The Finders

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  And the list went on. All in all there was a trail of twelve incidents in eighteen months. Twelve incidents of Everyman being in the same city, in the immediate vicinity, of the reported homicides. It was as though Chief Executive Officer Knox was walking through each and every one of Everyman’s per diems.

  “You can’t be serious, Eugene,” Everyman said, setting his empty bourbon glass on a coaster on his side of Knox’s desk. “If it bleeds, it leads … and murders lead the news in every single city on every single day.”

  “I know,” Knox nodded faintly in agreement. “I know.”

  “All the selling I do for you, all across the globe,” Everyman said, chuckling, “I’m in bed by nine, Eugene. Way too pooped out to go on a—what?—killing spree?”

  “I told you it was a silly notion,” Knox said, taking a last swallow of his bourbon.

  A minute later Knox’s ergonomic high back desk chair shattered through Knox’s office window and plummeted thirty flights to the street below. Three seconds later, Screen-Com chief executive officer Eugene Oliver Knox followed suit. And though Knox had been divorced for over a year—a divorce that he had requested—the note typed on his PC said simply: Without her I am nothing.

  The month after Knox’s funeral, Everyman left for Denver.

  * * *

  “This is Shelley,” the director of Silver Years said over the phone line, having finally returned from the book club. “How may I help you?”

  “Hi Shelley,” Everyman said. “You might remember me. I called a few days ago about finding a place for my mother.”

  “Of course I remember,” Shelley said. “I thought you were in Florida.”

  “That fell through.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Shelley replied. “Shall we schedule a tour for your mother?”

  “I’ve got a confession to make, Shelley. And, to be honest, I’m a bit embarrassed by it.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “You don’t record these phone calls or anything, do you?” Everyman said, followed with a nervous laugh.

  “Of course not.” The assisted living director added a short chortle herself. She was in on the joke. “We value our guests’ privacy.”

  “Good, Shelley. That’s good. You see, I wasn’t as forthcoming with you as I should have been,” he said. “Not forthcoming at all.”

  “How so?” The director now spoke with a more professional timbre.

  “But on my behalf, Shelley, I don’t think you were all that forthcoming with me, either.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The director was no longer in on the joke.

  “I think you do, Shelley. I believe you said that Weston Davies was a, quote, lovely spirit, unquote. I found Weston Davies to have anything but a lovely spirit. Anything but, Shelley. And we both know his daughter would agree with me.”

  “How do you know Mr. Davies?” The director’s tone was now direct, accusatory.

  “I bumped into him on those trails, Shelley. The trails you told me about. Don’t you remember? The ones at Gomsrud Park.”

  A pregnant pause, then, “What was your name again?”

  “Does Silver Years do a head count at lunch, Shelley? I doubt you do, but if you did, you’d have noticed Weston didn’t make it back in time for SpaghettiOs,” Everyman said. “Quite frankly, Shelley, Mr. Davies won’t be attending any more of your scheduled meals or pastimes.”

  “This isn’t funny,” the director said—some grit, some uncertainty, but mostly fright. “I’m calling the police right now.”

  “Ah, Shelley, I think you’re going to have to. There are so many acres between the trails, I can’t begin to remember where I misplaced our dear friend,” Everyman said. “Sorry to say but I think they’ll need one of them—what are they called?—cadaver dogs.”

  PART THREE

  THE VISITOR

  A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.

  —Josh Billings

  CHAPTER 26

  “My money has the old coot on a bar stool laughing his ass off and buying drinks for whatever barfly he got to make the prank call,” a Lansing police officer named Ennis informed me when we connected at the playground parking lot at Gomsrud Park. Ennis was big, bald, and looked as though he could bench-press Mars. He continued to fill me in. “Davies had his license taken away in the nineties—too many drinking-and- driving episodes—which is probably why he’s used to all this walking around bullshit. Plus, he got ticketed a couple years back for sitting on one of those kid swings and sucking down schnapps at ten in the a.m. I think that’s why he walks the trails or, more likely, finds a secluded bench to sit on and then tosses back a few.”

  I took the call fifteen minutes ago. Lansing PD had contacted Chicago PD, gotten my name and number, and dialed my cell. I was stunned to hear the job was practically in my own backyard. I’d never had a closer gig or an area I was so familiar with. I loaded all three girls into the F-150 and was at Gomsrud Park eight minutes later. Officer Ennis had parked his squad car on the grass in back of the playground, at the mouth of the north trail.

  “Hell, I shouldn’t bitch about the old guy. I’ll probably be doing the same thing when I reach his age. Better than sitting in one of them homes twenty-four/seven, alternating shuffleboard with jigsaw puzzles while waiting on the Reaper.” Ennis continued bringing me up to speed on the search for the missing senior citizen. “We got another officer checking the local bars, looking for the old codger, but I drew the short straw so I’m out here with you. No offense. You know the call the old folks home got was total bullshit. If you whack someone and drag them into the woods, you don’t turn around and ring up their landlord about it for Christ’s sake. So this is all a bullshit waste of time, but we’ve got to go through the motions.” Ennis scratched at his cheek. “I figure I’ll walk the trails, looking left and right as far into the woods as I can see because who’d want to lug a body any farther than they’d have to?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. I tend not to quibble with guys who have biceps bigger than my head. “I’ll follow the dogs into the tree line and we’ll cut through to the ravine and up to where it butts against Knob Hill.”

  “It’s good you know the area.”

  “I used to go inner tubing at Knob—that bunny hill they have.” Mickie and I had done that together, often, in winters past. Good times. Better days. “If we don’t find anything, we’ll cut across to the other side of the trails and work our way back.”

  Ennis and I talked logistics. He called my cell phone so we’d have each other’s numbers in case one of us found something or had a good joke to share. I showed him the stainless-steel sports whistle I wore around my neck like a referee, told him it was loud as hell and how I used it in order to alert others on broader hunts, but he shook his head.

  “I’d run around for an hour trying to figure out where that fucking noise was coming from,” Ennis said and held up his phone. “Just call me with some directions, you know, like base of hill or middle of the ravine.”

  “Can do,” I told Ennis. “If there’s a body in there, my dogs’ll find it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Everyman lay prone beneath one of the numerous pine trees that curved about the clearing. The pines signified where the woodlands at Gomsrud Park came to an end. The curve of pine trees was out of the shadows, and able to get their much-needed sun.

  Everyman had picked the perfect spot for an ambush.

  He was dressed in all black, exactly as he’d been the other night in the woods outside the Dog Man’s trailer—black jeans, boots, sweatshirt, and ski mask. His thin backpack beside him contained the John Deere cap, mullet wig, and black glasses he’d worn on his trek from where he’d dropped the rental car at the outer edge of an apartment complex’s parking lot less than a quarter-mile hike from the top of Knob Hill, from where he’d called Director Fedorchak on the burner phone. The burner had since been shut off, smashed with a boot
heel, and deposited in a storm drain.

  The rental car called for a driver’s license and credit card. In the course of his travels, Everyman had come across the name of a devilishly clever artist located in Manila—a man he’d never met and never would—whose identity documents would convince your own parents that you were someone they’d not raised since birth. And though the man in the Philippines provided him with a handful of IDs and credit cards in which to set up hotel or car rental reservations—on days or nights involving Everyman’s pastime—he always settled up in cash.

  It was best that way.

  Weston Davies’s remains lay in repose no more than forty yards in front of Everyman. Davies’s resting spot was a flat slice of undergrowth in the center of the clearing, before the ground dipped toward the ravine. His now-still hands cupped the small flask of vodka that, sure enough, Everyman had found inside the old drunk’s right front pocket. Davies looked almost serene in death—that is if your eyes didn’t linger too long on the jungle knife protruding from the center of his chest or the black velvet choker necklace he sported tightly about his throat.

  Or looked into the old man’s eyes—dry green marbles staring vacantly into the sun.

  Everyman had made his final moments with Weston Davies last.

  Compared to what he’d done to Davies, Dog Man Reid would be getting off easy.

  Everyman had his SIG 1911 near his right hand. Near his left hand—a 9.2-ounce canister of bear spray. If it could neutralize an eight-hundred-pound charging grizzly at thirty-five feet, the bear deterrent should make short order of any undesirable behavior on behalf of Mason Reid’s dogs.

  Assuming that Reid’s dogs lived up to their name, they’d lead the Dog Man straight to Weston Davies’s remains. And as Reid mentally processed the meaning of the jungle knife jutting out from the dead man’s chest, the significance of the choker necklace wrapped around the dead man’s neck, and as red flags went off in Reid’s mind, red flags about the Champines’ modus operandi, Everyman would make his move.

  He’d slip out from under the pine tree, creep as close as possible before the dogs’ attention would switch from the moist blood covering Davies’s torso to the newcomer approaching them from behind. He’d spray the scene, including Reid—the bear deterrent had piqued Everyman’s consumer curiosity—and as Dog Man and his team of canines crouched and sputtered and coughed, he’d take out any dog that so much as looked at him with any degree of alertness.

  Then he’d shoot Reid in the stomach.

  And—as Everyman stood over a writhing, gut-shot Mason Reid—he’d pull off his ski mask and show the Dog Man his true face.

  Everyman owed him that much.

  CHAPTER 28

  Vira led in the middle, with Maggie fifty yards to the left and Delta at an equal distance on the right. I hung back, keeping a leisurely pace, watching my golden retriever and two collies work as a team. They’d been to Gomsrud before, to the acres of woodland behind the park, all those times when I’d been too lazy to cart them someplace more complex for training exercises.

  I love my sister collies even though they do their damnedest to gaslight me. The two are inseparable; in fact, they’re so symbiotic they may as well be Siamese twins. Now and again I’ll catch them staring at something, then they’ll send sideway glances at each other before turning back to the original item of interest. It makes me paranoid, gets me thinking the canine duo knows a hell of a lot more than they’re letting on. Just last week I picked up a couple of Quarter Pounders on the drive home for dinner. I made a quick pit stop in the restroom before returning to the kitchen table, but they pulled their shtick on me as I lifted the first burger up to my mouth. The bag of food had only been out of my sight a minute or two, but I got all apprehensive and stopped everything to lift the bun and examine all condiments before I took a bite.

  We continued our walk together in the shadows of elm trees and oak, ash and maple.

  They say that humans have lost much of their sense of smell as we’ve continued to evolve, placing a greater emphasis on our sense of sight. I’m not so sure this is true. If I miss two meals in a row, I swear I can smell the hot dogs over at Wrigley Field.

  I watched my dogs sniff at the ground as we moved deeper into Gomsrud’s jungle of trees and underbrush. Then a site to behold as three snouts lifted into the air, a trio of bobbers coming to the surface. My dogs had caught a waft of something in the nearly nonexistent breeze. A second later they came together as one and took off in a mad dash toward the ravine. The scent of decomposition had tripped their radar … they’d zeroed in on the death trail. This was where I’d get my cardio workout as I jogged behind in their wake.

  I tapped at my iPhone. I should have made a wager with Officer Ennis. Turns out the old coot wouldn’t be found on a barstool laughing his ass off.

  “Sup?” the cop from Lansing answered his cell phone.

  “The dogs got a hit.”

  “No shit,” he replied. “Already?”

  “It’s what they do.”

  “You got eyes on the body?”

  “Give me a minute,” I said. “You’d have to be an Olympic sprinter to keep up with my girls.”

  “So where are you headed?”

  “You know that grassy area or clearing before it drops down into the ravine? About fifty yards in front of Knob Hill?”

  “Ah hell, I started on the southern trails—the farthest side,” Officer Ennis said. “If I jog over and they’re chasing a squirrel, I’m going to be fucking pissed.”

  “You won’t be fucking pissed,” I said. “It’s what they do.”

  I pushed forward, got my second wind and scampered faster, finally slipping into the weed grass and sunlight from behind a row of pines. Maggie May and Delta Dawn sat motionless, ten feet apart, staring into the grass in front of them. Vira sat as well, nearer Maggie, but gently patting at the soil. I couldn’t see the body yet, but I knew.

  My dogs had discovered the scent’s origin.

  “Good girls,” I said—my happy voice—as I walked over to join them. “What good girls I have.”

  I stared down at the body.

  What the hell?

  A knife identical to what feral-boy had done his damnedest to use on me was stuck in the center of the old man’s chest. And a black choker necklace—like the kind clasped about Kari Jo Brockman’s throat—had been fastened tightly around the old man’s neck.

  My heart began to race.

  And Vira began to growl.

  CHAPTER 29

  I stumbled backward, staring numbly into the line of pines from where I’d emerged only seconds earlier, where Vira had laser-focused her snarls and howls of warning. The sister collies turned about, scanning, and then joined in with Vira; I suspect more on principle and team solidarity than from a perceived threat.

  “Girls,” I said in a hushed voice, even though my fight-or-flight response clamored for us to flee the scene, to get the hell out of there.

  And then a figure dressed head to toe in black stepped slowly into a narrow gap between two pine trees.

  I froze to the ground, an ice sculpture—too terrified to breathe—but my golden retriever launched herself like a rocket, thundering down toward the dark figure. Instead of retreating, the man took a single step forward. His left hand lifted—he held something, some kind of tube—and that broke my trance.

  “No!” I screamed.

  A blast of mist—a thick funnel of fog—hit Vira at twenty feet out. She went down on her shoulder, yelped, rolled sideways, spun about a circle—becoming a whirling dervish of coughs and yaps and cries.

  I stepped forward. “Run, Vira! Run!”

  And my golden retriever ran. And it wasn’t pretty. I’m not sure how Vira did it—blind and choking on tear gas—but she scurried diagonally under a pine tree. We heard a thump and piercing yelp as she slammed into the trunk, then another second of scuttling noise … then she was gone.

  “Drop the canister, Motherfucker!” Of
ficer Ennis shouted, stepping into the clearing, sidearm drawn, his gun sights on the man dressed in black. “Drop it now, Motherfucker!”

  The figure in black released the cylinder with his left hand, letting it drop to the ground.

  I’d forgotten about the cop from Lansing, tears of relief came to my eyes … and then something bad—and I mean something very bad—happened.

  Ennis approached from the side, from where the trail curved around the clearing. He’d spotted the dark figure a step in front of the row of pines—saw the man sported a ski mask as though to knock over a savings and loan—and witnessed what he’d done to Vira with the can of pepper spray. Ennis had walked into something all right, something much more than a dead man lying in the weeds.

  Officer Ennis came in slowly, cautiously, gun leveled in a two-handed grip, held directly in front of his eyes. The only flaw was that the dark figure faced forward, still looking at me, and Ennis could only see him in profile.

  “Hands in the air where I can see them, Motherfucker.” Officer Ennis’s voice was authority incarnate, the man was all business.

  Bit by bit the figure’s left hand—his canister hand—began to rise. His right hand swayed inward, by his thigh now, no longer blocked by pine branches.

  And I could see what he held.

  My jaw dropped. “He’s got a—”

  It’s like when frames have been removed from a movie in order to make the movements speed past. It happened so fast I can’t say I saw the dark figure drop and twist toward the Lansing police officer, his right hand outstretched. Three shots were fired in the blink of an eye, another blink later and Ennis crumpled to the ground.