by Claire Booth
She hid a smile. She’d be more than happy to boss that man around. She met him at the top of the stairs, gave him his marching orders, took his notepad and pen, and then sat the poor little manager down on a step.
His name was Jim Chrzanowski. After he’d finished spelling that, she asked him how long the unit had been rented.
‘Since July. To John Kalin. I looked that up for the tall guy. Before we went in to the apartment.’
‘And were you able to tell, from what you saw in the bedroom, if the man on the floor was John Kalin?’
Jim went white. Sheila scooted as far away as she could on the narrow stair. But he held down the rest of his stomach contents and after a moment, shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. I didn’t see his face real good, but I don’t think the hair color is the same. I think the guy I rented to had lighter hair. Not blond or anything, but lighter. But I’m not totally sure.’
‘Did you xerox the license of the guy you rented to?’
Jim slumped against the railing. He hadn’t, because the copier was on the fritz. It broke about the Fourth of July and the owners hadn’t gotten it fixed until just last month. He’d been meaning to go back and get copies from the people he’d rented to during that time, but …
He’d been manager since the complex opened three years ago. It had twenty-two units, all of which were currently rented. They offered three-to-six-month leases. That worked well with all the seasonal folk who came for the peak tourist times and then left. That’s why he hadn’t thought anything of it when Kalin wanted a six-month lease. Although July was a little late to be coming into town for the summer season, he said with a shrug. At that point, Unit 213 had been the only one left.
Jim trailed off just as Jenkins arrived on the stairs with the crime scene tape. He started to angle between the two of them as they sat on the top step, but Sheila had a sudden thought and stopped him. By grabbing his ankle, which was not the best idea, she had to admit.
‘We need to use the laptop in your car.’
The look he gave her could have felled an elephant. But he turned on his heel and stomped back down the stairs. Sheila quickly prodded Jim down the stairs after him. She wanted to check her theory before Jenkins completely blew his stack.
Jenkins unlocked his door and stalked off with the crime scene tape. Sheila settled herself in the driver’s seat, and her fingers flew over the keyboard of the computer in the center console. There was no Missouri driver’s license for John Kalin. Then she had an idea, but there was no DL record for the other one, either. Huh.
She pulled her phone out of her windbreaker pocket and opened the photo roll. She and Alice had gone back and pulled the boys’ wallets out of their pockets before they were taken away from the scene. She had a photo of each of their IDs. And Alice had sent her pictures of the girls’ once their purses were removed from the wreckage.
‘Yeah, that’s him. That’s the guy I rented to. Him.’ He pointed at the phone screen and the blood-spattered DL photo of Johnny Gall, age seventeen.
Sheila thanked him and slowly got out of the car. Jim’s answer meant there was no way Hank would give up control of the murder investigation. He was probably already developing conspiracy theories.
She was going to hate it if he ended up being right.
TEN
‘You found a murder victim in my city?’
Yes, Hank said to the City of Branson police chief. That was exactly what he’d done. He rattled off the location and started to go into the circumstances, but Ed Utley cut him off.
‘I was going to spend the day on the lake fishing, but well, dead people trump dead trout. I’ll be right there.’
He hung up before Hank could explain that he thought everything might be connected.
‘He tell you to get the hell out of his crime scene?’ said Jenkins, who had finished with the tape and was taking his turn contemplating the corpse. ‘Because this doesn’t have anything to do with my crash. Some guy rents an apartment and gets killed in it. End of story.’
Actually, it’s only the beginning, Hank thought. For us, anyway. He ran his hand through his hair and turned away from the Jenkins before he got mad again. He started to hear the first faint sirens as Sheila walked back inside.
‘Were you able to figure out if he’s the guy who rented the apartment?’ Hank asked.
‘I was, and he’s not,’ Sheila said. ‘The guy who rented the apartment was Johnny Gall.’
Both men turned to stare at her.
‘So … who’s that guy then?’ Jenkins pointed toward the bedroom.
She shrugged. ‘No idea. But I do know that the kid who died in the crash is the same person who used an ID in the name of John Kalin to rent this place.’
Well, that put a new spin on things. Hank looked again at the dead Not-Kalin.
‘And Jim didn’t recognize this guy at all?’
‘Nope. Just in case, it’d be a good idea to show him a photo once we can get a headshot of the body. But I don’t think Jim had ever seen the man.’
They’d need that photo to show the weeble-wobble lady as well. And the rest of the neighbors. He was starting to make a mental list of everything he needed to do when Jenkins cleared his throat and headed outside. DeRosia met him at the door.
‘I can’t find the old neighbor lady,’ she said. ‘She must’ve gotten a ride, because she is nowhere in this complex or down the street. I did get her name from another resident. Apparently “crotchety” was the only description necessary. He knew right away who I was referring to.’
Hank chuckled a little, and they both smiled.
‘And I just asked the manager to get you a list of the rest of the tenants,’ DeRosia said. ‘Figured you’d want to get started.’
Sheila glared at Hank.
‘This … this isn’t our jurisdiction,’ Sheila said. ‘You can’t be—’
He tried to wave her quiet. He didn’t want to do this in front of the Highway Patrol. She picked up on it. Her eyes flitted to Jenkins in the doorway, and she stopped talking. The sergeant seemed to take it as his cue to leave and gestured to DeRosia.
‘Hold it,’ Sheila said. ‘I’m assuming you all touched things when you came in?’
Both Hank and DeRosia nodded sheepishly.
‘I’ve got Sam coming with a fingerprint kit,’ she said to DeRosia. ‘We’re going to need to take your prints so we can eliminate any we find in the apartment.’
‘What about him?’ DeRosia said, pointing at Hank.
‘Oh, we’ve got his on file,’ Sheila said. ‘He leaves ’em everywhere.’
DeRosia laughed. Jenkins muttered something about professionalism. Sheila hustled them both outside before Hank could say what he wanted to, which would have involved speculation about the man’s parentage.
Left alone, Hank walked the length of the living room and waited for the approaching sirens to arrive. The apartment, with the bedroom no longer closed off, smelled like a festering scab. He didn’t dare go back near the body and possibly trample evidence, so he kept his pacing to the far wall as he added to his homicide to-do list. The longer the list got the calmer he became. His breathing evened out for the first time in hours. The pounding in his head lessened to an ignorable ache.
‘Well, what’d you stumble into in my fair city, Worth?’ Utley chuckled as he walked in. ‘You don’t have enough to do in your own jurisdiction?’
The Branson city police chief was a few inches shorter than him, with a potbelly his wife kept trying to shrink with wacky diets. He must be on a juice thing right now. He held a green mess of some kind in a clear plastic cup.
The men shook hands and Hank explained how he came to be wearing a dirty patrol uniform and standing in an apartment that contained nothing except a dead body and a chicken McNugget. Utley sipped at his concoction and listened. He let out a low whistle when Hank got to the part about six crash victims.
‘I saw Highway Patrol trucks in the parking lot. They’re
involved, too?’
Hank shook his head. ‘Only with the crash investigation. They were helping with the death notifications.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘But there’s nobody here to notify.’
Utley walked to the bedroom and looked inside.
‘You got that right.’ He sighed and backed away. ‘We haven’t had a homicide in three years. There goes my streak.’
‘Well … about that,’ Hank said. ‘I think it might be related to my crash. There has to be a reason Johnny Gall rented this apartment. And where did his other ID come from?’
Utley nodded, considered his drink, thought better of it, and left it alone.
‘Or … your crash could be related to my homicide. Seems like the homicide’s the precipitating event. Clearly, this guy was dead before your crash happened.’
Hank had to agree with that.
‘Or … could be, it was an empty apartment that was getting squatted in or something. We don’t know that the dead guy was connected to your guy at all.’
Hank certainly wasn’t ready to agree with that. But he nodded anyway. This was the delicate part.
‘So … until we figure out what’s really going on, you think it’d be better to work together on this?’ he said. ‘It seems like all sorts of things could overlap.’
He was actually pretty impressed at his restraint. He had no grounds to ask for what he really wanted – that the entire investigation be handed over to the Sheriff’s Department. Because even if it ended up not having anything to do with his crash victims, it was too damn interesting to give up.
He waited with what he hoped was a patient expression as Utley contemplated his juice and then took another look at the bedroom.
‘OK,’ he finally said. ‘You’ve got folks here now. Have them start canvassing. My crime scene techs are on the way. They’ll process everything.’
Excellent.
Hank shook his hand again and headed off to find Sheila. That didn’t go as well. She gave him a look that stripped him down to his skeleton and then turned his bones into her special brand of ice.
‘Really? You’re participating in the homicide investigation? And why is that, exactly?’
‘Because it might be related,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘What do you mean, “so”?’
‘Well, I know they’d be happy to give us whatever information we’d need. We don’t need to be involved. Unless you just want something to do so you can stop thinking about the car crash.’
He stared at her. Behind them, Jenkins’s pickup roared out of the parking lot in the automotive version of a middle finger. Sheila didn’t even flinch. She just stared at his bare, frozen bones. He hadn’t put the two together. Now the head pounding came back in a rush. He glared at her.
‘I’m investigating whether they’re connected. That makes me a good investigator, not one who’s avoiding something.’
He spun on his heel and stomped back up the stairs to the apartment. She was wrong, and he had work to do.
The dude looked like he might be sick. Sam leaned a little to the left to get out of the line of fire, and then explained again why he was taking everyone’s fingerprints.
‘It’s only to eliminate you from the prints collected at the scene,’ he said.
Jim the manager stared at him blankly.
‘If we don’t know which fingerprints are yours, we might think your prints in the apartment are the killer’s.’
That seemed to wake him up. He stuck out his hands and Sam started the process, rolling each fingerpad in the ink. He wondered how much the manager had seen upstairs. A lot, judging by the green tinge to the guy’s face. Sam could sympathize. He remembered his first dead body. It had been a motorcycle accident six months after he became a deputy. A middle-aged man crumpled up on the asphalt like one of those Gumby toys. Sam had been a little freaked out. Sheriff Gibbons had yelled at him and sent him off to do traffic control. Hank never would’ve done that.
Sam ran his hand over his head, which was covered in a couple millimeters of stubble. The Chief hadn’t been happy at all when he’d shaved it. Kept saying it wasn’t a healthy reaction to Ted’s shooting. But Sam didn’t care. He’d barely been able to get out of bed in the weeks afterward, and he certainly couldn’t be bothered to comb his hair. It was his fault that a fellow deputy’d been shot and almost killed during a search of some scumbags’ property. Ted Pimental wasn’t even back at work yet, and it’d been almost five months.
Sam sighed. He needed to stop thinking about that. Every time he did, the anger and the shame bubbled up in the back of his throat like burning lava. He swallowed and dragged his thoughts back to the task at hand.
He finished with Jim Chrz-something’s prints and started to pack up. Then stopped and looked again at the little guy, sitting in a cheap chair in a tiny office.
‘Do you live here, too? In the complex?’
Jim nodded.
‘Do you get a break on your rent for doing the managing?’
He did. That’s the only way he could afford to live here. Otherwise, he’d be in one of those crappy older apartment buildings. He’d been here since it opened three years ago and managed it that whole time. And since he’d just gotten laid off from his regular job at the big steakhouse in town, this was even more of a godsend.
Sam put down his equipment and leaned forward. He was more than a tech. He needed to act like it, and start thinking like an investigator.
‘Can you tell me about the folks who live here? Are they quiet? Noisy? Do you have problems with anything like that? Or any unwanted guests?’
‘You mean besides the dead guy in 213?’
It was so unexpected that Sam burst out laughing. Jim seemed to have surprised himself with it, too. He blushed and looked at his feet. Then he smiled, a little. And then they had a conversation.
The tenants were generally pretty quiet, Jim said. As far as he knew, there was no drug dealing going on, or anything like that. No wild parties. People pretty much kept to themselves. That was the thing with the nicer apartment complexes. They tended to attract nicer people. He paused. Sam nodded knowingly.
‘Yeah. I know what you mean,’ Sam said. ‘But I’ve figured out that murder isn’t limited to un-nice people. Bad things happen to good people. A lot.’
They fell silent and then both looked up as the heavy boots of the BPD evidence techs hammered up the nearby stairs and overhead toward 213.
ELEVEN
Utley introduced the lead detective for Branson PD. Dale Raker was a bullfrog of a man, short and squat with a large downturned mouth and thinning brown hair. Hank shook his hand and showed him into the bedroom, where Handlesman was already busy photographing the body. Hank had met the lanky crime scene tech during the investigation into the shooting of Deputy Ted Pimental last spring. He couldn’t remember his first name.
Raker walked around the John Doe, giving the pool of blood a wide berth.
‘And nobody has any idea who this guy is?’
Hank started in surprise. He’d half expected a voice like a croak. This guy sounded like Michael Jackson.
‘Well?’ Raker said.
‘Uh, yeah.’ Hank dragged his thoughts away from the Thriller album. ‘He’s not the man that the manager rented to in July. We’re going to show him a mug shot once we’re able to photograph the body, just to double check. But so far, the manager says he hasn’t seen anyone else around in connection with this apartment. We’ve got a list of tenants coming.’
Raker stopped his circling and faced Hank. ‘And why are you interested in this?’
‘The man who did rent the apartment was using a different ID last night when he was killed in a vehicle accident out near Airport Road.’
Raker looked like he was trying to decide whether to be intrigued or irritated.
‘So?’ he said. ‘I appreciate the information. I see how it’s relevant to me, but I still don’t see how it’s relevant to you.’
‘Th
ere were five other people in the car. All minors. All fatalities. If this guy really is twenty-two years old and rented this apartment, then I want to know what the hell he was doing with a fake ID that puts him at seventeen and why he was hanging out with a bunch of Branson Valley High kids on a Saturday night.’
Raker rubbed his sizable jaw.
‘All right. I’ll bite. That doesn’t make any sense. And it involves minors. So, fine, you’ve got skin in the game.’
He went back to his pacing, then looked around the now-crowded room and frowned. Hank stepped forward and clapped once.
‘OK. I’m going to need to ask everyone to step outside for just a minute. Just right out into the living room. That’s it. Thank you …’
He gave Raker a nod and followed them out. Four minutes later, Raker emerged and the crime scene unit filed back in.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘How’d you know that’s what I wanted?’
Hank shrugged. ‘You seemed like you could do with a little less distraction.’
Raker nodded. ‘Yeah. I always like to get a feel for things before everything starts getting bagged up and moved.’
‘Me, too.’
The two men sized each other up. Hank felt a little sheepish that he still didn’t know all the BPD detectives – there weren’t that many, it wasn’t that big a department. He’d been sheriff for about a year. It’s something he should have made a point of doing by now.
‘I took my look around while I was waiting for Utley to get here,’ Hank said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know to call you directly.’
Raker grinned. ‘That’s OK. It’s got to go through Utley first anyway. It’s not like we’ve got a homicide division in this town that you would’ve known to call.’
Hank gestured toward the bedroom.
‘So, what do you think?’
Raker shook his head. ‘It’s tough. The whole place is so bare, it’s hard to pick up any kind of impressions. There’s nothing personal anywhere. Did you search the pockets?’
‘No. I didn’t want to disturb the blood pool. I figured I’d wait until all the photos were taken.’