Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  A gun safe.

  “Did you get a look inside?” I ask.

  She nods. “Three shotguns, three rifles, and four pistols. The rifles are a .22 and two thirty-aught-sixes. The pistols, three 9mms and one .40 caliber. There are also at least three full ammunition boxes of each type.”

  While that might explain the double locks on the office door, they still seem a bit excessive. The gun safe is a Marshall MN58, if I’m not mistaken. A good brand. Solid. Hard to break into without the appropriate skills. So more than secure enough on its own.

  Which in my mind means the locks aren’t there just for the guns. They’ve been installed because Chuckie doesn’t want people—specifically his family—going through his stuff.

  Speaking of…

  “You said you found many things?” I say.

  Jar closes the feed and clicks on a folder on her desktop. Inside are several image files. She opens them all and toggles through them.

  Not photographs from a camera. Screen grabs.

  “From Chuckie’s computer?” I ask.

  She shoots me an annoyed look as if that should be obvious. “Like I said. I had time.”

  Each image is of a different document. Loan statements, utility bills, insurance bills, vehicle information for several cars, brokerage statements, bank statements, and a few emails.

  She enlarges one of the bank statements. It’s for his checking account from last month, and shows a beginning balance of $3,758.21 and an ending one of $3,141.98. In between, there are approximately thirty transactions. Only three are deposits, while the rest are withdrawals for bills or other payments.

  On first blush, it seems normal enough. Money going in and money going out, and the difference in the balance from the start of the month to the end not too large, albeit in a negative direction.

  Jar shows me statements for the four months before that. They each start with a balance between five hundred dollars and just over a thousand dollars higher than they end with, meaning the account has steadily been trending downward.

  “Is he transferring money into his other accounts?” I ask. I know from her preliminary check a few days ago that he has both a savings and brokerage account.

  She shows those statements to me. The savings account has $18,391.17 in it, and the brokerage $57,464.03.

  “I looked at statements for each going back two years. Up until the summer before last, the savings account had $340,000 in it and the brokerage almost $700,000.”

  “Whoa.” That’s over $960,000 gone in twenty-one months. “He must have other accounts.”

  “It’s possible, but I have not discovered anything else.” Allow me to translate. That’s Jar speak for it’s highly unlikely.

  “Then where did the money go?” I ask.

  “I have been trying to discover that but have come up with nothing so far.”

  “What about the deposits to his checking account? Maybe some of the deposits come from the missing cash.”

  “If so, it was not done directly.”

  “Then he must be using the money to keep his business afloat.”

  “That is what I have been thinking, too. I’ve accessed the accounting files for Price Auto and am in the process of downloading them. There is a lot to go through, so it may take some time.”

  Money woes could partially explain Chuckie’s persistent foul mood. A downward financial spiral is not a great mix with an already volatile personality. I’m not saying it excuses anything, just that it could be a trigger.

  But going through all those records will take time and we already have a lot on our plate. “We can call JP if you want. He really knows this stuff and you can concentrate on other things.”

  JP is a forensic accountant, and a living encyclopedia on all things financial. It’s not often that my colleagues and I need his services, but when we do, his help is always invaluable.

  She considers the idea and nods. “I will contact him.”

  That’s another thing about Jar that’s different from most people. Ego is never a problem. If it makes sense for someone else to do something, she’s all for it.

  “Is there anything else?” I ask.

  “Perhaps, but I am not sure if it is important or not.” She brings up another document. “Look at this.”

  It’s an email to Chuckie, from August 17, two years ago.

  Mr. Price:

  This is to confirm your meeting tomorrow with Mr. Neuman at 10:30 a.m.

  If you have any questions, please let me know.

  Sincerely,

  Tara Kerns

  Executive Assistant to the Regional Vice President

  Hayden Valley Agriculture

  cc: Vince Neuman, Isaac Davis

  Jar brings up a second letter, dated one week later.

  Dear Mr. Price:

  We consider this matter closed. Please do not attempt to contact us again.

  Vince Neuman

  Regional Vice President

  Hayden Valley Agriculture

  cc: Isaac Davis

  “That sounds ominous,” I say. “Did you find anything that might tell us what the meeting was about?”

  “I couldn’t find any other communications or documents that mentioned the company. Charles…Chuckie has continued to visit their webpage a few times every month since then, however. The last time was on Tuesday.” The day after we arrived in Mercy. “He checks the bio page for Vince Neuman every time.”

  “That sounds obsessive.”

  She gives me an oh-there’s-more look and says, “And he always uses incognito mode.”

  I can’t help but snort.

  Incognito mode is great if you don’t want your significant other to search your browser history and find out what you’ve been looking at, but that’s pretty much where your anonymity ends. Your internet provider and the websites you view will know you stopped by. Which means if you end up doing something nefarious that makes the police curious about your internet habits, all they would have to do is get a search warrant for your records from your provider and they’d know exactly what you’ve been up to.

  Or you can do what Jar has done and hack into the internet company, without worrying about search warrants or permission, and take a look yourself.

  I can’t imagine Chuckie is trying to hide the fact that he visits the Hayden Valley website from his family. Double-locked door aside, I’m sure they’ve been trained not to go into the den, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care that he’s been visiting an industrial farming company website. Which probably means he thinks he’s preventing Hayden Valley—and anyone else who might be interested—from knowing what he’s doing.

  She shows me a few more of the documents, but nothing stands out as being important. She then asks about my afternoon at Grayson Lake.

  “Not much more than what I’ve already told you. A lot of people hanging out together.”

  She shivers as if cold. “So stupid.”

  “Yeah, kind of what I was thinking, too. Unfortunately, I was too far away to hear any conver—” I stop myself. I forgot about the visit Chuckie had made to the Winnebago with his two friends. “Can we check the bugs in the RV? Somewhere around, um, four-fifteen to four-thirty, I think. Could be a little later than that.” I explain why.

  It takes her just over a minute to find the audio and play it back.

  The first thing we hear is the RV’s door open and Chuckie saying, “Go on in. Have a look around.” His voice is muffled but clear, the bugs having no problem picking up the sounds through the Winnebago’s floor.

  “This is nice,” another voice says. It’s deep and kind of rusty, the kind of voice that only comes with age, so I’m guessing it belongs to the older man.

  “Thanks,” Chuckie says. “It beats staying in tents.”

  The door closes and for several seconds we hear only the floor creaking.

  Then: “Looks clear.” A third voice. Younger, stronger. Mr. In Shape.

  The silence returns for abou
t fifteen seconds.

  “Two?” Chuckie says.

  “We’re almost there,” the old guy says. “Pressure time.”

  Someone grunts a short laugh. I think it’s Chuckie but I can’t be sure.

  “Questions?” the old guy asks.

  “No,” Chuckie replies. His words are followed by a sound too faint to identify. Then, “How about a beer?”

  “I wouldn’t turn one down.”

  “Stop,” I say.

  Jar pauses the playback.

  “That noise right after Chuckie tells him no—can you turn up the volume and play it again?”

  Jar isolates the segment and lets it roll. The noise is louder, but I still can’t make out what it is. Jar noodles with the settings and then plays it again, this time on a loop.

  Three times through and I think I’ve got it. “Paper.”

  “Yes. Like it’s being folded.”

  “Go back to that gap after the one guy said it was clear. Where everything was quiet.”

  Jar does so, keeping the adjusted settings where they are. In what was silence before, we can hear something in the same movement-of-paper vein we just heard.

  A picture forms in my mind. “So, the old guy—”

  “The old guy?” Jar asks.

  “The raspy voice.” When she nods, I go on. “He pulls a piece of paper out of somewhere…his pocket, say. And he hands it to Chuckie. After Chuckie looks it over, Old Guy asks if he has any questions, Chuckie says nope and sticks the paper in his own pocket. How’s that sound?”

  “There is no way to know for sure.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a guess. Just want to know if you think it fits.”

  An uncomfortable look crosses her face. “It…fits the sounds we heard.”

  “Play the rest.”

  The conversation that follows the offer of a beer is strictly small talk—questions about the Prices’ recent vacation, comments on the high school’s decision to cancel the upcoming graduation ceremony, and general scoffing at how some people are overreacting to a virus that, in Chuckie’s words, “isn’t any worse than the flu.”

  Idiotic stuff, yes, but none of it shines any light on the exchange of the paper, nor does it touch on anything else that might be of interest to us. That is, until In Shape says, “We should be getting back. We don’t need people wondering where we’ve been.”

  It’s not a lot, but it confirms they don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing.

  “Here, I’ll take those,” Chuckie says.

  We hear bottles clinking together and then crashing into what I assume is a trash can. The door opens, and we hear the Winnebago groan as the three men exit.

  “Just one other thing,” the old guy says.

  He’s outside now, so his voice is not only muffled but fainter, due to him being farther from the bug. Jar turns up the volume before he speaks again.

  “The weatherman mentioned a storm coming through midweek. Do not let it slow anything down.”

  “Before and after?” Chuckie asks.

  A pause. “Right after.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good.”

  “Better if we don’t all return together,” In Shape says.

  “You guys go ahead,” Chuckie says. “I need to grab a couple of chairs anyway.”

  From the moment they stepped out of the RV to this point in the conversation, I saw them through the binoculars. So when we hear Old Guy and In Shape moving away, I tell Jar, “You can turn it off. There’s nothing else.”

  If I’m right about the exchange of a piece of paper, I’m betting we can see Chuckie do something with it when he gets to his house. Before I can mention it, Jar opens the feeds from the Prices’ house in a grid pattern, and sets the playback time to when the family arrived home from the barbecue.

  We see Chuckie enter the house first. He stops at the light switches next to the door and flips the one for the outside light down and back up, then looks into the yard. When he sees the light is still out, he marches through the house into the laundry room.

  “The fuse box is in there,” Jar says.

  We don’t have a camera in the laundry room so we can’t see what Chuckie does. We only see him exit a minute later and go over to the kitchen window. When he looks out from there, the light is back on. I’m sure he’s wondering why the breaker went off, but he’s not doing anything about it now.

  Instead, he heads to his office, which he unlocks, enters, and locks again.

  Alone now, he reaches into a pocket of his shorts and pulls out a folded piece of paper. (Yay, me!) He opens it and looks at it.

  I’m hoping he’ll set it on the desk so that we might be able to make out what the message says, but when he does set it down, he’s already folded it again.

  He unlocks one of the four-drawer filing cabinets—because of course he keeps them secured—and pulls out the second drawer from the top. It contains files stuffed with papers. He reaches for the file at the very back, but instead of removing it, he pulls it and all the files in front of it toward him, creating a gap between the last file and the back of the drawer. From there he removes a manila envelope that has been folded several times, creating a package about the size of a stack of money.

  For a moment, I think that’s exactly what’s inside, but when he unfolds the envelope, he pulls out a smart phone.

  I look at Jar, raising an eyebrow. “You didn’t find that?”

  She grimaces. “No. But I should have.”

  “Relax. I’m just giving you a hard time. I’d have missed it, too.”

  This does not seem to make her feel any better.

  Chuckie holds down a button on the side of the phone until the screen lights up. The device wasn’t just asleep; it was completely off. Once it’s booted up, he opens one of the apps and begins typing. Though we can see the screen, it’s tilted in a way that makes reading what he writes impossible. We also can’t see which app he’s using, though I’m willing to bet it’s some kind of message app.

  Once he’s done, he shuts off the device, puts it back in the envelope, and returns the package to its hiding place in the drawer.

  From his desk, he retrieves an unused business-size envelope and places the folded piece of paper in it. He sticks a piece of tape on each end of the envelope, opens the bottom drawer on the other filing cabinet, and tapes the envelope to the underside.

  The guy has obviously watched too many bad spy movies. If I’m looking for hidden documents, the bottom of a drawer would be one of the first places I check.

  None of what we’ve seen proves Chuckie’s up to something nefarious, but it sure feels that way. And while it doesn’t seem directly related to his behavior toward Evan and the rest of his family, anything that can give us leverage over him is fair game.

  So, do I want to see what’s in that envelope?

  Yes. Yes, I do. Very much.

  But just as important is that phone. If we can clone it, we can track what’s being sent and received.

  “We have to go back in,” I say.

  Not surprisingly, Jar is on the same wavelength.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I wake at six a.m. the next morning, it feels like I’ve slept in.

  Last night, Jar and I stayed up for a while, working out our next steps, but were still able to get to bed at a decent hour. At least I was. Who knows what time Jar turned in?

  It’s Sunday, and I’m hoping we’ll have the opportunity to get back into the Prices’ house this morning. Small-town life in America often revolves around church. And I’d be willing to bet, whether Chuckie is religious or not, going to church is part of his routine, if for nothing else than to mingle with potential car buyers.

  Should I have left in the predawn hours and hidden in the Winnebago again in anticipation? Maybe, but Jar’s successful trip during the daylight yesterday makes me think we can pull it off again.

  I take a shower, get dressed, and head into the living room, where I expe
ct Jar to be up and waiting for me. She’s there all right, sitting at the card table. Or should I say, leaning onto? Her head rests on her arms, which are lying on the table just in front of her computer. The laptop is open, but the screen is dark.

  I tiptoe into the kitchen, start up the coffee maker, and set about making some breakfast. We have only one frying pan, so I put the sausages on first and use one of our disposable paper bowls to make the French toast mix. As I do, I watch Jar, sure it won’t be long before the smell of the coffee or the meat will wake her.

  It’s not often that I can look at her like this. If I do it when she’s awake, she’d wonder what’s wrong with me. I guess anyone would.

  Her hair, the darkest of dark brown, is usually kept in a ponytail or some kind of bun clipped to the back of her head. This morning it’s free, flowing over her shoulders and draping over her upturned ear. When she’s awake, it’s hard for me not to focus on her eyes, as they’re the window into what’s in her mind, so it’s nice to have a moment to take in the rest of her face—the gentle nose that widens a bit at the end, the small but rounded cheeks, and the mouth that can smile as wide as a noontime sunbeam or grimace like a tiger ready to pounce.

  I sometimes forget how small she is. There are times, though, when I swear she’s as big as I am. Her drive, her determination, even her physical abilities far outshine what people expect. Which is why I make it a habit of not underestimating her.

  I can’t imagine not being around her all the time. If I try, I feel panic building. And if I think about it too much, guilt sets in, and I feel as if I’m betraying Liz. She’s been gone well over sixteen months now, but there are times when it feels like she was alive just yesterday.

  She’s as much as told me I need to move on. I’m kind of surprised she hasn’t shown up right now to do the same. Then again, her appearances have…lessened as of late, which I’m guessing is her way of helping me disconnect from our shared past.