Joe Ledger (11 page)

Touché,
you little jerk, I thought.

“Some,” I said.

“About the troubles we had a few years back?”

“Everyone knows about them?”

“Well,” he said, shifting a little. He glanced back at the redheaded kid and then at me. “Those problems were here long before we had our ‘troubles.’ I guess you could say that in one way or another we’ve always had troubles here in Pine Deep. Lots of people run into real problems here.”

I smiled now, and it probably wasn’t my nicest one. “Are…you trying to threaten me, Chief Crow?”

He laughed.

Behind him the redhead kid, Sweeney, spoke for the first time. “Just a fair warning, mister,” he said. His voice was low and raspy. “It ain’t the people you have to worry about around here. The
town
will help you or it won’t.”

Then he smiled and it was one of the coldest, least
human
smiles I think I’ve ever seen. It was like an animal, a wolf or something equally predatory, trying to imitate a human smile.

Then Officer Sweeney turned away and sat back down at his desk.

Chief Crow winked at us. “Happy trails, boys.”

I stared at him for a few moments as thunder rattled the windows in the tiny office. Then I nodded and turned to go. Just as Bunny opened the door for me, Crow said, “Welcome to Pine Deep.”

I turned and met his eyes for a few long seconds. He neither blinked nor looked away. For reasons I can’t adequately explain, we nodded to one another, and then I followed Top and Bunny out of the office. As we walked to the car, I could feel eyes watching me.

Chap. 5

The Safe House

August 16; 6:28 p.m.

We got back in the car.

“Okay,” said Bunny, “that was freaking weird.”

No one argued.

“Want me to run him through MindReader?” asked Top.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know him from somewhere.”

“Cop thing?” asked Bunny. “You do a shared-jurisdiction gig with Pine Deep?”

“No.”

“Something social? FOP weenie roast.”

“Cute. But no. I don’t think I’ve met him, but there’s something banging around in the back of my brain about him. Crow. Could be a martial arts thing.”

“He train?” asked Bunny.

“Yes,” Top and I said together.

Top added, “Not karate, though. No calluses on his knuckles.”

“Has them on his hands, though,” I said, touching the webbing around my thumb and index finger. I had a ring of callus there, too. “Kenjutsu, or something similar.”

“Kid uses his knuckles, though,” Top said. “Hard-looking son of a bitch. Looks like he could go a round or two.”

A few fat raindrops splatted on the windshield, and the glass was starting to fog. I hit defrost and waited while Bunny called the request in to Bug, our computer guru at the Warehouse. Bug did a search through MindReader and got back to us before we’d driven two blocks.

“Plenty of stuff here,” he said. “Malcolm Crow grew up in Pine Deep. Medical records from when he was a kid show a lot of injuries. Broken arms, facial injuries…stuff consistent with physical abuse.”

“Anyone charged for that?”

“No. His mother died when he was little. He and his brother were raised by his father, who has a loooong record of arrests for public drunkenness, DUI, couple of barroom brawls. Sounds like he was the hitter. Wow…get this. His brother was murdered by a serial killer thirty-five years ago. Your boy was the only witness. Couple dozen victims total before the killer went off the radar. Possibly lynched by the townies, and the local police may have been involved in that.”

“Lovely little town,” Top said under his breath.

“Chief Crow was a cop for a while,” Bug continued. “Then was a drunk for a long time. He sobered up and opened up a craft and novelty store, and helped design a haunted hayride for a Halloween theme park. All of this was before that trouble they had there. Crow was deputized by the mayor about a month before the Trouble, and—here’s another cool bit—the deputation was because
another
serial killer was in town killing people. Thirty years to the day from when Crow’s brother was killed. Freaky.”

“Damn,” I said. “What else you got?”

“He’s married. Wife is Val Guthrie-Crow. Hyphenates her last name. And they have two kids. One natural—Sara—and one adopted, Mike.”

“Mike? What was his birth name?”

“Same as he’s using now. Michael Sweeney. Never changed it.”

“What else?”

“Crow, his wife, and Mike Sweeney were all hospitalized after the trouble. Various injuries. Their statements say that they don’t remember what happened and they claimed everything was a blur,” Bug said. “That more or less fits because the town water supply was supposed to be spiked with LSD and other party favors.”

“Do we have
anything
linking Crow to the Trouble itself? Any involvement with white supremacist movements, anything at all?”

“No. Couple other guys on the Pine Deep police force might have been involved, though, including the chief at that time.”

“But nothing that would connect Crow to it?”

“Nothing.”

“What are his politics?”

“Moderate with a tilt to the left. Same for the missus.”

“And Sweeney?”

“Registered independent but has never voted. Oh…hold on. Got a red flag here. Looks like Sweeney’s adopted father—another asshole who liked to hit kids if I’m reading this right—was one of the men suspected of orchestrating the attack on the town.”

“What about the kid?”

“I hacked the Pine Deep P.D. files and it looks like the stepfather filed a report for assault. The kid decked him and ran away.”

I glanced at Top. “You read the kid as a bad guy?”

He shook his head, then nodded, then shrugged. “I really couldn’t get a read on him, Cap’n.”

I thanked Bug and told him to call us if he got anything else.

“So, what d’you think, Boss?” asked Bunny. “Crow one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?”

“No way to tell. We’re not even sure we
have
any bad guys in this. Burke could be shacked up with some chick.”

“And doing what?” asked Top. “Making crank calls to the AIC?”

“
And
terrorists?” added Bunny.

I grinned. “Yeah, yeah.”

We drove through the town, which takes less time than it does to tell it. Couple of stoplights. Rows of craft shops. A surprising number of cafes and bars, though most of them looked run down. More for drinking than eating, I thought. The biggest intersection had the Terrance Wolfe Memorial Medical Center across the street from the Saul Weinstock Ball Field. The hospital looked new; the ball field was overgrown, and a hundred crows huddled in a row along the chain link fence. Ditto for the hospital.

I noted it away and kept driving. The place was starting to get to me, and that was weird because I worked a lot of shifts in West Baltimore, which is probably the most depressing place on earth. Poverty screamed at you from every street corner, and there was a tragic blend of desperation and hopelessness in the eyes of every child. And yet, this little town had a darker tone to it, and my overactive imagination wondered if the storm clouds ever let the sun shine down. Looking at these streets was like watching the sluggish flow of a polluted river. You know that there’s life beneath the grime and the toxicity, but at the same time you feel that life could not exist there.

We left town and turned back onto Route A-32 as it plunged south toward the Delaware River. This was the large part of the township, occupied for the first mile by new suburban infill—with cookie-cutter development units, many still under construction, and overbuilt McMansions. More than three quarters of the houses had FOR SALE signs staked into the lawns. A few were unfinished skeletons draped in tarps that looked like body bags.

Then we were out into the farm country and the atmosphere changed subtly, from something dying to something still clinging to life. Big farms, too, like the kind you expect to see more in the Midwest. Thousands of acres of land, miles between houses. Endless rows of waving green corn, fields bright with pumpkins, and row upon row of vegetables. A paint-faded yellow tractor chugged along the side of the road, driven by an ancient man in blue coveralls. He smoked a cheap pipe that he took out of his mouth to salute us as we went by.

“We just drive into the nineteen forties?” asked Bunny.

“Pretty much.”

Mist, as thick and white as tear gas, slowly boiled up from gullies and hollows as the cooler air under the storm mixed with the August heat. 

The GPS told us that we were coming up on our turn.

The lane onto which I’d turned ran straight as a rifle barrel from the road, through a fence of rough-cute rails, to the front door of a Cape Cod that looked as out of place here in Pine Deep as a sequined thong looks on a nun. Heavy oaks lined the road, and the big front lawn was dark with thick, cool summer grass.

“Okay, gentlemen,” I said softly. “Place should be empty, and except for a brief walk-through by the handler, no one else will have disturbed the crime scene.”

“Wait,” said Top, “you want Farmboy and me to play Sherlock Holmes?”

“We’re just doing a cursory examination. If we find anything of substance we’ll ship it off.”

“To where?
CSI: Twilight Zone
?”

I rolled the car to a slow stop in a turnaround in front of the house. The garage was detached except for a pitched roof that connected it to the main house. A five-year-old Honda Civic was parked in that slot. The garage door was closed.

“Looks nice and quiet,” Bunny said as he got out, the big shotgun in his hands.

We split up. Bunny and Top circled around to the back and side entrances. I took the front door. We had our earbuds in place, everyone tuned into the team channel.

“On two,” I said. I counted down and then kicked the door.

The door whipped inward with a crack, and as I entered, gun up and out in a two-handed shooter’s grip, I heard the back door bang open, and then the side door that connected to the garage breezeway. We were moving fast, yelling at the top of our voices—at whoever might be in the house and at each other as we cleared room after room.

Then it was quiet again as we drifted together in the living room, holstering our guns and exhaling slowly. No one felt the need to comment on the fact that the place was empty. It was now our job to determine how it came to
be
empty.

“You take the bedrooms,” I said to Bunny. “Observe before you touch.”

He was a professional soldier, not a cop. There were no smartass remarks when being given straight orders that could remind him how to do his job.

“Why don’t I take the garage and around the outside?” asked Top, and off he went.

I stood alone in the living room and waited for the crime scene to tell me its story. If, indeed, it was a crime scene.

The doors and windows were properly closed and locked from inside. I’d had to kick the door, and a quick examination showed that the deadbolt had been engaged. Same went for the side and back doors. I went upstairs and checked those windows. Locked. Cellar door was locked and the windows were block glass.

Back in the living room I saw a laptop case by the couch, and one of those padded lap tables. The case was empty. The power cable and mouse were there, but the machine itself was gone.

Significant.

The question was…was Simon Burke crazy enough to actually
write
his novel about the unstoppable terrorist plot?

I hadn’t met him, but I had read his psych evaluations. He had that dangerous blend of overblown ego and deep insecurity that creates a person who feels that any idea he has is of world-shaking importance and must therefore be shared with the whole world. They typically lack perspective, and everything I’d read in Burke’s case file told me that he was one of those. Probably not a bad person, but not the kind you’d want to be caught in a stalled elevator with. Only one of you would walk out alive.

So…where was he?

My cell rang, and I flipped it open. The screen read UNKNOWN CALLER.

That’s…pretty unsettling. Our phone system is run through MindReader, which is wired in everywhere. There are no callers unknown to MindReader.

It kept ringing. Before I answered it I pulled a little doohickey the size of a matchbox from a pocket, unspooled its wire, plugged the lead into the phone and pressed the CONNECT button. MindReader would race down the phone lines in a millisecond and begin reading the computer and sim card in the other phone. One of Mr. Sin’s toys. He did not like surprises.

It rang a third time and I punched the button.

“Hello?”

“Joe?”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Joe? Is this Joe Ledger?”

“Sir, please identify yourself.”

“It’s me, Joe.” 

“Who?” Though I thought I already knew.

“Simon Burke.” He paused and gave a nervous little laugh. “Guess you’ve been looking for me.”

“Where are you, Mr. Burke?”

“C’mon, Joe, cut the ‘Mister’ stuff. Mr. Burke was my dad, and he was kind of a dick.”

I looked through the window at the white fog swirling from the cornfields. It was so thick you couldn’t see the dirt. Between the black storm clouds and the ground fog, visibility was dropping pretty fast. That wasn’t good. I said, “You told me that same joke the first time I met you.”

“Did I?”

“Can you verify
where
we first met?”

“Sure,” he said. “Central District police station on East Baltimore Street.”

“Okay,” I said, “good to hear your voice, Simon. You want to tell me where the hell you are?”

He laughed. “Too far away for you to come get me. At least right now.”

I turned away from the window just as tendrils of fog began caressing the glass. “We need to get you back into protective custody, Simon.”

“Joe,” he said, “listen…I’m sorry for doing this to you.”

“Doing what?” When he didn’t answer I said, “We know about the cell phones, Simon.”

“Yeah…I guessed you’d figure it out. I just thought Church would send more people. I…I didn’t know it would be just three of you.”