Criminal Enterprise (10 page)

S
TEVENS STARED
IN
through the window at the backseat of the Thunderbird, his sleeve over his face to mask the smell from inside the car. “Two of them,” the tech said beside him. “You see her?”

Stevens nodded. “So who the hell’s in the front seat?”

There were two skeletons in the Thunderbird. The first in the driver’s seat, the one Stevens had seen. The second lay across the backseat. The techs figured the second was Sylvia Danzer. She wore what remained of a synthetic North Face ski jacket, bright yellow. It was the same jacket listed in the missing person’s description. She looked small. The first skeleton looked bigger.

Stevens had been staring into the car for half an hour now, trying to get a feel for the scene as the techs worked around him. There was a yellowed state map on the backseat beside the second body, folded open to Koochiching County. There was an empty plastic package of almonds, and what looked to Stevens like the remains of a fire.

And then there was the knife lodged inside the first skeleton’s jacket.

The techs had noticed it as they’d photographed the scene. A hunting knife, plunged in to the hilt, chest level, slightly skewed to the left. Almost as though the passenger had leaned over and stabbed the driver.

She stabbed him,
Stevens thought.
Then he crashed the car.
No.
Rust aside, the front of the T-Bird was nearly pristine. It was the quarter panels that were scratched and dented. The driver had aimed between the two trees and then marooned the car. He would have had to drive slowly to get as far as he did.

He got stuck,
Stevens thought.
Then she killed him. And then what?
She’d stayed in the car, eating packaged almonds and huddling around a small fire. Eventually, the food ran out, or the battery died and the night got too cold. She didn’t set out for safety. She waited, and she died.
She killed this guy here almost definitely,
Stevens thought.
So what does that mean for her husband?

This guy killed him.
Or she killed him and ran away with this guy. Maybe. Or maybe we never find out for certain.

The tech cleared her throat. Stevens turned. “We’re about ready to start moving them,” she said. “I mean, if you’re done with the scene.”

Stevens took one last look inside. He shivered. “Sure,” he said, stepping back from the door. “Let’s get them out of here and go home.”

T
ONY SCHULTZ
STOOD
in his kitchen, a pile of money on the Formica table, a smaller pile of rubber bands beside. He counted the bills into thousand-dollar stacks, wrapped the stacks in rubber bands, and set them aside. It was tedious work, a long fucking job, and even when he’d finished, Schultz knew he wouldn’t have nearly enough to pay off the Mexicans.

Ricky had shown up the morning before. Schultz watched his big Cadillac truck bounce and jostle down the snowy dirt driveway to the house. He watched Ricky climb from the truck. Watched the driver climb out, too—a big fucker in a down jacket, probably a pistol or two underneath.

Schultz had toyed with the idea of shooting the spics, greeting them at the door with the TEC-9 he’d bought after the robbery, showing those brown fuckers who really was boss. He stayed put, though. Left the gun in the locker. Even if he killed Ricky, the Mexicans would send someone else. Better to try and talk things out.

Ricky didn’t bother to knock. “Yo,” he said, poking his head in the house. “Tony.”

Schultz walked into the front landing as Ricky walked past him, into the living room. The fucker didn’t bother to take off his boots, left a slushy track from the door to the couch. Schultz followed him back. Sat down opposite. The driver stood behind him and out of sight, the implication clear. “You know why I’m here,” Ricky said.

Schultz shook his head. “I don’t have it.”

Ricky glanced at the driver. Schultz braced himself, but the hit never came. Ricky sat back on the couch. “You owe fifty thousand, straight up. Plus twenty for the brick. That makes seventy thousand.”

“I told you,” Schultz said. “I got robbed.”

Ricky made a face. “Someone steals seventy grand in this little pissant town, you can’t figure out who’s the bad guy?”

“The guy came from Minneapolis,” Schultz told him. “I’m working on it.”

“Been fucking two months, Tony.” Ricky looked at the driver again. This time, the blow came. When Schultz opened his eyes, he was on the floor of his living room, his face on fire in one of Ricky’s slushy footprints. Ricky stood over him. “Try harder,” he said.

—

N
OW SCHULTZ STOOD
in his kitchen, stacking money. He figured he had maybe eight or nine grand, the last payoffs from old drug deals and gambling debts. All of it wrinkled, five- and ten-dollar bills, a kitchen table’s worth of dirty money and none of it worth spit to the spics.

Seventy grand. Bad enough that asshole Brill had taken his guns, knocked out his teeth. The money, though, and the drugs: that was a death sentence. There was no way he could come up with that kind of cash.

Unless he could find Roger Brill.

Schultz thought about it for a while. Had a bad idea, and pushed it aside. Thought about it some more, and couldn’t come up with better. So he picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Hastings PD. Asked for his brother-in-law. “It’s me,” Schultz told him. “You busy?”

“Just about to head out on patrol. This important?”

“Life or death.”

Scotty paused. “Gimme one second.”

Schultz waited. Looked out the kitchen window at the snowy front field, the highway in the distance. Contemplated making a break for it.
If I can’t find Roger Brill,
he thought,
I might just have to start running.

Scotty came back. “Yeah,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I need help,” Schultz told him. “That robbery of mine. I need to find the guy that did it. Roger Brill is his name.”

Scotty sucked his teeth. “Probably not much anybody can do now. Not this long after the fact.”

“It’s assault,” Schultz said. “Guy put me in the hospital.”

“Chris Russell said you chased her off your property when she tried for a statement,” Scotty said. “I can’t imagine she’d be inclined to come back.”

Tony stared out the window. “I need to find this guy, Scotty. I don’t have time for fucking around.”

Scotty said nothing.

“This is personal, man. This is more than just guns.”

Another pause. Then Scotty grunted. “I’ll talk to Russell,” he said. “See if she’s got any time. That’s the best I can do.”

Schultz mulled it over. “God damn it.”

“You gotta talk to her this time. And clean yourself up. You get pinched cause of something she finds, they’ll put you on
World’s Dumbest Criminals.
”

Schultz spat in his sink. “Who’re you talking to?”

“Some punk got robbed by a city boy, I guess.”

“Fuck you.” Schultz hung up the phone. He stared out the window a moment longer, then turned back to the pathetic pile of money on his kitchen table.
I need Roger Brill,
he thought.
That cop better find him, or I’m fucked.

T
HE DEAD
GUY
in the Thunderbird was a real piece of work.

The techs told Stevens a DNA check would take at least a couple of days. Not much hope for a credible cause of death. Figured, off the record, the guy in the driver’s seat died because of the knife in his chest, and the woman probably died of exposure. But nothing for certain, not yet and maybe not ever.

They found wallets, though; half-eaten leather and laminated IDs. The tech called Stevens back around lunchtime the next day, caught him pulling into a diner headed southbound on Route 53. “The woman in the backseat has Sylvia Danzer’s ID,” she told him. “So it’s probably her, like you thought.”

Stevens parked the Cherokee. “What about the driver?”

“The driver.” The tech paused. “Yeah, that guy’s the real story.”

The driver’s ID read David Allen Samson. The tech had run the name through the FBI’s national database. Forty-three years old; spent ten years of his life in prison. Manslaughter and aggravated sexual assault, a litany of assault charges, battery and the like. He’d been out of the federal jail in Sandstone three weeks when the Danzers had disappeared.

“Sandstone’s on I-35,” Stevens said. “Pretty close to Moose Lake.”

“Makes things a bit clearer, doesn’t it?”

Stevens stared out at the diner. “Maybe.”

“We’ll work on the DNA, anyway. Get this thing closed. You sticking around?”

“Already gone,” Stevens told her. “My girl’s got a basketball game.” He ended the call and sat in the Cherokee for a bit, staring out at the diner.
It was a place kind of like this one,
he thought,
where they found Elliott Danzer.

He pushed the thought from his mind. Went inside and ate lunch and tried to forget about it. Later, though, on the long drive down 35 back toward Saint Paul, Stevens passed the diner at Moose Lake and, a while later, the turnoff to the jail at Sandstone, and he turned down the radio and thought things over again.

Simplest solution said David Samson murdered Elliott Danzer and took off with the wife. Headed north, possibly for the border, and got lost on a back road, got stuck. Maybe Sylvia Danzer saw a chance and she took it. When Samson was dead, she realized she was lost. Could do nothing but wait to be found.

The wind howled outside, rocking the Cherokee, blowing snow across the highway. It had been a hell of a winter, the year that the Danzers disappeared. If Sylvia Danzer got stuck in a blizzard with a dead battery, she was done.

Stevens tried to picture the woman huddled in her backseat, working on a little fire as the wind blew around her, Samson’s body rotting behind the wheel. It would have been a bitter way to die, he thought. A miserable end. He shook the thought from his mind. Turned up the radio and drove onward, away from Moose Lake and Sandstone and south toward Saint Paul as the sun sank toward the horizon.

T
HURSDAY NIGHT.
Another basketball game. Tomlin spent the day in his office, trying to track down a mechanic hungry enough to fake his receipt. He must have made fifty phone calls. No luck.

Between calls, Tomlin booted up his computer and Googled Carla Windermere again. Returned to last year’s news story, the Arthur Pender case, and scoured it for details. Felt a perverse fascination, a kind of obsession. He hadn’t been able to rid Windermere’s knowing eyes from his mind.

She was a southerner, according to the slim profile in the
Star Tribune.
Mississippi born and raised. Had moved north from Florida. She hadn’t had much to say to the newspapers. The reporters described her as private. Quiet. Intense.

Intense
was a good word
, Tomlin thought. She’d looked at him like she didn’t plan to rest until she uncovered every last one of his secrets. Like she lived and breathed to solve cases like these.

She unnerved him. And every minute she stayed on the case was another minute she got closer to the truth. Tomlin knew he had to find a way to distract her.

The receipt would do the job. But so far the receipt wasn’t happening.

—

T
OMLIN LEFT THE OFFICE
shortly after five. He drove home, walked the dog, and ate dinner with Becca and the girls. Then he bundled Heather into the Jaguar and together they drove the ten or twelve blocks to Kennedy High School. It was game night.

Tomlin waited outside the locker room while his team changed into their uniforms. He leaned against the wall and watched the stands fill with parents, and when his team was ready he gave them their pep talk. As far as pregame speeches went, it wasn’t his best.

Tomlin was still thinking about Carla Windermere. He was thinking about all the parents in the stands, all the families, and what they would think if they knew the truth. If they knew he was a bank robber, a near-bankrupt deadbeat who could hardly provide for his family. He could hear the gossip already.

The girls were staring at him. Somebody coughed. Tomlin shook his head. “Sorry,” he told them. “Let’s win this, okay?”

—

T
HERE WAS A MAN
standing courtside. He wore a heavy down parka, half unzipped, his hands in his pockets. He was talking to one of the Kennedy girls, a pretty blond point guard.

Andrea,
Tomlin thought.
Andrea Stevens.

The girl looked embarrassed. She kept looking back at her teammates. The man said something to her. Smiled and clapped her shoulder. The girl blushed bright red and ran back onto the court. The man stood courtside and watched as she joined a line of her teammates shooting layups. Then he turned and walked toward the stands.

The guy looked familiar. Uncannily so. Just the sight of him made Tomlin’s skin crawl, but he couldn’t place the man’s face. Then he looked back at Andrea Stevens again, and he knew.

Kirk Stevens. The BCA agent. The man in the stands was Carla Windermere’s former partner. He was the pretty blond point guard’s father. And he was here for the basketball game.

T
OMLIN STOOD
COURTSIDE
,
scanning the stands as the buzzer counted down. On the court before him, the Kennedy girls trailed by one, but Tomlin hardly noticed the score. The cheers from the parents, the shrill piercing whistle, the squeak of shoes on the gym’s hardwood floor, all of it seemed muted. He’d barely coached at all.

Instead of drawing up plays for his teenage charges, Tomlin had spent most of the game watching Kirk Stevens in the stands. The BCA agent sat holding hands with his pretty wife near the top of the bleachers, watching his daughter play point guard on the floor. His young son sat a few feet away, fiddling with his Game Boy.

Stevens was hardly an imposing figure. Probably he and Tomlin were the same age, though Tomlin was thinner and had better hair. Stevens looked like the kind of middle manager that Tomlin had terrorized at the firm, the dull kind of man who ate his lunch at his desk, who vacationed with the in-laws in Duluth, who never got the girl.

Except the BCA agent had found a girl, Tomlin thought, stealing a glance at Nancy Stevens again. And his daughter, God knew where she’d come from. He looked at Andrea now, on the court—a pretty, vibrant blond thing who one day, sometime soon, would be beautiful.

This girl came from Kirk Stevens’s gene pool,
Tomlin thought.
How the hell did that happen?

Looking at Stevens, big and dumb, Tomlin would have figured him for a patrol cop, at best. Couldn’t imagine the man cracking an interstate crime ring. But he had. He and Carla Windermere both. They were colleagues. Partners. Probably friends. Maybe they still kept in touch.

Maybe
, Tomlin thought,
Kirk Stevens could provide a little cheap intelligence
. He turned away from the bleachers in time to watch Andrea Stevens pull up for a jump shot as the last seconds ticked off the clock. The ball rainbowed over the arms of a defender, arcing beautifully toward the basket as the buzzer sounded to end the game. The whole gym seemed to stop moving, stop breathing, waiting for the ball to land.

The ball hit the rim and bounced up again. It hung there, lingered for a few tantalizing seconds before falling again and ricocheting, harmless, to the floor. The whole gym exhaled in one dismayed breath, the other team swarming and cheering as Andrea stood at the top of the key, staring at the basket, alone for a moment. Then she turned and jogged back to her teammates, a sheepish half smile on her face.

Unflappable.
Tomlin wondered if her dad was the same.