

  “There’s a goddamn dryer blocking the way,” Mia said, using a high-pitched cartoon voice as she guessed what the brown-haired woman was saying. “Yes, a goddamn dryer. It’s sitting right in the goddamn middle of the goddamn driveway.”

  I was becoming happier every minute that I had come up with this partnership idea.

  After a little more conversation, the woman snapped her phone shut and leaned against the fender of her car, waiting, and giving us a good look at her face.

  “Let’s pause it right there,” I said.

  Mia complied, and I explained how to forward or reverse the video one frame at a time, so we could choose the best possible frame. Then I showed her how to save a still shot, and how to crop it as needed. Now we had a better photo of the woman’s face than the one I’d gotten when she’d arrived on Friday.

  “Okay, let it roll and let’s see what happens.”

  The woman remained against the fender for about one minute, then she looked to her left, which was our right, and she behaved as if someone was coming from the house. She came off the fender and waited.

  Sure enough, here came a man, not wasting any time, walking right past the woman, who followed him to the gate. The man was average height, sort of burly, with black hair and a full beard, closely trimmed. Nothing special about him. Middle-aged, maybe mid-forties. I was trying to decide whether the voice of The Guy matched up with this man. Maybe.

  He unlocked the gate and swung it open enough that he could slip through. Then he walked over to the dryer. Gave it a test push, as if checking to see that it really was just a dryer. Not a Trojan Horse or a nuclear warhead. He opened the dryer door and looked inside. Nothing in there, of course. Then he shoved the dryer out of the driveway, so traffic could pass. At one point, he was more or less facing the camera head-on, so I asked Mia to save a still shot of his face.

  After he moved the dryer, the woman, who had been watching from the other side of the gate, said something. He gave a shrug and a brief reply. Then the woman walked out of the frame, evidently to get into her car. The man went to the gate and swung it all the way open, and the Jetta passed through. The man closed the gate, chained it, and locked it. Then he walked out of the frame, back toward the house. Half a minute later, the camera turned itself off.

  The next action took place nearly four hours later. At that point, the front end of a white Ford F-150—Pierce’s truck—appeared from the right. Then the man with the beard walked into the frame. He opened the gate, drove through, and left in the truck. Apparently, he was only turning around, because he came right back twenty seconds later. He pulled halfway through the open gate, then stopped, just past the dryer. Then he hopped out and managed to wrestle the dryer into the back of the truck.

  “Must be a pretty strong guy,” Mia said.

&nb
sp; “Well, dryers aren’t really that heavy,” I said.

  The man got back into the truck and pulled all the way through, stopped, locked the gate, then drove away with the dryer, heading toward Pierce’s house. I said, “I can see as how you’d think this is super-exciting.”

  “Beats serving pitchers to drunks who want to bitch about their ex-wives.”

  The last action captured on video was from the previous evening. Of course it was. That’s when I went to retrieve the camera and it didn’t end well. I knew the video wouldn’t show much, because, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t have a flash. It works okay in low-light conditions, but there comes a point when it’s just shooting darkness, more or less.

  In this case, when the video began to play, you could tell that something was happening, and that someone was using a flashlight, but that was about it. The light was coming closer and closer to the camera, and then the light dropped to the ground, illuminating the grasses surrounding it.

  “And that’s when I got ambushed by a gutless coward.” Mia didn’t say anything.

  “He sucker-punched me,” I said. “Or maybe I should say ‘sucker-

  Tasered.’”

  No reply.

  “Not a fair fight,” I said.

  “Don’t get mad,” she finally said. “Get even.”

  25

  We took a break for lunch, and then I told Mia about my fictitious Linda Peterson Facebook account and asked her to log in to it.

  Mia was shaking her head as she tapped the keys. “You are one devious bastard. You friended Pierce?”

  “But of course.”

  “And he was dumb enough to accept?”

  “Hey, Linda’s a hottie. It’s hard to resist her feminine wiles. She also looks marvelous in a swimsuit. She’s no Mia Madison, of course.”

  “I never accept requests from strangers.”

  “You might if Robert Tyler sent you one. He has the chiseled good looks of Matthew McConaughey, without that look of smug self-satisfaction on his face.”

  “That actually works? Women fall for it?”

  “Well, sometimes. Admittedly, men are much less discriminating online.”

  “And everywhere else.”

  “Point taken.”

  Mia had clicked on Linda Peterson’s friends list and was scrolling downward.

  I said, “We’ll go to Pierce’s photos and compare the Jetta woman to some of his friends. I narrowed it down the other day. I’m pretty sure there are four candidates. Maybe you can help me pick a winner. Or maybe she isn’t on there at all.”

  “Fine, but…he’s not here.”

  And he wasn’t. Brian Pierce no longer appeared on Linda Peterson’s friends list.

  Mia laughed. “Dude, I think you’ve been busted.”

  “Well, crap. Go up to the search bar and let’s see if we can find him that way.”

  She did. A lot of Brian Pierces showed up in the results, but not the one we were looking for.

  I said, “That means he not only unfriended me, he might’ve blocked me.”

  “Hold on,” Mia said. She logged out, then logged in to her own account. She searched again for Brian Pierce—and there he was, confirming that he had blocked me, or rather Linda Peterson.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Should I send him a friend request?”

  “I don’t think so. Not right now. He might figure out that you’re connected to me.”

  “How?”

  “Because you have all those photos of me in your albums. Typical obsessed female.”

  She elbowed me. “I think I have three photos of you.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, let’s not. I can’t think of anything to gain by risking it. I could try sending a request from Robert Tyler, but I think we should hold off on that, too, until we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “Isn’t this pretty good proof that the guy who Tasered you is working for Pierce? He caught you watching Pierce, so now Pierce is suspicious about everything, including new Facebook friends?”

  “Maybe, but it could also be that Pierce accepted the friend request, then checked out Linda Peterson’s page and decided he didn’t know her, or that she’d mistaken him for another Brian Pierce. Either way, it seems like something is going on with Pierce.”

  “But what?”

  “No idea. Luckily, when I sorted through Pierce’s friends list the other day, I screen-captured the profiles of the four women who sort of look like the woman in the Jetta.”

  I directed Mia toward the folder containing the profiles, and she opened them, one at a time, and compared them to the photo of the woman in the Jetta.

  “Definitely not her,” she said immediately about the first one.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Cheekbones are totally different. And the eyebrows.”

  She moved on to the second one. “No. This woman has a much higher forehead.”

  She opened the third one. “For god’s sake, Roy, are you kidding me? This woman looks nothing like the Jetta girl.”

  “Well, if you squint…”

  “Not even a little bit. For starters, this woman looks Hispanic. The woman in the Jetta is about as Caucasian as you get. Very fair-skinned.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  That left one remaining photo. Mia opened it and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then, “Yep. This is her.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely. See the shape of the eyes? And the nose? Plus, look at that mole on her chin. Same on both photos. Didn’t you notice that? It’s pretty big.”

  “Uh…”

  “She has a different hairstyle now, but it’s her.”

  “Erica Kerwick,” I said. “Let’s check her out.”

  Mia found the woman’s Facebook profile, but her privacy settings were tight. She lived in Austin and was born on February 17, and that was about all we could see of her profile. We couldn’t view her wall, her photos, or her friends list.

  But here’s the thing many people don’t understand or simply forget about Facebook: The privacy settings you place on your own wall don’t apply to your posts elsewhere on the site. So if you make a comment on someone else’s wall, and that person has looser privacy settings than you do, your comment is visible to more people than you might like. If your privacy settings are “Friends Only,” but you post a wild party photo on the wall of someone whose privacy settings are “Everyone,” the photo can be seen by anyone with a Facebook account. Which often makes it a lot easier to poke around and learn things about people like Erica Kerwick.

  “Go to Google,” I said. “Now click on that little gear thingy in the upper right. Okay, select ‘advanced search.’ Where it says ‘this exact wording or phrase,’ put ‘Erica Kerwick.’ Now, down lower, limit the search to Facebook dot com.”

  “I didn’t know you could do this,” Mia said, typing away.

  “Yeah, and the good news is, I doubt there’s another Erica Kerwick on Facebook, so we won’t have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant junk. It’s always easier when the person has an uncommon name.”

  Mia hit return and we got hundreds of results. Apparently, Erica Kerwick was quite the busy little Facebook user, and lucky for us, she had some friends whose privacy settings allowed us to see their Facebook content.

  One comment from Erica Kerwick said: Happy birthday, Jane. Wow, you are still so gorgeous! Let’s catch up the next time you’re back in town!

  Another comment, on a page started by a new restaurant: The chiles rellenos were outstanding. Can I get the recipe for the salsa!? ;)

  On another friend’s wall, in a thread about some B-list celebrity I had never heard of, Erica Kerwick had written: That outfit was ridiculous. Doesn’t she have a wardrobe person that’s supposed to warn her against wearing anything that ugly?

  There were dozens of other comments like that. Tedious. Mundane. Boring. Trivial. Useless. That’s how it goes.

  And then, if you’re damned lucky,
out of the blue, with no real skill on your part, you hit paydirt. You see something so unexpected that it takes a moment to even comprehend what you’ve just learned. That’s what happened now.

  Erica Kerwick had left a comment under the status update of a young man who had recently graduated from high school. The graduation part was obvious, because the kid was wearing a cap and gown in his profile photo, and because he had said, ‘Done with high school!’ So you can understand how I pieced it together.

  The comment from Erica Kerwick read: I am so proud of you! We all love you and know you have a bright future ahead! xoxo Aunt Erica

  But it wasn’t the outfit or the comment that caught our attention.

  It was the kid’s name.

  Curtis Hanrahan.

  26

  “Wow,” said Mia.

  “Yep.”

  “She’s related to a kid named Hanrahan. No way that’s a coincidence.”

  “Absolutely not.” I could feel my pulse beginning to pick up speed. This was big news.

  Mia said, “So, what, is she Patrick Hanrahan’s sister? Kerwick is a married name?”

  “I don’t know. Could be Kathleen Hanrahan’s sister.”

  “Or, if either of them—Patrick or Kathleen—has a brother, Erica Kerwick could be married to him.”

  I said, “If she was married to Patrick’s brother, her last name would be Hanrahan. Assuming he doesn’t have a half-brother.”

  “Or unless she kept her maiden name.”

  “Right.”

  “Does it really matter?” Mia said. “We know it has to be one of the above.”

  “True, but it’s always nice to have all the facts when you can. Let’s check the kid’s wall.”

  “It’s called a timeline now.”

  “Whatever.”

  The kid—Curtis Hanrahan—had created a “Family” section on his wall. A lot of people don’t bother with this feature, but some do, and it can be useful.

  Mia said, “The kid doesn’t list any uncles with the last name of Hanrahan. Or any uncles at all, for that matter. And no other Kerwicks at all.”