Frank Zafiro - Beneath a Weeping Sky

She went back upstairs. After a while, she appeared again. This time, she held two much smaller bags. He was fairly certain they were full of girl stuff — toiletries, makeup, curling irons and so forth. She was definitely packing up to leave.

A thought struck him and he smiled.

Maybe she was heading home.

0841 hours

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Tower shouted into the phone.

“I’m sorry,” the tech support agent told him. “I can’t do it.”

“But I’ve got a fucking subpoena!” Tower raged.

The phone fell silent. Then the man said, “Sir, I understand that. I’m not refusing to open the file. I’m telling you that I am not able to open the file. I can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s password protected.”

“So who has the password?”

“For Juvenile Superior Court, the gatekeeper is in Olympia.”

“Gatekeeper?” Tower snorted. “What the hell is that?”

The tech support agent’s voice didn’t waver or become defensive. “That is the term for the individual charged with the electronic security and integrity of those files. Our county Superior Court transfers the information to Olympia for central housing.”

Tower shook his head. A dull pain was beginning to throb behind his left eye. “Do you have the number for this gatekeeper guy?”

The tech agent rattled it off from memory. Tower wrote it down and hung up without another word. Then he picked up the phone again and dialed. After five rings, an electronic voice answered. With growing impatience, he listened to the phone tree options, finally selecting what he hoped was the right one.

After two more rings, the line picked up. “This is Jonah Brandenburg,” a voice stated, “head of File Integrity for Juvenile Defendants and Victims for the State of Washington. I’m currently on vacation and will return on May twelfth. If you’re requesting information on a sealed file, please forward a request along with a subpoena to my office. I’m currently experiencing a backlog of two weeks in my response time, so thank you for your patience. If you’d like to leave a message, you may do so at the beep.”

Tower hung up, cursing.

“Dead end?” Renee asked.

“Goddamn government bureaucracy,” he groused. “You get anywhere?”

“Getting there,” she answered.

0902 hours

At first, she’d headed back north. He’d been thrilled at that. Anticipation hummed through him so powerfully that he almost let out a preternatural whine. He breathed in deeply and exhaled long and slow to get control of the urge. His grip on the steering wheel tensed and loosened while he drove.

Halfway to her house, when she pulled into a diner, he groaned out loud.

He parked across the street and watched her go inside. A few minutes later, the older man in the blue truck arrived and went inside to meet her. They sat across from each other in a booth near the window, giving him a front seat view to their little breakfast meeting.

“I guess it’s true,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Sex really does make you hungry.”

He laughed nervously at his own joke, but his mind was whirring. Why didn’t they just order room service? Or was this part of the facade? That if someone sees them having breakfast together in public, that explains why they were together today?

It didn’t make a lot of sense to him, but at this point he didn’t care. He just wished the bitch waitress would arrive with pancakes or whatever the hell they were ordering so that Katie should shove some food down her gullet and get her ass home.

He had plans for her.

0921 hours

“All right,” she said. “I’ve got about all I think I’m going to get for a while.”

Tower grabbed his cup of coffee and sidled up next to her desk. “Run it for me.”

Renee picked up her notepad. “The collision report from 1995 didn’t list a work location, but there was a telephone number. I did a reverse on the number. Turns out he works for Men Only, a men’s suit store on Wellesley Street.”

“I know that store,” Tower said.

Renee cast him an appraising look. “Not from shopping there.”

Tower ignored the jibe. “I drive by it sometimes. What else did you find out?”

Renee glanced back down at her notepad. “Okay, no time for jokes, apparently,” she muttered, searching for her place with the tip of her pen. “I also discovered something interesting when I checked the power records for his residence. Up until April, the account was in the name of a Jennifer Gallagher. Then, in late April, the account was switched to Jeffrey Goodkind.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Well,” Renee said, “you could surmise several things. The first is that she moved out in April and he moved in. But — ”

“But we already know that’s been his address since at least 1995,” Tower finished.

“Right. So another possibility is that they lived together, but changed the account over for personal financial reasons.”

Tower’s eyebrows scrunched. “So this guy has a girlfriend? Hard to believe.”

“I think ‘had’ is a better word to use.”

“Why?”

“I checked with the power company and the phone company for a Jennifer Gallagher. Both sources showed her with a new account as of early April.”

Tower pursed his lips. “So they broke up?”

Renee nodded. “Yes, I’d say so. And did you notice the timeframe?”

“Yeah, right around the time of the Patricia Reno assault.”

“A relationship ending could act as a trigger,” Renee said.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m not,” she answered. “A breakup is no small thing, but it just didn’t seem like enough of a cataclysmic event to send a man over the edge all by itself. Not a man who has been simmering but remaining under control for eight years.”

“It seems like a perfectly logical trigger to me.”

“Well, either way, that’s why I looked at Jeffrey Goodkind a little more closely. I called Men Only and posed as a wife wanting to bring my husband in. I told them Jeffrey had helped us out last time and asked if we could have him again. The manager said that would be no problem.”

“So he still works there,” Tower observed. “No job loss for a trigger.”

“No. And again, depending on how important his job is or isn’t, getting fired or laid off might be a big deal or might mean absolutely nothing.” Renee put a check mark next to that item on her notepad. “But I had to eliminate it.”

Tower nodded. “That’s just good investigative technique. Process of elimination.”

“Problem is, I was running out of things to eliminate.”

“I run into that sometimes, too,” Tower said ruefully.

“Then,” Renee said, “I asked myself what the biggest stress-related event in a person’s life might be. And then it all made sense.”

Tower twirled his finger in a hurry-up gesture.

“Death,” Renee pronounced.

“Huh?”

“Someone dying is the greatest stressor for most people,” she explained. “So I checked the River City Herald obituaries for anything related to Goodkind.”

Tower raised his eyebrows hopefully, but Renee shook her head.

“Nothing there. But when I didn’t find anything, I tried a Lexis-Nexis search on the last name. There were a lot of hits, but I started with Pacific Northwest cities like Portland and Seattle.”

“That’s a lot of work,” Tower said. “How’d you manage that so fast?”

Renee tapped her computer. “Once I had the articles, all I had to do was tell the computer to search for a mention of Jeffrey Goodkind in any of them.”

Tower thought about it for a moment, then nodded his understanding. “Because he’d be listed as a surviving family member in an obituary, right?”