“Shug Saunders please,” Behr said.
“He’s not in, but I’ll connect you to his office,” a receptionist’s voice cooed. After a few rings an automated voice mail picked up and offered him the chance to leave a message, which, pointless as it was, he took.
“Hello, Shug,” he said. “This is Frank Behr. We met a little while ago over at your offices and I was hoping to talk to you about something important, so please give me a call.” Behr left his number and hung up.
He was stuck and frustrated and without direction or answers. Hikers lost in the mountains are advised to stop and stay still and wait to be rescued, but Behr knew no one was coming to find him. Only his experience told him not to give up, that if he could just look at the situation with focus for long enough, an angle would present itself and he would finally see it. He flipped pages in his notebook, scanning his notes, when something caught in his mind and stopped him. It was a question he’d asked and gotten a response to, but it was not an answer he should’ve accepted.
Who did the hiring?
he’d asked Pat Teague.
I don’t have a clue. Not a damn clue
, is what Teague had told him. Behr pictured the man’s face, sweaty and beaten. His eyes, glazed in anger and defeat, had flashed downward. And Behr’s own rage, his indignation at being set up, had caused him to careen ahead without probing further. That was the moment, and he’d missed it. Whoever it was that had supplied
the money—Shugie Saunders or Lowell Gantcher or the two of them together—and whichever one of them had initiated the plot, who involved was most likely to know how to hire a professional contractor? It was Teague all the way.
Goddammit
, Behr hissed, already dialing. But he got no answer from Pat Teague. Behr let it ring and ring, and then he put his car in gear. He was going to have to drive out to Thorntown again.
The man has money, but he lives like absolute swine
, Dwyer thought. He was standing in Shugie Saunders’s walk-in closet in front of a row of expensive but garish suits. There was another row of dress shirts, many with sweat rings around the collar and armpits that laundering had only faded but didn’t remove. The enclosed space smelled like feet, thanks to the pile of cheap shoes on the floor, many with their soles and heels worn to the uppers. Dwyer had been over the place with painstaking detail, from the dirty dishes in the sink to towels piled on the bathroom floor. First he’d called, then waited in front of the building for a couple of fruitless hours until he was convinced that the man wasn’t home and was probably off in Washington, before making entry. The building had an external fire stairway and Dwyer was able to jump from it to a neighboring balcony, cross two more, and reach Saunders’s. A six-inch lockout tool easily popped the glass slider and he was in.
What he hadn’t found was a safe, but neither had he come upon any documents implicating him and Shugie. Dwyer
had
found a checkbook with a balance of $62,000, and this was in his pocket. Three months earlier there had been more than $100,000 in the account, so the man was on a bit of a spending spree.
Dwyer took in the apartment, which he’d thoroughly tossed, a final time. He wasn’t sure why, but he now had the feeling Saunders
hadn’t left town permanently for D.C., but that he must be staying elsewhere. No discernible amount of clothing and toiletries were missing—there were several large pieces of luggage in the top of a hall closet—so it was likely a short trip if Dwyer was right in the first place. As tempting as it was to wait out Saunders’s possible return for another hour or day, Dwyer and Rickie had agreed to rally back at the shite hole after their respective actions. One never knew if one’s partner in the field might need support, so he had to keep discipline and make the meet. Dwyer did a quick wipe down of the doorknobs and let himself out the front door.
A piece of storm cloud snaked its way into Behr’s belly when he reached the head of Teague’s street. There were police cars and an ambulance and neighbors lining the block, and like a funnel of bad news it all led to Teague’s door. Behr parked as close as he could and advanced through the onlookers toward the house and was just in time to see a stretcher bearing a loaded body bag being carried out.
“What happened?” Behr asked those in his general vicinity.
A woman with a tearstained face didn’t turn toward him, but just kept her eyes on the stretcher as she spoke. “Someone killed the Teagues.”
“All of them?” Behr asked, sick with the knowledge that Pat had four children.
“Both of them,” a man in a checked shirt said, rubbing the back of his brush cut head. “Pat and his wife. The kids weren’t home …”
“Thank god,” the woman said with a half sob, “those poor babies …”
There was assorted talk about who could’ve done the crime in this quiet community, and the quick consensus was gangbangers down from the city looking for easy drug money via robbery.
“Son of a bitches,” the man in the checked shirt said through gritted teeth. “I’ve got a Remington twelve gauge’s gonna be waiting by my bed if them junkies want to try this town again.”
Behr wondered if any of the neighbors had seen
him
coming or going earlier, or if Teague had told any friends of their runin and
he
was the one headed for a police interview room. He drifted away from the group and moved closer to the house and found a spot near some officers by the door where he listened to fragments of their radio chatter.
“… yeah, the resident was male, Caucasian, early fifties. GSWs to chest and head, over.”
“… deceased was law enforcement, or ex-law enforcement, retired FBI …”
“… victim two, spouse, also early fifties …”
“GSWs, over?”
“Negative. Stabbing … or, well, slashing, chopping really, with a bladed weapon, over …”
“… Homicide and robbery units on scene, copy …”
Behr dropped back from the house and passed through the crowd toward his car.
“What they ought to do is check his old cases, see if some serial killer or felon he put away was recently released,” a bystander voiced to some murmured agreement.
Behr knew he wasn’t getting inside. He had no pull with the cops out here, and no standing as one of Teague’s coworkers anymore. It didn’t matter. There’d be nothing in there for him by way of evidence. The doer was a professional, and while the neighbors may have wanted to speculate over vengeful master criminals with vendettas, the killing of Pat Teague represented another loose end snipped off by the cold player he was chasing. He imagined the wife was an accident, collateral. Perhaps she’d walked in at the wrong time or the guy couldn’t wait until she’d left. Or he’d used her to get Teague to talk. Regardless, this guy was stone coldblooded in everything he did.
It wouldn’t be long before Potempa and the rest of Caro received word and traveled out in a caravan to gather up around the surviving family. Behr, as he returned home, imagined he was driving east past them as they went west to Teague’s.
Dwyer was sitting in the shite hole drinking a Newcastle and looking out the window when Rickie arrived, and he couldn’t help laughing at the sight of oversized Ruthless in his silly little Japanese motor. He could practically stick his arms out the windows and his feet out the floor and carry it around his waist as if going to a costume party dressed as a car. When he got out, he looked a little weary but otherwise unfettered.
He carried a plastic rubbish bag in his left hand and walked into the room.
“I’ll have one of those, please,” Rickie said of Dwyer’s Newcastle. Dwyer pointed to the remainder of the sixer in a plastic ice bucket.
“Did you get him?” he asked.
“Nah,” Rickie said, popping open the ale. “I waited as long as I thought it was wise.”
“So, nothing then?” Dwyer asked.
“Well …” Rickie said, and went into the bathroom. Dwyer heard him empty the contents of the bin bag into the sink and turn on the faucet. He got to the door in time to see the water run pink over the tools in the basin.
“What happened?” Dwyer demanded.
Rickie met his eyes in the mirror. “I had to do the big guy’s wife.”
The first thing Behr saw when he walked into his house was blood—what looked like gallons of it—on the diamond-tiled floor near the door, slowly spreading in every direction, and lapping over plastic shopping bags from Target. His world flipped upside down in that instant and he fought a roaring surge of panic. A dead woman lay on the floor in his entryway. She was pregnant and blond, her throat slit and bled out, her hands folded over her abdomen. His mind fought to process what he was seeing … she was six inches shorter and five years younger than Susan, and there were some dark roots showing along her scalp, which was mostly soaked red. A cold wave of relief and crushing dismay collided within him. The dead woman was Gina Decker.
He crouched to touch her neck for a pulse, but saw it was more than just cut—it was opened up in horrific fashion, chopped away in a deep, wide arc from ear to ear beneath her chin. She hadn’t lost all her heat yet, but it was going quickly. He put a hand on her belly, which was still and without life.
Behr muttered a stream of epithets and what passed for prayers as he dialed Susan. His call passed straight to voice mail and he went white with fresh fear before he remembered that she was at a doctor’s appointment. He speed-dialed the gynecologist and got a receptionist who told him, “She’s in with him now. Any message?”
“Tell her not to leave alone.”
He hung up on her and dialed 911, calling the police and an ambulance to his house and police to the doctor’s office for Susan.
His next call was to Eddie Decker, and he felt his voice go flat.
“It’s Frank Behr. My place. Get here now,” was all he said.
He looked around for evidence or clues of any kind, but nothing looked out of place. The thing appeared to have been coolly and expertly handled. His head was swimming, though, so short of whoever did it crouching in the corner, he had to allow he was probably going to miss anything subtle.
Two patrol cars arrived first, the whoop of sirens breaking him out of his head-down, trancelike stare at the body. Four officers—three men and a woman—appeared at his entryway, and he moved aside to let them in. They were silenced by what they saw, save the youngest male in the group who looked like he was fifteen but must have been past twenty-one, who doubled over and gulped and dry-heaved but managed not to vomit.
“What happened?” asked Sergeant Ryan, the female officer, who seemed to be senior in the group.
“My name is Frank Behr,” he said, showing his old three-quarter tin and his driver’s and P.I. licenses. “This is my residence. I returned home to this. Her name is Gina Decker. She’s my wife’s friend and married to an IPD officer.”
They reacted to this news, but before anything else could be said, another car raced up and ground to a halt outside. Behr saw it was Decker, in uniform, getting out of his cruiser, and hurried down to meet him.
“Behr …” Decker said.
“This thing I’m in the middle of …” Behr began, “someone came for me. Susan was going to be collateral. But Susan, she wasn’t here …” Behr felt Decker’s black, knowing eyes search his own.
“Gina,” Decker said. He must have known his wife’s schedule. He practically ran through Behr up the steps and knocked the young officer, who was exiting the front door, flat on his ass.
A blood-in-the-esophagus wail echoed from inside when
Decker saw her, and the officers inside were not equipped for what happened next. By the time Behr got there Decker was tearing the place apart. A chair exploded against a wall. A left-right combination blew holes clean through the drywall next to it. A kick turned more drywall to powder, but also found a stud that cracked in half under the boot heel. None of them could get close to him. Decker turned, his eyes wild with pain and rage, and he moved for the door. The older male officer tried to put a comforting, restraining hand on Decker’s shoulder, but he ended up slumped against the doorframe for his trouble. Behr followed Decker down and out into the street. He was headed for his car.
“Uh-uh, Eddie,” Behr shouted. He knew if Decker got behind the wheel, somebody was going to die.
Behr reached him just as he was opening the driver’s side door. He didn’t pull Decker, but instead pushed him forward, using his own momentum, into the side of the cruiser, and tried to wrap him up from behind. Decker caught Behr’s elbow and spun him, slamming him into the rear door. Behr fought to hang on to him, and finally got his arm over and around Decker’s in a whizzer, then clapped his other hand around the back of Decker’s head, who in turn got an under hook on Behr, and then they clinched.
Decker drove Behr back into the police car again, standing him up. Decker was strong, that much was clear. The man was a beast. He wasn’t just stronger than Behr, he was exponentially so, like a lion or a gorilla would be. Behr tried to use his height for leverage, leaning down upon and sinking his weight onto Decker’s shoulders, but Decker fired his legs and whipped Behr around like a rag doll. Behr stumbled but kept his feet. Barely. He recranked the whizzer and then jerked hard and fast to the other side, unbalancing Decker. Decker went with it, though, yanking them both to the ground, as if he were pulling guard, but instead of wrapping his legs around Behr’s body, he jammed them inside Behr’s legs—butterfly guard—then rocked back, extending his legs. Behr felt himself travel up, flying through the air in an elevator sweep, and landed hard on his back. It was no massage, but
nothing broke or tore either, and he managed to grab Decker’s wrist as it was being yanked away, and keep it. He used it to pull himself forward, and Decker toward him, until he caught the sleeve of Decker’s other arm. Behr gator-rolled, keeping them on the ground, spinning them in a cloud of dust. After three revolutions, the rough dirt and gravel scraping their elbows, hips, and knees, Behr stopped them and went for a front headlock that he hoped to convert to an anaconda choke. If it’s not applied perfectly and sunk deep, the anaconda becomes something of a strength move which doesn’t work on a powerful, educated opponent; and Decker was on his way to ripping loose from it when the other cops on the scene got with the program.