Marina nodded slowly. “I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
“And so do I.” Oliver handed her a card. “Call if you think of something you’d like to tell me. Any little detail is fine. Even if you think it isn’t important, it might be.”
Marina swept her foot along the floor. “So when do you think the insurance company will pay out?”
“First we need a body, Marina. Nothing’s going to happen until then.”
“Okay.” She tapped her toe on the ground. “Ivan told me they were kaput, you know. Roseanne was going to divorce him and take him to the cleaners.”
“That part was probably true.”
“Just lucky for him that she died before she could divorce him.”
Oliver’s smile was slow and wide.
Sometimes people make their own luck.
SAME MIKE HOLLANDER but older: the man looked his full seventy years, with a ruddy round face, a big, bulbous nose, and a mop of snowy hair. A thick white walrus mustache obscured the top of his lip, and now he had added a goatee. With just a little bit more facial hair, Mike was Santa Claus incarnate. He wore glasses and a hearing aid, both new since the last time they had met. Maybe hiring his crew and him wasn’t one of Decker’s finest moments of planning. Not that he looked feeble, but he showed his age. At least his handshake was firm.
“Great to see you, Pete.”
“Likewise, Mike, you’re looking good.”
“I’m looking old, but that’s better than looking fine in a coffin.”
“C’mon, you’re not ready for that.”
“Not if I can help it, but God may have other plans.”
“You sound like my wife.”
“That’s good. Rina was always wise.”
They were sitting in a booth at a local coffee shop, halfway between Devonshire and Foothill. Mike had retired in the district he had served for over thirty-five years. The waitress-a fifty-plus woman with a bouffant hairdo-seemed to know Hollander by taking his order as “the usual.” Decker asked for a salad and coffee.
Mike may have looked elderly, but he looked happy. Decker told him that.
“Finally doing what I want to do,” Mike answered. “You know I always like working with my hands. Now I get to do that and help people out. Problem is we’re getting too successful. I’m busier than I’d like to be.” He sipped his coffee. “But being busy never killed anyone.”
“How many people do you have working on a crew?”
“Anywhere from twenty to thirty.”
Decker was taken aback. “That’s a huge amount of people.”
“I know lots of seniors with time on their hands…retired men who drive their wives crazy. You don’t know how many pies I get from grateful women. We may work a little slower, but because there are so many hands, the job moves faster than traditional contractors. You’ve got the plans for your daughter’s house?”
“I do.” Decker brought them out of his briefcase and spread them across the tabletop. Hollander adjusted his glasses and studied the drawings silently. After a few minutes, he took out a pad of paper and began to make notes. He didn’t speak for the next ten minutes, and when he did, he was all business.
“The architect did a good job. Thorough. The plans aren’t that complicated and he specked out several options depending on how much they want to spend. I also know discount places for appliances, flooring, hardware, granite, marble…fit-and-finish materials. If your daughter can call me and tell me what she has in mind, I could probably price this out for you in a couple of weeks.”
“Any idea of the cost?”
“You’re adding about eight hundred square feet, including a new kitchen and two and a half bathrooms. Hmm…depending on material…oh, anywhere between sixty and one-twenty.”
“That’s quite a range.”
“Depending on materials. You’re not going to get lower than sixty. If you do, the guy’s a crook.”
Decker knew that was true. “That price is doable.”
“You’re paying for it?”
“I’m going to offer to help them out. My son-in-law is going to do some of the demolition himself.”
“That’ll save some money. You know I’ll give you the best price I can, but these people gotta come away with some money in their pockets.”
“Absolutely. Thanks for looking at the plans. I’ll have Cindy call you as soon as she can.”
“Great.” Hollander slipped the prints in his briefcase. “So enough about me. Tell me what’s happening in the wonderful world of detective work.”
The waitress arrived with their food just as Mike had asked the question. She looked at Decker. “You’re a cop?”
Hollander said, “Best detective I ever worked with. Now he’s a lieutenant. If he had acted more politico, he could have made captain.”
“I blush,” Decker said.
“We like cops coming in here,” she said. “They keep an eye on the riffraff.”
The restaurant skirted the edges of Devonshire’s border. Decker gave the waitress his card. “If you have problems, give me a call.”
“’Preciate it. Enjoy the meal. It’s on the house.”
The men nodded. Hollander said, “So what’s been taking up your time other than bureaucracy?”
“Actually, we’ve got a couple of interesting ones in homicide.” Decker told him about the body in the flight’s wreckage that turned out not to be the body they were looking for.
“The flight attendant is still missing,” Decker told him.
“And you have no idea who the unidentified body is?”
“Not a clue. Sometimes in these kinds of crash scenarios you find extra ID. I’ve never heard of anyone finding an unexplained body.”
“Maybe it was a stowaway hiding in the baggage.”
“You know, I thought about that. Three things militate against it. First of all, there are really tough security measures now, so I don’t see her slipping through. Second, she had a nice-size bash on her skull. Third, she was wearing a very old jacket that was probably manufactured around 1974. If the body was in better shape, we could have had a forensic artist slap a face onto the facial bones. But the biological material is so delicate that the D.A. refuses to let the artist make a cast of the skull and face. If the bones crumble, we lose forensic evidence.”
“The bash mark on the skull.”
“Exactly. We’re thinking about doing some computer forensics but it’s never as good as putting a face on the bones.”
Hollander sat back in his chair and stroked his goatee. He looked very wise. “This is ringing a bell. It’s going to take me a second or so to bring it up.” He took a bite of his hamburger, ketchup dribbling onto his goatee. He dabbed it with a napkin but the hair still looked pink. “Good food for a coffee shop and they serve turkey burgers. Red meat for me nowadays is a no-no…ah, I got it.”
He put down his sandwich.
“I confess to missing my old profession now and then. You ever watch those true detective shows on TV?”
“What ones? Like that private detective on cable?”
“No, no, like Forensic Files or Cold Case Files or The New Detectives?”
“Occasionally one of them will catch my interest.”
“Yeah, most of the time it’s just dogged detective work and the bad guy confessing, or today it’s all DNA. But I saw something on one of the shows that was a similar situation to your case. The fingers had been removed or acid-washed and the skin of the face had been flayed off, leaving only the face muscles.”
“No way to ID the body.”
“Yep, that was the culprit’s plan. And it almost worked because the forensic artist couldn’t create a forensic face. She didn’t have the usual bony landmarks to work with and the D.A. wouldn’t let the police remove the muscle because it was forensic evidence.”
Decker was listening really carefully now. “Go on.”
“What they wound up doing was reproducing the skull in three dimensions from some kind of machine.”