The Finders

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  “But you train dogs on basics, right?”

  “I run an obedience school, mostly evenings and weekends.”

  “I could get a Labrador puppy for free from a neighbor.”

  “Don’t even think,” I said. “Just do it.”

  “Jim’s got about a hundred in the litter and the little buggers are cute as hell.” Landvik smiled and stood up. “Let me walk you out.”

  “Think Jim’s got one for me?”

  “I could bounce it off him,” Landvik said as we walked past Tommy B.’s cube and entered the reception area.

  Landvik was ahead of me and I dropped the cup of crème brulee into a garbage bin and followed the senior director into the foyer, and from there out to the IDOT parking lot.

  “I’m always out and about and would love to have the dog with me,” Landvik said, “but would hate for it to run out in traffic. I don’t want any of that HRD stuff—don’t want Snoopy finding corpses or anything like that—but basic commands to keep him out of the street.”

  “That’s a piece of cake. I do private lessons as well. Take a few hours to train you on how to train the basics.”

  “What’s that cost?” Landvik stopped next to a black BMW in a reserved spot near the front of the building.

  “I usually charge anywhere between two hundred and a million dollars a session.”

  “Can I get it free if I talk Jim into giving you a black Lab?”

  “I see how you became a senior director.”

  I tapped in Kippy’s cell and listened to Vira bark as I approached my F-150 that I’d parked in a nonreserved spot. “I’m coming, girl,” I said, though evidently not fast enough for her. “It’s Kippy.” I held up the phone as I opened the door and gently pressed Vira into the passenger seat. I heard Kippy answer and held it up to Vira’s ear until she settled down.

  “Thanks a lot, Mace,” Kippy said ten seconds later.

  “Vira missed you.”

  “Did Landvik get the packet?”

  “Yup—he’ll let us know by this time tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” I could tell by Kippy’s tone she was disappointed, that she’d wanted it done yesterday.

  “Landvik’s a busy guy,” I said in my defense. “He’s got a corner office.”

  CHAPTER 47

  “So, you’re the new guy renting the old Hanegraf house?” the next-door neighbor called over the chain link.

  My back was turned; I jumped out of my skin at his intro, yet somehow managed to maintain control of my bladder.

  I’d been tossing the Frisbee to Vira, good exercise and it kept me from climbing the walls. My morning outing to the Egg River rest facility and the Illinois Department of Transportation had kept me in motion. And now that my shoulder was bit by bit starting to come around—a little more movement to go with the pain—farting around in the backyard helped with the cabin fever. The sister collies were content lying in the sun as spectators—their Frisbee years behind them. And when I tossed the saucer in Sue’s direction, he shot me a Yeah, right look and then lifted a leg to water one of the deck posts.

  More important, Frisbee also kept my mind off my financial woes. Sure, I’d get a few bucks from the training classes I’d set up—but wouldn’t be able to teach—tossed back my way thanks to the brethren of Chicago dog handlers, several of whom had stepped up to lead the arranged sessions. I’d also need to walk through my deadbeat file—a list of the people I’d done work for in the past but whom, in return, had never gotten around to compensating me. I’d normally send out an invoice to those who dodged paying me on the spot, followed a month later by a second billing containing a negligible late fee, and, eventually, that would be followed up with an awkward phone call in which words were often mumbled about checks being in the mail. After that kabuki dance, if they still refused to reimburse me—into the deadbeat file they’d go.

  Unfortunately, if the situation I currently found myself in dragged on much longer, my name would begin cropping up in a number of deadbeat files.

  With a little luck I could swing the next mortgage payment. Of course I’d have to play hide-and-seek with the utility bills and other creditors. For food, maybe the kids and I could chisel the burnt drippings out of the oven. Or maybe I could let the trailer home slide into foreclosure, live in the safe house forever, and eat pineapple pizza every night.

  “Hi,” I said when I landed back down on terra firma. Thank God the next-door neighbor wasn’t wearing a ski mask or the funeral would have been on Saturday. I hated to lie to the guy, but Detective Marr had set me up with a cover story and, after all, it was their safe house. “I’m Rick Jackson.”

  We shook hands after he introduced himself and said, “Sorry to scare you. I always like to meet the renters whenever I get a chance.” After he complimented how well-behaved my dogs were—he and the missus hardly heard a thing—he said, “So what do you do, Rick?”

  “I’m a database administrator.” Marr had assured me there’d be a mass exodus of any overly inquisitive neighbors as soon as I brought up some mind-numbing IT job. “I’m here on contract work for a month.”

  “Really,” the neighbor’s eyes lit up. “I’m a network architect.”

  Evidently, this was his work-from-home day. He began talking shop and in under a minute I’d hustled the girls and Sue back inside the safe house, telling my new acquaintance I was tardy for a conference call.

  Great, as if cabin fever wasn’t bad enough, now I’d have to peek out the side window to see if anyone was in Mr. Network Architect’s backyard before loafing on the deck or letting the kids out to play. Sue, of course, sensed something was amiss and, minutes later, stood in front of the screen door, demanding to be let outside. The safe house’s deck had been perfect for him, just a single step down onto the lawn. Since his recovery, Sue had me trained as though I were a doorman, only without the tips. I shrugged and slid open the screen door. My German shepherd sauntered outside, lay down in the middle of the yard, and stared back my way.

  The computer guy was next to our mutual fence, taking forever to water some kind of flower bed. The last thing I needed was to look all deer in the headlights as he waxed on about bouncing servers and building local-area networks.

  “Sue,” I whispered. “Get back in here.”

  Sue looked away, but I knew damn well he could hear me. “Sue,” I said again, urgently, “Delta’s got your spot on the couch. Delta took your spot.”

  That got his attention, all right. Sue rose and strode back inside—a middle school vice principal on his way to impose order on an unruly classroom. I slid the door shut behind Sue and followed him into the living room where he discovered his sofa to be vacant.

  Sue glared at me and would have given me the finger had he known how.

  “What?” I said to him. “You started it.”

  * * *

  “A woman in one of those Knob Hill apartments—you know, the ones at the top of the hill—was out on her balcony ’cause of the sirens,” Detective Hanson said over the phone, “and she spotted a guy in a John Deere cap get into a car on the far side of her building’s parking lot.”

  I got excited. “She get a plate number?”

  “Didn’t occur to her at the time, and she probably wouldn’t have been able to read it from the angle off her deck.”

  “How ’bout a description of the car?”

  “She doesn’t know. Said it was a gray four-door.”

  “But she knew it was a John Deere cap?”

  “Yeah, told me her asshole ex was a John Deere dealer,” the detective replied. “Anyway, it confirms what we suspected. His escape route was up the bunny hill. Pretty fucking smart, actually. LPD had the park surrounded in record time, but the shooter’s getaway car was parked in a different part of Lansing and he was clear to drive away.”

  My excitement began to wane. “Those apartments have any security cameras?”

  “Just one in the lobby, completely useless for where the guy was parked. You
know Lansing better than I do, but I get the impression the top of Knob Hill isn’t the swankiest part of town.”

  Hanson was right on that count.

  He asked me, “You got anything?”

  I filled him in on my trip to the IDOT office downtown, left out the Egg River excursion, and then said, “Hey, tell Marr his cover story for me here sucks. The guy next door’s an IT geek. If I go outside, he’ll glom onto me and know I’m full of shit.”

  I could hear Hanson begin to chuckle before I tapped to end the call.

  CHAPTER 48

  “Jake?” Bernt Landvik opened the front door of his two-story farmhouse on the outermost edge of Batavia. “It’s after ten. You drive all the way out here to tell me about a hot date?”

  “I wish,” Saunders slipped past his boss, headed into the kitchen, and began sliding his laptop out from its sleeve. “You still got any of that Canadian swill?”

  “Molson?”

  “Two, please.”

  “How about you tell me what’s up?” Saunders had a condo in the city. Although Landvik had his subordinate to his home for dinner and drinks on a handful of occasions, he had no idea what would motivate the younger man to make the forty-something-minute drive out to Kane County. “They have this new device called a phone. I think they even make some you can walk around with that you could have called me on.”

  “You know that woman cop, the hot babe that wants us to review the digital at the Egg River rest area? You know, at mile post 62?”

  “Yeah, last month on the day that woman, Denise Nieland, disappeared,” Landvik said. “Mason Reid stopped by this morning and he gave me all that information—the date and general time, a picture of Ms. Nieland, the car she was driving, and her license plate number. I told him I’d get to it tonight or first thing in the morning. Why are you involved?”

  “I guess you weren’t moving your ass fast enough for her and she called me.”

  “Called you?”

  “Remember we all handed out cards at that meeting?”

  “So you dove in to impress her?”

  Saunders nodded. “Pretty much, but now I wish I’d left it for you because Egg River’s all fucked up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me bring it up and I’ll show you. The video recording jumps from 11:42 that morning to 1:07 that afternoon. On all of the Egg River cameras. Those eighty-five minutes are missing … gone … deleted.”

  “You’re kidding.” Landvik stared at his assistant in alarm. “That digital didn’t edit itself.”

  “No shit.”

  “Let me get those Molsons.” Landvik headed the long way around the kitchen island as Saunders began booting up his laptop. “You tell the lady cop?”

  “No,” Saunders said. “I wanted to run it by you first.”

  “Good move. There’s got to be about six dozen or so staff members that have full or partial access, whether they actually use the system or not. We’ll have to run an audit, find out who got in and tinkered before we start pushing the panic button.”

  Landvik stopped well short of the refrigerator, picked up the antique flat-bottom cast-iron skillet off the oven’s back burner—it was more for show, he’d never used it—and swung it forehanded into the side of Jake Saunders’s head. Landvik’s star employee toppled off the stool and dropped hard to the floor.

  There was no need for a second swing so Everyman returned the skillet to the oven top, grabbed a single Molson from the fridge, and shut down Saunders’s laptop.

  CHAPTER 49

  I woke with a cold start.

  Nights were still the hardest, no Mickie around to comfort me after a bad dream. Only this wasn’t a dream. It had come to me, slowly, like mist over a lake. I knew it sounded ridiculous but it was past two in the morning—a time when your mind starts to wander toward places it shouldn’t. Places where you imagine the unthinkable. Nevertheless, I found myself wide awake, terrified, and wandering into one such shadowy spot.

  “I’m sorry, Vira,” I said to my golden retriever, who lay diagonal from me—in the lower half of the opposite side of the bed—staring my way. Perhaps I’d woken her. Perhaps Vira never sleeps. Either way, she shot me her What’s up, Dude? gaze.

  “I’m so sorry, girl.”

  I’d been focused on the pain in my shoulder. I’d been focused on my failing business, on how I was going to bounce back financially after life in a safe house, after canceling a string of classes and private training sessions. How pretty soon the kids and I would be boiling rocks for soup. But most of all I’d been focused on Kippy, on updating her on the IDOT meeting on West Washington, but it went beyond that. Far beyond it. I know it sounds all gooey and syrupy and runs in the face of my he-man, macho image, but I’d kind of like to know everything about Kippy. I’d like to get lost in her minutiae. What was her favorite Halloween costume as a kid? What’s her favorite breakfast cereal? Did she sleep in jammies or sweats and T-shirts like me?

  I wanted to fall deep into those brown eyes and never resurface.

  And that’s why I didn’t recognize Vira’s warning growl in the IDOT parking lot this morning.

  It buzzed inside my head like bees about a hive. Sure, my golden retriever had been muffled inside the pickup—the windows down an inch. Sure, I’d been distracted and crushing on Kippy … but Vira had done her best to tell me—she’d done her level best.

  Only I wasn’t listening.

  And I remembered that feeling of déjà vu in the IDOT hallway as Bernt Landvik stared back at me from the coffee station across the hallway.

  A feeling of déjà vu? What the hell? I’d never set foot in an IDOT office in my entire life.

  But I have a distinct memory of a man dressed in black clothes and a black mask standing between pine trees and looking my way in the clearing at Gomsrud Park.

  The same posture. The same exact stance and comportment.

  Sure, it was a thought that would be laughed at in the light of day, but Vira had sealed the deal in the IDOT parking lot. And my head had been too far up a certain cavity for me to realize it at the time.

  I reached for my phone.

  CHAPTER 50

  It was over.

  And it was a damned shame. Right when everything was falling into place like pieces in a child’s jigsaw puzzle. When IDOT had been contacted by a certain Detective Hanson at the Chicago Police Department, interested in how the video surveillance worked at the state’s rest areas, Everyman was only too happy to step forward, volunteering the services of Jake Saunders and himself. He’d been mildly taken aback walking into the conference room at CPD’s Headquarters Building only to find out, after all this time, the authorities had finally begun to look in the right direction.

  Of course with Bernt—call me Bernie—Landvik acting as their liaison with the Illinois Department of Transportation, there’d be nothing for the CPD detectives to find.

  Ever.

  Everyman had been slightly more taken aback when he came face-to-face with the Dog Man himself as Mason Reid came strolling into the CPD conference room along with the lady cop and her partner. But Everyman was in a suit and tie and designer glasses and full of grins and casual chitchat. He’d been on his game. Quite frankly, it had been one of the better presentations he’d led in a long while.

  Jake had even tossed a flattering word his way.

  But that female cop, the one with all the probing questions, she just had to pressure Saunders into doing what Everyman had already committed to do, and Jake—who had never said “No” to an attractive woman in his tragically short life—had to go into the system and unearth the missing gap in the video recording at Egg River.

  Goddamnit—he hadn’t wanted to kill Jake Saunders. Just like he hadn’t wanted to kill Eugene Knox in San Francisco all those eons ago when CEO Knox had connected one dot too many … when old Eugene had flown too close to the sun.

  But you had to roll with the punches.

  Dog Man Reid had ev
en come to his place of work in order to hand deliver the Denise Nieland–Egg River file, which, in retrospect, he should have deep-sixed as quickly as possible, informing the investigators and that woman cop that there was nada, nothing, zip, zero, zilch to be seen, but—as twists and turns abounded—Everyman had truly been tied up in a series of afternoon meetings at the Thompson Center.

  But the woman cop had to push it with Jake. She just had to push it.

  He’d even had Dog Man convinced he’d be getting a fictional Labrador puppy from a fictional neighbor named Jim. Everyman didn’t know any of his neighbors—Jim or otherwise—and had bought the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Batavia for, among other things, the seclusion of not having any immediate Batavians to wave to or nod at.

  Everyman would have Dog Man coming to him, for Christ’s sake.

  It was beyond serendipitous, and Everyman imagined it being somewhat how a spider felt—spinning a web, streaming something on Netflix … and waiting to see what drops by.

  On the bright side, perhaps he’d have some wiggle room. Perhaps he could call Mason Reid over the weekend and ask if he’d care to come to Batavia for some obedience training with Landvik’s new Labrador. Good God, Reid’s eyes had lit up when Bernt Landvik became a prospective client, chomping at the bit to get two hundred a pop for some private lessons as though Dog Man were some all-star tennis pro. Hell, Everyman thought, I’ll even sweeten the deal and offer to buy Reid lunch and fill up his gas tank just for driving out.

  Everyman noted online that Dog Man had reassigned this month’s training classes to different instructors. He’d been surprised the police weren’t keeping a couple of Reid’s orientation sessions active as some kind of bait to lure in the Gomsrud Park shooter. Detectives Hanson and Marr probably figured there were too many people attending those events and too many ways a thing like that could head south … and they probably weren’t willing to sacrifice Reid.