“Desert Storm? I was over myself.”
“Is that right? Who were you with?”
“Air Force. I flew A-10s.”
“Hog driver, huh?”
“Shake and bake, baby.”
“You guys saved our bacon more than once, that’s for sure.”
“Good times,” I said.
The manager looked away wistfully as the trace of some distant memory crossed his face. He was quiet for a long moment. “You know,” he said finally, “I never really got a chance to thank you guys properly.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s Ted, by the way.”
The surveillance tape, shot by a video camera hanging from the corrugated aluminum ceiling, was grainy and without audio. Still, Robbie Emerson’s likeness was unmistakable. No wonder he went by “Herman Munster” during field operations. Anybody that grodylooking, you can spot with a satellite. He was wearing his Home Depot apron, arguing animatedly in the plumbing department with a lanky customer who stood with his back to the camera. The customer wore jeans, a plain green T-shirt, a black or possibly blue baseball cap, and sunglasses. He carried in his right hand a red plastic case about two-and-a-half feet long. The word, “Milwaukee,” was printed on the side of the case.
“Looks like a Sawzall,” I said.
“Fifteen amp Super Sawzall,” Ted said. “One of our better sellers. You can cut through a two-by-six like butter with one of those bad boys.”
“Or cut off somebody’s hands.”
“You are one strange dude,” the manager said.
“It’s been said of me before.”
Inside the Home Depot’s darkened security office, the store’s security director¸ a squat, bespectacled retired postal inspector named Skaggs, reclined in a well-worn swivel chair while monitoring a wall of eleven camera monitors, each of which shifted its view automatically every ten seconds, covering every aisle as well as the store’s parking lot and loading docks.
The heated discussion between Emerson and the faceless customer played out silently on a twelfth monitor. Ten seconds of video on a repetitive loop. I moved in closer for a better look.
“Play it again.”
Skaggs replayed the clip. And again. The man carrying the Sawzall case never showed his face to the camera.
“Nobody heard what they were arguing about?” I asked.
“None of our associates,” Ted said. “We talked to everybody who was on-shift at the time.”
“What about any customers?”
“Nobody heard anything so far as we were able to determine,” Skaggs said.
“What about when the guy goes to pay for the saw?” I said. “You must’ve gotten a better shot of his face then.”
Skaggs spooled up another video clip. “The camera covering those registers, unfortunately, was down that afternoon for maintenance. This was as good a picture as we could get.”
The second clip, also shot from on high, captured the man with the Sawzall swiping a credit card at a self-service check-out stand, but the on-screen resolution was no better than the first clip. With his baseball cap pulled low and wraparound sunglasses, the man’s face was impossible to make out.
“He paid with plastic,” I said. “You can ID him that way.”
Ted looked chagrined. “Yeah, well, unfortunately, we had a problem with that, too. American Express reported the card stolen out of California about an hour after we processed the transaction.”
Scottsdale police, he said, had reviewed the videotape and concluded that the faceless crook who bought the Sawzall probably had little, if anything, to do with Emerson’s decision to kill himself the following day.
“That guy might’ve set Robbie off for whatever reason,” Ted said, “but Robbie was always wound up pretty tight anyway, always about two seconds from going off on somebody for something. I mean, if anybody was unhappy with his life and was gonna, you know, do himself in, it was him. The cops said that’s what all the evidence pointed to and that’s good enough for me. I don’t want to sound cruel or anything but, really, the only reason I hired him was because he’d been a grunt, like me. I probably was gonna have to let him go anyway given his attitude.”
“Mighty considerate, him saving you the trouble.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant. Robbie Emerson was far from perfect. He made his share of mistakes. But the man did earn a Silver Star defending his country. He deserved better than a six-word goodbye note and a bullet in his brain.”
I stalked out of the security office, which was in the back of the store, and through the paint department, making for the main entrance. Ted hustled to catch up.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”
“Forget it.”
“That crack you made,” he said, “about cutting somebody’s hands off. I’m just curious. What was that all about?”
“Me flapping my gums.”
The image of Gennady Bondarenko’s charred carcass flashed through my head. According to the coroner, Bondarenko’s hands appeared to have been removed by a power tool equipped with a reciprocating blade. Like a Sawzall. Robbie Emerson had shot himself soon after arguing with a man who’d purchased such a saw. According to his widow, Emerson had called Arlo Echevarria the night before he died to warn him that someone was out to get him. Echevarria and Bondarenko had been murdered with the same handgun. I was never a whiz at higher math, but I needed no algebraic equation to figure a possible common denominator in the deaths of all three men:
The guy who bought the Sawzall.
All I needed to do was find him.
TWENTY-ONE
Darkness had descended on the Valley of the Sun by the time I persuaded Ted the Home Depot manager to give me the name and account number of the guy whose stolen credit card had been used to purchase the power saw. Ted expressed concern about violating privacy laws and what his superiors at corporate headquarters might say if they knew that he was passing along confidential information to a non-cop like me. I’d like to think I won him over by my undeniably charismatic persona alone. But my having flown close air-support missions in the Gulf, helping clear the way for ground pounders like Ted, probably had more to do with it than anything else.
I hoped that the card’s owner might have some inkling as to how it ended up in the hands of the man on the videotape who’d exchanged words with Robbie Emerson, but my hopes sagged after Ted gave me the cardholder’s name: Richard Smith, with no middle initial. Ted said he didn’t have Smith’s address. I’d have to get that from American Express. The chances of Amex complying without a court order, I knew, were zero. The chances of locating someone with so common a name without an address of record, I also knew, were less than zero.
I was too tired to make the drive back to Los Angeles. I found a Best Western just off the freeway with free HBO and a complimentary continental breakfast for forty-nine bucks a night. Not bad. There was a Taco Bell conveniently situated across the parking lot. I enjoyed a Burrito Supreme value meal, stole a handful of napkins if only to keep in practice, then walked back to my room. Come morning, I’d return to California, pass along to the LAPD what I’d learned about Emerson and his possible connection to Echevarria’s murder, and get back to being a failing flight instructor in serious shit with the FAA.
My room was spartan but clean. The motel’s walls were thankfully stout enough that with the TV turned up, I almost couldn’t hear the couple next door going at it like libidinous Sumo wrestlers. I took a long shower, toweled off, and stretched out on the bed to think.
Aliens-obsessed Emma Emerson may have been a few yards shy of a first down, but her micro-expressions — those involuntary, almost imperceptible facial movements we all make that can inadvertently reveal hidden emotions — told me she was telling the truth about not knowing who’d been issuing cashier’s checks in her name all those years. It sounded like Kremlin standard operating procedure to me. “Palm oil,” the Russians call it, relatively small amounts of money paid to a prospective intelligence asset for non-sensitive, often open-source information. The asset figures he’s pulling a fast one over on his handlers. After all, he’s trading on “secrets” that aren’t really secrets. No harm, no foul. Then, one day, his handlers take him aside and give him a choice: Do exactly as we say from now on or we will let the FBI know that you’ve been on our payroll, and you will go to prison for a very long time.