Precise…
“Oh,” Eddie said offhandedly, “I found ’em on the street. The permits.”
No skipped beats. She continued, “I have to tell you none are John Westerfield’s.”
This was a surprise and a disappointment.
“But I could identify one other person who touched the documents. We got his prints from military records.”
“Not criminal?”
“No.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s Daniel Rodriguez.”
It took five seconds.
Carmel’s husband.
Sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn’t…
Whatever you call your profession, security or investigation, you need to be as professional as any cop.
Eddie Caruso was now in his office, number crunching what he’d found, not letting a single fact wander away or distort.
Was this true? Could Daniel Rodriguez be the third conspirator, the one who’d actually disposed of Sarah Lieberman’s body?
There was no other conclusion.
He’d worked in Sarah’s building and would have been very familiar with John and Miriam Westerfield. And they had known that Daniel, with three girls approaching college age, would need all the money he could get. He was involved in the trades and would know his way around construction sites. He probably even had friends in the building whose foundation was now Sarah Lieberman’s grave.
Finally, Daniel hadn’t wanted his wife to pursue her plan to find out where Sarah’s body was. He claimed this was because it was dangerous. But, thinking about it, Caruso decided that was crazy. The odds of the other guy finding out were minimal. No, Daniel just didn’t want anybody looking into the case again.
And whatta I do now? Caruso wondered.
Well, there wasn’t much choice. All PIs are under an obligation to inform the police if they’re aware of a felon at large. Besides, anybody who’d participated, however slightly, in such a terrible crime had to go to jail.
Still, was there anything he could do to mitigate the horror that Carmel and their daughters would feel when he broke the news?
Nothing occurred to him. Tomorrow would be a mass of disappointment.
Still, he had to be sure. He needed as much proof of guilt as a cop would. That’s what Game required: resolution, good or bad. Game is never ambiguous.
He assembled some of his tools of the trade. And then decided he needed something else. After all, a man who can toss the body of an elderly woman into a building site can just as easily kill someone who’s discovered he did that. He unlocked the box containing his pistol, nothing sexy, just a revolver, the sort you didn’t see much anymore.
He found the bullets, too. They weren’t green. Which meant, Eddie Caruso assumed, that they still worked.
The next day Caruso rented an SUV with tinted windows and spent hours following Daniel. It was boring and unproductive, as 99 percent of tailing usually is.
On the surface, round Daniel Rodriguez was a harmless, cheerful man, who seemed to joke a lot and seemed to get along with the construction crews he worked with. Eddie Caruso had expected — and half hoped — to find him selling crack to schoolkids. If that had been the case, it would have been easier to report him to the police.
And easier to break the news to his wife and daughters? Caruso wondered. No. Nothing could relieve the sting of that.
Daniel returned home to his small but well-kept house in Queens. Caruso cruised past slowly, parked up the block and stepped outside, making his way to a park across the street, dressed like anybody else in the casual, residential neighborhood — shorts and an Izod shirt, along with sunglasses and a baseball cap. He found a bench and plopped down, pretending to read his iPad, but actually observing the family through the device’s video camera.
Apple had revolutionized the PI business.
The weather was nice and the Rodriguez family cooked out, with Daniel the chef and Carmel and their daughters his assistants. Several neighbors joined them. Daniel seemed to be a good father. Caruso wasn’t recording his words but much of what he said made the whole family laugh.
A look of pure love passed between husband and wife.
Shit, Caruso thought, sometimes I hate this job.
After the barbecue and after the family had been shuffled off to the house, Daniel remained outside.
And something set off an alarm within Caruso: Daniel Rodriguez was scrubbing a grill that no longer needed scrubbing.
Which meant he was stalling. On instinct, Caruso rose and ducked into some dog-piss-scented city bushes. It was good he did. The handyman looked around piercingly, making certain no one was watching. He casually — too casually — disappeared into the garage and came out a short time later, locking the door.
That mission, whatever it was, smelled funky to Caruso. He gave it two hours, for dark to descend and quiet to lull the neighborhood. Then he pulled on latex gloves and broke into the garage with a set of lock-picking tools, having as he often did at moments like this an imaginary conversation with the arresting officer. No, sir, I’m not committing burglary — which is breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. I’m committing trespass only — breaking and entering with intent to find the truth.
Not exactly a defense under the New York State penal code.
Caruso surveyed the jam-packed garage. A systematic search could take hours, or days. The man was a carpenter and handyman so he had literally tons of wood and plasterboard and cables and dozens of tool chests. Those seemed like natural hiding places but they’d also be the first things stolen if anybody broke in, so Caruso ignored them.
He stood in one place and turned in circles, like a slow-motion radar antenna, looking from shelf to shelf, relying on the fuzzy illumination of the streetlight. He had a flashlight but he was too close to the house to use it.
Finally he decided: The likeliest place one would hide something was in the distant, dusty corner, in paint cans marred with dried drips of color. Nobody’d steal used paint.
And bingo.
In the third and fourth he found what he suspected he would: stacks and stacks of twenties. Also two diamond bracelets.
All, undoubtedly, from Sarah’s safe-deposit box. This was his payment from the Westerfields for disposing of the body. They hadn’t mentioned him, of course, at trial because he had enough evidence to sink them even deeper — probably enough to get them the death penalty.
Caruso took pictures of the money and jewelry with a low-light camera. He didn’t end his search there, though, but continued to search through all the cans. Most of them contained paint. But not all. One, on the floor in the corner, held exactly what he needed to figure out Sarah Lieberman’s last resting place.
“Come in, come in,” Eddie said to Carmel Rodriguez, shutting off the TV.
The woman entered his office and glanced around, squinting, as if he’d just decorated the walls with the sports pictures that had been there forever. “My daughter, Rosa, she plays soccer.”
“That’s my favorite, too.” Eddie sat down, gesturing her into a seat across from the desk. She eased cautiously into it.
“You said you found something.”
The PI nodded solemnly.
Most of Eddie Caruso’s work involved finding runaways, running pre-employment checks and outing personal injury lawsuit fakers, but he handled domestics, too. He’d had to deliver news about betrayal and learned there were generally three different reactions: explosive anger, wailing sorrow or weary acceptance, the last of which was usually accompanied by the eeriest smile of resignation on the face of the earth.
He had no idea how Carmel would respond to what she was about to learn.