Killer Move (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

S
teph had left the house by the time I got out of the shower. I knew she had some big-deal meeting, though I couldn’t recall who it was with. As I trotted down the stairs toward a kitchen that seemed larger than usual and preternaturally empty, I was aware of how strange this was making me feel. Our lives are meshed at root level. I’m normally very aware of Steph and her movements, her doings and concerns. Not this morning. She was out, meeting someone somewhere. Not a big deal, yet a big deal. Life felt different on the back of it.

She’d gone early, too. It was still only seven fifteen. I put a pot of coffee on and fetched my laptop—now destined to be looked over by Kevin at his very earliest in/convenience—and my phone. I copied the folder of photographs off onto a USB thumb drive and deleted the original from the laptop. If Kevin was going to geek all over my computer, the folder clearly couldn’t remain in place. Then I picked up my phone and found Melania’s number. My finger was a quarter inch from tapping it when there was a knock on the front door.

I swore irritably and went to open it.

Outside was a man in a police uniform. He had short brown hair and was about the same height as me, but with the trim, fastidious-looking build that comes from working out with free weights. His upper arms looked, in fact, as though he’d come straight from doing bicep curls.

“Mr. Bill Moore?”

“Yes,” I said. “What—”

“Deputy Hallam,” he said, showing me his ID. I blinked at it. He stowed his badge and held something else up. “This yours?”

It was one of my Shore Realty business cards. “Yes,” I said. “But what are you doing with it?”

“Can I come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“A man called David Warner.”

I
took the policeman back through to the kitchen and offered him a coffee, which he declined. I poured one for myself, feeling as if I was acting a part.

“I should tell you straightaway,” I said, “that I don’t know the guy well.”

Hallam held my card up again, this time flipping it over to show me the other side.

Call me when you’re ready to do business.

“I found this wedged into the entry system of Mr. Warner’s property,” the cop said. “Is that your handwriting?”

“I called round yesterday morning, on the off chance. He wasn’t there. I left my card.”

“The message could be interpreted as threatening, sir. Snippy, at the very least.”

“I was feeling snippy,” I said. “I was supposed to meet with the guy. He gave me the runaround.”

“How?”

“We arranged I’d view his property at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. But he wasn’t there. The meeting was rearranged, for a bar in town. He didn’t show up to that, either. So I bailed. Got home at midnight, a couple beers down, which did
not
make me popular with my wife.”

The cop didn’t respond to this attempt at guys-together chumminess. Either he didn’t have a wife or being unpopular with her was business as usual.

“Next morning I happened to be near the guy’s house, so I stopped by in the hope we could talk. He wasn’t there. I left my card, went to work.”

“You arranged these meetings with him direct?”

“No—via his assistant, on the phone. What exactly is the problem here, Officer?”

“The problem,” the cop said, returning my card to the pocket of his short-sleeve shirt, “is that David Warner seems to have disappeared.”

My stomach turned over, as if I was in a plane that had suddenly dropped five hundred feet.

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

He cocked his head. “That’s a word most people have a ready understanding of, sir. You really need help with it?”

“Pardon me?”

“I apologize,” he said, his gaze flicking away. “Mr. Warner is an extremely wealthy person, and my boss is all over this. Warner was supposed to be having lunch with his sister yesterday, but didn’t show up at the agreed place and time. It’s under twenty-four hours, in which case normally we wouldn’t be paying any attention. But with Mr. Warner, evidently we are.”

“At what point did he, uh, stop being where he was supposed to be?”

“That’s what I’m trying to establish.”

“I know my colleague Karren White had a meeting with him late morning, day before yesterday.”

“What time was that?”

“Not sure. But she was back at the office around lunchtime. So I don’t know, maybe one thirty? I mean that’s when she got back.”

“And she’d come straight from seeing him?”

“Far as I know. Then evidently Mr. Warner was out meeting
someone
Tuesday evening—he missed my appointment because a dinner engagement ran late.”

“Time?”

“It was a little before half past eight, I think, when we rearranged. I waited fifteen minutes before I called his assistant. Though . . . his message to her had come in a little earlier, so I don’t know when exactly.”

The deputy noted all this down and asked if I had any idea who Warner’s dinner had been with. I said I did not. He asked for any information I had on Warner’s assistant, and so I got my phone off the counter and—without really knowing why—made it appear as though Melania’s number wasn’t already sitting there on the screen, ready for me to call. I spent a few seconds looking as if I was going through different screens before I read out her number. He noted this down, too, then flicked back a couple of pages in his little pad.

“That’s different from the one I have.”

“I believe there’s more than one line of communication,” I said. “When I was on the phone to her she talked about having a BlackBerry, too.”

“Oh, okay.” He stowed the pad, then handed me a card of his own. “If this guy gets in touch with you again, will you do me a favor and let me know right away?”

“No problem,” I said, leading him back out through the house toward the front door. “But probably he’s just not picking up his phone, right?”

“Or he doesn’t want to talk to his sister,” the policeman muttered. “You have a good day, sir.”

I watched him stride pugnaciously down the path to his vehicle, thinking that were I Deputy Hallam’s boss—Sheriff Barclay, presumably—I might want to have a conversation with him about not wearing his heart so evidently on his sleeve.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

W
hen I got to The Breakers I was relieved to see I was the first to arrive. The mere act of speaking Karren’s name to Deputy Hallam had made me feel odd. I didn’t want to have to deal with her in person right away. As soon as I got to my desk I called Melania’s number. There was no reply. It was early, but I got the sense David Warner’s assistant was used to being at his beck and call.

I left a voice mail asking her to call me back. Then I e-mailed Kevin the Geek, thanking him for sending the instructions the night before and saying I’d like to take him up on his offer to give my laptop a sweep. I offered to buy him lunch at his choice of venue. Finally, I sent an SMS message to Steph, saying I hoped her meeting was going/had gone/would go well.

I felt extremely jumpy, and lack of sleep wasn’t helping my mental clarity. The arrival of the police officer that morning had complicated matters in ways I hadn’t yet been able to quantify. One of the doors I’d seen while floating in the pool still hung open in my mind, however. Finally, I walked through it.

Someone, somewhere, was fucking with me—seriously, with malice and forethought.

The photographs on the USB drive were not tied to me, in the sense that it couldn’t be proved that I’d taken them. They couldn’t be, as I
hadn’t taken them
. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the images had linked them to me by association. First, by causing them to be discovered on my laptop; second, by causing the camera to date-stamp each picture. It was this second link—pinning the event to an evening when I hadn’t been at home, and so could feasibly have done what I was purported to have done—that seemed far more important, and had kept me awake half the night. It
proved
it was a deliberate setup, one that had been planned. It might not to Steph, but
it proved it to me
. If enough odd things happen—inexplicable little events, one after another—after a while you start to question yourself. The date stamp on the pictures got me out of self-doubt jail. On any normal evening I’d have been at home, or out with a friend (or Steph), who could have been a witness to my whereabouts. On Tuesday night I’d been out on what had proved to be a wild-goose chase . . . and perhaps deliberately so. Whoever took the photos
knew
I wouldn’t be at home, either because they’d observed me being out or—probably far more likely—because they’d engineered me to be where I was in the first place. And who could have done that?

I only had one answer.

David Warner.

He’d called the office midday, got hold of Karren instead, and so played along—but then insisted it be me who turned up for part two of the negotiations. He’d had his assistant call and set up the meeting . . . to which he didn’t show. Having committed me to being out, he then
kept
me out by rearranging the time and place via his assistant (even though, as she’d mentioned at the time, it would have been easier for him to call me direct). Using Kevin the Geek’s technique of Occam’s Razor, you only need one guy to make all this so.

But why the hell would Warner do this?

I didn’t even
know
the guy. I’d met him just once, that chance encounter in Krank’s—and it wasn’t like I’d latched on to him and got feral Realtor upside his face, hustling him to the point where I deserved some kind of comeuppance. I was in the bar with Steph and a couple of her colleagues from the magazine. They were all over some minor work crisis, and so I’d wound up chatting with a stranger about the Reds’ chances in the state league, as two men leaning on the same bar will sometimes do. It was
Warner
who’d brought up his house, not me. So why on earth would he meet Karren on Tuesday, think, “Hey, here’s a pretty girl, here’s some leverage, let’s stir things up for the asshole Realtor . . .”

Why?

I heard footsteps approaching the office, and froze. The door opened and Karren walked in. There was nothing different about her, but she looked different.

“Hell happened to you?” she asked, as she dumped her purse on her desk.

“What do you mean?”

“You look like a bad passport photo. Late night?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.

She winked. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do you mean?” My tone was a lot sharper than I’d intended.

“Whoa,” she said. “Just a pro forma dig, okay? The ‘How do you
sleep
at night, dude?’ routine. Not that I’m implying you have anything to . . . Look, whatever, you know? Call off the dogs. Relax.”

“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”

I was finding it hard to look away from her. Once you’ve seen a picture, you can’t forget it, and I had seen pictures I should not have seen. Being in her presence wasn’t turning me on, however. I felt . . . protective, perhaps, which was not something I’d ever have expected to feel about Karren White, a woman I believed had chosen to spell her Christian name in a nonstandard fashion purely to give her an excuse to spell it out to clients, the better to lodge it in their minds.

I felt that I should warn her about the photographs. But you can’t just pipe up with “Hey! I’ve got a dozen seminude pictures of you on a USB drive in my pocket . . .” unless you have a very innocent and convincing second half to the sentence, ready and waiting. I did not. Maybe I could do it when I had an explanation for how the pictures had ended up on my machine, but not yet.

“When you met with this David Warner guy on Tuesday,” I said instead, making it sound casual. “Anything strike you?”

“Apart from him being a sexist asshole? Not really. Why?”

“I didn’t tell you. He arranged to meet me that evening, to see the house.”

“Good for you.”

“Uh, not so much. He blew me off. Twice.”

“Huh,” she said, a little less tart. “Seems like he’s prepared to piss off Realtors regardless of their race, creed, or gender.”

“An equal opportunity asshole, for sure. You get a number for him?”

“No,” she said, looking sheepish. It was appealing because of its rarity value. Karren did not make unforced errors. “Forgot to take a note of it off the log. Duh.”

Indeed. One of the first rules of the job is to get a potential client’s phone number. I smiled and said something about it being no great loss.

As she settled down to bash out e-mails, I picked up one of the office handsets and scrolled laboriously back through the log of incoming calls. I went more slowly once I got back to Tuesday morning, knowing that what I was attempting would likely be hard—as we get a lot of calls, almost all with local codes.

I was about to give up when I saw a number I thought I recognized, however. I cross-checked with my phone and confirmed it. When I’d been sitting with Hazel outside Jonny Bo’s, a call had come into the office from the number I had stored for Melania’s cell phone.

“Karren—he called the office himself, right? Warner? Not his assistant.”

“It was him.”

“And not a pass-through? A ‘Got my asshole boss on the line, will you take a call from Planet 1970s’?”

Karren actually laughed, unaffectedly, a sound I hadn’t heard before. “Nope.”

I didn’t know what to make of that.

K
evin the Geek was a cheap lunch date, professing himself a big fan of some grilled sandwich on offer at Starbucks. I met him at the one on St. Armands Circle and left him at a table with my laptop while I ran a few errands. I performed these with about a third of my mind. The bulk was taken up with trying to work out whether to try calling Steph, and with wanting a cigarette, pretty badly. I didn’t call her, though I sent another SMS. I didn’t buy any Marlboro Lights, either.

“What’s the deal with the word ‘Modified’?” Kevin asked, when I returned.

I stiffened as I sat down, horrified that I’d somehow screwed up throwing away the pictures, and the folder was still there on my desktop. “Why do you ask?”

“You got about ten, twenty folders called that. Plus, it’s what you named your hard drive, right?”

“No,” I said, concerned that I hadn’t even noticed this the night before. “It was called, well, whatever the default is. Hard Drive, HD . . . I can’t remember.”

“Well, I’ll add that to the Pile of Strangeness, but I’ll warn you it’s a very small pile. You got nothing on here that raises a red flag. No keystroke recorders. Nothing unusual when it comes to wifi. Built-in firewall operating as it should, no suspicious ports open. Your machine is clean, basically, and your desktop as tidy as any I’ve ever seen. I have given it a gold star.”

“So what does that imply?”

“One of two things,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Either someone is cruising your gated ’hood—a person who can grab passwords and whatnot out of the air and also tunnel back through a firewall to change folder and drive assignations.”

“How hard would that be?”

“Reasonably hard.”

“So what’s the
or
?”

“Physical access to your laptop. It’s by far the simplest explanation. Sending e-mail is a formality. Your browser will have saved a cookie, which means ordering off Amazon is easy, too, unless you log out every time, which no one does. And renaming folders and disks is
far
more explicable if someone’s just sitting at the machine.”

“There’s only one person who’d have access to my laptop,” I said. “My wife.”

Kevin didn’t say anything. He just looked a little more uncomfortable.

A
s we walked out of the coffeehouse, someone called out Kevin’s name. We turned together to see Cassandra the ice cream girl coming along the sidewalk.

“Oh my lord,” she said. “What cataclysmic online dating accident brought
you
two together?”

“Hey, Cass,” Kevin mumbled. In the presence of a Real Live Girl his geekiness trebled in intensity. “What’s up?”

“Well, you know, you know,” she said, pausing to light a cigarette, her hands cupping around it in the process, as if to protect against a strong wind. “Still bathing in the glory of having kicked your ass.”

I presumably had the air of a human question mark. The girl blew out a mouthful of smoke and smiled. I watched the smoke dissipate into the hot air.

“Me and Kevs—or Lord Kevinley of Benjamin’s Estate—lately hang in the same gaming crowd,” she explained. “We were both at a meatspace meet-up last night for some convivial Dark Ages fragging fun. Lady Cassandra of the Eternal Lurid Flame—that would be me—proved
far
too tight a strategist for this gentleman and his rat-punk accomplices.”

“ ‘Meatspace’?”

She held up her hands to indicate the universe in general. “This hot, smelly place that some do call ‘The Real World’ and in which we are constrained to hang out. At least some of the time.”

Kevin chuckled appreciatively, and I realized he didn’t mind losing at whatever this dumb game was, at least not to this girl—and that her presence in the much-maligned Real World probably had a lot to do with him playing the game in the first place.

“Gotta head,” Cassandra said. “Kevs, see you in the chatterverse, stat. Mr. Moore, I’ll be dishing the frozen cow squirt later, should you wish to drop by.”

Kevin and I watched her go, like a cool breeze departed, and then got into my baking car.

I
dropped him back at the main Shore premises up at Ocean View, then drove thoughtfully back down to The Breakers. As I parked I saw that Karren was sitting at a table outside the deli. She glanced at me when I got out of the car, and then back down at her hands.

I walked over. “You okay?”

“Kind of. The police are on their way.”

“Why?”

“They think David Warner might be dead.”