The Crime Writer (20 page)

K
asey Broach’s family moved through the open doorway of partment 1B to a U-Haul and back again, toting lamps, trash cans, cardboard boxes. Strong family resemblance in the parents and the younger sibling, whom I recognized from the news. They moved in automated silence through the powerful beam of the truck’s headlights. Now and then one would halt along the brief path from truck to door and lean against a post, bending over as if catching lost breath.

Frozen meals thawed in a translucent trash bag by the doorway. Kasey’s father paused to dump in an armload of toiletries—fraying toothbrush, faded razor, half carton of Q-tips—while his daughter wound a telephone cord around the base unit before stuffing it into a salad bowl. The logistics of loss. The awesome minutiae.

The 110 rattled along behind a vast concrete barrier a half block away. A group of kids ran around the dark street, waving toy guns that looked real enough to get them shot by worn-down cops. Their laughter seemed to mock the somber procession of surviving Broaches.

To see the apartment, I wouldn’t require the harried manager’s goodwill after all. What I required was perhaps more nerve than I could muster. This was an opportunity that my trial had robbed me of having with the Bertrands. A chance to speak to the bereaved and offer what little anyone could under such circumstances. For a moment I hated who I was for how it would taint my approach here. And I hated my ulterior motive, a seamy lining to a dark cloud.

The mother, a stout, well-put-together blonde, glanced over at me a few times, and I realized I must be creeping them out, watching behind my car’s tinted windows with Kasey’s killer still at large.

I approached, keeping a respectful distance. “Mrs. Broach? I’m—”

“Yes.” She paused, a stack of dresses, still on their hangers, draped over her arm. “Andrew Danner. I recognize you.”

“I’m so sorry to intrude. I know it’s quite odd, my coming here and…and…” The hallway light over Kasey’s door had been broken recently, judging by the bits of glass kicked to the side of the jamb. The coldness of such preparation made me shiver. That’s why the Broaches were using headlights for illumination now—because the killer had broken the hall light in anticipation of dragging out their daughter’s unconscious body.

“Well?” her husband said from behind me. “What
are
you here for?”

In the distance, the street kids shouted back and forth in prepubescent sopranos. “I got you! I shot you
dead
!”

A small choke came out of nowhere, seizing my throat, shocking me. I pressed my lips together, trying to find composure.

Mrs. Broach dropped the dresses on the ground, stepped forward, and embraced me. She rubbed my back in vigorous circles, in-finitely more effective than I’d been when Lloyd had broken down. She was soft, slightly damp with perspiration, and smelled nicely of conditioner. For a moment she blended into my own mother, April, Françoise Bertrand, cooing accented forgiveness.

I pulled back, blinking against the headlights, and said, “I don’t even know how to begin. Except to say that I’m so sorry for what happened to Kasey. And I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Kasey’s sister—Jennifer, if memory served—stood in the doorway, chewing gum and swiveling a lanky leg on a pointed toe. The news stories had made much of the fact that she was a freshman in high school, which put almost two decades between her and her big sister. Jennifer looked as if she wanted to cry but had no more energy for it. Somehow she summoned it, pressing her hand to her top teeth and hiccupping out something between a moan and a sob.

“Come on inside,” Mr. Broach said.

We went in, stepping over half-packed boxes and strewn clothes.

Mr. Broach looked around and said gruffly, to himself, “How do you know what to keep?”

They sat on a couch that had been shoved away from the wall, I on a large overturned earthenware pot. Where to start?

“I was a suspect in your daughter’s murder,” I said.

Mrs. Broach said, “We know. Bill told us.”

Bill Kaden. Right.

“He said you still
are
a suspect,” Mr. Broach said, “but I don’t think you did it. I watched your trial. That tape you made showing you sleeping the night our Kasey was killed? Bill thinks it implicates you more. I think the opposite.” He looked at his wife. “We understand how you could have gotten to the point of questioning yourself.”

Here we were, just a couple of old friends dismissing the notion I’d murdered his daughter.

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“I’m simply stating my opinion. We certainly don’t presume to judge.”

Mrs. Broach sat sideways on a hip, tilted over her daughter, one hand smoothing Jennifer’s hair behind her ear. “Kasey’s in a better place now. Joshua 23 says God keeps all promises.
All
promises. One way or another.”

“I’m glad you can find some peace in this. I doubt I’d have your strength.”

“We have experience,” Mr. Broach said. Then his eyes watered, and he coughed into a fist. “We lost our boy, too, five years back.”

I must have looked stunned.

Mrs. Broach picked it up. “No, no. Tommy died of leukemia.”

Some people get it with both barrels, can barely catch their breath before fate reloads. And others skip through life stepping on the heads of others, swinging the world by its tail.

Jennifer was staring at me. “Did you do it?” she asked.

“No. I did not.”

“How about the first? That French girl you dated?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe I did.” I parted my hair, showed the seam of scar tissue. “But I can’t know for sure until I work out what really happened.”

“So that’s what you’re doing?” Mr. Broach asked.

“What I’ve been through…I think maybe I could help find out more about your daughter’s death. I’ve been looking around, and I’ve found a few leads.”

Mr. Broach said quickly, “Have you told the police?”

“I’m sharing everything with them as I go. But they’re working the case day and night and have a lot of leads of their own, too. So I figure I might as well stay involved, see that nothing slips between the cracks.”

“How can we help?”

“Well,” I said, looking to each of them, “can you tell me about Kasey?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Broach said, “we can do that.”

She spoke first, detailing Kasey’s habits and lifestyle, but soon they were all chiming in with small memories, smiling. A box of tissue circulated. The man in 1A had been out the night of her death, but Trina Patrick had been home in 1C. She’d been watching a game show, volume up loud, augmenting the experience with a table red, and had heard nothing. I asked about Morton Frankel and brown Volvos and recent boyfriends, and we all grew politely frustrated at our inability to get traction.

Mrs. Broach leaned into her husband, and he held her. “She was a wonderful girl. Sunday school. Youth group. Some trouble in her teens, but who didn’t have that? Her job worked her hard, but she still found time for outreaches, short-term missions. Always had a hand out for others. Her brother, when he was diagnosed, they run the test on family members, you know? None of us matched.” Mrs. Broach waved a hand to encompass the three of them on the couch. “But Kasey did. She was Tommy’s angel. She went in time after time, shots in the hip, needle this thick, never complained, not once.” Her fingers were trembling, and when she spoke again, her voice cracked. “We had three children. We’ve still got one. We’re blessed.” She pressed her face to her daughter’s and squeezed her hard around the shoulders. Jennifer wore an expression I’d seen once in a photo of a makeshift raft that had come apart en route to Florida. A Cuban girl bobbed among the flotsam, clinging to a tire, the sole survivor and not sure that she wanted to be.

“Do you mind if I take a look at Kasey’s room?” I asked.

Mr. Broach, tending to his wife, waved his assent.

Kasey’s furniture had been broken down, and maybe half of her possessions had been boxed, though there was no discernible order to the packing process. A picture of Kasey with her brother, thin and bald, was taped to the inside of her closet door so she’d see it every morning as she dressed. Her mattress leaned against the wall, the unhooked headboard and slats propped against it. I closed my eyes, imagined Morton Frankel approaching the bed through darkness, toting a canister of sevoflurane and a face mask. Kasey’s brief, terrified struggle before the gas took effect. The Volvo he could’ve parked right out front where the U-Haul was now. I walked over and fingered down the blinds, noting the motel-style proximity of parking spaces to doorways. Five steps through darkness and he’d have had her passed-out body in the back of the wagon. It would’ve been easy to time so no one would notice.

On the windowsill a cluster of key chains the size of a fist pinned down a petite monthly calendar. I flipped through. It was unused, purchased, I guessed, for the cheesecloth-filtered pictures of wildlife at play. In the midst of the key chains and charms, only three keys—car, apartment, mailbox.

A silver thimble hooked to the ring caught my eye.

I plucked it from the tangle, letting the other baubles swing.

A recovering alcoholic’s reminder that even a thimbleful of booze counts as a slip.

The tiny bathroom had already been packed up. I searched out the box of meds and dug through it, finding little more than Aleve, Tylenol, and various antacids.

No Xanax.

A recovering alcoholic wouldn’t want to mess with benzos. Yet the autopsy had revealed Xanax in Kasey’s system.

I walked back out. The Broaches were doing their best to get into packing mode again, but clearly our conversation had thrown them off.

“Kasey was a recovering alcoholic?” I asked.

Mrs. Broach flushed—not a favorite topic of discussion. “Well. As I said, she had some problems in her teen years, right after Jennifer was born. We got her help.”

“Did she ever slip?”

“We just celebrated with a twenty-year cake.”

“Do you think she would have ever taken Xanax?”

“Not a prayer of a chance. She wouldn’t touch my Black Forest cake, not even with the cherry brandy cooked off.”

In the kitchen Mr. Broach dropped a coffeemaker, and the pot shattered. He looked down at it blankly.

A potent three seconds passed before his wife said, “What were we going to do with it anyways?”

“I’ve put you behind schedule,” I said. “Would you mind if I helped?”

Mr. Broach said, “We wouldn’t mind that at all.”

For the next hour, as the whine of traffic diminished and the kids chased each other around the street, whooping and screaming, I helped pack and load. We made decent progress.

I came out with a halogen floor lamp and a framed Matisse print to find Mrs. Broach sitting on the ground, running her thumb over a white-ribbon barrette that had fallen from a bag.

Mr. Broach paused before her, helped her to her feet.

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” he said.

We finished loading the stuff by the U-Haul, and he turned to shake my hand.

“Maybe they’re wrong about you. With Genevieve Bertrand.”

“I hope so,” I said back to him.

Mrs. Broach smiled sadly at me. “You take care of yourself, Andrew.”

Jennifer offered me a wave from the U-Haul as they pulled out, and I stood and watched until the taillights were two distant eyes in the darkness. The kids circled with their crew cuts and ten-year-old voices, yelling about stickups and screeching imagined injuries. Their toy guns emitted electronic blips and blasts, red lights blinking deep inside the barrels.

I was almost to my car when I noticed that one kid’s pistol was deadly silent, nothing inside the bore but a circle of shadow. I jogged a few steps after him.

“Hey,” I called out.
“Hey.”

He pivoted with a crooked grin and said, “Bang bang, you’re dead, buddy.”

The gun he was pointing at me was real.

I
put my hands in the air. “All right, I’m sticking ’em up, buddy. Don’t shoot.”

He smiled, showing off a gap between his front teeth. All fun and games.

I watched his little finger tighten around the trigger and said, “Wait! Lemme give you my wallet first.”

Shuffling forward, I dug in my pocket and produced the pitifully light leather billfold. It distracted him just as I hoped, and I snatched the gun out of his hand, grabbing the barrel from the side and twisting it out and free. He stared at me, rubbing his wrist, stunned. “I was just playing.”

“This is a real gun.”

A shitty .22, to be precise. I nosed back the slide—no round in the chamber. Lucky thing, or someone would be bleeding out on the pavement right now. I dropped the magazine. A hollow point peeked out from the top, spring-loaded and ready to go. I reseated the mag and thumbed the safety on.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I didn’t steal it. I didn’t. It was in my trash.” He pointed to a row of houses backing on the parking lot. Garbage cans lined the rickety wooden fence, awaiting pickup. “I found it. On my property. It’s mine.”

I turned the pistol to check the serial number on the frame above the trigger and was not surprised to find only a stripe of gouged metal. “When?”

The other kids circled, scared but keeping a good distance. A boy in an Angels cap ran off toward the row of houses.

“Dunno. Coupla days ago.”

“The night the cops were here?”

“Day after. They weren’t looking for this, though. A lady got kidnapped from right there. That’s why we’re all playing together now. Buddy system.”

“You talk to the cops about this?”

He shook his head, scared. I looked across at his house. The kid in the Angels cap was returning, tugging at the hand of a big man in a flannel shirt. Through a back window, I could make out trophies and baseball pennants.

“You see anything the night she was kidnapped? Out front here? Around ten, eleven?”

“A car was there a little while.” He pointed at a parking space to the left of Kasey’s door—her car would have held the front slot. “Then it was gone. That’s all. I was up watching TV, so I didn’t even see nobody.”

“What kind of car?”

“It had a big butt on it with windows.”

The best description I’d ever heard of a Volvo. I opened my door, digging through printouts. “What color was it?”

“Brown, or black even. It was hard to tell, ’ cause there was no light.”

I handed him a picture of a Volvo 760. “Like this one?”

“Yeah.” A dirty fingernail tapped the printout. “Like that one. Now can I have my gun back?”

“Can I help you?” the man in the flannel shirt shouted, advancing quickly.

“He was playing with a gun.”

“My boys can play with whatever they damn well please.”

“A real gun.”

“Where’s my ten-year-old son gonna get a real gun?”

“It’s not, Daddy. I swear.”

The man continued at me aggressively. I didn’t want to fight a father in front of his son, so I chambered a round, aimed straight up, and fired. The boom sent the kids sprawling on the concrete and the man back on his heels, crouching, arms raised over his head.

“It’s a real gun,” I said.

Their scared reaction didn’t make me feel good about myself. Not even close.

The kids stayed down on the ground until I drove off.

“Remember for
Chainer’s Law
you showed me how to restore a serial number that had beenled off?” I raised my shirt, showing the pistol snugged in the front of my jeans.

Lloyd stared at me across the pristine sheet of butcher paper that covered his lab bench. “You want to blow your pecker off? This isn’t a movie, Drew.”

I withdrew the .22 and set it down beside the skull-and-bones matchbook, dimpling the glossy paper. Lloyd coughed uneasily and glanced around.

He’d gotten stuck processing some paint chips and was eager to get home to his wife. Given my excitement over the pistol, he’d yielded to my pressure to see him at the lab. He was working late and figured his superiors would be gone by this hour. I’d caught a few stares on my way in, but the halls were mostly abandoned.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said, snapping on latex gloves. “Why bring a gun if he was planning on knocking Broach out with gas?”

“It wasn’t for Kasey. Her he wanted alive and unconscious. It was in case one of the neighbors stumbled in on him or during that short unlit walk to the Volvo.”

He dusted the pistol, though I was certain that five days of fetishistic fondling by the kid would have smudged over any underlying prints. Indeed, besides mine, Lloyd brought up only child-size marks, which we matched against the prints the kid had left on the Volvo flyer I’d shown him. The magazine and bullets—each of which Lloyd dusted and checked—had been wiped clean.

Using a rotary hand tool fitted with a buffing wheel, he sanded the gouged strip where the serial number had been to a mirror finish. “Wouldn’t he know the neighbor’s routines? Everything else about this guy points to meticulous preparation.”

“But I think he was getting desperate,” I said. “Needed a fix, maybe. He’s thinking less clearly here—he should’ve picked someone who lived somewhere more secluded, like Genevieve. But for whatever reason, he wanted Broach. Which meant neighbors. Which meant he wanted a gun for backup. Once he had her safely in the car, he didn’t need the gun anymore. The trash cans were at the curb, right on the way back to the freeway. He could’ve just slowed down and tossed the gun into one of them.”

Lloyd carried the .22 over to a fume hood, beside a wire basket filled with guns, mags, pistols, and slides of all makes and models, samples for comparison. Quite a few had their serial numbers ground off as well. He donned goggles and gloves and clicked a button on the fume hood’s overhang, the fan suctioning air out from the cube of workspace in which the gun rested. The acids and reagents ranged from clear to dark green; Lloyd applied them to the obliterated metal using cotton swabs, wiping gently in one direction. The acids ate into the steel, the smell keen and foul. The metal that had been deformed by the stamping process should erode more quickly, leaving us with a ghost impression of the numerals.

Focused on his task, Lloyd said, “He’s got an unconscious woman in the back of his wagon and he’s worried about getting caught with a gun?”

“It’s not just about getting caught. I think he doesn’t
like
guns.”

Looking wonkish in his protective eyewear, Lloyd glanced up from the bubbling acid. “Morton Frankel,” he said, “doesn’t strike me as skittish.”

“You might be surprised about the complexities of Morton Frankel. Kasey Broach was twenty years sober. The Xanax? I don’t think she took it. I think he gave it to her.”

“The killer gave her Xanax? Why? She was knocked out.”

“Maybe not the whole time. Sevoflurane’s difficult to regulate, and Frankel’s not an anesthesiologist. Maybe she popped back into consciousness a few times—especially if he kept her under for a long period.”

“Why would he care if he’s a sadist?”

“Maybe he’s not.”

Lloyd guffawed—the broad laugh. “Come on. This hardly matches a guy who used bondage rope to bind her wrists. So now what? He was worried about his victim’s anxiety? Morton Frankel with the two rapes and a molest? What kind of killer is he?”

What I knew of Mort, I had to confess, didn’t match my theory. Which meant either my suspect had to budge or my theory, my character or my plot. Then it struck me—“Frankel’s in a small apartment. If he brought her there, maybe he gave her Xanax in case she stirred so she wouldn’t freak out and make noise before he could adjust the sevoflurane.”

“That,” Lloyd said, “is a valid hypothesis.” He steered the boom-mounted lamp down to a hard oblique angle to pick up contrast on the gun, and used water to rinse off the acid. “I’m getting something.”

I leaned to squint at the emerging characters, lighter than the surrounding steel, but he moved me back from the rising fumes.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “These aren’t numbers. They’re letters.”

“How is that possible?”

He applied a bit more acid, trying to get the final edges to resolve. He could’ve gouged off the number entirely, so no restoration could be performed, then stamped letters on and scratched it down again.”

Easy work for a machinist.

Lloyd took off the eyewear and threw it on the lab bench. “Looks like our boy has a sense of humor.”

I stepped around and peered down at the frame of the .22. Brought to the surface of the gouged metal, a simple message.

NICE TRY.