Homeless rarely abandoned their belongings without a fight.
Hailey sat back against the seat.
“Did you ever find the car that hit them?” Hal asked.
“Nope. Never found anything. I did some research on Blake, though, while he was in rehabilitation. Some shitty irony for a guy like that.”
“And Donald Blake is also deceased?” Hal asked.
“Killed himself,” Tomaso added. “Broke into the salvage yard where the police kept the car—the one his family was in when they were shot. He douses the car in gasoline, gets into the driver’s seat, and lights it on fire.”
“They sure it was Blake in the car?”
“Wasn’t easy, but they ID’d him by a dental bridge. It’s the worst case I ever worked,” Tomaso added.
Hailey imagined a man so desperate that he’d lit himself on fire. It was awful.
“Damn,” Hal said. “Anything about Blake stand out during the investigation? Any reason he would’ve been a target?”
“Not really. He worked in DC—low-level jobs mostly. He spent his free time running with a group that organized protests to push for gun control, but nothing that tied to any Oakland gangs.”
The description reminded her of Fredricks, but Fredricks died in 2004. Blake would have been barely out of college then. Had their paths crossed?
“They lived in your neck of the woods for a while,” Tomaso said, “then moved back to the East Bay.”
“Right. We talked to the paper.”
“You read his stuff?” Tomaso asked.
Hailey thought about the drafted article they’d received. “A little.”
“He wrote almost exclusively about guns and gang violence, a lot about the problems over here.”
“You think he was a target because of what he wrote?” Hal asked.
“No idea,” Tomaso confessed. “I couldn’t make it fit. Tried every damn thing, followed every trail—his colleagues, family, past jobs, everything. I wish I could be more help.”
“No. This was useful,” Hailey said. “Thank you.”
Hal drove up California Street, crossed Battery and Sansome, caught the tail end of a yellow light at Montgomery, and stopped at the entrance of the Bank of America Center.
A uniformed security guard stood at the top of the driveway and told them to circle and enter on Bush Street. He was white-haired with a thick accent—Eastern European maybe. Hailey was bad with accents. Hal was good with them.
But he wasn’t talking to her.
Hal flashed his badge, but the guard shook his head. “You’ve got to enter on the other side.”
Hal swore under his breath and circled the block. Another guard, younger, with no accent—except maybe a trace of Jersey—asked for Hal’s ID and studied it carefully.
These guys worked for the building, so the extra security wasn’t for the murder scene. “Something going on in the building today?” Hailey asked.
“Standard since 9/11.”
When the guard returned the badge, Hal drove down into the belly of the building and parked in a spot marked “Loading and Unloading Only.”
A young guy jogged out of the small valet box. “Excuse me. You can’t park there.”
Hal stepped out of the car and flipped open his black badge. Then he tossed the kid his keys.
The kid fumbled and dropped them to the ground.
“Better not scratch it,” Hal warned. “Belongs to the police department.”
Hailey passed the guy as he picked the keys carefully off the ground and carried them to the small glassed-in guard’s shed.
Hal was already walking into the stairwell when she entered the building. She followed him up to the mezzanine where they rode an escalator to the lobby.
At the entrance to the elevator bank was yet another guard who pointed them to the main desk to sign in.
“We don’t have this kind of security in the damn jails,” Hal muttered as they opened their badges for the guard at the desk.
“We’re heading to a homicide scene on thirty-one,” Hailey told him.
The guard nodded, took Hal’s badge, and wrote down his information in slow block letters.
“You take down the information for the paramedics when they head up to save some guy having a heart attack?” Hal asked, the edge in his voice making the guard halt.
“I haven’t heard of any heart attack today, officer.” He passed the badge back and reached for Hailey’s.
“Rendell Funds?” Hal said when he was done writing.
The guard pointed down the hall. “For thirty-one, take any of the elevators in the middle bank.”
Hal frowned. Hailey knew he was thinking about the thirty-one floors he was about to ride up.
She walked past him, punched the button in the bank, and waited until the orange light lit. Hal got in behind her and stepped to the back of the box. As the heavy sway of gravity sank in her gut, Hal made a small, suffering groan behind her. She didn’t turn back, instead watching the yellow lights above the door click off the floors until they stopped on thirty-one with a lurching halt.
Two uniformed officers stood in the hall, talking. Across the floor, a set of double glass doors read Rendell Funds in large, blue block letters.
“The building’s on rollers,” one of them was saying. “If there’s a big quake, the whole thing just slides around.”
The other one looked around. “I don’t want to be up here when that shit’s going on.”
“Better than the whole thing breaking in half. That’s what would happen without the rollers.”
“One of you should be inside,” Hal barked.
Both stood at attention. “There’s an officer inside, Inspector.”
“Then go back to the station. Go do something else. Don’t sit up here fucking around,” Hal mumbled, walking past.
“He doesn’t like heights,” Hailey explained, shrugging apologetically at them.
A length of yellow crime scene tape stretched across the top of the doorway. Hailey ducked beneath it, past a brass plaque on the wall beside the door that read, “Harvey Rendell, Rendell Funds.”
Inside, Roger Sampers was heading up the evidence collection. His bald head and hairless face looked a strange shade of yellow under the office’s halogen lights. A moment later, he crossed to her. “I got the cork.”
Hailey saw Hal in the other room.
“Talk later?” Roger said as though sensing her unease.
“Yeah.”
Hal watched them.
Roger stooped to talk to a tech collecting evidence around the secretary’s desk with a red Dirt Devil.
Hailey joined Hal beside the corpse.
Rendell sat in his chair, his head lolling back, mouth open, eyes closed as though he were sleeping. He was a huge man—close to three hundred pounds.
Shelby Tate was taking photographs.
“Hey, Shelby.”
“Hailey, good to see you. Been missing you at our dinners.”
“I’ll get back one of these days,” Hailey said.
“I hope so.”
“How did this guy die?” Hal interrupted, looking annoyed at the two of them.
Shelby gave Hal a sideways glance. “Secretary thought it was a heart attack until she saw the bottle.”
“Bottle?”
Shelby nodded to the table where a plastic evidence bag sat on the desk. Inside was an orange pill bottle, empty.
No prescription sticker on the outside.
“He had a pill caught in the back of his throat. I think it was Halcion,” Shelby said.
“Halcion—that’s—”
“A heavy narcotic,” Hal said with almost the same tone he’d used with the officers in the hall.
Shelby raised her eyebrows and turned to store her camera in a gray canvas bag.
“I was going to say it was the same stuff used on the Dennigs,” Hailey said.
Hal didn’t acknowledge her. “How do you know he didn’t OD?” he asked, turning toward Shelby.
“Well, it was meant to look like one,” Shelby said, unzipping the body bag. Two paramedics lowered the body into the bag. “He was smothered, actually,” Shelby went on. “Heavily drugged first. Maybe he wasn’t dying fast enough.”
“Or maybe the perp figured it was going to take more Halcion than what he had to kill the guy,” Hailey said.
Hal looked down at the huge man. “Like maybe the killer had never seen Rendell before?”
“Maybe.”
“Where’s the secretary?” Hal asked, looking around the room.
“We sent her out for a cup of coffee,” Roger said, walking back to them, glancing at his watch. “She was screeching too loudly to get anything done. She should be back here soon.”
“You sent her out for coffee?” Hal said.
“I sent her out with one of my people. I’m not an idiot, Harris.”
Hal nodded, stepped back. “Of course not.”
Hailey put some distance between her and Hal as they watched the lab techs work the room. Soon, they’d be able to look around, but Roger guarded his crime scenes like a sentry, and he insisted his team do the initial sweep without interference.
Plenty of crime scene leads had been ruined by the nasty business of evidence chain of custody. Evidence had to be tracked from the initial scene through a multi-step process. If you overlooked anything, then the evidence might become inadmissible during the trial. When the investigators wanted their man convicted—and they all did—they knew better than to interfere.
“You guys can start with the files,” Roger said after a few minutes. “I still want the area around the body clear.”
Hailey and Hal snapped on latex gloves and moved to opposite ends of the room, starting in on the file cabinets. The first drawer she opened was client files, beginning with “T.”
Each had a white label with the first and last names of the client, an account number, and a date that Hailey assumed indicated when the account was established. Tanner, Mark and Christine, had been clients for three years. Inside the file were records of trades, deposits, and withdrawals. Each page had been signed by Rendell. The file also included check stubs from disbursements and copies of client deposits.
From the looks of it, Rendell kept meticulous records. The older files were bigger. One from 2000 contained trade confirmations that were fifteen years old. “This guy kept everything.”
“Here too,” Hal said. “Don’t usually see these guys hang onto stuff longer than the law requires.”
“Even that’s sometimes a stretch,” she said.
“Why keep them?”
“Don’t know. The IRS requires you keep records seven years, but the statute of limitations for prosecuting criminal charges is usually longer,” Hailey added, feeling some of the familiar rapport return between them. “Better to dump everything right at seven than risk having something farther back getting used against you.”
The two worked in silence for a few minutes, until Hal called, “I’ve got something.”
He held a file marked with Abby and Hank Dennigs’s names. “Filed under ‘R.’ Her maiden name. There’s one for Tom Rittenberg too.”
He set the file on the top of the cabinet and let it fall open. The page on top was dated November 9, 2010. He flipped through the stack and turned to the back as Hailey watched over his arm. The last page was dated January of 2004.
“Nothing since 2010?”
He went back through the middle of the file again. “Doesn’t look like it.”
He pulled the pages out of the folder. Maybe two inches of paperwork, but the faded bottom of the green hanging folder was worn, its perforations looked stretched to three inches or more.
“Someone cleaned it out.”
“We’ll need to collect anything in the garbage and the shredder,” Hal said to Roger.
Roger nodded. “It’s already done, and I’ve got someone trying to find out where the trash goes from here. If it’s not at the dump yet, I’ll get it.”
Naomi Muir stood in the doorway. “We found a safe out here.”
“Let’s call someone in to break it,” Roger said.
The partners continued searching the cabinets, working in silence for almost fifteen minutes.
“Hailey,” Hal said, almost a whisper. He drew the file out, set it on the cabinet between them, and held his palm flat on top of it. His hand covered almost the entire front surface. Between his fingers, she saw the name on the file—Wyatt.
“Oh, Hal,” she whispered.
Hal moved his hand from the file. The first page was a copy of a check for twenty thousand, written last month and signed by Jim.
“I’m so—”
Hal returned the page to the file, his jaw tense as he slammed the file closed. “Maybe Marshall will give me that transfer now.”
Hailey tried not to flinch. “Maybe he will.”
Hal walked away, and she pressed her forearm against the cold metal, checking her phone while her thoughts raced. She was alone now. She couldn’t trust Jim, and she had alienated Hal. Bruce was with someone else. She could do this alone. She needed to find a place for the girls. To keep them safe.
No word from the girls’ old babysitter. They’d be out of school in a couple of hours, and she still had nowhere to take them.
“You guys probably want to come have a look at this,” Roger called from the other room.
Keeping distance between them, the two followed Roger through the outer office and into a small adjoining kitchen. The freezer door was open. Cold smoke billowed out into the warm room. The freezer was empty, except for two trays of ice.
On the kitchen table a small blue plastic box was laid out on a sheet of plastic, its lid open.
Inside were a half dozen of the buttons.
Without looking, Hailey knew they read “Wage Peace, Not War.” Roger lifted a plastic sandwich bag from the box.
The plastic was fogged from the freezer. Whatever was inside looked vaguely like a cork.
Hailey found it hard to swallow.
Shelby entered the room, and they all stood over Roger as he opened the bag. Hailey leaned forward and looked in. It wasn’t a cork. It was the tip of a finger.
“Jesus Christ,” Shelby whispered over her shoulder.
“Or Nicholas Fredricks,” Hailey said.
Hal nodded, staring at the frozen finger. “That would be my guess.”
Chapter 21
Watching Roger pack up his team, Hailey started to get antsy. She didn’t want to talk about that cork over the phone, and Hal was watching her now. She’d have to follow Roger out, make an excuse to leave Hal.
She would have to lie.
Again.
She’d tell him as soon as she was sure. She swore to herself. As soon as she was sure the girls were safe.
“I’m going to head out if that’s okay,” Hailey said. One of them had to stay and wait for the safe breakers, but it wasn’t going to be her.
“Where to?” Hal asked. He gave her his full attention. Arms crossed, leaned against the wall.
“Picking up the girls from school.”
“You’ll be back?”
Roger walked out.
Hailey started past Hal.
“You coming back?” he said again, louder.
She didn’t stop. “I’m not sure. I’ll have my phone.”
Only one officer stood in the hallway now. “You can probably go,” she said. “Check with Inspector Harris.”
“Harris,” he said. “He’s the—”
“The big guy. The angry one.”
The officer nodded but didn’t make a move. Maybe he figured it was better to stay put rather than deal with Hal.
Smart choice.
Hailey caught Roger at the elevator. The tech, Naomi Muir, was with him. The two of them discussed evidence priority on the ride down. As the elevator settled on the ground floor, Hailey inhaled deeply.
Roger was going to have questions too.
She
wouldn’t ask him to lie for her. If the cork matched, they’d get the information to Kong and O’Shea. They could get a subpoena for Jim’s house and collect their own cork. Jim had at least half a case of the wine left.
“I need to speak to Inspector Wyatt a moment,” Roger told the tech, turning towards Hailey.
“I’ll take the evidence and meet you at the van,” Naomi offered.
“It’ll be only a few minutes,” he added, waving over his shoulder.
Hailey and Roger walked slowly across the lobby toward the door to Kearney Street. Rain fell in a light mist. Roger looked longingly outside.
Gearing up to deliver bad news, maybe.
Hailey held herself still.
It wasn’t like him to avoid a conversation, which meant he was struggling with something. She and Roger had always worked well together. She respected him and he her. Or at least, he had.
“I’m sorry if I put you in a bad position,” she said.
He sighed. “What’s going on, Hailey?”
“I’m chasing a theory. About Jim Wyatt.”
“Your father-in-law?”
“Yes.”
“The corks are the same,” he said.
“How certain are you?”
“Very,” he said. He touched her arm.
She nodded, grateful that he didn’t say it, that he didn’t try to console her with words.
“Clearly it’s the same wine,” he continued. “We know that from the cork design. St. Jean has up to eight red varietals, depending on the year. If you’re dealing with the same varietal, then you get into vintage differentiations, which can be enormous, as well as some minimal barrel distinctions within a single vintage. Those are less obvious but still present. But I tested the two corks and the wine on each is from the same varietal, the same vintage …” He paused. “It’s possible that the two bottles even came from the same barrel, but I can’t be certain.”
The same barrel. Jim was involved. For all the times she’d thought “maybe,” now it seemed clear. He wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t believe that. But he wasn’t innocent either.
Hal had been right.
“How many bottles does a barrel hold?” she asked.
“A barrel is sixty gallons so it holds twenty-five cases, three hundred bottles.”
“Twenty-five cases,” Hailey repeated.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 48