The Ten-Mile Trials (23 page)

‘That Escalade we saw in front of the shop,' Winnie said.

‘Winnie was looking at them like a kid at a Christmas doll,' Rosie said. Her cheeks were bright, remembering. ‘And I said, “Would you like to see where they go?”'

‘You didn't tail them!' I said. ‘Tell me you didn't follow those weird thugs in an RPD Crown Vic that any grandmother could spot without her reading glasses!'

‘Well, no,' Rosie said. ‘We had two cars.'

‘That's why we knew it would work,' Winnie said.

‘And it did,' Rosie said. She grinned like the old, let-'errip Rosie that hadn't been much in evidence lately. ‘We stayed on our cells and traded being the tail every couple of blocks, talked each other through the turns, and – omigod, Jake! – you would have been so proud of us. That Escalade is beyond easy to follow in traffic.'

‘Flaming-red body the size of a house,' Winnie said, ‘spinner hubcaps, and stainless-steel door-sill plates. Surprised they don't have a beacon on it.'

‘They've probably got that on order,' Rosie said. They traded quick delighted glances.

‘So you followed them in two Crown Vics,' I said. ‘Even more subtle!'

‘No, I was driving my own car,' Winnie said. ‘See, I promised to lend it to my brother while his was in the shop, and he was going to run me home later so I could—' She saw me starting to puff up and muttered, ‘Never mind.'

‘Your car,' I said. ‘That cuddly little yellow Volks that I'd recognize across town in a heavy fog?'

‘Maybe you'd recognize it, but they wouldn't,' Rosie said. ‘I'm telling you it worked, Jake.'

‘I'll bet it worked for them, too,' I said. ‘They probably let you follow them around until they were sure they recognized Winnie from the store.'

‘I don't believe so,' Winnie said. ‘If they knew I was there, why would they let us follow them home?'

‘Do what?' I stood up so fast they both jumped. Kevin walked in my door at that moment and found us all standing there, staring at each other and breathing hard. He stayed in the doorway, silent for once, and watched us with great interest. I said, ‘You followed them home?' They nodded. ‘How do you know?'

‘Know what?' Rosie said.

‘That they were home.'

‘They both got out and went into the house,' Rosie said. ‘Isn't that what you do when you go home?'

I sat back down and said, ‘I'll be goddamn'd.'

Kevin said, ‘Soon as you got time, Jake . . . The reports are starting to come in from the first responders, you might want to come over.'

I consulted the ceiling light for a couple of seconds, trying to remember which first responders I had ever been interested in.

Kevin said gently, ‘Three burglaries . . .'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘I'll be there in a few minutes.'

When he was gone I said, ‘Where is this house?'

‘On Benton between Fifth and Sixth Street – that nice retro area of fifties ramblers, detached garages, big old yards with hollyhocks and lilacs. I was so surprised to see them going into a sweet place like that. I thought all those houses were owner occupied. How do you suppose they even found it?'

‘What's the address?'

‘523 Southwest Benton Avenue.'

I wrote it down. ‘Did they put their car in the garage?'

‘No. Parked in front of it, in the driveway, like they intended to go out again soon.'

‘But they walked right in the front door?'

‘Side door. Next to the garage. Kitchen door, I'd guess.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘I don't want either one of you within ten blocks of that place till we find out if those guys are really living there, you hear me?' Rosie opened her mouth to say something indignant, but I saw it coming and cut her off. ‘Yes, OK, what you did was very clever. Brilliant, even. You both get A in sleuthing. It was also impulsive and potentially dangerous. Can you be absolutely certain those guys didn't spot you?'

‘Come on,' Rosie said, ‘you know that's impossible.'

‘That's right, it is. And these are almost certainly the drug dealers who killed that man in the garage, are you really ready to bump chests with guys like that?'

‘I'm as ready as anybody else is,' she said, turning red. ‘Why are you treating me like a girl?'

‘I'm not. I'm treating you like a good investigator who made an error in judgment. You know we don't go off the reservation and do things like that without backup.'

‘It was a sudden opportunity—'

‘Yes. And knowing where they live, if they actually do live there, might turn out to be . . . convenient. But now everything's starting to break wide open – as of today almost this whole department is on this case. What if you blew it for everybody?'

‘What do you mean, break wide open?' Right away, she lost interest in the lecture, she just wanted to know about the action.

‘We got a new cluster of break-ins. We're hoping to pick up the bad-suit guys today, and take down the store.'

‘Ah,' Rosie said. ‘How about my boy Arnie Aarsvold?'

‘He's not going anywhere. If you're right about him, we'll get him later. For now, don't talk to him or any of the Aarsvolds. Or Knowleses or Andersons, if you can help it. Stay away from anybody connected with this case. Both of you, try not to do anything that will make all this work go to waste. OK?'

‘All we did,' Rosie said, ‘was try to help catch the bad guys. And I think we did, too.'

‘I hope so,' I said. ‘We need to put surveillance on that house right away, but it can't be either one of you. And most of Kevin's crew is out on calls right now. Maybe Clint . . . I'll see. You two can go back to whatever you were doing before you came in here. What was that?'

‘Working for Ray,' Winnie said.

‘Good. Go back to his office, and tell him I need him to come up here as soon as he can. What about you, Rosie?'

‘I
was
trying to get an interview with Arnie Aarsvold,' Rosie said. ‘But I can't seem to find him. Not at work, not at school. He's seventeen, where else could he be?'

‘Almost anywhere, I'm starting to think. But don't look for him any more, I don't want him to know we're on his tail. I might need you two to describe the bad-suit guys to everybody that's going to be looking for them soon, so don't go anyplace. You hear what I'm saying? Do not stick your faces out the front door of this building today without checking with me first.'

When they were gone, I walked across to Kevin's office. In a congested space where two phones and a steady stream of people competed for his attention, I perched in a corner and absorbed information from the overflow.

‘Nobody's hurt,' he told me during a lull. ‘All three of these burglaries follow the pattern we've been seeing – in and out, focused and clean. Except—' his phones sprang to life again and I had to wait. He had sent Julie and Chris to the McMansion on the northeast side that had the biggest losses to report, and Julie was calling to tell him they would probably be out there all day and would need tech support to help with fingerprints and photos.

‘Jesus, three flat-screen TVs!' he said, when he could talk. ‘And a whole fucking bin full of brand-new designer bags and shoes. Lady just got back from a New York shopping spree. She said to Julie, “Really, it's as if somebody knew where I'd been!” You think? She probably told every single person she talked to since she got back.'

‘What's the exception?' I asked him.

‘The what?'

‘You said “nobody hurt except”, and then you had to answer another phone.'

‘Oh. Nobody got hurt because, as usual, nobody was home when they broke in. But the older couple on Benton took it hard when they came home from a trip this morning and found all their best heirlooms gone. They both got sort of shocky and had to be taken to Emergency. Word now is that they're going to be fine, though.'

‘Where on Benton?' It wasn't, of course . . . It couldn't possibly be . . . But then Kevin read off the address, and it was the house Rosie and Winnie had followed the thieves to, where they watched them enter. It was 523 Benton Avenue Southwest, the nice fifties rambler with the hollyhocks and lilacs, where all the best heirlooms were gone.

ELEVEN

B
y ten o'clock the Emergency Response Unit was assembled and standing by. In Rutherford, it's made up of the best-trained members who happen to be on duty that day. In a force as lean as ours was getting, there was no question of keeping five men hanging around equipment lockers waiting for a call – so ‘standing by' meant they were going about their regular duties but monitoring their radios every minute. ERU guys are always looking for practice, though, so I knew when we summoned them they would blaze right into the station and gear up fast.

The Krogstad twins radioed in to say they had found an excellent spot for surveillance. ‘We're in the parking lot by the sushi place, pulled up close to the fence,' Gary said. ‘We got a good view of the front of Reddi-Kash, but from inside the store they can't even see us. Even out in front of the store, you'd have to know we were here to spot us. We're surrounded by a hedge and some garbage cans.'

‘You're not blocking an alley, are you?' Kevin asked them. He was not exuding the confidence we like to see in our leaders of men. Because he hates to fire people, he'd steeled himself for the awful task of demoting the Krogstads by persuading himself that they were not as bright and special as he'd originally believed. As they grew angrier at him over the loss of a rating, he grew surer he had never liked them at all. Now that they were almost ready to go back on the street, he was close to believing they should not be outside without keepers.

I couldn't see that he had anything to worry about. OK, they had overdone casual Friday a tad – but now that they were on assignment they were fully engaged, their reports were incisive and precise.

Admittedly they had very little to report, at first. The lights were on in the store, they said. Now the squinty manager had unlocked the front door, swept the sidewalk, and rolled out the awning. And he was doing business as usual – a scabby loser from last night's bar scene brought in a boombox and left a few minutes later tucking a few pitiful dollars into his jeans.

Listening to this trivia made Ray and Kevin almost too hyper to sit still. I stayed in my office and tried to work, but I was almost as distracted as they were. It still seemed a little unbelievable to me that the burglary cases we'd been working on for weeks were going to merge with last Friday's murder and land the culprits in our laps. I had worked for this day as hard as anybody and I wanted it to happen – but so much could go wrong.

We all had our desk radios turned up high enough to hear the traffic in the cars, so everybody was talking louder than usual, which by itself made us all jumpy and irritable. I was answering emails, making short terse phone calls, and shuffling the most routine paperwork while I monitored the scanner.

When the duty sergeant called to tell me there had been another call-out of several cars to stop a brawl at the Blue Moon Bar last night, I was inclined to blow that nuisance off until Monday. But then the sergeant said, ‘And the chief asked me to remind you we need to stay on top of that situation.' So now Frank was checking on my work? I would have liked to get seriously annoyed, but I didn't have time.

Be it recorded, I walked the Blue Moon call down to Ray's office first. But he had stepped out for something. So before the Blue Moon Bar ate a hole in my gut, I went along to Maddox's cubicle, where I knew this job would end up anyway, and gave the call to him. I asked him to interview the complainants, talk to management, and come back with his assessment of the situation before close of business. Maddox, having nobody below him in the pecking order and being much too cool to waste his breath pointing out the futility of this assignment, tucked his notebook in his pants and walked out of the building whistling a merry tune.

I left a message about Maddox on Ray's tape, and went back and listened as Wally, on the radio from the pawnshop, described the scabby loser walking away with his dollars. In the background as he talked, I heard Gary answer his cell phone in the middle of the first buzz, speaking softly and then a little louder. Then Gary was on the radio, saying, ‘Houston, we got a problem!'

Dispatch, not at all amused, said, ‘What problem?'

‘Our Mom just— Wait, I'll call Kevin on the phone.' I went across the hall to Kevin's office, hearing his phone ring. When I got there Kevin was listening to Gary, saying, ‘Mm,' and ‘Mm-hmm,' into the phone. After a minute he said, ‘Hang up, I'll call you back.' He put the phone down and said, ‘Ray?' and Ray, who was walking past in the hall, turned and came in.

‘The Krogstads' father just had a heart attack at work,' Kevin said. ‘He's in an ambulance on his way to Emergency. One of the twins has to go help their mother, she doesn't drive. Gary says he'll stay, but we need to get a replacement for Wally over there, driving a car Wally can take to go home.' He looked at the two of us. ‘Who, though? Every one of my detectives is out on a call.'

Ray said, ‘Clint Maddox.'

‘I just sent him to the Blue Moon Bar,' I said, not meeting his eyes. ‘I left a message on your phone.'

He swallowed once and said, ‘Andy, then.'

‘I was hoping,' I said, ‘to keep him in reserve in case we start some rough stuff.'

‘Yeah, you got a point there,' Ray said. ‘Well . . . Winnie's had a little too much exposure over there already, right? So it's gotta be Rosie.' He looked at me. ‘You think she got made when she and Winnie followed those guys?'