Death Benefits (24 page)

Walker stared at the entries as they began to go past again. He froze the tape and pointed. “What’s this number: fifty-three by twenty, forty-six by twenty?”

“I don’t know. My knowledge of optometry is starting to get used up.” He stared at it for a few seconds. “It’s by the frame order, so it must be a size.”

“Then what’s this—one hundred and fifteen?”

“That I understand. It’s millimeters: the length of the arms that go from the lens to your ears. Probably the other is the size of the circular part that holds the lens.”

Walker snatched up the dead man’s sunglasses and studied the frames. “Fifty-nine by twenty. One forty-five.” He went back up the list in reverse, writing down the numbers beside each name.

When they had gone back to Linda Asheransky, Stillman picked up the notepad and the pen, and began to cross off names. When he had finished, he said, “Our man could be Donald Ross, James Scully, Paul Stratton, or Michael Tyler.” He began to speed through the tape again, stopped at Michael Tyler, and began to write.

“What did you find?” asked Walker.

“Phone numbers.”

“You’re just going to call them up?”

“It’s probable I’m going to bother three harmless guys with a nuisance call in the middle of the night. The fourth is the only one I’d worry about making suspicious, but I don’t have much chance of reaching him. He’s dead.”

27

“Listen to this.” Stillman handed the telephone receiver to Walker.

“This is Jim. If you want to leave a message, wait until you hear the beep.” Walker hung up, then looked up at Stillman. “That’s him?”

Stillman shrugged. “He’s the only one who wasn’t home when I called.”

His name was James Scully, and he lived in a town called Coulter, New Hampshire. Walker had not heard the voice before, because when he had shot the man, he had heard nothing but the sound of the gun. He had just finished listening to a ghost. Walker looked at his watch. “It’s three-thirty
A.M.
We’ve got his name and his address. What do you think? Do we call the police or the FBI?”

Stillman frowned at the wall for a few seconds. “Not just yet.”

Walker watched him. “What do you have against the police? You were a cop once.”

Stillman slowly turned to face Walker. “Who told you about that?”

“The police captain in Miami. The one who asked all the questions,” said Walker.

Stillman looked at the carpet for a moment, then raised his eyes again. “I don’t have anything against the police. Or the FBI, for that matter. But they’re in a slightly different business than we are.”

“What do you mean? What’s different?”

“They’re in the business of arresting and convicting people.”

Walker stood up and walked across the room. “Isn’t that what we want? This isn’t some isolated fraud that’s going to be okay the minute we get the money back. They’re not just stealing money from a company. They’re doing it by taking ordinary people, one at a time, and killing them. Somebody’s got to get arrested.”

“I’m just not sure this is the time,” said Stillman. “Suppose we call the FBI and bring them up here. They’re at Scully’s house by morning. They begin an investigation—go around methodically and thoroughly collecting all the evidence in little plastic bags. The investigation hits on all cylinders, they eventually ferret out every one of the people who were in on this, put them on trial, and convict them of everything they did.”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

“The trouble is, an investigation like that takes at least two months with a strong wind behind it. If it succeeds, they make arrests. The trials begin six months after that, if the federal attorneys prepare their case with due speed and diligence. All that has got to happen, of course. And since they’re already on the case, we couldn’t get them off it if we wanted to.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“What I just said. The second we make that call and let them actually talk to us without McClaren’s in between, we’re out. The FBI is not going to let us keep poking into everything we have a theory about.”

“Are they wrong?”

“No,” said Stillman. “They’re right. But right now we know who one of these guys was and where he lived. His buddies may or may not know that much. Maybe they know Scully’s dead, but the last time they could have seen him was in Miami, where the police are telling reporters they don’t know who he is. It’s possible that James Scully’s house is just the way he left it. By the time the FBI could get up to speed, it may not be.”

Walker thought for a moment. “What if the Miami police have already figured out who Scully and the other one were? How do we find out at this time of night?”

Stillman shrugged. “The time of night isn’t the problem. If they don’t want to release information, they won’t. If they do, it’ll be in the papers.”

“Serena,” said Walker. “She was reading the
Miami Herald
today. Maybe it’s late enough for the morning edition.” He dialed the number, and Serena’s voice came on instantly.

“Yes?”

“Hi,” he said. “It’s the usual me. I’m sorry to call you at this hour, but it’s—”

“What hour?”

“It’s three thirty-five here, so it’s twelve thirty-five there, right?”

Her voice was amused. “You didn’t know? This is when we do most of our work, sweetheart. The preteen geeks and stock traders are asleep, the phone lines and networks are clear, so things happen faster. Haven’t you ever noticed that languid, sensuous look I have around the eyes in the daytime?”

“I’ve never seen you during the day,” he said.

“Oh. Well, we’ll have to go have a picnic beside the freeway, or whatever it is people do.”

“I called to see if the Miami police had announced anything about who those two guys were.”

“No,” said Serena. “But they’re still trying. The FBI has been doing tests on the two bodies.”

“We know,” said Walker. “The company has been talking with them.”

“Do you know about the blood tests?”

“No. What about them?”

“The cops type the blood at a shooting scene right away to figure out whose blood got spattered where. These two both had O positive—not unusual, but inconvenient. So the FBI sent samples to a lab in Wisconsin that does DNA tests. That was in the Miami papers, so I hacked into the e-mail at Donnard Laboratories to see what they were saying to each other. Apparently there are at least two kinds of examinations. One takes a month or two, and tells you more than you wanted to know. But while they’re doing it, they get preliminary results that can at least tell one person’s blood from another’s. They told the FBI that the two men were relatives. Not brothers, though, or father and son. Something more distant, like second cousins.”

“Can they tell that?”

“They seemed to think they could, and I don’t know why they’d say so to the FBI if they weren’t sure. I mean, how many customers can a company like that have? And it makes theoretical sense. First cousins would share one-eighth of their genes, so these guys share less than that, but more than two random guys.” She paused. “Are you even listening?”

“Yes,” said Walker. “I’m trying to figure out what it means.”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “It’s not going to be a shock to the FBI that criminals sometimes have relatives who are also criminals. Do you have news for me?”

“I guess all I’ve got is questions. We’ve figured out that one of those two guys was named James Scully, and he lived at 117 Birch Street, Coulter, New Hampshire.”

“C-O-L-T-E-R?”

“With a U. C-O-U-L—”

“Got it. Right here on the handy New Hampshire tourism Web page. What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you know.”

“Population, four hundred and twenty-eight—or twenty-seven, now.” She paused. “No pictures of it. Founded in 1753—no big deal. So was everything else around there. It’s not too far from Keene. It’s about an hour northeast of you, on Route 9. That’s marked as a scenic route, so let me see if they say anything about that. Yes. It’s called the Old Concord Road, because eventually it gets to the state capital. It says ‘eventually’ because it winds around a bit. That’s all I can see. Coulter seems to be just one of a few dozen places just like it.”

“Okay. We’ll find it.”

“You stopped using Stillman’s credit card. Where are you calling from?”

“The Days Inn in Keene. The number is—”

“That much I just got, from caller ID. What room?”

“Stillman is 93, and I’m 95.”

“Cozy. Are you going to Coulter now?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Be careful. Stay close to Stillman and do what he says.” She corrected herself. “I guess staying close to Stillman isn’t being careful. Just remember he’s been doing stupid things a long time, and he’s alive, so pay attention.”

“He’d be flattered.”

“I’m going to drop everything else and find out whatever I can about James Scully.”

“Do you—” But the line was dead.

“I’d be flattered about what?” asked Stillman. Walker turned and saw that he was taking things out of his suitcase, putting some of them into his leather bag, and others into his pockets.

“She pointed out that you’re alive.”

“Smart as a whip, that girl. Presumes very little on your time, too.”

“That hasn’t escaped my attention,” said Walker glumly. “I’ve talked to her about three times in the past two days, and she’s hung up on me every time.” He added, “The police don’t know the names yet.”

“Get your stuff. Wear jeans and hiking boots and a jacket. Try to look like a harmless, respectable guy on vacation. I’ll meet you in the car.”

Five minutes later, Walker found Stillman sitting in the passenger seat of the Explorer studying a map in the light from the open glove compartment. Walker got in and drove out West Street until he saw the sign for Route 9 he had remembered. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. “It’s already almost four. She said it’s about an hour away. Is four forty-five
A.M.
a good time to arrive in Coulter?”

Stillman said, “It’ll do. We’ll take a look around before they get to look at us.”

“There are four hundred and twenty-eight people.”

“I’ll keep count when I see one,” said Stillman. “What else did she tell you?”

“The FBI apparently hasn’t identified Scully and his friend yet, but they know they were related.”

“What do you mean, related? How?”

“Like second cousins, but not as close as first cousins. They had some company do DNA tests. Don’t ask me to explain more than that. She stole it off some e-mail the company was sending to the FBI. Smart as a whip, as you said.”

Stillman was staring ahead at the road, and his brow was furrowed.

“What?” asked Walker. “Does that mean something?”

“It’s odd,” Stillman mused. “Brothers, I can easily take in stride. Somebody comes up with a way of making big money, tells one of them, and asks if there’s somebody else he can trust to bring in on it. The one he thinks of is his brother. Fine for us, because we can find a brother. But this business of second cousins twice removed or something, how do we use it? Most likely they’d have different last names, and nobody but them would even know they were related. That’s no help.”

“I suppose not,” said Walker. He drove in silence for a while. Stillman’s sharp eyes stared, unblinking, into the dark, until Walker said, “Is there something else wrong?”

“I was thinking about all of them: Ellen Snyder, Fred Teller, the two people who got killed in their swimming pool, the guy in that swamp in Florida.”

“What about them?”

“I was thinking we’re way behind. We still haven’t figured out very much about the way these people are doing this, or what they’ll do next. I’d say that all we can be sure of is that they always move a little faster than we can, and they don’t mind killing people.”

“We know a little more than that. We know about James Scully.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Stillman. “After all this time, we managed to get through all the intentional confusion just once. This time while we were flailing around, we reached in blind and got our hands on a throat. The fellow’s dead, but all we can do is keep squeezing.”

28

They drove along the Old Concord Road, following its meanderings around gentle hills that had been cleared two hundred years ago for sheep that would keep the woolen mills along the Ashuelot River spinning. There were no sheep now. As the mills had died a slow death, the land had been turned, acre by acre, into pasture for dairy cattle, but now another change had occurred. At short intervals, the pastures would be interrupted by stands of second-growth forest, the tall trees blocking the dim purple glow that had begun to tinge the horizon beyond the eastern hills, making it full night again.

There were few cars on the road, but as they drove on they began to see houses with dim lights glowing from windows near the back, and Walker decided somebody must be getting ready to make breakfast. Once when Walker coasted to a stop at a blinking traffic light, the silence let him hear birds chirping unseen in a big tree to his left.

A few minutes later Stillman said, “Wait a minute. What was the name of that last town?”

“South Haverley.”

Stillman switched on the dome light and studied the map. “That was five or six miles ago, I think. Okay. We should be at Coulter, or almost.”

“Could I have driven through it without seeing it?”

“I doubt it,” said Stillman. “Keep going, but slowly.”

After another mile, there was a crooked stretch of road that traced the bases of two identical hills, and then Walker saw a narrow secondary road that met the highway to the right. On the left was an old, sparse apple orchard with rows of low, gnarled trees that looked black in the dim light. At the shoulder was a small blue sign that said
COULTER
. He continued on the highway for a mile, but there seemed to be no buildings. “This can’t be right.”

“Go back,” said Stillman.

Walker stopped and turned the Explorer around, then drove until he came to the sign. He decided it was safer to park on the secondary road, so he made the turn. A few yards down the road was a sign that said
MAIN ST
.

“Well, hell,” said Stillman. “Here we are, right on Main Street.” He glared at his map, then waved it at Walker. “See the dot that says ‘Coulter’? It’s on the right side of the road, but it never occurred to me that the whole town was off the highway. Go ahead. Let’s see what it looks like.”

Walker drove on slowly. The narrow road pierced the space between the two hills. At a narrow curve where the hills edged up to the road on both sides, the tires passed over a wide metal grate that gave a hollow, ringing noise.

“Wonder what that was for,” Stillman said.

“Must be a cow stile,” said Walker. “The cows won’t walk over one of those, so it works like a fence. I guess that must be why it goes all the way across from hill to hill.”

“Maybe,” said Stillman.

As soon as it was out of the pass between the hills, the road widened. Curbs had been poured, and the pavement was new, black macadam.

“Looks like the Department of Public Works is on the job,” said Walker.

“Right,” said Stillman. “Odd that they didn’t take it the last two hundred yards to the main highway.”

“Summer isn’t over yet,” said Walker. “And cities here must be like everywhere else. They get people to vote for a bond issue, and by the time anything gets built, the price goes up.”

“It’s possible,” said Stillman. The road passed into a wooded lot, then curved a bit and there was a sign that said
BRIDGE 100 FEET
. The road straightened, and before them was an old wooden covered bridge.

Walker slowed to five miles an hour as they came closer. “That’s something, isn’t it?” As he was about to drive under the roof, Stillman said, “Stop for a minute.”

He got out of the Explorer, and Walker pulled over to the narrow shoulder and got out too. He found Stillman kneeling on the bridge, looking down between two of the thick planks. Walker bent down too. Between the boards he could see a black stream of water. He said, “You afraid it won’t hold us?”

“No,” said Stillman. “The roof and sides look really old, but the bed has been replaced. If you look down here, you can see they’ve left the old cross ties in, but they shored it up by putting concrete piles and steel beams between them. You drive to the end of it, and I’ll join you.”

Walker went back to the Explorer and drove it slowly across the bridge. In the middle, both sides were left open for a space of about four feet, where he could look out and see the course of the stream. He revised his assessment, and promoted it to a river. The current was flowing steadily, but the surface had the untroubled look that deep water had, and it was wider than he had expected. He stopped at the end of the bridge and watched Stillman walking to the open spot. Stillman looked out at the river, then went on.

When he climbed into the Explorer again, Walker asked, “Why are you so interested in the bridge?”

“I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like,” Stillman answered. “I’m not about to drive all over New England looking at covered bridges to compare. If the bridge was out, it would be pretty hard to reach the town by road.”

“That’s probably why they shored up the beams with steel supports.”

“Right,” said Stillman. “Your tax dollars at work.”

“Not mine,” Walker said.

“Don’t be too sure. Any city council that couldn’t get federal money to preserve a landmark that also happened to be the bridge to the main highway wouldn’t be worth a damn.”

They drove on for another mile, past open fields that Walker judged must be pasture for cattle that were let out at dawn. There were a couple of old barns, but he didn’t see any lights or any vehicles. “This should be about milking time,” he said.

Stillman looked at him. “I’ll have my secretary free up an appointment. Have you been reading the farmer’s almanac, or what?”

“I grew up in Ohio. There’s pasture, and there are barns.” Walker added, “You said—or implied—that I should be mentioning things that I notice. This is when dairy farmers feed and water their cattle, and milk them. When that’s done, they let them out to pasture and clean the barn. But I don’t see any signs of life. No lights, no pickup trucks. If the barn’s that far from the house, you drive there.” He shrugged.

Stillman said, “That’s a point. I suppose what it means is there are no cows. If you have to get up this early to shovel cow shit, they were probably murdered.”

Beyond the next row of trees that had been left as a windbreak at the end of the field rose the gray roofs of buildings. The little river they had crossed at the covered bridge had looped ahead of them in its meandering. It ran along the edge of town in a stony bed, and the trees were just above the riverbank. There was a short, modern steel bridge with no sidewalks about fifteen feet above the water, and then they were in town.

Walker drove slowly along Main Street, turning his head to take in both sides in alternation. The buildings along Main looked old in the same way as the ones in other towns, the biggest faced with red brick and three stories high, with ornate struts holding the overhangs of the eaves. There were others in wood and clapboard that had pilasters flanking the doors and triangular cornices above the windows that gave them the look of the eighteenth century. Stillman said, “One more nice little town. Everything’s squared away and shipshape. Look for Birch Street.”

The town was too small for traffic signals, but there were stop signs at each corner. Walker would coast to a stop, look at the street sign on a post to his right, stare up and down the cross street, and then move on. The side streets all appeared to be about four blocks long, disappearing at either end into an empty field or a building or a stand of trees. The names in this part of town were the names he remembered from small towns in Ohio: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, then jumping ahead to Grant. More recent heroes came too late, probably after the town had stopped growing.

They passed a two-story brick building, set back on a lawn, that proclaimed itself Coulter Library and looked like one of the thousands built in the era of Andrew Carnegie. Beyond it was a white clapboard church with a tall steeple that looked like all of the others he had seen in the past two days. Ahead he saw a lighted blue sign that said simply
POLICE
, so he turned off Main onto Grant and went up the parallel street to his left.

When he passed Sycamore, then Oak, he knew it was coming. There was Maple, then Birch. He paused at the corner, looking at house numbers. There were no lights in any of the windows on this block, but he could see that the dim purple luminescence in the east had begun to make colors distinguishable. He turned up the street. The houses were old, most of them Georgian or early Victorian, but there were modern touches—sidewalks and driveways poured within the past few years, porch lights and fixtures that were shiny and recent. When he braked as he approached 117, Stillman said, “Keep going and park around the corner.”

Walker stopped in front of a low fence that separated the street from the beginning of a pasture. He got out and waited while Stillman went to the back of the Explorer and opened his leather bag. Walker could see him putting things into his jacket pockets, and then he appeared at Walker’s side. “We’ll have to do it efficiently,” he said. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before the sun comes up.”

“Maybe we should come back at night.”

“No,” said Stillman. “This is fine. It’s not prime time for burglars, so if somebody sees us, we’re not automatically in trouble.”

He walked briskly up the block, turned in at 117, then kept going around to the back door, looking up at the eaves of the house, stopping to study windows. When they reached the back door of the house, Walker stood by and waited, but Stillman kept going. There was a sloped wooden cover for a basement entrance a few feet away with a door on it and a padlock.

Stillman knelt on it, put a thin metal object into the padlock, and opened it as though he’d had a key. He lifted the door and went down the narrow concrete steps. Walker came down after him, then pulled the door shut.

As he watched Stillman pull out his pick and tension wrench and insert them into the lower door to the basement, Walker said, “How did you open the padlock?”

“A shim pick. I’ll get you enrolled in a class on locks sometime, and buy you a set of picks for graduation.”

Walker didn’t respond. He watched Stillman swing the door open and step inside.

Stillman said, “Or, if we get caught one of these times, we can spend a couple of years on it.”

The basement was the sort of place he remembered from his grandparents’ house in Ohio. In the summer it had been cool and damp, and had a faint musty smell. Stillman switched on a small flashlight and moved it slowly around the walls.

The walls were bare and the concrete was coarse and old. It seemed to have crumbled in places and been patched and painted over with whitewash. There was a hot-water heater in one corner, a work bench with a vise and tools in another, and in the middle an oil furnace with a big storage tank. There were a new washer and dryer along one wall beside a big metal sink.

Stillman switched off the light and quietly climbed the wooden stairs to the landing above. When Walker joined him, Stillman whispered in his ear, “Give me five minutes.” He opened a door and disappeared into the first floor of the house.

Walker listened, looking out the back door at the lawn. The sun was beginning to rise, and he felt each second passing, taking away a little of the darkness. When Stillman opened the door again, he jerked in nervous surprise.

Stillman said in a normal voice, “He lived alone,” then turned and walked across the kitchen. Walker could see a gleaming stove and marble counters, a big side-by-side refrigerator.

“Are you sure?” he whispered. “Look at this kitchen.”

“I have. Look in the fridge and you’ll see this is just where he came to open his next beer. Anyway, there’s no women’s stuff anywhere, and no toys or clothes for kids. He slept up there.” Stillman pointed up the stairs to the second floor. “He had a sort of den down here. I’m going through that. You go up and do the bedroom.” As Walker climbed the stairs, he added, “Remember, we’re looking for things that will give us the names and locations of his buddies—address book, phone bill, photo album, birthday card.”

Walker found the bedroom and did a quick survey, but found no photographs or papers in the open, so he looked for storage places. He had watched Stillman do this enough times that he could dispense with wasted motion. He searched the drawers of the dresser, pulled them out to see if anything was behind them, and looked under the bed and in the closet. He found nothing, so he looked for hiding places. He went into the small bathroom, lifted the tank cover of the toilet, searched the area under the sink, tested the baseboards and tiles to be sure none of them were loose. He moved quickly back to the bedroom, checked the mattress for slits in the fabric on the top and bottom, squeezed the pillows. He moved close to each light fixture to be sure nothing was in it. He tested the carpets to be sure no section had been lifted. Just as he was running out of places to look, he found the gun.

He had noticed that the headboard of the bed seemed thicker than most, so he tapped it in a few places to see if it was hollow. When he tapped the center just above the mattress, a small door opened outward. There was a squat, square-cornered SIG pistol sitting where James Scully could reach it in the night. He closed the little door and kept searching.

The walk-in closet was another proof of James Scully’s neatness, but the clothes surprised him. Walker counted twenty-two suits and sport coats hanging neatly side by side, all facing to the left. His shirts were all, likewise, hanging with their fronts to the left on another pole. His shoes were in a cupboard, four pairs to a row with the toes outward.

Walker stood on a chair to look at the top shelf. There were hats—mostly baseball caps with the bills facing forward and the logos of heavy-machinery companies on their crowns, and a short-barreled shotgun with a box of deer slugs beside it. Walker patted each pocket of the coats and pants, looked inside the shoes, then knelt and was checking whether anything was taped to the bottom of each shelf when Stillman appeared in the doorway.