David Levien - Where the dead lay

“Cocksucker,” he said, and spit down on Hector.

“All right, hold him,” the father said, the cords in his neck standing out like high-voltage wires, and Hector felt himself held still. The air went thick with the finality of it, even before it happened.

“No,” Hector said. Then he felt his head jerked back by the hair and his throat exposed. He saw the father loom over him and raise a machete, his black eyes devoid of light. Chaco, flashed through Hector’s mind, Papa. The blade came down toward him.

It was a night of cataclysmic mash-ups for DJ M.D. “Crazy Train” and “99 Problems” were joined in a mad creation that had the dance floor packed. Then the Schlegels and Knute came in, and their corner of the bar cleared without a word. They all sat and Pam served them Jameson poured to the top of rocks glasses with no rocks, and beers back. Dean said something to her, and Doc saw her use the speed gun to soak a bar towel with water, wring it out, and hand it to him. None of them spoke to one another. They just drank and stared at themselves in the mirror, although their gazes were fixed on the far beyond. Doc’s tracks ended and he switched up to “Black Dog” mashed with “One Time 4 Your Mind,” from Illmatic and kicked it to top volume.

The sound didn’t touch them. The Schlegels were in some kind of bubble. And it didn’t help Doc escape those faces either. Newt looked grim, almost like he was in pain, Charlie appeared pissed off. Terry wore a flat stare that was all business. Kenny’s mouth curled up at the edges. And Dean, with the wet bar rag wrapped around his wrist, he looked like he might cry. Something about them all there in a row made Doc stay as far away as he could without attracting attention to himself. When the songs ended, Doc put a mix CD in the house system and packed out his gear the minute he felt he could get away with it.

When Behr opened his door Monday morning there was a green folder waiting for him next to his daily paper. The paper’s lead story read, “City Inspector Discovers Pair of Bodies on Everly.” It was just as Pomeroy and his attorney had previewed. There was an account of an inspector who entered an abandoned house near the fairgrounds and discovered the bodies of two forty-year-old Hispanic males. Dead and decomposing, they were thought to be brothers or cousins, by the name of Restrapo. No one knew how they had come to be there or why. Vermin, including rats, had overrun the house, and the bodies appeared to have been there for at least several weeks. One man had been beaten, the other stabbed to death-but that was only speculation, as the rats had gotten at them. It didn’t sound pretty.

The article was tight and well written and Behr noticed the byline belonged to Neil Ratay, the reporter he’d met out at Lake Monroe. Behr thought of Ratay at the crime scene, his experienced eyes knowing and fixed as he took down the particulars in his notebook before going outside for a smoke. Behr wondered if it was right then and there that Pomeroy, or someone else on the force, got him to leave a few details out.

It was no day on the lake, that was for sure, Behr thought. Then his mind drifted to Susan, not out at the lake, but for some reason in the shower one morning, rinsing shampoo out of her hair while he stood at the sink and shaved-their usual routine. It had only been thirty-six hours since he’d seen her last, and he’d almost called her a dozen times, but they seemed a great distance apart. He pictured her face through the steam, her chin tipped up, her eyes closed to the water in an expression of purity. The image hurt him in a place deep in his core.

He shook it off by browsing the contents of the folder. It was a photocopy of Aurelio’s case file. The news, such as it was, was bad. No legitimate prints had been developed at the academy. The department’s witness canvass had come up as blank as his own. There was a bland, uninformative interview with the bread truck driver. He didn’t need a call from Jean Gannon either, as no tramline fractures came up in the medical; Aurelio hadn’t been hit with a shotgun barrel. There was a blood alcohol level of. 01 and the food in his stomach had been from the night before, which led Behr to believe Aurelio hadn’t arrived at the academy in the morning after a night’s sleep and his customary light breakfast of fruit but had come there or been brought there at some point during the night before. The police had collected Aurelio’s cell phone from the family at the house and accessed the records. There was no activity after nine o’clock the night before. There was a thick sheaf of papers detailing past calls that Behr would have to go over in detail.

He closed the folder and set it on the passenger seat, putting aside his thoughts on the matter for the moment. He had to. Earlier in the morning he’d run backgrounds on Ken Bigby and Derek Schmidt. Both men were in their early forties, neither was currently married, though Schmidt had been at one time, which must have suited the Caro bosses when they assigned the case. Bigby had been Philadelphia PD, right out of high school, and had gotten his twenty by the time he was thirty-eight years old. He took his detective’s shield and his full pension and went to work at Caro. Schmidt was from Virginia, the Falls Church area. He did college at University of Maryland, combined criminology and law degrees in six years, and joined the Bureau. He spent twelve years in various East Coast field offices, including New York and Boston, specializing in forensic accounting and tracking the ill-gotten gains of drug dealers, smugglers, and counterfeiters, before ending in Philly and making the jump to Caro. Both were members in good standing of the World Association of Detectives, and both were currently nowhere to be found. This fact was confirmed over the phone by the manager of the Valu-Stay Suites, where neither man had been seen in or around his studio sleeper unit for the past four or five days. Behr would need to check their accommodations in person, and it was something he should do right away. After the background on the men, he’d also gone on to run the properties on the list that Pomeroy had given him. That didn’t turn up much besides nondescript owners’ names-White, Fletcher, Menefee, Bustamante, Skillman, Minchin-and dodgy tax lien situations. What he really needed to do in order to pursue the Caro case properly was to go out and recon the properties in person. Instead, he put the car in gear and shot back out to Muncie.

Behr nosed his car over to the side of a driveway in front of the large, well-kept clapboard house that had come up on his database search. It was Francovic’s home address. Fighting had been good to the man, that much was clear. The house was probably six thousand square feet, undoubtedly featuring one of those finished basements with screening room, video games, and poker table. There was a three-car garage, an outbuilding that had once been a barn but now looked like it had been converted into a guest or caretaker’s cottage, and his land-fifty acres according to the county database-spread out past green fields to a distant tree line. He could see the edge of an in-ground swimming pool poking around the side of the house. Behr shifted in his seat feeling the handle of his Bulldog. 44, the one that Pomeroy recommended he keep handy, press into his kidney from where it sat, snug in its Don Hume DAH small-of-the-back holster. He opened the window and listened closely for the sound of dogs, which often roamed properties like this one. If there were any, they weren’t around at the moment. At least he couldn’t hear them. He got out of the car and trod carefully toward the front door.

Behr knocked and rang the bell and waited, but there was no answer. He peered in through the window and saw a quiet, clean, nicely furnished home. There was a family room dominated by a leather sectional and large plasma television. A case holding several championship belts was on one side of the television, a gun cabinet on the other. There were several long guns behind the cabinet’s glass, and Behr wondered if a 10-gauge was among them. Even if Francovic owned one, even if he had used it on Aurelio, what were the chances it would have been put back in its place? Zero, Behr figured, but he sure wanted a look. After knocking again, he tried the knob. It didn’t turn. The door was locked. He had to admit some relief as he walked back to his car, as he wasn’t at all sure he could’ve stopped himself from going in had it been unlocked.