I re-entered the house, still feeling like I was on the wrong side of a glass wall, retracing my steps of a half hour ago. The place was basically as I’d found it, as attractive and sterile as a monastery cell.
There was one difference, however, a change that hit me like a hammer, smashing the tidy myth of a crime long past.
As I stepped away from the ladder after climbing to the sleeping loft, my eyes went to the one item I felt instinctively had the most to offer.
But the chart over the bed had been removed.
5
J.P. Tyler, Willy Kunkle, and Ron Klesczewski found me pacing in front of the cottage a half hour later, boiling over with anger and frustration.
“Where the hell have you guys been?”
Each of them reacted true to form at my outburst. Tyler silently raised his eyebrows, Kunkle smirked and ignored me, and Klesczewski looked worried.
“We left as soon as you called,” he answered.
“Did you see an old guy in a red-and-black-checked wool shirt when you drove up?”
Tyler answered crisply, “Nope. Is this the place you want checked out?”
I began walking quickly toward Coyner’s house. “Yeah, but wait ’til I get back. Ron, come with me. You guys just keep an eye out.”
I heard Kunkle’s “So much for bustin’ our butts to get here” as I led Klesczewski back down the trail.
“What’s goin’ on?” he asked in a tentative voice. Ron Klesczewski was my second-in-command, a senior detective sergeant still in his twenties, serious, sober, and hard-working, a little shy of using his authority, and a man in dire need of a good sense of humor.
Not that I would have appreciated one had he chosen to display it now. “While I was using the phone to get you three up here, somebody ripped off a major piece of evidence.”
“The guy in the wool shirt?”
“His name’s Coyner. He owns this whole place. Did Harriet give you any idea of what’s going on here?”
“Pretty much.”
By the time I got to the edge of the woods, within sight of Coyner’s house, I’d cooled down considerably from my earlier humiliation and had come to realize that I was hunting for a lion with an empty gun. I stopped dead in my tracks, staring at the distant house and breathing heavily, both from exertion and the dregs of my anger.
Klesczewski took a couple of steps farther on and then hesitated. He looked back at me quizzically. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m being a horse’s ass-again.”
“You don’t think Coyner took it?”
“I’m sure he took it, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it. I have no proof, so I can get no warrant. He could have that damn thing right behind his front door, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Unless he invites us in.”
I smiled at the thought. “He might invite us to drop dead, but that’s about it.”
We both stood there in silence for a moment, with nothing much to weigh. I finally shrugged. “What the hell; we’re here. We might as well knock.”
I resumed my course, slower and calmer now, thinking more about what the search of Fuller’s house might reveal than about the chances of Fred Coyner undergoing a sudden personality change. If we were lucky during the search, we might even get something to pin Coyner to the theft of the chart.
We walked up to his front door, and I pounded on it with my fist, having fruitlessly looked for a bell. There was a pause; I thought I heard something move within the house.
“There he is,” Ron muttered.
At a side window, the curtains moved slightly, revealing Fred Coyner’s impassive, creased face. He looked at us without expression for several seconds, and then the curtain fell back into place. We could hear footsteps retreating slowly away from the door.
We waited a half-minute more, until I finally shrugged and turned my back. “Okay, he screwed us. Off to plan B.”
“Search the other house?” My pace grew stronger as I set my sights ahead, the sharp sting of my earlier embarrassment fading, if not vanishing completely. “That, and have the photographs I took developed. There may be another way around Mr. Coyner.”
Back at the cottage, Tyler was loitering in the garden, looking around generally, his technically oriented mind no doubt intrigued by the effort in Fuller’s work. Willy Kunkle, by contrast, was lying flat on his back near the front door, staring at the clouds overhead with a cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth.
“Jesus,” Ron sighed under his breath as he caught sight of him. Willy Kunkle, the most unique member of our detective squad, had one working arm, a lousy attitude, and a sniper’s eye for other people’s weak spots. He was also one of the best cops I’d ever worked with. When he was inspired, he went after cases like a pit bull after a mailman, ignoring long hours, hard work, and lousy working conditions, all while staying totally sharp to every new wrinkle around him. He had a feel for the overlooked detail and a nose for his fellow humans’ devious ways. But his contemptuous, cynical, and constantly testing attitude gave truth to the cliché that some great cops, given the right spin at the wrong time, had the makings of crooks.
His instincts were as nasty and combative as Ron’s were compassionate and hesitant, an outlook not helped by the crippled left arm he’d lost to a rifle bullet several years ago and which he dealt with by stuffing his shriveled hand in his pants pocket so the arm wouldn’t flop around. That arm was a symbol to him of adversity overcome and of his own tenacity; it was also a symbol to us of how embittered and unbalanced he could become when his occasional self-pity kicked in and dragged him into the depths. To say he was an emotional roller-coaster was to put it lightly, which explained why Ron tended to treat him like unstable dynamite.
The search took the rest of the day. We used a line method, stringing out four abreast and working our way, on hands and knees, across the floor to the kitchen area’s far wall. It was a painstaking effort, involving the occasional use of tweezers and a magnifying lens; transparent sticky tape for lifting hair and soil samples; and tiny Ziploc bags for storing minute particles whose origin only a lab analysis could reveal. As one of us located some item of interest, the rest had to stop where we were and wait, so the integrity of the line would be maintained. Traveling twenty-five feet of open floor took over an hour.
Tyler was in his element. This, rather than working street snitches and following up leads, was his idea of police work at its best. Due to our small staff and the mundane quality of most of our cases, however, Tyler’s forensic expertise was only rarely called upon.
Four long hours later J.P. had a cornucopia of hair, dirt, and fiber samples to keep him busy for days, and I had a headache and nothing more to show for our efforts than what I’d discovered earlier on my own.
I also had nothing linking the chart’s disappearance to Fred Coyner.
I sent my three colleagues back to the office with the evidence, the film from my camera, and the duffel bag full of money from under the kitchen sink, while I remained behind. All sense that this was a paperwork case destined to pass from our hands to some other agency’s had vanished along with the chart on that wall. Its disappearance had served notice that Fuller’s crimes, if he had committed any, might not be as remote in time or distance as we’d imagined.
I made my way back to Coyner’s house. What warmth there’d been was fading with the day, and an autumnal chill ran down my back and numbed my face. As before, Coyner looked impassively out at me following my knock on his front door. This time, however, the door opened.