by Ethan Cross
Andrew, knowing the drill, sat on the end of the break room table and said, “He’s obviously calling the shots.”
“Or is at least a willing participant.”
“You think he’s some kind of patsy?”
“I don’t know. Let’s talk facts. Jerry Dunn was here at the time that Peter Spinelli was killed.”
Andrew snapped his fingers and said, “By the way, Stan told me earlier that he found Peter Spinelli’s offshore account. He was the one who gave up the software. Or that’s the working theory at least.”
Marcus made a dash beneath the “Jerry Dunn” heading and wrote, “Did Not Kill Spinelli.”
Then he said, “Peter was stabbed with professional precision and pushed into traffic. That, to me, always felt like a job Judas did himself. That steered me away from Dunn in the beginning. He couldn’t have been in both places at once.”
“Maybe one of Lash’s followers took out Peter.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Dunn isn’t Judas.”
“Then who’s our mastermind? This Demon guy who Sheriff Hall encountered?”
Marcus wrote “Demon” on the board as a new heading and said, “I don’t think so. I still think there is something there with Reese. I hate to think that, because I was a jerk to the guy and, if he isn’t Judas, I probably got him killed. But I still can’t shake this feeling about him. And until someone finds his body at the bottom of that pit—”
Andrew raised his hands and said, “I’ll stop you there. Sheriff just asked me to tell you that one of his men had cave diving experience. He found a body in the location you gave them. I was coming in here to let you know.”
Marcus balled up his fists and counted to five. “A positive ID for Reese?”
“Who knows how long before they get the body up for official confirmation, but the sheriff said the description matches.”
Marcus rubbed at his cross tattoo and said, “I don’t know what to think here, brother. I feel like my instincts have been off. I should have caught this sooner. It never should have reached this point.”
Andrew looked around, picked up a napkin from the break room table, and held it out for Marcus. He said, “In case you wanted to cry about it.”
Marcus slapped his hand away and said, “Screw you.”
Andrew dropped the napkin and said, “You’ve done a great job on this case. There’s not exactly any field manual for something like this.”
“Yeah, but that’s the job.”
“Maybe. Then again, maybe your instincts aren’t that far off. Maybe Reese isn’t our Judas, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t still involved somehow. We know his fiancée is missing and probably dead. Maybe he was being coerced. Or he’s an accomplice or partner. Something.”
Marcus said, “We still have Reese’s car. Sheriff’s guys took it back to their station. We should have them tear it apart. See if they can find anything.”
“If there are any of them still at the station.”
“It’s a big department, but we definitely are all hands on deck.”
Andrew paced in front of the whiteboard and tapped his teeth. “So what’s the end game here?”
“It has to be about Lash.”
“All this just for an escape?”
“There’s definitely more to it than that. This isn’t just business. There’s a strong personal element.”
Andrew picked up a blue marker and wrote “Lash” on the board as a new heading. “Maybe Lash wants to not only escape from prison but have no one looking for him long enough to get out of the country.”
Marcus nodded. “Okay, so Lash hires someone to orchestrate a standoff. This thing could go on for days. All the while we’re out here thinking that Lash and everyone else is still inside the building.”
“And by the time anyone knows Lash is gone, he’s sitting on a beach in a non-extradition country,” Andrew added.
“Which means we need to figure out how Lash—or Judas or whoever—plans to slip past our perimeter.”
“But what about Demon? Where does he fit in?”
“A guess?”
“Humor me. What’s your theory?”
Marcus said, “My guess is that he’s the commander or supervisor or whatever they call it in their business for a group of mercenaries hired to stage a big spectacle and extract Leonard Lash. But I think Lash hired some very bad men to break him out.”
“If Jerry works for Demon, then why did Demon involve the sheriff? His guys obviously had the access to get him inside.”
Marcus turned back to the board and said, “I don’t know. But I do know that Jerry Dunn is right in the middle of it.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking breaking and entering.”
*
Jerry Dunn’s apartment was on Twenty-Ninth Street in South Tucson. He rented out half the second story of a squat, brown building that also housed a dry-cleaning business and a nail salon. The forty-something woman who ran the dry cleaner also owned the building. She had nothing negative to report about Jerry, not that Marcus had expected she would. She brought down the key in the middle of the night and gave her consent for them to search the premises. Not that it mattered at that point. They were going in one way or another.
Andrew was the first one up the stairs. Key in hand, he unlocked the second apartment door they came to. He twisted the knob and pushed, but the door wouldn’t budge. He said, “Jerry must have installed his own deadbolt or something.”
Marcus said, “Step back. I’ll kick it in.”
“Hold up a second.”
“What?”
“Maybe he rigged the door?”
Marcus said, “If Dunn had it rigged to blow, then why would he have it locked? But more importantly, there’s no keyhole for a deadbolt on this side of the door, so what’s blocking us. And how did Dunn secure the door from the other side?”
“He could have locked it up and then climbed out the fire escape.”
“Or there could be someone else in there. Someone who has himself barricaded.”
“So what’s the play?”
Marcus cocked his head to both sides, cracking his neck. “I’ll go in through the fire escape. You cover this exit, just in case.”
“Don’t forget to let me in.”
“You can go up the fire escape, and I’ll wait here, if you’d prefer.”
“No, my leg, remember.”
“Right. Milk that for all you can.”
“I intend to.”
Marcus took the stairs in a fast jog and didn’t let up his pace until he was in the alley pushing a dumpster up to the wall in order to allow him to access the retractable ladder. Climbing up the fire escape reminded him of Claire Cassidy, his one-time fiancée and Dylan’s mother. He had performed a similar maneuver many times back in Brooklyn when she still lived with her parents.
The thought of Claire reminded him of Dylan. And thinking of Dylan only added to the anxious dread that had been eating away at him since they had been driven from Foxbury. Was he failing his son, just as he had failed his friends still trapped inside the prison? He had never been there for Dylan as a father. He wanted to raise him right, to be a good dad. But what did he know about being a father? His adopted dad had been killed when he was Dylan’s age, and his biological father was currently locked away in the kind of place they would have incarcerated Osama bin Laden, if he had been captured and convicted. And his grandfather, Louis Ackerman, wasn’t exactly a model parent. The fact was that he came from a long line of people who royally screwed up their children. And he hoped that his grandchildren wouldn’t be looking back at him in the same way he was his ancestors.
Within a few seconds, Marcus had climbed up to Jerry Dunn’s window, but he couldn’t see inside. The glass had been blacked out. He checked the locks. The ones on the inside weren’t latched, but there was a keyed padlock on the outside of the window. Maybe Dunn really did exit through the fire escape.
He checked the lock itself—a good brand, Master Lock, the disc-style padlock with a partially hidden shackle to keep people from snapping off the lock with a pair of bolt cutters. The lock plate and fastenings were also sturdy and well made. If he had been merely a would-be burglar, he would have been deterred.
He removed the sound suppressor from the pocket of his leather jacket and threaded it onto the barrel of his Sig Sauer pistol. It took two shots to remove the lock, and the suppressor only muffled the sound of each blast. It didn’t silence the sound completely. But in this neighborhood, he wasn’t sure that he even needed to use the suppressor.
With the lock gone, he raised the window and slipped inside. He could see from there that the front door wasn’t rigged with explosives. But it had been bolted and screwed and secured in ways that seemed to go beyond the realm of extra security into the range of obsessive-compulsive irrationality. There didn’t even seem to be a way to open it anymore, at least not without power tools.
He banged on the door and said, “You’ll have to come around. It’s blocked.”
“Okay, wait for me,” came the muffled reply from the other side of the door.
Marcus didn’t wait, not that Andrew really expected him to.
The apartment was spacious for a single man. A kitchen and dining area accented by blue-and-gold linoleum gave way to a living room. The hallway entrance divided one wall and led down to two bedrooms and one bathroom. Marcus could have seen a family living here: two parents and a new baby or a single mom and a young son. He could imagine memories in these hallways and kids posing for cheesy photos.
Of course, those people probably would have bought some furniture and lights and beds. Jerry Dunn had nothing like that. No furniture. Just some blankets and pillows scattered about. No television. There was a fridge in the kitchen, and dishes stacked in the sink. The place smelled of moldy food and stale piss.
Marcus supposed that the young parents or the single mom who could have lived here would have decorated the walls a bit differently as well.
Jerry had chosen to decorate his walls, every square inch of them, with photos. Printed pictures of different women. It was clear that Dunn had taken the photos himself, and it was clear that the women had no idea that their picture was being taken. They were unloading groceries and walking down the street and closing blinds, and in some, ones which looked to be shot with long-range lenses, the women were in various states of undress.
The pillows and blankets seemed to be arranged around the room’s perimeter, as if Dunn’s personal life consisted entirely of sitting on the floor alone and staring at his photos.
Marcus wandered all the rooms, giving a cursory scan, but he didn’t immediately notice anything that could be of use to them. Beyond analyzing the photos, which was one hell of a big job.
Marcus had noticed a photo printer in the corner of the living room, but he couldn’t imagine what Dunn had spent on ink and photo paper.
And, of course, there was no sign of the computer or the camera equipment.
From behind him, Andrew said, “Remember when these kinds of guys would have their own dark rooms and develop their own photos.”
“Yeah, they had to. It wasn’t like they could get these kinds of photos developed by Kenneth down at the local drugstore.”
Andrew nodded. “This conversation is making me feel old.”
“I thought it was your gray hair making you feel old.”
“And I suppose you don’t have gray hairs?”
“I’m like a fine wine. My hair actually gets darker with age,” Marcus said.
Andrew laughed, but then his smile faded. He pointed toward one of the picture walls. Andrew said, “That’s Debra Costello. Powell’s daughter. Looks like Jerry was fixated on her, just like all these other women. Guess it’s pretty clear that he’s the one who killed her.”
“If she’s dead. We don’t know for sure on anything yet.”
“I hope we find her,” Andrew said. “But we both saw her cuts. That was a different level from these other killings.”
“Right. She had to be the inciting incident of all this. But why? And why Jerry?”
Andrew shrugged. “He loved her. Blah. Blah. Blah. They were soul mates, and she rejected him. So he killed her, and he’s taking it out on the world until we stop him.”
Marcus stood back and looked at the photos. There almost seemed to be a pattern or something strange about their arrangement. But he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
After a moment, he said, “Let’s check the trash. You want the cans up here or the dumpster.”
Andrew said, “I better take the cans up here. You know, my leg.”
*
Marcus opened the dumpster, and then he dug into the heap of plastic bags, discarding each bag of refuse until he found Jerry Dunn’s trash. The dry cleaner’s trash was obvious by the type and size of bag, and he was able to identify the nail salon’s offerings by their contents. This narrowed the search down to two possible bags that could have belonged to Jerry. He put them on top of the pile, but he left them inside the dumpster. He had a few things he needed to check before he returned to Andrew.
First, he needed to check around for the real garbage.
Marcus fully expected the trash he had just found in the dumpster to yield no clues. But it still needed to be checked. He had always found that the biggest part of detective work was ruling out possibilities until only one remained.
The problem with this case was that he had entirely too many possibilities and not nearly enough time to rule them all out. What he needed was a little luck, or one slip-up on the part of his opponent.
And that’s where the real trash came in.
A perpetrator would often take certain countermeasures to leave no evidence of their crimes. One common mistake on the part of the perp was to dispose of evidence in places geographically close to their home or business or the scene of the crime. Investigators knew to check for possibilities like that. And, if the situation warranted it, investigators would sometimes check all the trash cans within the public domain inside a ten block radius. But all of that took time. Time he didn’t have.
Marcus tried to imagine himself in the killer’s shoes. If Jerry Dunn was the Judas Killer, then he would have a great deal of evidence to dispose of. And if the Judas was setting Dunn up as a scapegoat, then he could have faked some or all of the apartment’s contents. In either case, there was a lot of potential evidence being disposed of by someone who was intelligent, thorough, and well versed in the methods of both killers and those who hunted them.
Marcus tried to imagine himself in the shoes of a man like that. A man who strived for and coveted superiority and prided himself on the ability to plan ahead by many steps and manipulate people into playing his games, his way. He asked himself how a man like that would dispose of evidence, a part of Marcus wishing his brother would have been there to offer guidance.
Judas would want the method to be quick and easy to access and leave no trace. Burning was good in those circumstances, but Marcus ignored burning as an option. If Judas had burned his evidence, then there would have been little evidence left. Better to focus on something that would yield greater rewards. So he considered other methods of disposal.
The next best method for disposing of evidence like that completely would probably be to “flush it” in one way or another, either down the toilet or straight into a storm drain or sewer.
He walked out to the curb to check the sewer first. He didn’t remember any manholes, but he did recall seeing a storm sewer. The drain was inset into the curb, right where he remembered it. The metal cover was heavy, but light enough for one person. He hefted up the grated covering and slid it aside. Then he peered into the hole.
Marcus could see some debris that had found its way down the drain and then had lodged itself in the mud covering the bottom of the pipe and surrounding the grate. It had rained some since they had arrived, and the rain would have
been pumping water down the drain faster than the storm sewer could have handled. He could imagine Judas stuffing something down this hole and then considering it to be gone forever.
Marcus poked around some with his shoe, but he knew that, unfortunately, he was going to have to get down on the wet ground and ram his arm into that pipe. He got on his knees and shed his leather jacket. The pipe was about two feet in diameter, just right to stick in an arm.
A memory from his younger days came to mind. A scene from a Stephen King movie. A vision of a demonic, supernatural clown ripping off a little boy’s arm by pulling him down into a similar sewer.
Marcus stuck his arm in anyway.
He jammed it in all the way up to his shoulder. He felt around the pipe but found nothing. He prayed for a little luck. In his head, Marcus heard John Williams, his real father, saying, You make your own luck.
Marcus reached out farther. He stretched his arm out and was rewarded with the feel of plastic and branches and other garbage that had been swept down the drain. It had found its way a few feet into the pipe before the debris had conglomerated into a sticky mess that refused to be carried away. He wrapped his fingers around the plastic and gave it a gentle tug, being careful not to tear the thin membrane of plastic. It was tangled in the twigs and other debris, so he grabbed hold of the mass by its roots and tore the whole thing free of the mud.
Once he had the entire clog out of the drain and lying on the concrete sidewalk, he examined the plastic he had felt. It was a Ziplock freezer bag. The kind with a red pull tab.
Marcus smiled as he held up the bag and examined its contents.
You make your own luck.
*
Andrew started with the small kitchen and bathroom, since they were the most normal rooms in the apartment. But he didn’t find anything useful; just the typical bathroom and kitchen contents, only with an extra layer of grime and filth.
Next, he went around and checked inside all of the heating vents. They were small and brown and rectangular and inset into the floor. He moved to each room, pulled the blankets aside, and popped up the vented registers. People often hid things inside spots like this, and so it had become an SOP for the SO to check the vents when searching a suspect’s house.