Tag Man (12 page)

Joe was wondering where this was heading. “Okay,” he said.

“I know you know all that. What I’m saying, Joe, is that when it came time for Lloyd to part ways with his clients, he had to be at the top of his game. He had to make sure they wouldn’t follow instinct and just kill him for having lost their money.”

“So he took out insurance?” Joe ventured.

Abijah straightened, a smile on his face. “Precisely. The blackmailer’s instinct served him well. From what I heard—and I did a little homework before we got together—he’d been collecting facts and figures for years. Maybe even tape recordings. But enough evidence to guarantee that his former clients would absolutely go to jail if any harm came to him.”

“And they bought that?”

The two of them paused again to let their waiter remove their plates and bring in the main course.

“What choice did they have?” Reed asked after they’d had their first bites. “He had them over a barrel, but keep in mind that he also removed himself from their direct realm of influence. He left town. That’s when you inherited him. He had brains enough to recognize that if he got out of sight, it would help in putting him out of mind. That was his gift in all this—his key to survival. He made his apologies, promised to sever all ties, got out of the financial-management racket,
and
he took out insurance, making sure everyone knew what he had and what it would cost them to come after him. Smart, like I said.”

“And it worked?”

Reed raised his eyebrows dramatically in midbite before agreeing, “It worked. But you’ve got to wonder what’s going through his head now that your Tag Man came by to visit, especially if—as you suggest—he took something as a souvenir.”

He laughed suddenly and asked, “Can you imagine? Not only can a blackmailer be blackmailed, but so can somebody else put the squeeze on the original targets if he managed to get hold of the right incriminating information.”

Joe scowled, following the complicated suggestion.

“I love this stuff,” Abijah admitted gleefully. “I’m not saying it happened, by the way. But it’s all possible. Think of it: Tag Man steals what Jordan was using as insurance. What’s that do? If Tag Man was hired by the Boston crooks, then Jordan is dead. Period. If instead, your mystery midnight snacker merely stumbled over the goods by accident, then he’s got two options: He can either approach Jordan and sell the stuff back, or he can do the same thing to the original blackmailees. That would be the riskier route, of course, since it would put him in their crosshairs.”

“Would you have the pipeline to hear about something like that?” Joe asked.

Reed tilted his head thoughtfully. “Probably for the second scenario. I’d have no way of knowing if Tag Man approached Jordan directly. Of course, if the truth is behind door number one, you’ll find Jordan dead in a ditch soon enough. How long ago did this happen?”

Joe told him.

Abijah scratched his chin. “They don’t usually sit on this kind of thing for long. Like I said, they’re not terrific planners. My instinct tells me that you may be dealing with someone who fell into a really lucrative deal, if a highly risky one. For his sake, I hope you find a ‘Tag!’ note at another house soon, and not some anonymous corpse, without ever knowing who and what he’d been. That would be a bummer.”

“Jesus,” Joe murmured. “What a mess.” He thought back through the various topics they’d covered, and chose to add to his own complications. “You have names of Jordan’s past associates?”

“You mean the most likely targets of any secret paperwork?” Abijah asked. “Benjamin Underhill comes to mind first. A ruthless man, utterly humorless. He’s probably the one Jordan would have to watch the closest. It’s safe to say that if Jordan doesn’t have something on Underhill, then he doesn’t have anything on anyone, and my theory is flat wrong.”

“Tell me about the first wife,” Joe asked after chewing awhile thoughtfully. “Where was that left?”

“Actually,” Abijah conceded, “the medical examiner never even ruled it a homicide. All of us just figured it couldn’t be anything but. She fell down a flight of stairs. Simplest thing in the world. Was there anyone else in the house? Nope. Could Jordan account for his whereabouts at the time? Yup. Was the time of death narrowed down to everyone’s satisfaction? Yup again. It was ruled an accident and Jordan was off the hook. Next case, please.” He pretended to dust his hands off.

“Did the police give it a fair shake, like I was hoping?” Joe asked, exploring Abijah’s implication that they had the usual urban caseload weighing them down.

“Yes,” he said affably. “It was hard to argue with the evidence. Jordan was rich and mobbed up, which caught their attention. But,” and here he smiled broadly, “Jordan was also rich and mobbed up, which meant that he could have arranged whatever he needed and made it look airtight. That’s where the smart money put this.”

“Meaning,” Joe ventured, “since we’re talking about blackmail, that somebody might still be around who has what we need to pin a murder charge on him.”

Abijah raised his glass. “Correct. Good Lord, Joe. We should do this more often, don’t you think?”

Joe lifted his glass and returned the toast, thinking that every few years was fine with him, given all the new homework he’d just picked up.

Still, there was something stirring inside him as a result—the old hunting dog’s eagerness to be back on the job.

And that, he did enjoy feeling.

CHAPTER NINE

Dan crouched in the bushes outside Gloria Wrinn’s old mansion, his black clothes making him all but invisible on a moonless night.

His first visit here had been according to his rules—the time, the target, the risk level, and the challenge of the obstacle had all fit his comfort zone. Dan had no interest in being caught, after all. It was his anonymity he wanted to play large in people’s imagination. Being the Tag Man appealed to several needs—intellectual; financial, when it caused no loss to the victim, as with Merry Hodgkins; and playful. At his most even-keeled, Dan—as Sally well knew—could be as lighthearted and even mischievous as any impish boy.

In the past, he had picked from a wide selection of targets, giving weight to the security systems opposing him, as well as to what he could learn of each home’s inhabitants. For example, the Jordans, being nouveau riche and Lloyd a stuffy know-it-all who bought extravagantly, tipped poorly (as Dan knew from personal experience), and he treated his wife dismissively; Merry Hodgkins, being smart and talented and self-made, if a little paranoid; and Gloria, with her love of travel, her generosity to others, and her simple old-fashioned grandeur. All of them and the others, too, had offered Dan the chance to stand covertly in their midst—a thief in the night—to eat their best food, enjoy their possessions, and absorb their contributions—good and bad—to human nature.

But never before had he been in his present position, having to act at his peril by entering a house a second time, with at least one of its residents both knowing of his existence and wishing him and Sally harm. For a man as committed to the shadows as Dan Kravitz, this was the equivalent of stepping out onto center stage buck naked on opening night.

All because, simply put, it had to be done.

And that wasn’t all—he had made a practice of dogged research in the past. Houses and house owners had been subjected to thorough scrutiny, his computer skills put to use, his background in electronics and security systems, his fondness for surveillance. He’d sometimes even gotten short-term jobs that put him close to the people whose privacy he planned to invade. That was one reason he’d worked at Bariloche—to study the Jordans.

But Paul Hauser? Dan had found no mention anywhere, and the more he’d searched, the more he’d felt the pressure of time. The words of the man he’d killed on the bridge—the first person he’d ever harmed in his life—burned like a fuse in his head. “It involves your daughter,” he’d said of the reason he’d been stalking Dan.

Whatever that was, whatever it meant, it told Dan that he didn’t have time to conduct his usual homework. He needed to take back control, and he needed to do it to save Sally from the evil he’d glimpsed in those albums.

This was now combat. He’d been driven to kill once, if admittedly in self-defense. Now he was ready to do it again, to protect the only human being he’d ever held dear.

But he needed to understand his enemy.

And therein lay his dilemma.

He studied the house as if for the first time, a confusing but appealing mixture of brick, clapboard, and Victorian flourishes, clearly remodeled over the centuries, and resulting in a maintenance nightmare and a visual treat. It utterly lacked any architect’s guidance and showed off instead the Yankee penchant for independence, accented with no small measure of humor.

Dan, however, was all business this time, paying no attention to the minutiae he favored and focusing instead on the threat level alone. He watched the windows and doors for light or movement, the bushes near the walls for shapes and shadows that didn’t fit. He tried with his will simply to sense the presence of another living soul.

But he picked up on nothing besides his own anxiety.

He’d been out here for an hour already, studying the building from every accessible angle. Considering a final approach, he decided against repeating his previous means of entry, or trusting what he knew of Gloria’s lack of interest in security. As before, he assumed all alarm systems to be on and all locks thrown, and even that, for once, someone might actually be watching.

Having thus weighed his new point of entry, he crossed the lawn at a silent run and quietly scaled a tree near the back wall. Once securely positioned on a sturdy branch fifteen feet off the ground—still a good ten feet from the second-floor window he’d selected—he removed a coil of rope from his close-fitting backpack, triggered the spring-loaded grappling hook on its end, and gracefully and successfully sent it looping over the top of a decorative piece of woodwork protruding from under the roof’s elaborate edge.

Once the rope was made taut and tested, Dan clipped it to his harness, alongside a second line attached to the tree trunk, and eased himself free of his branch, rappelling horizontally over to the window directly across from him. He arrived without a sound, high above the motion detectors designed to be monitoring the outside perimeter of the wall—that’s where he would have fallen prey had he simply used a ladder to reach the same window.

Comfortably tied off, dangling directly before the window, Dan removed several tools from his cargo-pants pockets and quickly extracted a single pane of glass. He reached inside, unlocked the window, and then replaced the pane, applying putty prestained to look old and weathered.

He repacked his tools, cleaned up his handiwork, placing the fragments of old glazing into a small plastic bag, and slipped inside the house. Leaning out the open window, he pulled on the accessory lines he’d laid out, above and across from him, and loosened his two primary ropes, reeling one in and catching the other as it fell toward him. By the end, he’d eliminated all but the tiniest signs of his ever having been there. The entire operation had taken fifteen minutes.

Only then did he shut and lock the window behind him and stand stock-still, listening, inside the house once more.

He knew the layout well by now. His mind, with its obsession for detail, retained memories of spatial relationships and lighting angles as he imagined cartographers’ did of cherished maps. A major factor in his choice of which window to assault had been based on his recall of the floor plan and even the actual window’s characteristics.

So now, he stood as still as a piece of furniture, in a small sitting room down the hall from Gloria’s bedroom, reacquainting himself with the heartbeat of the house.

But whether it was the truth or simply his own heightened anxiety, he didn’t like what he was sensing.

Something felt distinctly off-kilter, as if his every movement was being tracked.

He left the room, stopped in the hallway, and tried to peer into the surrounding darkness, wishing he’d invested in a pair of night-vision goggles.

Relying on his memory, he stole down the corridor, avoiding a side table here or a creaky floorboard there, headed for the master bedroom to confirm the homeowner’s whereabouts.

At Gloria’s slightly ajar door, outlined by the barest glimmer from a night-light at the rear of the room, he placed his hand on the knob and pushed, knowing the hinges to be well oiled and silent.

The scene was what he had expected. This time, he wasn’t startled to see the old lady propped up in bed, but he was tense nevertheless, more nervous about what he couldn’t see than about what was directly before him. He stepped free of the open doorway and placed his back against the wall.

He grimaced, fighting his growing unease. What the hell felt so wrong?

He studied Gloria carefully, or what little he could see of her. Her face was in shadow, her shape under the covers little more than a bulbous lump. A bit of cloth had fallen over the distant night-light and made of her a virtual apparition—the suggestion of a human being.

Chilled by the thought, Dan sidled across the rug, working his way around the foot of the large four-poster to get a better angle on his subject.

What he finally discerned was no face at all. The sleeping Gloria he was expecting had no eyes, no nose, no features at all. Planted atop the pillow, slightly turned away as if in slumber, was the blank orb of a volleyball topped with a wig.

Dan whirled around, convinced that someone had to be standing behind him, having lured him in with this subterfuge.

There was no one there, but he swore that there’d been a flicker of movement, framed in the now open doorway.

He dropped into a crouch behind the hulking bed, peering over its blankets at the door. A moment later, he glanced again at what he’d thought to be Gloria, concentrating on the ramifications of his situation.

One thing was safe to assume: He was now caught in this house like a rodent in a trap. He no longer needed to return to a cellar room for evidence of a monster on the loose. The monster was coming for him.