“And what did Bill say?”
“Didn’t say much of anything, as I recall it. He could be a stubborn old coot.”
“Tell me something, Fred. How long have you worked here?”
“Me? Six, seven years now.”
“And how long was Bill Miller here? Before you?”
“Oh sure. He was a carryover. He’s been here a while.”
“Do you know exactly how long?” Justin asked.
“Pretty close. But not exactly.”
“Don’t you keep records?”
“Duhh, yeah, we do. But the day before I started work, literally the day before, we had a robbery. They took some office stuff, a computer, a phone machine, you know, stuff like that. And a bunch of files. God only knows why they wanted that stuff. One of the things they took was Bill’s file. Don’t think they got a lotta dough fencin’ it, I’ll tell you that.”
Justin stood up to go.
“You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on here?” Fred asked.
“I wish I could,” Justin told him. “I really wish I could.”
Back at the station, Justin went straight to his desk, was already dialing Ed Marion’s phone number before he was even seated in his chair. For some reason, he wasn’t at all surprised when he got a recording telling him that the number he’d dialed was no longer in service.
He wasn’t surprised, either, when he got Susanna Morgan’s phone records faxed to him slightly less than an hour later and saw that, on the last day of her life, at 2:07 p.m., she had placed one call to Ed Marion’s number and, at 5:54 p.m., received one call from that same number. A number that no longer existed.
The first call had lasted twenty-seven seconds. Long enough to leave a phone message. The return call had lasted just over four minutes. Plenty of time to have a substantive conversation.
But what was the substance?
So a senile actor was mind-bogglingly old. So what? What made that something other than a piece of fascinating and astonishing trivia?
What made it a fact worth killing over?
Justin checked the information he received from the phone company. The address that belonged to Edward Marion’s number was 2367 Old Post Road in Weston, Connecticut. It was a valid address. He could take the car ferry over, be there in three hours.
He could—
“Hey, Westwood.”
It was shithead Brian. Justin didn’t bother to look up at the young cop.
“What are you doin’ playin’ policeman all of a sudden?” Brian said. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”
Justin stood up now. Took three careful steps over to Brian’s desk. But before he did, he palmed the heavy stapler from the corner of his own desk.
“You’re a tough guy, aren’t you, Brian?”
Brian smiled up at him from the seat behind his desk. An arrogant and confident smile. “I’m tough enough.”
“You could kick my ass in a fair fight, couldn’t you?”
“I could kick the shit out of you. And I wouldn’t mind doin’ it, either, if you want to know the truth.”
“I believe you. The thing about life, though,” Justin said calmly, “is that it isn’t very fair. Maybe you’re too young to have learned that lesson yet.”
Brian put his hands down on the desk, spread his fingers apart, ready to use them to push himself up from the chair. “Then maybe you should try to teach me,” he said.
“I think that would be a good idea.”
Brian went to stand up, but before he could rise more than an inch or two, Justin slammed the stapler down on the fingers of his right hand. As Brian yelped in pain and looked down at his smashed knuckles, Justin picked up the telephone that sat on Brian’s desk, swung it back, and slammed it into the young cop’s mouth as hard as he could. Brian toppled over backward in his chair, blood streaming down his chin. Justin was certain he’d loosened three or four teeth, maybe even knocked them out completely.
The younger cop groaned now from his prone position on the floor, looked up at his attacker. Justin could see the hate in his eyes, even through the pain. It wasn’t over yet, he decided. Not quite yet. So he lifted the phone above his head and threw it down with all his might into Brian’s groin. That was the end of Brian’s resistance. He lay on the floor, moaning and twisting in agony, spitting blood, his hands shoved between his legs.
“Let me explain something to you, Brian, now that I’ve got your attention.” Justin was surprised how calm his voice sounded. “My name is Westwood. Justin Westwood. I’d like to hear you say it.”
Brian did his best. Through his broken teeth it came out, “Ussin Esswood.”
“If I hear you call me anything but that again,” Justin said, “here’s what’s going to happen. Because you’re such a big, tough guy, I’m not going to fight fair with you ever. You’re going to be walking down the street, nice and relaxed, maybe even with a girl if you can get one to look at you again now that you’re uglier than shit and your dick’s gonna be broken for a while. And what I’m going to do is take my gun out, the gun I’m going to carry at all times now, and bring the butt down on the back of your head and crush your fucking skull. Do you understand?”
Brian managed to nod his head and say, “Ah unnersan.”
“Good,” Justin said. “I’m glad.”
Chief Leggett came rushing out of his office then, saw Justin standing over one of his young cops, saw his other young cop, Gary, standing several feet away, paralyzed, his mouth open in dumb shock.
Jimmy Leggett looked up at Justin Westwood, looked back down at the floor.
“You better clean yourself up,” he said to the terrified Brian. “You’re a pathetic mess.” And to Justin Westwood he said, “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.”
“I was just leaving,” Justin said.
As he gathered up the papers off his desk, shoving them into his small satchel, and took the gun out of his drawer, making sure that Brian saw it, Justin realized something that surprised him. Since his wife and daughter had died, he had felt, almost every minute of every day, as if he were choking to death. There was a weight on his chest and his breath came in short, shallow bursts. He could not take in much air. When he went to that first shrink, the one the force had insisted he go to, he had told her that he hadn’t been able to breathe since it had all happened. She asked him what air meant to him. That was her exact wording. At first he hadn’t understood what she was asking, he wanted to say, “This isn’t a fucking abstraction here—I can’t breathe!” But he thought about her question for a few seconds, then he said, “Life. Air is life.” She had nodded and said, “That’s right. That’s exactly why you’re having trouble breathing. You can’t let any life back into you.”
He accepted what she said. It made sense. It didn’t help, though, not a bit. But he believed that she was right.
What surprised him now, as he walked back out onto the streets of East End Harbor, was that, for the first time in so many years, he did not feel that heavy pressure in his lungs. His chest was rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm, letting air in, easing it out.
Justin looked down at the knuckles of his own right hand, saw that they were speckled with drops of Brian’s blood, and he thought:
I’m breathing again
.
Justin drove into Weston, Connecticut, exactly three hours and fifteen minutes after he left East End Harbor. On the ferry ride across the sound, he sat in his car, never even got out to lean over the railing and take in the fresh air. While he sat, he didn’t listen to the radio, didn’t read the newspapers. He just stared at a small spot on the windshield, stared through it really, trying to make sense of all the pieces of information he’d managed to put together. William Miller’s age. The murder of Susanna Morgan. The disappearance of Wallace Crabbe. He tried to keep his thinking as linear as possible, tried to keep his mind open to any and all possibilities that might pop into his head. None of that mattered. He came up with no connections, no logical conclusions. When the ferry landed on the Connecticut side of the water, he had exactly as many explanations as he’d had when the trip started: none.
He consulted his fold-out map, basically figured out how to get to Old Post Road, but when he filled up the gas tank of his four-year-old Honda Civic, he decided to play it safe and ask for specific directions. It didn’t take him long after that before he was on the rural-sounding Old Post Road, which turned out to be a decidedly suburban-looking thoroughfare. A few blocks later, he was in front of the address he had for Edward Marion. It wasn’t a house or an apartment building. It was a fairly large office building in the middle of a small strip mall. Although it was not what he was expecting, he realized he was not surprised.
There was no Edward Marion listed on the tenant directory in the lobby. Nor did the security guard know the name. The phone-company information showed that the number Susanna Morgan had dialed was in room number 301. The directory had that office being occupied by a company called Growth Industries, Inc. Justin asked the security guard what he knew about the company and the answer, also unsurprising, was absolutely nothing. Justin then asked the guy what his name was. He half expected the same answer: I don’t know. But this one the guard knew. He said his name was Elron.
Justin wondered why Elron was called a “security” guard, because when he asked if he could go up to the third floor and Growth Industries, the answer was, “Why not?” So he took the elevator up, walked down the hallway until he came to a door with the right number and the name of the company on it. He rang the buzzer and, when nobody answered, knocked loudly. Still no answer. Justin stuck his ear against the upper part of the door, which was beveled glass, but heard nothing. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. At three-thirty in the afternoon on a weekday. Either Growth Industries was not a very well supervised company or …
Or what?
Justin decided his imagination was running away with him. The various answers to his question all suddenly seemed foolish. Or it was a front. Or it didn’t really exist. Or—
Stop it
, he told himself.
This is exactly what you don’t do as a cop. You don’t imagine. You go for logic. You latch on to what’s real and understandable. There
are
no “or”s in police work. You eliminate them. That’s your entire job. You eliminate them and that’s how you find what’s real.
Justin went back down to Elron who, miraculously, actually knew how to reach the building manager, a man named Byron Fromm. Byron Fromm turned out to be puffy and pale and maybe forty years old. When Justin showed him his badge and explained what he wanted, Byron Fromm got even puffier and paler.
“Well, have they done anything wrong?” he wanted to know.
“What I’m trying to do, Mr. Fromm, is actually find out who
they
are.”
“You mean Growth Industries?”
Justin nodded. “What do they do?”
“Well,” Fromm said, his voice rising a notch above its normal pitch, “they’re in market research.”
“For whom?”
“Don’t know. For whoever hires them, I guess, but that’s really none of my business.”
“Do you know how long they’ve been here?”
“They were our very first tenant. They’ve been here since we opened in 1972. You know, at the time, we were the only mall in town. This was a very classy address then. It still should be but they’ve kind of let it run down a bit.”
“And who is that?”
“The real estate company that built it. Alexis. The Alexis Development Company.”
“Why do you think they’ve let it run down?” Justin asked.
“Why? Why does anybody do anything? Or rather not do anything? Money. Either they don’t have it or they have it but don’t want to spend it. Those are the only choices, aren’t they?”
Justin had to agree with him. But those choices weren’t what interested him. ”Do you know who owns this building?”
“I work for the people who manage the mall. That’s who I know. I deal with the individual tenants. I’m responsible for upkeep, within a budget, and day-to-day stuff like security and tenant complaints. The owner deals directly with my contact at Alexis. Bert Stiles.”
“Growth Industries,” Justin said. “They pay their rent on time?”
“Never been a minute late.”
“Why do you think there’s no one there right now? This is prime business time, right?”
“It should be. Although, I gotta say, this place hasn’t had a prime business time in quite a few years.”
“Mr. Fromm,” Justin said, slowly, “how’d you like to let me into room 301?”
“Detective, I would be happy to. Except I quite like this job. It’s easy and they pay me really well. And, aside from the fact that you don’t have a warrant—
do
you have a warrant?”
“No.”
“You’re not even local. So I can’t see as there’s anything in it for me at all if I let you in. Except trouble.”
Justin decided he’d hold off on his answer, give himself a few seconds to see if he could think of something other than trouble that just might be in it for Mr. Byron Fromm, but before he could come up with anything, his cell phone rang.
“Yeah?” he said, answering it.
It was Jimmy Leggett. “Where the hell are you?” the chief said. “Actually, I don’t care where you are. Just get the hell back.”
“I thought it was my day off,” Justin said.
“Not anymore,” Leggett said. “The shit’s hit the fan.”
“What happened, Jimmy?”
“We got another body, that’s what happened. We got another god-damn body.”
“Who?”
Leggett told him who it was and Justin heard his own sudden intake of breath.
“Where?” he said. “When?”
“I can’t give you any details over the phone. Just get back here.”
“All right,” he told the chief, glancing over at Byron Fromm. “I just need about half an hour here to—”
“No half hour,” Leggett cut him off. “I’ve been ordered to get you back ASAP.”
“You’ve been ordered?” Justin asked. “Ordered by who?”
“By me,” a strange voice said over the phone. Justin could hear the receiver being wrested away from his boss.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Special Agent Leonard Rollins. FBI. And that’s the end of your little Q and A, Detective. Get your ass back here. Now.”