“What about the SUV? Anything in it?”
“Yeah, and it’s strange. There was a photo on the front passenger seat. Maybe Peter left it there or maybe the perp did. We don’t really know.”
“What kind of photo?”
Arne fished out his cell phone. “Have a look for yourself. I took a shot of it.”
The image showed a woman walking along a busy street. The woman—African-American, probably in her thirties, dressed in a gray business suit—looked to be a professional of some kind. It didn’t appear to be a posed picture and might well have been snapped without her knowledge. Behind her, out of focus, skyscrapers loomed, suggesting the photo had been taken in a big city—New York, maybe, or Chicago.
“Any idea who the woman is?” I asked.
“Not a clue,” Arne said, “but I doubt she’s from around here.” This was hardly a Sherlockian deduction on Arne’s part. Most of the handful of Blacks in Paradise County work at the casino. The woman in the photo did not look like she dealt blackjack for a living.
“All right, anything else I need to know?”
“As a matter of fact, there is. When was the last time you had any contact with Peter?”
A peculiar question, I thought, so I posed one of my own, “Why do you ask?”
“Just answer the question, if you would.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m really not sure the last time I talked to him. We’re not friends, Arne, as you well know.”
This was true. Peter didn’t like me for any number of reasons. While I was still in private practice, I’d sued him in a case involving an historic family mansion in town he was trying to renovate. Later, when I became county attorney, there was a big dustup over his hotel project. He and his phalanx of clever lawyers had cooked up a scheme that would have saddled Paradise County with the full cost of new roads needed for the project. The county board, eager to please the king, was willing, but I challenged the plan’s legality. I also leaked some of the more fragrant details to our local newspaper, the Paradise Tattler. An outcry followed, and the scheme quickly died.
Never one to take defeat lightly, Peter called me the next day and said, “You cost me a million and a half, you little shit, and I won’t forget it.” I told him, in a calm and measured voice, that I thought he was a crook as well as an asshole. More charming conversation followed. Later, we had other clashes in court, and Peter regarded me, not unjustly, as his biggest adversary in town.
Arne said, “So you’re saying it’s been quite a while since you had any contact with him, is that right?” Suspicion lurked in his voice. It didn’t require any legal acumen to realize I was being interrogated.
“Okay, Arne, I can tell you’re sitting on something. Why don’t you share it with me and we’ll go from there?”
“Well, here’s the thing. We found Peter’s phone. It was lying on the driveway next to his vehicle. Being the ace investigators we are, we looked at the recent calls and text messages. You’ll never guess what popped up.”
“A call from the Pope?”
“Oh, better than that, counselor. We found a message Peter sent to your cell number at midnight.”
My first thought was, oh shit, which was also my second thought. I considered my situation and said, “Well, that’s strange. I didn’t even know Peter had my number, and I have no idea why he’d send me a message. What did it say?”
“You tell me.”
“I haven’t looked at my phone this morning, Arne, so I can’t tell you what the message said, assuming there was one.”
“Well then, I’ll need to see your phone.”
I didn’t like Arne’s tone, and my lawyerly instincts took over. Was the message in some way incriminating? If so, I wanted to see it for myself before I let Arne have my phone. It also occurred to me Arne might have an ulterior motive. Maybe he wanted to look at my phone for a reason unrelated to Peter’s disappearance. Maybe I was being set up for something. Paranoia comes all too naturally when the law is on your tail.
“Well, if you’ve read the message,” I said, “just tell me what it says. That seems fair enough.”
“I’d rather look at your phone, to verify you received it.”
“And I’d rather you not, until I have a better sense of what’s going on here.”
“You’re beginning to sound like a man who has something to hide.”
“No, you’re the one who’s hiding things. How about we quit playing silly games? What did the message say?”
“So you’re not going to give me your phone?”
“Tell you what. You’ll get it—later.”
The blowtorch eyes were now cutting holes in my face. “Why are you being such a dickhead about this? Do I have to go out and get a fucking warrant?”
“No, you don’t. I’ll drop the phone off at your office later today and you can obsess over it all you want. How’s that for a deal? Now, unless there’s something else you want to tell me, I think we’re done here. You can show yourself out.”
Arne crushed out his Marlboro, stood up, and glared at me as though I were a naughty child. “You’re not being very cooperative, counselor. I really wonder why that is.”
“Wonder all you want, Arne. It’ll give you something to do in your spare time.”
“Go ahead, be a wiseass. But guess what? You’ve got some real problems. Fact is, I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to call in a prosecuting attorney from the state to handle this case. You’re compromised, the way I see it.”
Arne had finally done it, ticking me off to no end. “I’m compromised? Strange words coming from someone who’s been in Peter’s back pocket for years.” This was true, more or less. Like every other public official in Paradise County, Arne had cozied up to Peter, attracted by his wealth and unapologetic hedonism. It was said Arne had been invited more than once to the bacchanalias at Peter’s mansion, and there were courthouse whispers money had changed hands for favors rendered. I’d never been able to prove any wrongdoing, but Arne knew I didn’t trust him.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” he said. “You’d best watch yourself. You’re in trouble and that smart mouth of yours won’t help you.”
“Again, thanks for the helpful advice,” I said. “As always, it was lovely chatting with you.”
After Arne left, Camus wandered in for a discussion. He gave me a long look, searching my eyes for secrets, then tilted his head a bit as if to say, “Now what have you done, you damn idiot?”
“Well, what do think?” I asked Camus. “Am I in serious trouble?”
Camus’s light blue eyes gazed balefully at me before he delivered a sharp, quick bark, suggesting the answer was a definite “yes.” As always, Camus proved prescient, and it became clear just how deep my troubles were once I looked at Peter Swindell’s message on my phone.
3
I hate my smart phone and it hates me, and that’s why I use it as little as possible. It’s an outsized Moto—Verizon, wishing to have a laugh at my expense, gave me a deal on it—and I’ve come to think of it as a malicious elf living in my pocket. It finds many ways to torment me. Sometimes a screen appears out of nowhere. Sometimes the ring volume magically descends to zero and I miss calls. Sometimes the phone locks up without warning or drifts off into a mysterious setting known only to Google engineers and every twelve-year-old on the planet. Or maybe the phone is just a whole lot smarter than I am.
Now the damn thing seemed ready to implicate me in a crime. I went into the kitchen, where I charge the phone overnight, and started scrolling through the text messages. Arne, I found, hadn’t been playing me. There was a message from Peter, at two minutes past midnight. To say the message was cryptic would be an understatement. It read: “I’m ready. Come to Kingshill now & come alone. We can still settle this thing.”
The message didn’t make sense. Why would Pete
r have texted me at midnight and what was the mysterious “thing” we supposedly needed to settle? Was he still angry, three years later, about the road deal I’d scotched? That seemed unlikely. Or was something else sticking in his craw? The fact that Peter requested an immediate meeting at Kingshill was also puzzling. Why invite me to his mansion at such a strange hour when he could have talked with me any time he wanted?
Nothing about the message rang true, and I thought it very likely Peter’s kidnapper, rather than Peter himself, had sent it. I could think of only one reason for doing so and it was chilling. The kidnapper wanted to cast suspicion on me. What I didn’t know was why.
Second thoughts, like second marriages, aren’t necessarily good things, but as I chewed over the message I had another idea, which was that Peter’s supposed abduction might actually be a big show. Maybe he’d staged his own disappearance. Because of his complicated business dealings, Peter carried a lot of debt, and there were tales linking him to certain people in Chicago whose method of settling past-due accounts usually entailed the breaking of bones. Had Peter found himself staring at that unattractive possibility and arranged to vanish while implicating me just for the merry hell of it? It sounded far-fetched, but I couldn’t rule it out. With Peter, anything was possible.
Whatever was going on, I had to be careful. I scoured my Moto looking for old messages or calls that might arouse suspicion. I found none, but that wasn’t necessarily comforting. A smart phone is a harbor filled with hidden mines ready to detonate. Who knew what some clever forensic technician might discover? Even so, I knew I had to turn the phone over to Arne. It would look bad if I didn’t and, besides, Arne could always obtain a search warrant if he had to.
Plenty of people in Pineland dislike me, despite my manifestly charming personality. One of them is Dewey Swindell, and I was surprised when he called my land line just before noon. Dewey is not a highly regarded figure in Pineland. Loud and relentlessly opinionated, he’s the kind of man people walk across the street to avoid. He wears a MAGA hat like a crown—his right, I don’t care—but he thinks it entitles him to share his profound political insights with everyone else, whether they want to hear them or not.
“Hello, Dewey,” I said when I heard his grating voice. “Sorry to hear about your father and what happened out at the mansion. I hope he’ll be all right.”
Skipping the niceties of a preamble, Dewey said, “So what’s this meeting you had with the old man this morning? What did he tell you?”
Dewey always refers to his father as “the old man” and it’s not a term of endearment. The story around town is that father and son haven’t gotten along since Dewey was tapped to manage the Paradise Pines Hotel, a plush assignment he took to the way a duck takes to sand. I’d heard rumors, not long before Peter disappeared, that he blamed Dewey for the hotel’s problems and was about to fire him.
“I didn’t have any meeting with your father,” I said. “What makes you think that?”
“Don’t bullshit me. It’s all over town. He texted you and you were out at the mansion. Was he feeding you some crap about that Lorrimer bitch?”
Dewey clearly knew all about the message on my phone. I wasn’t surprised. Criminal investigations in Pineland tend to be a community affair, powered by a wondrous gossip mill. Or maybe Dewey had simply been tipped off by Arne.
As for the “bitch” Dewey referred to, her name was Jill Lorrimer and she’d once worked as a blackjack dealer at the Paradise Pines Casino. She was also reputed to be a pricey call girl who served clients at Dewey’s hotel. Three months earlier, on New Year’s Day, she’d been found dead in her car of an apparent drug overdose. Documents discovered in her apartment suggested Dewey had in effect been her pimp, taking a cut of her proceeds and possibly those of other prostitutes who worked out of the hotel. There were also tantalizing hints Dewey had bribed sheriff’s deputies to overlook these indecent activities.
The allegations were juicy enough to prompt an investigation by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Because of my connections to the sheriff’s office, a state prosecutor was called in to oversee the case, but so far no charges had been filed. Now Dewey seemed to be suggesting his father was also involved in the matter, possibly as a witness against his own son. This was news to me.
I told Dewey again that I hadn’t talked to his father about Jill Lorrimer or anything else. “There was no meeting. It’s that simple.”
“You’re a fucking liar, just like you’ve always been,” Dewey said with his usual grace and good humor. “I know you’re up to something. You haven’t heard the last of this.”
He disconnected before I could patiently explain to him that he was being a complete asshole.
Early that afternoon I decided to go into town. I wanted to drop off my Moto at the sheriff’s department, thereby keeping Arne from going apoplectic. Then I planned to stop at my office to catch up on a little work. I’d also need to acquire a new phone, since Arne would undoubtedly take his time returning mine.
As I backed out of the garage, Camus riding shotgun, I saw a sheriff’s cruiser parked in my lonely cul-de-sac. Apparently, I was under surveillance. I pulled up next to the cruiser. Robby Lindquist, a florid dumpling of a man in his early thirties and one of Arne’s least brilliant deputies, was at the wheel. He rolled down his window so we could talk. Spotting a suspicious uniform, Camus went into his usual low growl but I quieted him with a disapproving stare.
“Hi, Robby,” I said. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Just sitting here for a while. Catching up on some stuff.”
“Kind of a strange place to do that, isn’t it?”
He shrugged and said, “Good a place as any.”
“Have you been assigned to follow me, Robby?”
“Can’t say.”
“Ah, I see. It must be a state secret. Well, do me a favor, will you?” I handed him my Moto. “Give this to Arne. He’ll have fun with it. Now, just so you know, I’m heading to the courthouse. Feel free to follow.”
Robby did just that, sticking to my tail all the way into town. Clearly, the surveillance wasn’t going to be subtle. He was still behind me when I reached the Paradise County Courthouse.
Built in 1894, the courthouse is a towering pile of pinkish red sandstone that stands in Pineland’s central square. A brochure in the lobby describes the building as an “outstanding example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style.” That may be, but I’ve always thought of it as a giant ogre that wandered into town one day and decided to squat for perpetuity. The stone used for the courthouse came from a quarry north of town founded by my great-grandfather—Paradise County’s first Zweifel—and so I’ve always considered the building, ugly as it is, part of my heritage.
A big clock peers out from the massive central tower, and it was still keeping time with remarkable accuracy until vandals with no fear of heights somehow managed to break off the hands last fall. Maybe it was an omen of the disordered days to come, when time itself seemed out of balance. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. I’ll let you decide. In either case, the county board—always a parsimonious lot—has shown no interest in budgeting the fifty thousand dollars needed to repair the clock. “Everybody knows what time it is anyway,” a board member explained to me, “so why should we spend a fortune to fix the damn thing?”
I parked my blue Prius on one side of the square, then waited for Robby to pull in behind me. I didn’t know if he’d get out of his cruiser or simply continue to watch me from his front seat. He stayed put, so I waved at him, put Camus on a leash, and walked toward the courthouse. It’s closed to the public on Saturdays, but an after-hours entrance at the rear provides access for county employees. A line of white pines, planted as a nod to the county’s history, screens the entry, and by the time I got there Robby and his cruiser were out of view.
A surprise awaited me. Taped to the courthouse door was a
typewritten message on a plain sheet of white copy paper. At the bottom of the message, secured by another piece of gray duct tape, was a thumb drive. The message read:
Do you know what happened to Peter Swindell? Ask his son. Ask Sigurdson. Ask Zweifel. Ask Moreland. They all have secrets. They all tell lies. Await THE WOMAN. Let the truth shine forth.
The Serenader
4
I stared at the message, wondering if it was a joke. But the way it pointed to specific people suggested the author was dead serious. The “Serenader” was a complete mystery to me. I’d never heard of anyone using that name.
I also didn’t know why I and the three others were being called out as suspects in Peter’s disappearance. Raised a Catholic, I’ve always adhered to the cheerful view that pretty much everybody is guilty of everything. Even so, I couldn’t think of any reason why I’d want to harm Peter. We’d had plenty of run-ins over the years in court but they weren’t personal. True, I had no great love for the man, but if I started kidnapping people I disliked there’d be no end to it.
As for Dewey, Arne and Marty, who could say? But if one or all of them had good cause to spirit Peter away, I didn’t know about it. Yet the Serenader was clearly implying a conspiracy of some kind surrounded Peter’s disappearance. If so, how did he know? And who was he, or for that matter, she? Trying to guess the Serenader’s identity would soon become Pineland’s favorite sport, but for the moment I was completely in the dark.
The uppercase “WOMAN” we were told to “await” was another question mark. Who was she and what wisdom might she have to share? Could it be the Black woman in the photo found in Peter’s SUV? I assumed Arne was trying to track her down, but the photo wasn’t much to go on. Then again, maybe she was someone Peter knew and her identity wouldn’t be that hard to discover.
The thumb drive was equally intriguing. Presumably something was on it, but what? And why leave a digital file next to a message produced on an old-fashioned typewriter? I had my laptop with me and was tempted to plug in the drive and see what it revealed. I resisted temptation.
Pineland Serenade Page 2