Dennis, J.P., Sammie, and several members of the Special Reaction Team entered first, guns drawn, fanning out inside like a release of lethal, armored locusts.
I stayed outside, listening to the sound of boots pounding throughout the building, enjoying the first hint of coming coolness in the night air. The forecast for tomorrow was for temperatures in the seventies, with an eighty-percent chance of rain. The weather, like the investigation, looked about ready to break.
“Scene’s secure.”
I entered a central hallway, with a small living room to one side, a spare bedroom to the other, the kitchen straight ahead. Even with the lights on, it had a dingy, dark, forgotten feel to it. The wallpaper bellied out from the walls, the wooden floors had been ground into a uniform gray, the light fixtures were bare bulbs. It wasn’t a dirty place but definitely forlorn.
“Joe?” Tyler stuck his head out of a doorway farther down the hall.
I joined him at the entrance of a bedroom/office combination, really just a room with a bed at one end and a desk at the other. But it was obviously the heart of the house and, aside from the bathroom and kitchen, probably the most used room of all; unlike the rest of the place, it looked, if not cheerful, at least comfortable. There was an ancient, overstuffed armchair, a well placed black-and-white TV, stacks of well-thumbed paperback books and periodicals reflecting an eclectic and surprisingly intellectual range. I reminded myself that the inhabitant here had once been a grade-A student with hopes of college and presumably a great deal beyond. It was a sobering reminder of how potentially poisonous the mixture of brains and a damaged psyche could be.
I stepped back into the hallway and whistled loudly. “Yo, people. Your attention for a second.”
Heads appeared from various openings.
“Just a few reminders: One, we have a warrant for curare only; two, if you find it, let out a shout so J.P. can deal with it; and three, if you find anything else that catches your eye, let us know. If it’s juicy enough, we can try to expand the warrant to include it, but do not look in places where a bottle of curare obviously wouldn’t be.”
There was a general murmuring of assent and most of the heads disappeared.
“I think I got something here,” I heard Sammie announce from behind me.
I re-entered the bedroom and crossed over to where she had removed the drawers of the desk; she was flashing a light inside the cavity.
“Looks like one of those soft-sided briefcases.”
I stuck my head in next to hers and saw what she was describing, wedged high up against the back of the desk, just shy of where the drawer back would end up when the drawer itself was closed. “Looks like it could hold a bottle or two. J.P.?”
Tyler came over, took a photograph of the desk, then a close-up of the case in its hiding place, and finally gingerly removed it, wearing his cotton gloves. He unzipped the top and poured the contents out onto the floor. Fanned out before us were a sheaf of documents, notes, and letters, and rolling a short distance away before coming to a stop in the middle of the room was a long black metal cylinder. A silencer.
None of us moved for a moment. I quickly scanned the top sheet and another that poked out farther than the others. The first was a bank account showing Fred McDermott’s address but using the same false name we’d found his slush fund hidden under. The second was a plaintive note from Luman Jackson, agreeing to “the terms you set forth” but demanding, typically, that “this must have an end or I will damn the consequences.”
I turned to Sammie. “The silencer is ours, since it’s illegal in this state, but we’re going to have to get a judge in on the rest of it. See if you can round one up, will you?”
“Roger,” she said, and headed out to the hall to find a phone.
Borrowing a pair of gloves from J.P., I carefully began sifting through the rest of the documents, feeling as I did that I was being slowly sucked under by the intrigue and anguish that Buddy Schultz had set in motion. What he’d secreted in the desk was more than just the ammunition we’d seen him use, like the bank account and the blackmail of Jackson. There were other items, little gems whose potential spoke for themselves, like the copy of a receipt for the watch Rose had bought Charlie. It hadn’t been used-the planting of the watch among John’s socks had done the trick-but obviously Buddy was a man who liked more than one option at his disposal.
The material concerning Jackson was less blatant. I had to make assumptions in order to piece it all together, and then I knew I’d have to talk to Jackson to have it all make total sense.
I stuck my head out into the hallway again. “George?”
George Capullo, the senior shift man here, appeared from around a corner. “What’s up?”
“Pick up Luman Jackson at his home and bring him here, would you?”
“Just like that? What makes you think he’s not going to piss on my boot?”
“Tell him I’ve got the paperwork that’s been costing him so much. And do it code-three. I want him here now.”
“You got it.”
Sammie gestured to me from the kitchen. She was holding the receiver of a wall phone in one hand. “I’ve got Harrowsmith,” she mouthed soundlessly.
I took the phone and began talking. Harrowsmith, for all his intimidating ways, was a cop’s judge. His demeanor, helped by the enormous hawk nose and bushy eyebrows, imparted a fierceness he was well capable of demonstrating, but it was only provoked by sloppiness. It was his desire to see the bad guys in jail that stimulated him to be tough on us, for he knew that if the case was lost in court, or never got there to begin with, it was usually because we’d screwed up our homework.
Twenty minutes later I’d made my case and had received his official sanction. He’d made it clear, however, that to really make him happy, we should make every effort to locate the only item that did appear in the written warrant: the ever-elusive curare.
I saw flashing lights draw up to the house through the open front door. As I walked through the house to greet my reluctant visitor, Tyler’s voice drifted up the basement stairs. “We’re off the hook; I just found a couple of the bottles, plus I’m pretty sure the dirt down here will match the samples I got off Jardine’s shoes.”
I poked my head through the door. “Great; what was the vet’s count on the total missing?”
“Four.”
“Okay, assuming one was used on Jardine, that leaves one more to find.”
Tyler, the wind strong in his sails, sounded optimistic. “We got a couple of rooms left to go.”
My own good mood was further enhanced as I stepped outside. The air was cooling down rapidly, bringing with it the return of the grouchy, brittle, northern weather we knew so well. I took the first deep breath I’d allowed myself in over a week.
Capullo nodded to me as I approached the car. “I told him to sit tight; figured you two would enjoy the privacy.”
“Thanks.”
Luman Jackson was sitting bolt upright in the rear of the patrol car. He glared at me as I entered and settled down next to him. “What the hell do you mean by rousting me in the middle of the night and having me dragged over here with some nonsensical threat note?”
“If it was nonsensical you wouldn’t be here,” I said flatly. “You came of your own free will. Look, we have two ways of doing this: We can either chat here and now, and get everything out in the open so we can do our best to save your butt on the murder charge, or you can pretend to be outraged and above it all and watch James Dunn turn you into a roman candle, with Stanley Katz lighting the fuse.”