“See,” he said. “This place has more land than the others. Do you know what land costs up here?”
Megan just shook her head, and Jonas said, “Plenty, that’s how much. I bet there’s a tennis court down behind there. This is the kinda place we should go for. But not now. Look, there’s a van down there by the garage. It says something on the side but it’s parked at an angle, so I can’t read it. Probably a delivery guy or a plumber or something.”
“Can we go home now?” Megan said.
He said, “What we gotta do is come back here sometime when there’s no car in the driveway and no gardeners around and ring the bell.”
“There’s a big gate,” Megan said.
“We ring the bell at the gate,” Jonas said. “There must be one. And if there’s no answer we go over the wall and check it out and see what we can see.”
“And what if there’s another dog like last time?” Megan said. “Maybe a vicious guard dog?”
That stopped him. His back was still sending him messages from time to time. He said, “Okay, we’ll come by a couple more times on other days before we try out a house like this. Meanwhile, we can go for more conventional places where we can see the yards and figure out if there’s a guard dog or not.”
“Let’s go home and I’ll call my mom,” Megan said.
“For what?”
“I’ll beg her for a loan of two hundred. I’ll say that I’m staying with a friend and we’re being evicted on Saturday unless we can come up with the money. She always says she’ll never give up on me. I’m her firstborn and I don’t think she’ll let me down. Not that I’m proud of it.” She paused and said, “I just need a taste of ox.”
Jonas pressed hard on the small of his back, groaned, and said, “I wonder why God is letting me get knocked on my ass so much lately?”
Raleigh Dibble found Marty Brueger’s missing dentures in the trash can by the toilet, but how they got there was anybody’s guess. He figured it was the result of too much Irish whiskey. If the old man had any cash to speak of, that probably would’ve ended up shit-canned as well. But only Raleigh had access to the modest checking account at the local bank that Leona Brueger had left for groceries and other items in order to keep the house running smoothly while she was gone. She had opened the account with $4,000 and told him to phone her in Tuscany if any sort of emergency came up requiring more funds.
“Mr. Brueger,” Raleigh said, “why don’t you sit in your chair and watch Oprah or something? I’m going up to the house now to make you a nice snack. How about one of my special omelets?”
Marty Brueger nodded and said, “Got any more whiskey in the butler’s pantry up there?”
“No, but I’ll run out and get some later,” Raleigh said.
“Why don’t I go up there with you and look?” Marty Brueger said.
“No, Mr. Brueger!” Raleigh said. “Just rest. There might be another bottle. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll have all the rest I need pretty soon,” the old man muttered.
Raleigh was a wreck by the time he got back to the house. But he was overjoyed to see that the floodlights had been turned off in the great room, and the tripod was lying on the floor. Nigel Wickland had finished.
Raleigh said to him, “Did you get it done the way you wanted?”
“It’s a wrap, as they say in Hollywood,” Nigel Wickland said with a satisfied grin. “The next trip here will be far briefer. These are all conventional frames, even if the paintings are not of a common size. It’ll be easy enough to make the poster board fit nicely. I think Sammy Brueger had them reframed with those ghastly ornate monstrosities in the past dozen years or so.”
Raleigh was so relieved, he felt like sitting down. Now he had a headache, and he was a man who seldom got one. “When’re you coming back?”
“It depends on how it goes at the lab,” Nigel said. “I’ll apply as much pressure as I can to my friend and I’ll offer him a bonus of several hundred dollars if he can speed up the process. But it can’t be done overnight, you know.”
“Will you call me as soon as it’s done?”
“Of course,” Nigel said. “But be careful never to use your name if you ever ring my office again. And don’t use my name when I ring you here. We must proceed precisely as planned.”
We’re going to come to a new understanding before we’re through, Raleigh thought. But all he said was, “Yes, precisely.”
FOURTEEN
Viv Daley and Georgie Adams were “off the beach” and cleared for street duty while Force Investigation Division worked on building a twelve-inch-high stack of reports that would be presented to a Use-of-Force Board within nine months of the officer-involved shooting of Louis Dryden. Viv was not as jocular as she had been before that night, and nor was Georgie. Neither would ever speak of Cindy Kroll or her murdered baby again, at least not to each other.
They both had been ordered down to Chinatown, where Behavioral Science Services had their offices, and each one spoke with a BSS psychologist about the event in Little Armenia. Georgie had given brief answers to every question that the shrink asked regarding the taking of a human life. He said that he’d killed a few insurgents in Iraq and that this had felt no different to him afterward. He simply shook his head when he was asked if he had gone upstairs and seen the strangled baby. Both officers had the typical cop’s distrust of shrinks from having seen and heard all that the profession had done with their “expert” opinions as witnesses for and against the prosecution in criminal cases.
Viv said that as far as she was concerned, they had killed a boogeyman and she felt not a shred of doubt or remorse about his death. She was less forthcoming when asked by her questioner to talk about what she’d seen in Cindy Kroll’s apartment. The psychologist was a generation older than Viv and had gentle eyes and a motherly manner. At the very beginning of their session, she had come from behind her desk to sit next to Viv in one of the two client chairs. She asked Viv to call her Jane, but Viv never used the woman’s given name at any time during that meeting.
When pressed repeatedly about her feelings concerning that horrific event, Viv reluctantly admitted to the psychologist that she’d grappled with impulses to contact the Department of Children and Family Services about the surviving child of Cindy Kroll. Viv said she’d thought about inquiring into the possibility of fostering the toddler, who she’d learned was named Carly, at least until a responsible relative could be found or until the child could be placed for adoption.
But Viv then added, “Of course, that was a silly thought. It made no sense at all. Here I am, a single woman with a job that requires me to work half the night, and then of course I have to sleep half the morning. Why would they ever give an infant to someone like me to foster?”
“I agree with you that they certainly would not,” the psychologist said. “Still, you say you had impulses about being a foster parent, even if it was impossible given your lifestyle. Why was that, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Viv said. “Pity, I guess. It was all so… pitiful.”
Viv refused to do more than shake her head when asked if she felt any residue of guilt or responsibility for what had happened to Cindy Kroll and her baby that night, and Viv bristled when the psychiatrist pressed her on it.
“Why should I?” she said.
“You shouldn’t,” the shrink replied. “But sometimes our unconscious mind doesn’t understand words like should and shouldn’t.”
“Well, I don’t,” Viv said. “Just because I had a random thought about how that apartment could be attacked doesn’t mean I had a premonition or something. I’m not a mentalist, you know.”
“No,” the psychologist said. “You’re not. You were less cynical than the two detectives and your partner.”