SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (15 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN / Monday, 8:44 AM

Brendan listened to her voicemail greeting.

“You’ve reached Jennifer Aiken; I can’t answer my phone right now but please leave a message and I will return your call. Thank you.”

“Ms. Aiken this is Brendan Healy. I received a call from Sheriff Taber in Oneida County that you were looking to speak with me.”

He paused for a moment, thinking about what to say next. He stood smoking on Argon’s front lawn. The snake of cigarette smoke was white in the chilly morning air. The fallen leaves had curled in the overnight frost and the sky still held the promise of snow.

“My guess is you’re investigating the Heilshorn case at a higher level, and you’d like to debrief with me. I’m actually . . . well the Sheriff asked me to look into a matter concerning Seamus Argon, an officer for the Mount Pleasant Police. Officer Argon has . . . been killed in the line of duty. I’m wondering not only if Argon may have met with foul play, but also that he might possess some information possibly related to the investigation you’re conducting. I’ve been here for approximately eighteen hours and I’ve been able to uncover nothing yet that I would consider evidentiary . . . but there are several circumstantial factors I find compelling. I’m trying to put it all together. Be happy to speak with you.”

He fumbled with the phone for a second, and licked his lips. “Sorry for the long message. Please call this number back as soon as you can.”

He hung up and slipped his phone into the parka he’d brought with him from Wyoming. It was the kind that had fluff around the hood – a thick, warm jacket, a bit too much, but he didn’t care.

He blew on his hands and rubbed them together. Then he pulled his phone back out and tried Colinas, to see if he’d been able to uncover anything about the medical supplier yet. Colinas didn’t answer, and Brendan hung up without leaving a message.

He was still standing in the yard when a Mount Pleasant Police Department vehicle pulled up. He watched as the officer got out. Leonard Dutko.

If a man had ever been born to be a cop, it was Dutko.

Dutko stood, unfurling a height of well over six feet, and then ducked back into the cruiser for a moment and retrieved his night stick. He slid this through his belt loop. He was dressed in the standard blues, with a police-issue parka on top. He walked towards Brendan.

“Morning,” Brendan called.

“Morning,” Dutko said. His lips were a flat line beneath his bushy black mustache. He reached Brendan and stuck out his hand. “How you been, Healy?”

The man had one of those extra-firm grips, as if letting him know he could break bones in Brendan’s fingers if he wanted to.

“Been a long time,” Brendan said.

“Yeah.” Dutko’s eyes flicked to Argon’s house. “What a fucking thing, man. Argon was one of the best. Just one of the best. Known him for twenty years, now, about.”

“He’s going to be missed.”

Dutko cut his gaze back to Brendan. They were dark eyes. His brows lifted and his expression morphed into mild surprise. “You got a few minutes?”

* * *

Inside, he showed Dutko around, though Dutko seemed to know the layout. A uniform still in its dry-cleaning bag hung in the back of Argon’s closet. Dutko pulled it out and laid it on the bed.

“What do you know about how he died?” Brendan asked.

Dutko turned away and went back to the closet and bent down, hunting for a pair of shoes.

“What do I know?” His head came out of the closet and he looked around at Brendan. His expression suggested he was deciding whether or not Brendan could be trusted. “I know it’s fucked up,” he said, but Brendan thought he wanted to say more.

“Where is the vehicle he was driving? Has it been impounded as part of the investigation? Can I see it?”

Dutko briefly returned his attention to the closet and then retreated with a shiny pair of Argon’s shoes pinched together in the back between his thumb and forefinger. He set these down on the bed next to the suit. Then he turned and looked at Brendan again.

“You’ve been away, what, two years?”

“About that. I took the job in Oneida two summers ago. So a little over two years.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dutko went to the closet a third time. He pulled out a duffel bag of Argon’s. Brendan had seen all of this stuff in the closet – he’d been through it four or five times already. It struck Brendan that Dutko seemed to know just where to look for everything. Dutko opened the bag and put the shoes in.

“You ever hear about that case in Ohio? Baby was found in the back of a trunk at an automotive shop. The car had been there for two days, and then the mechanic goes to work on it. Smells something he thinks might be a dead animal. It’s coming from the trunk. So he goes and opens the trunk and sees the remains of this tiny little infant,” said Dutko.

Dutko was now going through Argon’s drawers. He found a chain with a crucifix and put it in the bag.

“The baby was inside a shoebox. That’s where they put the kid. The mother, who was seventeen. The father, also seventeen.”

Dutko paused and looked Brendan in the eye. “Know what happened to those two kids who put their baby in the trunk to die?”

“Probably counseling, lots of intervention.”

Dutko’s face grew a shade darker, it seemed, as if filling with a rush of blood. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened to them.”

“They’re minors,” Brendan said. He wasn’t for a moment condoning their behavior, but he was curious to see where Dutko would go with this.

The big cop just laughed. It was a humorless sound, a rise and fall of the shoulders and a disdainful exhalation. “Minors.”

Brendan’s mind raced for a second. Then he hit on what he was looking for. “You know about Argon’s history, I’m sure. With the baby he found in the storm drain.”

“Everyone knows.” Dutko zipped up the bag. He’d put in the shoes, a wristwatch, the crucifix, and the picture Brendan had found of a younger Argon.

“Did Argon do anything else like that?”

Another severe look from Dutko.

“Like what?”

“Like in the line of duty, or even off the record – was Argon involved in anything like that again – maybe missing kids, or discarded babies – something like that? You make me ask because you just brought up the Ohio story.”

“I brought up the Ohio story because you asked about the cruiser and whether it was impounded and you made me remember the Ohio thing.”

Brendan smirked at the circles they seemed to find themselves in. “That’s quite the association.”

“Excuse me?”

The tension was rising in the small bedroom. Brendan could feel his skin tingling as his body temperature started to climb.

“What I mean is, I ask about a police officer’s car, and you bring up something about a baby in a trunk. I’m just wondering if . . .”

Dutko leaned forward, surprisingly quickly for a big man. His nose was inches from Brendan’s. “That’s because it’s fucking disgusting,” he said. “The whole thing. The whole world we live in where people put babies in the trunk of a car to die.”

“I agree with you,” Brendan said, keeping calm. “Trust me. I feel the same way. Just sit down with me for a minute, alright? Let’s go into the living room.”

Dutko was like a snarling dog, but he blinked and withdrew his face from Brendan’s. He picked up the duffel in one hand and the suit in the other and walked out of the room, with Brendan stepping back against the wall to let him pass.

He followed Dutko down the hallway and into the living room. Dutko stopped in the middle of the room and turned around. Brendan watched him. Dutko’s gaze drifted along the bookshelves for a moment. Then his eyes locked on Brendan again.

“Typically, going by the book, you can’t see the vehicle. You’re a civilian. You’re not family. Cushing told me about you. Your P.I. license is for Wyoming, not New York. You gotta take whatever you find, on your own, and let us know about it. That’s augmenting the investigation.” He spoke with an edge to his voice, but some of the aggression seemed to have subsided.

“I’ve been here a day,” said Brendan. “I’ve met a lot of people already. Like you said, Argon was the best. No one has a bad word to say about him. But no one can seem to give me a straight answer about how he died. What happened to Carrera?”

Dutko twitched his massive mustache. “You tell me.”

“Me? I don’t know. All I do is bump into walls. Every time I try to lift the lid on Argon, there’s just more questions.” Brendan could hear the frustration edging into his own voice.

“He was a private person.”

“You’re not kidding. What about the second driver? You know anything about that? Was he cleared? Arrested? Drunk? Anything?”

“You see anything in the papers about him?”

“No, nothing. But there was barely any coverage on Argon, either.”

“I don’t know anything about the second driver. I’m day shift. I was sleeping when it happened, woke up, went to work, and that’s when I found out – Cushing debriefed us at oh-eight-hundred. Said Argon was killed in the line of duty. Random traffic collision.”

“He used that word? Random?” Brendan was sure Cushing had said “random” during their earlier conversation, too. It was an adjective being tossed around a bit.

“Yeah. Cushing’s an idiot.”

“You don’t like him?”

“No one does. But, he didn’t say anything about the second driver, and I didn’t think to ask.”

“Nobody asked? Room full of cops, one of their best goes down in the middle of the night, no one has a hankering to know about the fucking guy who ran into him and caused fatal injuries?”

Dutko had been calming down before, but was immediately furious again. “You better watch your mouth. You already look like you got a bad habit of poking your shit where it don’t belong, limping like that, your face and hand all loused up. Who do you think you are?”

“Why am I the bad guy? I’m trying to figure out what happened to my friend – your friend – and all I get is this hostility.”

“Hostility?”

“Yeah.”

“No, motherfucker, no one asked about the other guy because . . .”

“Because what?”

“Because Argon had been tipping them back again lately, okay? Goddammit.”

Dutko looked like he didn’t know whether to smash Brendan in the face or to sit down and cry. The news hit Brendan hard. But he couldn’t believe it. Or, he didn’t want to.

“No way.”

Dutko’s gaze challenged Brendan’s assertion.
Yes way
.

“I went to a meeting last night with Argon’s sponsor. Half a dozen people who saw him regularly. No one said anything.”

Now Dutko seemed to deflate. He stood holding Argon’s stuff, stooping over. “They didn’t know.”

“Then how did you know? Or any of the others?”

Dutko frowned. “Come on. These people saw Argon once a week maybe. When you work with a guy, you know.”

* * *

Brendan swept the room with his eyes, taking stock of this new information.

“I don’t buy it,” he said. “There’s got to be more than that.”

Dutko’s eyes were like quivering, shining stones. His upper lip twitched beneath his mustache. “Oh yeah? How about the flask in the front seat?”

“Argon had a flask in the front seat?”

“That’s what Cushing said. That’s why no one else questioned it, big shot.”

Brendan filed this away for the moment and decided to start on a new tack. He looked at the kitchen table, where Argon’s notepad still rested. “What does the name Philip Largo mean to you?”

Something flickered across Dutko’s dark face. “You kidding? He’s the horn-dog in Albany who hired prostitutes.”

“So I’ve heard. But why would Argon have his name written down?”

“Why? Probably was just committing it to memory. Argon knew all of them.”

“All of who?” Brendan thought of Santos saying
He had his sights set, man
.

Dutko presented a level gaze. “Every twisted one of them. Every politician, every bond trader, investor, banker, CEO, lawyer, you name it.”

“Like who?”

“Like who? Where the fuck have you been, under a rock? You some Obama nut? They’re everywhere you goddamn look. Matuso, Barre, Kilroy, Hazeltine, Bianco, Stark, Dillon, Winston, Good, Lewalt, Milton, Rellendiz, Fernandez, Finkle, Cross – and those are just the B-team. You’ve got your Elliot Spitzers, your Bobbie McDees, your Terry McAuliffes. Governors as dirty as a dustbin lid. You’ve got . . .”

“And you and Argon talked about these politicians. What did you say about them?”

“Not just politicians. You’re missing the point. I thought Argon called you ‘The PhD Policeman.’”

“I studied neurobiology, not political science.”

“You don’t need to. It’s everywhere you look. Stockbrokers, CEOs screwing over their clients, investors running from emerging markets the second things get risky, central banks unable to stem the slides. The currencies in foreign countries are dropping like rocks. Investors are confronting the reality of the end of the Fed’s bond-buying. When the dollar dies, it’s going to be total chaos. And that time is coming quicker than people think. Shit is bad, Healy.”