“My rates are three hundred a day and expenses,” I interjected, even though I was getting six hundred that year. I’ve always been flexible, and I felt the way Swenson did — it was a job that needed doing.
“Fine.” He stood up. “I’ll take two days worth, then call me.”
The kid’s name was Jason Harnisch: brown hair, blue eyes, five feet eleven inches in height, one hundred ninety pounds, date of birth 9/9/77, place of residence Silicon City, California — or so I learned from the photocopy of his driver’s license that Swenson had made at the time of the rental.
“I knew him already, you see. That’s how I got taken in. I remembered he was going to college some place up north and working summers for L & L Construction through a family connection. Except when I called up over there this morning, the boss wasn’t around, and the gal who answered said the kid hadn’t been on the payroll since the summer.”
The head shot on the license had come out fairly well on the copy, and in it Jason Harnisch looked cocky and callow, with close-cut hair, a full, immature face, and three-day’s growth of beard. The date of issue on the license was August 31, 1997, sixteen months earlier.
“Does he still look like this?” I asked.
“Yeah — pretty much. His face isn’t so fat, and — oh yeah. He’s got an earring. My kid tries that and he loses an ear, but whatcha gonna do?”
“Find him, I guess, and hope he’s not getting into mischief.”
My first stop was L & L Construction about two miles west. Snow from the record-setting blizzard over New Year’s was plowed into six-foot high banks in the small parking lot beside the business office, but in the yard to the rear I could see a Bobcat, a tractorlike affair with a backhoe, and various other vehicles all stranded in drifts that rose high up over the axles. The parking lot held one car when I pulled in, an SUV, and the office held one person, a girl-woman of twenty or so who seemed to have spent the day making the air around her unbreathable with cigarette smoke because she had nothing else to do.
She buzzed me in the secured door at the front, then stood waiting behind a counter as I came through. She wore Levi’s, a ski sweater, and a distracted expression, but otherwise she looked friendly and intelligent, and without the cigarette she might even have been pretty: five feet six at a guess, with pert features and toffee-colored hair that flowed down her back.
I said, “Hi. Are you the one who talked to a man named Swenson about Jason Harnisch?”
“Yeah, that was me.” The distracted expression melted into a mix of curiosity and apprehension. “Who are you?” I gave her one of my cards, and after looking it over she let out an exaggerated sigh. “Oh boy. The idiot’s in real trouble, is he? I was afraid of that.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette, then went on, “All right — so what’s he done?”
“Swenson didn’t tell you?”
“Not much — something about a piece of equipment Jason rented for L & L. As if. We’re down through the fifteenth, except for a couple of dink jobs. Dad and Mom are in sunny Arizona, and I’m here freezing my — never mind. What did he do?”
“Monday morning he rented a stud gun, agreeing to return it by Tuesday. The phone number he put on the rental form turns out not to exist, and actually Jason only insinuated that the gun was for your company, since the name on the form is his own. Not that that exonerates him. He’s either irresponsible or up to something.
“Swenson’s shy of bringing in the cops for a bunch of reasons, but he has to have the gun back — that’s the point — and I’m here because he’s willing to put out a little of his own money to recover the thing privately, rather than seeing the boy charged with a felony.”
The girl stood there listening and smoking until I finished, then she mashed the cigarette in a tray with an angry gesture. “Sometimes I think Jason is a living, breathing felony. What do you want to know?”
“Anything at all about Jason Harnisch, but mainly how to find him.”
The girl invited me around the counter to sit beside a large desk and offered me a Diet Coke, which I accepted. Then she slumped back into a leather chair and said, “All right. Shoot.”
“You seem to know Jason. Tell me how.”
A gesture. “Third cousins, or something. I’m Cathy Lindner, in case you were wondering, as in Lindner and Lindner Construction — only I’m the silent L. Jason — as to where he is, that’s simple: Appleton, Wisconsin. He went back Monday.”
“So he goes to Lawrence?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re bright.”
“My son’s a sophomore there.”
“Oh. Well, Jason’s a senior — kind of. He says he’s dropping out. Why don’t I start over?” She sipped Diet Coke from a can, looked at the pack of cigarettes on her desk and then at me and decided to hold off for a while.
“Jason’s folks divorced about ten years ago, and God knows where his father went off to. His mother — that’s my mother’s second cousin — she remarried about four years ago to an exec at Motorola, only he jumped to Intel — I think it was — and so they moved out to California. Jason hates his stepfather and he hates California. I said he was an idiot, didn’t I? So he’s spent a lot of time here with us in the summer mooching off my mom and dad’s good humor. This is the first Christmas we’ve had him, though — not that we saw him much.”
“Why not?”
“We-e-ll... I was working here, what work there is. Dad and Mom left Christmas night, and Jason was gone in the evenings. I don’t know where. We weren’t talking much.”
“Nobody I know went out last Friday and Saturday, though. You couldn’t drive five blocks where I live in Elm Grove.”
The girl had been avoiding me with her eyes, and not for the standard reason, I thought. She finally looked at me directly and exhaled audibly at the same time. “You’re being awfully nosy, you know. All right. Off and on Jason has had the idea we ought to be closer than third cousins, especially if I’m not dating anybody and we’re alone in the house. I’ll say it one more time: he’s an idiot.”
“But you’re not.”
“Is this about me or Jason?”
“I’m just trying to figure out, Ms. Lindner, why he used subterfuge to obtain a dangerous piece of equipment that doubles as a handgun and then failed to return it.”
“Do you mind?” She had a cigarette out of the pack and lit in about two seconds whether I minded or not. “If I am an idiot, it’s because I let Jason worry me. He’s such a loser, and when I — you want the truth, so here it is — he tried to hit on me when we were snowbound, and I pinned his ears back, as my gramps used to say. That was last Friday, so it’s been a week, New Year’s Day around lunchtime. He stayed in the guest room sulking and soaking up beer until Sunday, and I left him alone because I didn’t want to give the impression that I was feeling sorry.”
“Not a good weekend, in other words. I get the picture. But what about those evenings when he went out? You honestly don’t have any ideas about where he went?”
“Honestly?” Blood rose into the girl’s cheeks. “Honestly, I think he had a job someplace, and the stupid mutt’s got me covering for him, so I am an idiot. He came here for Christmas, you see, because he wanted to work for L & L, free room and board courtesy of Hank and Marilyn Lindner, only we haven’t got any work. We’ve got three crews doing nothing until spring, two down until the fifteenth, and—”
When the phone rang she jumped to answer it and sounded cordial and efficient for the next three or four minutes concerning a construction bid. Then she wrote on a form after hanging up, consulting a computer screen half the time.