Hollow Man (21 page)

“Funny,” she said, with the first hint of a real smile. “You can ride with me, I'll carry the gun.”

Ledsome went over the plan one more time, and when the recon car drove off to scout Otto's house, the SWAT commander assigned specific roles to his men: who would breach the door, who would go in first, second, and third. The detectives and I would go in as soon as the place was secure.

The recon car returned within five minutes, and we took turns looking at the video, grainy and wobbling, but we all agreed that Otto's car in the driveway meant he was probably home. With a rumble of exhaust and a small crowd watching from the gas station, we headed out of the parking lot and set off north on Montopolis Drive. I rode in Ledsome's slicktop at the head of the convoy, saying nothing. I could tell she was nervous; she was checking her mirrors, licking her lips, and adjusting her radio every few seconds. I shifted about in my seat to give that same impression, but I wasn't feeling it. Nerves didn't come to me that way. My responses were physical, if any. My mind didn't seem able to torture itself with the what-ifs that empaths suffered in certain situations. Maybe he'd be there with a bazooka to blow us all away. Maybe he'd be on vacation in Hawaii and we'd find no evidence of anything. I knew Ledsome was considering all the options and her mind was teasing her with which it might be, and her body was responding accordingly. Like the robbery itself, I hoped she was too preoccupied with her own worries to notice my lack of them.

Ledsome signaled and turned right on Porter Street, and when she
saw that her entire team had made the turn, she picked up her handset. “Charlie 501. Let's go.” She gunned the engine and the car leaped forward, and I turned to see the snake-tail of vehicles surging after us, winding around the cars parked on the street and snapping back to the curb. A block away, Ledsome pulled to the side, and the car following us roared past. It was one of the detectives, who'd park his car across the street fifty yards on the other side of Otto's house. The armored truck went by next, aiming straight for Otto's lawn, bumping over the curb and coming to a halt across his front path. We followed at a crawl, giving them time to get into position and execute, watching them as they leaped from the back of the vehicle. Two men ran around either side of the house to cover the rear, while the rest went straight to the front door. A short battering ram made quick work of it, and as we pulled up opposite Otto's house, the door flew inward and the troops went in.

We got out of the car and Ledsome looked over. “Follow my lead,” she said.

“Will do.”

Her head turned toward the house and we waited for a minute. Then she put a hand to her earpiece. “We have the all-clear.” She started moving toward the house.

“That was quick.”

“Those guys are good. And being fast is part of being good.”

We reached the front of the truck. “Not in my book.”

She looked over like I was weird, but part of not being nervous was not recognizing when to make sexual jokes. And when not to. I just smiled and followed her through the front door, going in sideways as several of the SWAT officers filed out.

As we passed them, Ledsome stopped the team's second-in-command with a hand on his arm. His name patch read Shindler. He pulled off his helmet and looked like a Boy Scout, young and fresh-faced, like he wouldn't be ruthless enough to win an arm-wrestle with a preteen. Ledsome still had her hand on his arm and I felt a flash of jealousy.

“Greg,” she said, “no one in there?”

“Yes and no.” He grinned like a kid playing a prank on his mum. “It's safe, but I'll wait out here for you.”

For you
.
Greg
.

She let go of his arm, and we went inside.

“Detective, over here.” The SWAT commander stood by Otto's dining table and pointed at the floor. From the entrance, his sofa blocked our view, but as we rounded it, we saw what he was pointing to. Otto's body lay face up, his eyes half closed and his mouth slack. The right side of his head sported a black hole the size of a dime. Blood had trickled from the wound, down into his ear, a dark line leading to a congealed dark pool on the floor. A gun lay under the table.

For ten long seconds we stood there looking at Otto Bland's body, all processing this apparent suicide in our own way. Ledsome's way was to lick her lips some more and slowly reach for her little notebook; the SWAT commander's was to stand in grim and respectful silence, Otto's personal honor guard. Me, I felt a warm wave of relief that started in my toes and washed upward, a relief so palpable I was sure these cops would feel it emanating from my body, or see the muscles of my face fighting the smile that every man smiles when he's told he no longer has to go to prison.

As Ledsome took notes, I moved forward to get a better look. I knew Otto was dead, but the best way to truly believe something is to see it with your own two eyes. Up close. But when I drew level with her, Ledsome put a hand on my chest.

“Let's let CSU do their thing,” she said.

“Sure.” I nodded and backed off. The crime-scene guys were thorough, and they'd almost certainly find my prints. They wouldn't be able to identify them, though. Even though all county employees gave prints for a criminal-background check, they weren't put into the automated fingerprint identification system, more commonly known as AFIS.

Ledsome wandered over to me. “So what you told me before. Looks like we'll need that in a formal statement.”

“Yes, of course. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks.”

“I don't understand something, though,” I said. I didn't understand a lot of things. Suicide, especially in this situation, was one of them. To me, there is no one as important on the planet as me. My world revolves around me, and I try to make other people's do the same. So the idea of ending my own life is incomprehensible, and that meant I had my doubts about Otto's demise. I didn't think Tristan was up to the task, but given Gus's odd disappearance and Otto's unpredictable nature, there was room for doubt.

“That's suicide for you,” Ledsome was saying. “Although most
people who blow their brains out don't have the cops about to descend on them.”

“Can you tell when he did it?”

“No. The medical examiner is on his way. He'll give us an idea. Five or six hours ago, maybe, since the blood looks dried but there's no smell.”

I grimaced. “Poor Otto.”

“Unless he killed two men, in which case sympathy will be a little harder to come by.”

“How did he know you were onto him?”

“That's what I want to find out. Being former law enforcement, my bet is someone tipped him off somehow. Or just called with a question about his gun that made him suspicious. I really don't know, but I sure as hell intend to find out.”

“I can't believe he's really a suspect in a double murder.”

“It'd explain his bizarre behavior with you the other week.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But his crappy, dead-end job and objectively miserable life would explain that too.”

“And you just gave him a motive to commit those crimes.”

“To commit murder? Why?”

She looked at me for a moment. “No harm in me telling you, I guess. We think one of the victims was basically a slum lord. Likely he had a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, bucks on him in cash.”

“For real?” I processed the information for a moment. “How would Otto know that?”

“Not sure yet, but he did a lot of security-guard gigs, and that included one at the Crooked Creek trailer park. He'd just started and maybe he got the job there on purpose when he found out about the money.”

“That's possible, I guess.”

Ledsome looked back toward Otto's body. “It's also possible he had no idea we were coming and decided that killing people wasn't something he wanted to live with.”

“He killed himself from guilt?” An image flashed in my mind, not of Otto but of the man who'd accused me of stealing his music. The image wasn't dissimilar to what I was seeing here, a gun and a body, but the body had a different face. The reason was similar: the bastard's guilt at ruining my music career in Austin.

“It's certainly possible. We'll look around once the body is gone, maybe find a note or something.”

“Suicides usually leave one, I suppose?”

“No, in my experience that's a myth. More often than not they don't. You have to look for other, less obvious signs.”

“Such as?”

“A glass of whisky. A sappy card to a relative. Evidence of private or business affairs being put in order. Sometimes there's nothing at all, no evidence whatsoever. If a sense of guilt hit him, it might have come like a tidal wave. People commit suicide very quickly, sometimes, when they see no way around what they've done.”

“I didn't know that.” I turned to look out the window and suppressed another smile. If he'd done this to assuage his guilt, and not because he wanted to avoid prison, then he was heaping irony on top of irony. If that's what happened, then a man with a conscience had seen the error of his ways and reaped his own soul, thereby saving a man who didn't have one.

It may have been that warm tickle of relief still, but oh, how I wanted to laugh.

The cops cleared out of the house when CSU arrived. In the front yard, neighbors peered over the yellow crime-scene tape and took photos with their camera phones, and we all knew that the media were minutes away.

With so much going on, it was easy for me to slide around the crime scene, listening in and watching but with no one paying much
attention to me. I didn't know what I expected to learn, or hoped to hear, but I kept my eyes and ears at work for anything that might conceivably link me to this place or the dead Otto. At about three o'clock, Ledsome offered to have an officer drive me back to my car.

“We'll be here for hours, not much for you to do,” she said. “And after the initial excitement, now come hours of tedious police work.”

I felt like I was in the clear, and while I was reluctant to separate myself from a place that might incriminate me, to give up this illusion of control over a potentially dangerous situation, I was genuinely tired. I also told myself that if they'd not yet turned up a diary or some sort of written confession with my name in it, they were unlikely to. I accepted that offer of a ride.

The cop's name was Steven Constable, which was perfect of course. He was built slightly but moved like an athlete, graceful almost. He held the passenger door for me and went around to his side. As we drove down Porter Street, we talked.

“So you knew that guy?” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Decent chap, I'd always thought.”

“Maybe he was. Couldn't live with what he'd done and ended it. Better than most assholes who try and get away with it.”

“I suppose. I just couldn't see Otto doing a robbery like that. Always been a law man, one of the good guys.”

“People change. Desperate circumstances, maybe. I heard he quit APD under a cloud and got fired from your office.”

“Yeah, I don't know what for, though,” I said, preempting the inevitable question. “And he was working some pretty shitty gigs, security-guard stuff.”

He shook his head. “What a way for it all to end.”

I was thinking the same thing, but from a slightly different perspective. Otto's death could also be the death of the investigation. If the cops went into this with no idea who was responsible, they'd be licking their chops at pinning the whole thing on a dead guy. Sure, one of the bullets they pulled from the bodies wouldn't match his gun,
but the cops could reason that Otto had used two weapons and gotten rid of the one he used to shoot Silva. Unlikely, but so was a former APD officer being a double-murderer. The last thing the police would want, it seemed to me, was to admit there was another shooter out there, someone they couldn't begin to identify. With an unpopular victim in Silva, all the more reason to close up the file, call it a day, and pat each other on the back in the local bar.

At the gas-station parking lot I shook hands with Officer Constable and we peeled off in opposite directions, him back to the crime scene, me heading for home. I drove slowly, running my mind through Otto's house for the umpteenth time, wondering if there was anything there that might incriminate me. Any fingerprints were easily explained as coming from my prior recent visit there, and I simply couldn't think of a single other thing that might hurt me. Otto didn't seem the journaling type, and the lack of a suicide note ruled out another chance to drop my name into police hands.

As I pulled into my parking spot, I allowed myself a small smile and the thought that Otto was a loose end well and truly tied off.

Tristan, of course, took a while to see it that way. I sat on the couch in the living room as he paced back and forth in front of me.

“You're sure there's no note or written confession, absolutely sure?”

“I was there almost two hours. They found nothing.”

“What if he hid it? They could be finding it right now.”

“Nope.” I shook my head, like I was explaining to a child. “Think about it. If he shot himself out of remorse and had written some sort of tell-all confession, then it would have been on the table. Or the floor. Or pinned to the fridge. He's not going to write a note like that and hide it, is he?”

“I guess not.” Some color returned to his face as the good news sank in. It drained away as his brain latched onto another problem. “My fingerprints. From when we were there.”

“Relax. Those prints are useless unless they have some to compare them to. You're not in the AFIS database, are you?”

“I don't think I am, no.”

“Have you been convicted of a crime?”

“No.”

“There you are then. Free and clear.”

“Unless I become a suspect, in which case they can take them and—”

“If they ask your permission, just say no. Get all civil rights on them. But they won't, because they have no reason to. So like I said before, relax. I'm wondering if they'll even look for a second person.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have Otto. They know he's guilty, but they have no idea if anyone else was involved, right?”

“I guess.”

“Even if they did, they wouldn't know where to start. So it's easier for them just to lay it all at his door. A dead perp doesn't argue with you. And there'll be no trial, obviously, so there won't be a slimy defense lawyer trying to point the finger at someone else, haranguing the detectives on the witness stand about why they didn't look for the real killer, or the ringleader. Whatever.”

He stopped pacing as he considered the theory. “All wrapped up, nice and tight for them.”

“With a bow on top,” I added.

“Jesus, poor Otto. You really think he was feeling that guilty about it?”

“Didn't seem like it to me. More likely he knew his gun had been found and took the easy way.”

“Easy for us, anyway.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Ledsome. “Detective,” I said. I resisted the urge to make a joke about her not being able to stay away from me, and instead went with, “What's up?”

“Not much. We're wrapping up here. Just wanted to say thanks for your help today, and ask whether you're the point person on this for the DA's office, or whether Maureen is the person to call.”

“Probably her. I think I was covering while she had a kid thing.”

“Got it. Thanks again, Dominic.”

“Wait, did you find anything?”

“Not much. Plenty of fingerprints that aren't his, but that's not surprising because the place hasn't been cleaned in a decade. Men are pigs, you know.”

“We try to be. Nothing else?”

“Nothing to speak of.”

“So that's it then? Case closed?”

“What do you mean?”

“The capital murder. Your suspect is dead, so I assumed you'd spend a few weeks writing a report and that's that.” I kept my voice light, casual, like I didn't care either way.

She laughed. “I wish. Don't get me wrong, he's definitely our shooter. But he wasn't out there alone.”

“How do you know?”

“We have two bodies with two different holes in them.”

“Maybe he had two guns? For a former cop, that wouldn't be unusual.”

“I agree. The thing is, we didn't find any money. If he did this alone, I would have found the money at his place.”

“Not necessarily.”

“We went through everything, Dom. No locker keys, no storage-facility contracts, nothing like that. And it looked like the guy hadn't spent a dollar in weeks. Not on his place, his wardrobe, or his car.”

I clenched my jaw. “So what's your theory?”

“Someone else is keeping the money until the heat dies down. The leader of this little expedition.”