Open Season (25 page)

“Like this assignment you’re working.”

Todd flashed a quick glance up at Jack “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Like this assignment. Besides, marriage is a big step. I was kind of glad to have the assignment as an excuse. I was crazy about her, but. . . hell, I guess I had cold feet. So that’s why she was at the club.”

Jack nodded, thinking he got the picture. Normal relationships were hard enough; when the woman had been raped, she understandably had a hard time trusting men again, or enjoying sex. “Did she get into therapy?”

“For a while. It didn’t do any good. She killed herself.”

The stark words fell like lead. All expression was gone from Todd’s face, from his eyes.

Howard swore. “Jesus, man—you just said a friend was raped. God, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I,” said Jack. “You’re grieving, you felt guilty, so you set Daisy up for exactly the same thing that happened to the woman you loved. You fucking bastard, I’d
enjoy
killing you.” His clenched fists were shaking with the need to do just that.

“Don’t go overboard with the sympathy, Russo,” Howard said sarcastically.

Todd managed a faint smile, though there was no humor in it. “That was fast. You’re in love with her; that’s why you’re so hot under the collar.”

“Daisy doesn’t deserve being used that way.” Jack shoved away the comment about loving her. Whether or not he did was something he’d have to work out; he definitely cared about her and would do whatever it took to protect her. And whatever it took meant using whatever means necessary, with whatever weapons he had at hand. Something else was going on, something these two weren’t involved in; alone, Jack would be hard-pressed to cover all the bases, but he figured he now had help.

“There’s something else concerning Daisy, something I don’t understand, but it’s put me on edge.”

A little expression filtered back into Todd’s eyes. “What?”

“This assignment you’re working. . . are you federal, local, or private?”

Todd and Howard exchanged a quick glance. “Federal. It involves interstate fraud.”

“Fine. I don’t need the details. I just need your help and I wanted to know what level I’ll be dealing with.”

“We can’t compromise this setup—”

“You won’t have to. Something peculiar happened this morning. The mayor called me, wanted me to run a license plate number, said he’d seen the car parked in the fire lane at a doctor’s office. He gave me the small-town bullshit, how he didn’t call a patrolman to write a ticket because he didn’t want to upset someone who was sick—”

“Yeah, right, Temple Nolan with a big heart,” Todd muttered.

“So I ran the number, and it was Daisy’s. Not only would Daisy never park in a fire lane, she wasn’t at the doctor’s office. I know. So the mayor lied about where he got the number. If he’d seen the car himself, he’d have known it was Daisy’s. Someone else wanted him to find out who the car belonged to.”

“Maybe someone at the Buffalo Club saw her and was interested, wanted to find out where she lived and how to contact her.”

“Someone who figured she’d never come back to the club and that was the only way he’d have of finding her? Someone who also happens to know the mayor?”

“Okay, so it’s a thin idea. Do you have anything better?”

“No, all I have are the little hairs on the back of my neck, and they’re standing straight up.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Howard. “From the accent, I know you’re not from around here, but I can’t quite place it. You’re not just a small-town chief, though. What’s your background?”

“SWAT, in Chicago and New York.”

“Guess your little hairs have seen their share of action.”

“They’ve never been wrong.”

“So what do you want us to do?” asked Todd. “There’s nothing to go on, no direction.”

“Not yet. For now, I just want to make sure she’s safe. The good news is, the address on the registration is for her mother’s house. There’s no official record now of her real address, unless someone has the strings to find out from the utilities—which the mayor does, with the city water department, but unless he knows she’s moved, he has no reason to ask.”

“Can you get into the files, take out that information?”

“The water bills are computerized. I’m no hacker, so I can’t get into the system from outside, but maybe I can from the inside. What about the phone and electricity companies?”

“I’ll see what I can do about blocking that information,” Todd said. “And she needs to have her number unlisted, or any bozo can call information and get it.”

“I’ll handle that,” said Jack. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, I don’t know why anyone would want to track her down, and until I do know, I want a shield around her.”

“We’ve been working a situation for a couple of years now. If things come together, Howard and I will be busy and won’t be able to help. You know how it works. But until and if the case breaks, we’ll do what we can to help.” Todd drummed his fingers on the desk. “Off the record, of course.”

“Of course. Just friends helping friends.”

J
ack drove back to Hillsboro, returned the truck to his officer, checked that Daisy was safe at the library, and filled the rest of the day handling the myriad details that cropped up every day in a police department, even a small one. He left the office at the usual time, drove home, cut his grass to kill some time, went in and showered, then called his office phone to make certain Eva Fay had gone home. Sometimes he thought she spent the night there, because she was always there when he arrived and no matter how late he stayed, she stayed later. As a secretary, she was damned intimidating. She was also so good at her job he’d have loved to see her transplanted to New York, to see what kind of miracle she could work on some of the precincts.

There was no answer at his office, so it was safe to go back. His car was in the driveway, plainly visible to
anyone who looked. He left a bar light on in the kitchen, a lamp on in his bedroom upstairs, and one on in the living room. The television provided background noise, in case anyone listened. There was no reason for anyone to be watching his house, at least so long as whoever was after Daisy didn’t find out about his involvement with her, but he wasn’t taking chances.

At twilight, he got a few items he thought he might need and slipped them into his pockets. Wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and another cap—this one plain black—he slipped out his back door and walked back to the police department. At this time of day almost everyone was inside for the night, having finished the chores around the house, eaten supper, and settled down in front of the tube. He could hear the high-pitched laughter of some youngsters chasing lightning bugs, but that was one street over. Maybe there were some folks sitting on their front porches, enjoying the fresh air now that it wasn’t as hot, but Jack knew he was virtually unrecognizable in the deepening twilight.

His second-shift desk sergeant, Scott Wylie, looked up in surprise when Jack entered by the back door, which was the way all the officers came in. It was a quiet night, no one else around, so Wylie didn’t even try to hide the fishing magazine he was reading. Jack had come up through the ranks, so he knew what it was like to work long, boring shifts, and he never gave his men grief about their reading material. “Chief! Is something wrong?”

Jack grinned. “I thought I’d spend the night here, so I can find out what time Eva Fay comes to work.”

The sergeant laughed. “Good luck. She has a sixth sense about things like that; she’ll probably call in sick.”

“I’ll be in my office for a while, clearing up some paperwork. I was going to do it tomorrow, but something else came up.”

“Sure thing.” Wylie went back to his magazine, and Jack went through the glass doors into the office part of the building. The police department was two-storied, built in a back-facing L, with the offices in the short leg facing the street, while the officers’ lockers and showers and the evidence, booking, and interrogation rooms were on the first floor of the long section, with the cells on the top floor.

Jack’s office was on the second floor, facing the street He went in and turned on the lamp on his desk, scattered some papers around the desk so it would look as if he’d been working—just in case someone came up, which he doubted would happen—then he got a key from his desk and silently went down to the basement, where a short tunnel connected the ED. to city hall. The tunnel was used to transport prisoners from the jail to court for their trials and was securely locked at both ends. Jack had a key, the desk sergeant had a key, and the city manager had once had a key, but it was taken from him when it was discovered he was giving his girl-friends tours of the place.

He unlocked the door on the RD. side, then relocked it when he was in the tunnel—again, just in case. The place was dark as a tomb, but Jack had a pencil flashlight with a narrow, powerful beam. He unlocked the door on the other end, and left this one unlocked, because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in city hall after five P.M. The basement was silent and dark, just the way it should be.

He soundlessly climbed the stairs; the door at the
top had no lock. He eased it open, listened, then put his eye to the crack and looked for light where there shouldn’t be any. Nothing. The place was empty.

More relaxed now, he opened the flimsy lock on the water department door—the city really needed to replace its locks, it only took him a few seconds to get in—and booted up the computer. The system wasn’t password protected, because it wasn’t on-line. He clicked on Programs, found Billing, and opened the file. Bless their tidy little hearts, everything was cross-referenced between account numbers and names. He simply found Daisy’s name, clicked on it, changed her address to his, saved the change, and closed the file. Bingo.

That taken care of, he backed out of the operating system and turned off the computer, relocked the door behind him, then made his way upstairs to the mayor’s office. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he sure wanted to look around.

Like his own office, there were two entrances to the mayor’s: one through Nadine’s outer sanctum, and a private, unmarked door a little farther down the hallway. The locks here were much better than the locks on the door at the water department.

Jack decided to use Nadine’s door, on the theory that she might think she’d accidentally left it unlocked. Repeating the process he’d used at the water department, he took a small set of probes and picks from his pocket, then put the penlight in his mouth, crouched down, and went to work. He was good at picking locks, though until tonight he hadn’t been called upon to do so since moving to Hillsboro. When people asked him about his SWAT training or any of the action he’d seen, they never asked about any specialty training he might have had on the side. He always downplayed the action
part—hell, he wasn’t a Rambo, none of them were, though there were always a few who let their heads get too far into the mystique—and kept quiet about some of the training, because it seemed smart to keep something in reserve.

The lock yielded in about thirty seconds. Normal citizens would be alarmed at how easy it was to open locked doors; they thought all they had to do was turn the key and they were safe. Unfortunately, the only people they were safe from were the people who obeyed laws and respected locked doors. A lowlife would break a window, kick in a door; Jack had even known them to crawl under houses and saw holes in the floor. Alarm systems and burglar bars were good, but if someone was determined to get inside, he’d find a way.

Witness himself, breaking into the mayor’s office. Jack grinned as he slipped through Nadine’s office, holding the penlight down so the beam wouldn’t flash across the windows, and tried the door into the mayor’s office. It was unlocked; that meant one of three things: Either Temple had nothing to hide, he was so careless he didn’t deserve to live, or he made certain there was nothing suspicious here to see. Jack hoped it was the first but figured it was the third.

Working fast but systematically, he went through the trash and found a wadded piece of paper with Daisy’s tag number scribbled on it, but nothing else interesting. He smoothed out the paper, it was a sheet from the memo pad printed with
Temple Nolan
at the top, the same memo pad that now rested on top of Temple’s desk. It followed, then, that the mayor had been here in his office when someone called asking him to run that tag number.

A quick search of the mayor’s desk turned up nothing.
Jack surveyed the office, but there were no file cabinets, just furniture. All the files were in Nadine’s office. There were, however, two phones on Temple’s desk. One was the office phone, with a list of extension numbers beside it. The other had to be a private line, so Temple could make and receive calls without Nadine knowing.

It was a long shot, but Jack took a tiny recorder out of his pocket, hit
redial
on the private phone, then held the recorder to the earpiece, recorded the tones, and quickly hung up. He had a pal who could listen to the tones and tell him what number had been dialed. Next he hit *69, and scribbled down the number the computer provided. It wasn’t a local exchange, so the last call Temple had received had not been from his wife asking when he’d be home for supper. Jack tore off a few extra pages of the memo pad to make certain no impression was left behind, wadded up the extras, and dropped them into the wastebasket. The trash would be emptied before Nolan came to work, not that he was likely to go through his own trash, considering there was nothing interesting in there except Daisy’s tag number, which Jack also dropped back in the trash.

That was all he could do tonight. Taking out a handkerchief, he carefully wiped all the surfaces he had touched; then let himself out through Nadine’s office. He went back through the basement tunnel, up to his office, where he restacked all the papers he’d scattered on his desk so Eva Fay wouldn’t realize he’d been here when she wasn’t, turned out the light, and locked up. Everything was just the way he’d found it.