Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 63, No. 11 & 12, November/December 2018

Manitoba Postmortem by S. L. Franklin

R. J. Carr

The police station was the newest and best-maintained building in Grand Fork, Manitoba, population 267, a four and a half hour drive north of Winnipeg along two lanes of blacktop. The four and a half hours included a couple of stops early on to break the monotony, but since the last sizable settlement we’d encountered lay a hundred fifty miles of wilderness to the south, I was ready to plead with the Mountie behind the counter to pass us through to the station restroom, under gunpoint if necessary.

The Mountie’s name was Sergeant James Hardin, early thirties in age, height five eleven, broad shouldered but otherwise slender beneath the blue uniform. No red coat and flat-brimmed hat. No horse or sled dogs either, none that I could spot near the station, anyway. An SUV labeled RCMP was the only mode of transportation in sight except our rental sedan.

Hardin invited us in, waited while we took turns in the lavatory, and got the three of us settled in a glass-walled office before saying, “Why you had to come all this way to hear about Tom Kostner, Mr. Carr, I really don’t know. I could have told you everything over the phone last week and saved you a trip.”

I shook my head. “I’m a private detective — or was. Retired at the end of 2008. Ginny—” I nodded toward my wife. “—used to help out once in a while if I needed some heavy thinking done. Neither of us, though, ever cared for telephone interviews. Also, I’ve got a client who wants a thorough job done. It’s complicated on that end but simple on this one, if you can just walk us through what happened.”

“Yes,” Ginny added, “with as much detail as possible, if you don’t mind. We’re... emissaries, I suppose, for people who feel hurt and shortchanged of an explanation.”

Hardin eyed Ginny, still about as worth eyeing at age sixty-three as she ever was, then looked at my birthmarked mug and mad scientist glasses.

“All right. I’ve got the file—”

“Hold the file,” I interrupted. “First just tell us what happened as you saw it happening.”

“Okay.” He sighed. “But there isn’t much.” He glanced at a calendar across the room, then began: “August twenty-second. I came in to open up the station at nine A.M. Station hours are nine to four, but an officer isn’t always here. Jill holds the fort.” He gestured toward a young First Nations woman at a desk near the counter.

“Anyway, we found a mobile phone that morning propped on the window ledge by the front door — no explanation, but it wasn’t the first time a lost article’s been left here after hours. Jill put it on a shelf and things got busy and... the next afternoon a transmission came through from Winnipeg on our private system. Some photos had been posted on a Facebook page — this American’s, Tom Kostner — showing what looked like a suicide by hanging, and they — someone, the tech people — had tracked the point of posting to this vicinity, meaning about a hundred meters from where we’re sitting. The dead person appeared to be Kostner himself, and the posting happened about eleven P.M. on the twenty-first.

“I took the transmission out on a back road, so I called in here to Jill and told her to put the lost phone on my desk, just in case.

“Well, when I got back, we went online first of all to look at the posted pictures. Have you seen ’em?”

I shook my head again. “By the time we got involved, the Facebook page was down.”

“Here, then. The file has copies.” He slid a folder at me from across the desk with an expressive thrust, then sat back and folded his arms.

The top photo in the file showed a man’s body suspended by the neck from a tree branch via a heavy cord, the general background being that of a medium dense forest, but with fairly good lighting coming down through the trees. The next showed a much closer view of the man’s upper body and head from a low angle, with the face a death mask of yellow and purple agony. Attached to the man’s shirt in this view was a piece of paper, and the third photo was a close-up of the paper, again from a low angle, but not so low that the message on it wasn’t readable:

Ginny and I examined the pictures together and compared the second one to a photo of Kostner that we’d brought along.

After a moment of silence, she looked up at the Mountie and said, “And the phone?”

“It belonged to Tom Kostner, and the photos were on it. No dating. I asked if there might be a way to find out where the phone was when they were taken — that triangulation business from the towers — and got a negative. If the event took place more than a few miles away from the main highway, though, well — that area’s out of mobile range anyway. Forest, lakes, and bogs, mostly, not enough people to justify extending the towers. Hardly any.

“So... that made finding the body somewhat difficult unless the site was near a traveled road. I hope you can understand the problem. Our manpower’s limited; the wilderness areas... there’re probably two thousand square kilometers of unpopulated forest within fifty kilometers of Grand Fork. We searched the likeliest locales pretty carefully, but nothing’s turned up, and it’s now—” He glanced at the calendar. “I make it seven weeks. Wolves, scavengers, carrion birds, they’ll have picked the bones clean long since. Some hunters just might find what’s left, now that the season’s starting, or trekkers. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“Right,” I said. “We understand that part. Did you try to trace Kostner’s movements?”

“We did, a pretty thorough job. He entered Manitoba on August nineteenth coming up through North Dakota, told the border people he was on vacation and was going to be in Canada nine or ten days. He spent that night and the next in a lodge in Arborg and was expected back for two more.”

“And Arborg is where? From here, I mean?”

“It’s... I’d say it’s about a three hundred kilometer drive — south to Ashern and then east over to Lake Winnipeg. We did find the car, his own. It was right here in Grand Fork parked in some shrubbery behind a remote vacant house. Nobody saw it drive in, though, and nobody remembers seeing anyone who resembled Tom Kostner.”

“The phone,” Ginny said as soon as Hardin seemed finished, “I still... that is, you’re saying that Tom Kostner’s own phone was used to photograph him hanging there, but the person who took the photos...” She gave me a look of dubiety before continuing, “Doesn’t that suggest a strong possibility that he had a... or rather, I see two — no, three, at least three possible scenarios. Either someone accompanied him and, in essence, assisted him; or someone came across his body hanging from the tree and found the cell phone on the ground; or... someone murdered him and manufactured the appearance of suicide. Were there fingerprints on the phone?”

Hardin sat still for a few seconds, looking uncomfortable before responding, “Right now we don’t even have a body, Mrs. Carr, but, believe me, everything in the investigation so far points to a simple explanation. Tom Kostner came to Manitoba alone, he stayed alone, he drove his car to Grand Fork alone with the intention of doing what he did — committing suicide privately somewhere out in the woods, and he left a note saying as much. We do have verification from the U.S. that he was a loner with no close family or friends, just a son and daughter he hardly ever saw. In the trunk of his car I personally found the wrapping for a hundred feet of nylon cord, a brand not sold in Canada.

“As for the phone, the simplest explanation seems the best there too. Someone came on the scene by accident. It was August, when amongst the other tourists we get a fair number of wilderness trekkers doing their vacations. Or it could have been someone more local doing something they shouldn’t have — trapping or hunting out of season. It still goes on. Or they may have robbed the corpse.

“One thing certain is that this person wanted to report the situation without getting involved. He — or she — found the phone. If you look at that wide angle picture closely you can just make out a backpack on the ground, and it may have come from there. The person took the pictures, we know that, probably played around with the phone and found the owner’s identity and links to the Facebook page, and left it outside for us to find. There were no fingerprints on the phone but mine and Jill’s, which says a lot.”

Ginny gave me a quick, dissatisfied glance but stayed silent, and all I said was, “Well, now maybe you can see why we wanted to talk face to face.”

“In a way. But it’s been an expensive conversation.”

“That’s our worry, not yours.”

I thanked him for his help and asked for copies of the photos and the name of the lodge in Arborg where Kostner had stayed, and he was, so he claimed, happy to help.

He was even happier — no doubt in my mind — to see us off the premises, and you couldn’t blame him. No cop anywhere likes to have his failures dragged out into the light to be second-guessed by strangers, especially, as in this case, when he’s done a thorough job and come up short.

We got cold sandwiches and chips in a convenience store/gas station for a late lunch and sat at a picnic table under some pines to eat, even though the temperature was only low fifties, the wind blew in gusts, and the sky was overcast.

“Well,” I said, after a couple of minutes of silent munching, “What do you think?”

“About the food? This is one of the worst sandwiches I’ve ever eaten. About the case? I’m thinking the same thing you are, I presume: What’s wrong with this picture?”

“All right — what is wrong with it?”

“The note. If he wanted to die in such deep isolation, why wasn’t the note left behind or mailed? Pinning it to his chest makes no sense.” She crunched on a potato chip reflectively. “That’s why I’m certain he had help — almost certain. The phone, too, is highly suspicious. This sandwich is easier to swallow than the idea of a stranger coming across such a ghastly tableau and having the presence of mind to hunt out the suicide’s own device and then use it to record the grim details — not to mention forwarding the images to the suicide’s Facebook page. Not to mention, either, taking the trouble to come into reception range to do so or carefully depositing the phone at the police station afterwards. Sergeant Hardin may find this a plausible chain of events, but to me it reeks of artifice and intent.

“It also strains my credulity that the only person to happen across the tragedy in seven weeks did so on the day it transpired.”

“Unless the body was removed,” I said. “Taken down, buried nearby, sunk in one of the lakes and bogs around here.”

“By the demurring itinerant photographer, do you mean? After stripping it of its its clothing and valuables?”

“It’s an explanation that fits the facts, that’s all, whether the one who took the pictures did it or someone else. Our Mountie friend’s no dummy. He’s had the thought but doesn’t want it spread around. You saw how that third scenario of a fake suicide-murder hit him, and it wasn’t because he hadn’t considered it. His investigation may be stalled, but it’s still ongoing.”

“He wants it to be the second scenario, though, even though the first is far more likely.” She made a face. “I suppose...”

“Suppose this: If you got on that cell phone of yours and called the Royal Lodge in Arborg, we’d have a place to stay tonight and a place to ask questions in the morning. They should be anxious for business midweek this time of year, and here’s the number, courtesy of — you guessed it — the Royal Canadian Mounties.”

Ginny Carr

For three and a half years R. J. had painstakingly avoided anything resembling detective work. He’d handed Carr Investigations and Security over to our son Steve on January 1, 2009, counseled him about taking on a partner some months later, and beyond giving advice when asked and twice performing some “gofer” work with myself along for company, he’d settled into retirement with the visible appearance of relief. I’d retired, too, from high school counseling, and we spent our time exercising, reading, taking walks and hikes, traveling, renovating the house, gardening, and baby-sitting grandchildren, of which, by 2012, there numbered four.

When the phone rang that October second I answered it in the kitchen after ascertaining that the caller was Steve.

“Hi,” said his familiar voice. “It’s your favorite son. Is Dad around, by chance?”

“He’s out working in the yard, but—”

“Don’t get him yet. Do you think he’d like a case?”

“A... detective case?”

“Yep. We’re swamped right now, it involves time and travel, and it won’t wait. Plus, they called up asking for R. J. Carr. Plus again, it needs an investigator, not a gumshoe.”

The following day R. J. met with Steve and the client and provided this report when he and I settled in the family room after dinner.

“The client turns out to be a large group of people, something new, but their spokesperson is a Catholic priest. On his own I don’t think he would have gone to a detective, but the others pushed for it. Anyway, why don’t I just begin at the beginning?”

“Chronology, yes,” I teased. “Just like old times.”

“Right. A man named Tom Kostner is the worry for these people. Kostner was active in church and youth organizations going back to nineteen ninety in that section of the city north of Elmwood Park and west of the office — prosperous bungalow belt. Kostner worked for his father-in-law as an independent insurance adjuster for property claims; he and his wife had two children; they were Catholic, as you probably guessed; and Kostner himself was noted for being a moral paragon and seriously devout, someone everyone looked up to, especially the kids he coached and their parents.

“In two thousand and three, when he was forty-three years old, he suddenly moved out on his wife and went to court to get custody of his teenage children, which he did. The details about this aren’t pretty, and they’ve never been made public, but the priest’s the source, so I’d say they’re accurate. Late in the nineties, a group of couples who met through his old church and socialized a lot together apparently drifted into what used to be called wife-swapping. Maybe it’s ‘partner exchange’ now, who knows, something out of a woman’s paperback bestseller, anyway. A few years later straight-arrow Kostner got sucked into it by his wife, who hung around a lot with some of the women in the group, but for him the first encounter was the last — although not for her. She worked it alone somehow. A year and a half later he made his break, which was also, of course, a break from his job with the father-in-law, right in the middle of the post-9/11 downswing. He went through some very tough years economically, trying to build up his own property claims business and doing home inspections as a sideline — with the father-in-law, of course, sabotaging him every chance he could.

“In two thousand eight he was approached by a newly formed real estate company to be its appraiser for buying and reselling properties at a good salary, and things finally seemed to be stabilizing. All this time he kept on coaching and involving himself in church affairs, just in a different parish, and getting his kids through high school and into college. Two years ago, though, he suddenly disappeared from view. He stopped going to Mass, dropped his church committee work and the coaching, told people he was too busy, and wouldn’t return calls.

“Now, here’s where the priest really comes into it, Father Daly by name, attached to Kostner’s more recent parish. One day last February, Father Daly went to the local UPS Store to send a package to a relative, and he spotted Tom Kostner there at the counter. Kostner apparently looked miserable, had aged about five years in the year and a half since Daly saw him last. Daly said, ‘Hello, Tom,’ and when Kostner turned and recognized who was speaking, a look of fear came into his eyes — according to the priest, anyway. ‘No, Father,’ he said. I’m quoting the priest here quoting Kostner, ‘No, Father, you don’t want to know me anymore. You don’t want to come near me. Please. Stay away.’

“Then the guy grabbed some stuff up from the counter, told the clerk he’d be back, and pushed past Daly and practically ran out the door.”

“Yes,” I said, “because he obviously felt ashamed. But of what?”

Instead of answering, R. J. gestured his bafflement, then went on, “Kostner, unlike me, was into the information age in a big way. First on his block with a tablet, on Facebook from day one, cell phone junkie. Before the disappearing act he used his Facebook page as a kind of bulletin board for his church work and coaching: ‘Soccer practice at five on Thursday’ — that kind of stuff and there were people who cared about him who kept checking it out after he gave up posting, hoping for some kind of turnaround or at least an explanation.

“Late in August there was finally a new post, but not anything anyone wanted or expected — what used to be called a kick in the head, in fact — three photos showing Kostner’s body hanging from a tree with a suicide note pinned to his chest. Still no explanation, though. The note just said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and for a while none of his friends could get any information. His children were gone from the area, and his wife — or ex-wife, take your pick; she got a divorce decree somewhere and remarried outside the church — anyway, she only knew what her estranged daughter told her, which was that the authorities had tracked the photos to some remote area in Manitoba, but Kostner’s body so far hadn’t been found. Facebook took down the web page — I think that’s the terminology — and that’s where the guy’s friends were left hanging.”

“Without ‘closure,’ to use the current term.”

“Barely even with an opening. Someone got the idea of trying to find out more, got no place, got mad, and dreamed up the idea of hiring a professional investigator. Some other person remembered me from some case that made the news about ninety-three — obviously a driveling old-timer — and together those two collected a hundred dollars each from twenty-one people or families, ponied up two hundred apiece, and talked Father Daly into approaching CIS thinking that I was ageless and twenty-five hundred dollars was an irresistible enticement.”

“You’re ageless to me,” I said, not really in jest.

“Like a petrified rock.”

“And the enticement is the case itself — don’t deny it. I’m going along, even if I have to pay my own way.”

“Along?”

“To Manitoba, of course.”

“Just making sure. Expensing the trip’ll eat up half the twenty-five hundred, maybe more. When I explained this fact to Father Daly, he said that in that case he’d have to do something religious: take up a collection.”

The amenities at the Royal Lodge in Arborg, Manitoba, were more bourgeois than regal, but after five hundred miles of two-lane driving we were satisfied to find clean sheets, quiet, and a functioning bathroom. This town was considerably larger than Grand Fork, and we had an acceptable dinner in a restaurant recommended by the lodge’s desk clerk before an early bed.

The next morning, I relished a secret pleasure in watching my husband, the master interrogator, go back into action. He was still large and imposing, and his glasses and birthmarked cheek were as much an obstacle to overcome as they ever were. Only his hair, having turned iron gray, seemed to differentiate him from his younger self as he approached the lone woman at the registration counter and asked — in his patented offhand manner — if we might speak to the manager of the lodge.

“I am the manager,” she replied in a slight middle-European accent. “Is something not satisfactory?”

“No, no. No complaints. The truth is, I’m looking into the suicide of a man named Tom Kostner for some interested friends of his back in Chicago.” He held out one of his old business cards and went on speaking as she inspected it. “The police in Grand Fork directed us here as the place he stayed the night before he died, and I was wondering if you could stand answering a few questions about it.”

She was a stockily built, middle-aged woman with a naturally severe facial expression, and rather than answering directly she cast a dubious glance at me and said, “And this lady is your wife, Mr. Carr?”

I nodded and he replied, “Right. Most days I can’t believe it either.”

She examined the card again before saying, “Yes. I will answer, but we must talk here, as I am alone at the moment. What do you wish to know?”

“Well, to start, do you remember Tom Kostner at all?”

“I do. First came a general notification asking for information about him, and I called the number. Then the police came, also asking questions. I could tell them almost nothing. He stayed here two nights and paid in advance for two more.”

“Is this the man?” R. J. held out a photo. “I just like to be sure.”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Good. Did you talk to him at all?”

She shook her head. “I answered a question about the ice machine. A striking man, though.”

“How do you mean?” asked the detective’s wife, butting in.

“Ah. A large head, a handsome face. Not so tall. Sad eyes.”

R. J. waited for a moment, then dropped the surprise question — surprise to me, at any rate. “Did he leave much behind in his room?”

“Oh, yes, everything. The policeman who came — him I had to tell.”

“Uh-huh. And when you say everything...?” R. J. coaxed.

“Oh — there were two cases, clothing, an iPad, an iPhone, an electric toothbrush plugged in, books. I have an inventory, if you would like to see.”

“Eventually. There wasn’t any suicide note, though, was there?”

“No. Twenty dollars left for the maid.”

R. J. gave me a quick glance. “And what did the policeman do?”

“He looked... you see, we had moved all to a storage closet by that time, four days later. It was the busy season, and the room was committed. The policeman came. He asked questions. He made a great show of looking at everything and wanted to take it all away.

“I said, no, he must have written authority, because I was responsible, that was the first thing, and because the man’s daughter had called that morning to say she would soon come to claim her father’s possessions. The police, I think, were unsure what to do, and I heard nothing. When this daughter came I allowed her to take everything without telling them. What did they need to see again of the poor man’s leavings?”

R. J. nodded in agreement, although he was thinking otherwise, I felt sure, because of the iPad and iPhone.

“I’d guess the daughter was pretty broken up. She didn’t say anything did she? About her father’s motives?”

“Motives? Ah, for hanging himself. No.”

Without her realizing it, I think, the woman’s expression suddenly became wary and hesitant.

“Well,” R. J. said. “Thanks for helping. And if you could show me that list, or... making a copy actually might be faster, if you don’t mind, since that’s what I’ll have to do.”

“I do not mind. Call out if someone comes.” She retreated through an archway into an adjacent office, and after a moment we could hear her speaking in low tones. When she returned it was with no list but a question. “These friends of the man Kostner. What is their concern?”

“They just want to understand why, I think. He was a devout Catholic, for one thing, and most of them are too. I’m a Protestant, but I’m fairly sure suicide’s not just a bad end for a Catholic, but something—”

“A mortal sin,” the woman said grimly. “An eternity in hell. I am no longer Catholic.” She gestured toward the office. “I have forgotten the inventory.”

Again we waited, and again we heard her speaking in low tones out of our view. The sound of a drawer opening and closing and a machine beeping and humming followed, and upon her return she carried several sheets of paper in her hand.

“I have decided to give you all that I gave the police. Also, I have talked to one of the maids on her phone. Doreen. She will see you in your room. Now I have work.” The woman’s expressive face begged for a cessation of the interview, and R. J. obliged by saying, “In that case, thanks. You’ve been a great help.”

I led the way back, and there waiting in the hall stood a smock-clad woman of thirty, tallish and dark haired, with a pretty but prematurely worn face. R. J. took charge by saying, “Doreen, right? The manager said you might have some information. Why don’t we go in and sit?”

“Okay, but... okay.” She, too, seemed hesitant, even apprehensive, and once in the room with the door closed, she said, “Wait. You have to promise: no police.”

“Sure,” R. J. answered. “No police. Now relax. Take the chair. We’ll take the beds.”

She lowered herself onto the front edge of the cushioned seat and looked at me. “Helen said you were okay and I should tell. Only her and I know this, and I don’t think it makes any difference, not to him killing himself, but... okay.” She inhaled deeply. “Over the summer I picked up extra money waitressing dinners down at Babcock’s.”

“We ate there last night,” I said to encourage her. “A nice atmosphere.”

“Well — there was a night that man, Mr. Kostner, ate there, and he didn’t eat alone. He came in and I remembered him as staying here, because I’d seen him that morning in the breakfast lounge. I was helping there, too, before cleaning rooms.” She came to a halt and stared into space.

“Take your time,” R. J. prompted.

“He... came into Babcock’s and there was a backup, maybe twenty minutes. All the wait-benches were full. I took a party to their table and, you know, brought drinks, checked my other tables, didn’t give him another thought. But later on I saw him at a table, not one of mine, having his dinner with a young couple, man and woman. They stayed a long time, talking, and one of my tables was across from theirs, so I know I’m right, okay? The young woman in the couple was his daughter — the one who came later to get his things. I helped carry them to her car.”

She looked from me to R. J. and then back. R. J. said, “And I’d guess that if she and her partner had stayed here, you’d have known.”

“Helen checked, okay? But she would have recognized her. Nothing gets by Helen.”

Before we left, R. J. went back to the registration counter and convinced the manager, Helen, that she could save us time and effort by passing along the address and phone number of Tom Kostner’s daughter.

“Sure, she has them,” he claimed as he headed off. “Minneapolis,” he announced on his return.

Teresa Kostner

One day when I was sixteen Dad picked my brother and me up after school, something he never did, and drove us to an apartment building over near Harlem-Irving. Mom could have the house, he said, but we three would be living in two bedrooms plus bath from then on, or until we could find something better.

I was glad.

It wasn’t that Mom and Dad had drifted apart. It was that she had zoned the rest of us out. For years. The fact that she was unfaithful to him — which I pretended not to know — was just a minor part of the picture I personally saw. She started working full-time as a paralegal when I was nine and Mark was six, and over the next few years her job and colleagues and yuppie friends gradually displaced us. Her role in the family became perfunctory, and then it stopped being even that. If Dad was partially to blame for what happened, his share couldn’t have been more than ten percent.

He never talked about it. Instead he would say something once in a while like, “Since no one’s perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes are a lot like sins. When you sin you have to admit it first, then confess it, then atone for it, then try not to do it again. When you make a mistake, you have to recognize it and own up to it. Then you have to correct it if you can, and avoid making the same mistake twice.” This sounds heavy, I know, but most of the time he didn’t play the heavy father at all. He was enthusiastic and encouraging and understanding.

Everybody loved him but Mom.

There was money in a fund for our college, and even though times were hard he wouldn’t touch it for living expenses, and we never went hungry. I left for college after a year and a half and that meant one less mouth to feed and a bedroom, not the sleeper sofa, for Dad. Then three years later Mark left — that was 2007 — but there was a hitch. Costs had gone up so much that the year we both were in college depleted the trust money to the point that, even though I graduated that spring, what was left wouldn’t see Mark through another whole year, not at Marquette. Dad’s budding business was rocky, too, right then, because the economy was down, and the two things together made him make a mistake, although it didn’t look that way at the time. He wanted Mark to stay at Marquette and graduate debt free the way I had, that was his goal number one, and he also wanted a steadier income source than the freelancing gave him.

When the detective came all the way from Chicago to ask about Dad, I ended up telling him as much. He got it out of me, anyway. I suppose I wanted to talk, and he had a presence you felt you could trust — large, old, passive, and not anyone’s dream in terms of looks. He commiserated with me, losing my dad, said he lost his own when he was even younger than me, said his father still was a kind of secret ideal to him, the person he wanted most to measure up to.

Well, he read me like a book.

He didn’t even try to trap me. He just said a woman had seen me by chance with Dad in a restaurant the night before the suicide, something I’d not mentioned to the RCMP when they finally got hold of me. They hadn’t asked, and I was upset.

The explanation was simple enough. I have a degree in theater, and at the time I was working for a Minneapolis acting troupe as production supervisor — temping on the side to help pay the bills. That August we did a trade-off with a Winnipeg company for a month — they used our space and we used theirs — so I was in Winnipeg when Dad came up, and that Monday I drove out to see him in that little town.

“Tell me about it,” said Mr. Carr. “Take your time.”

I had to think, of course. “I only saw Dad three or four times a year after I moved to the Twin Cities — except on FaceTime every couple of weeks — so it wasn’t a coincidence, him coming to Manitoba when I was there. He planned it so we could see each other.

“He arrived on Sunday morning, we had lunch, and he watched our matinee before heading on. Monday and Tuesday we weren’t performing, so I drove out there around noon. It only took about an hour. We had a late lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon at a park along Lake Winnipeg—”

“What about the young man with you at dinner?”

“Oh.” I had to think about this too. “Yeah, Jess. Well... he’s in the troupe, and he and I were hanging together a lot just then, so he came along, but he wasn’t... he was just there. Anyway, we went to that restaurant and had some beers and some dinner, and I... never saw Dad again. Got back to Winnipeg around dark, and the next day I was running a theater workshop for kids while he... did what he did.”

“And your father was how?” asked the detective. “While you were there?”

I understood.

“He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t relaxed, though. He didn’t want to talk about himself, not in a personal way. He never did that. I’m sure he kept a lot from me about being alone and unhappy, but I know the past couple of years were rough on him. He said this, maybe not in these exact words: ‘I’m thinking of making a big change.’ And I thought he probably was going to quit his job, maybe go back to freelancing.”

“And you’re aware that he’d stopped going to church and quit coaching.”

“Not... really. We didn’t talk about the Catholic church. I left years ago because of — mainly because of the child abuse scandals, but lots of things, really. And the coaching? He might have said he was too busy at work one spring, I sort of remember.”

“So his unhappiness was work related, do you think?”

“That... I’m afraid we mostly talked about me, my life, but I... yeah, his job, that must have had a lot to do with it. But he never said.”

After the man left I had a crying jag. But I hadn’t told too many lies.

R. J. Carr

The Kostner affair was one of those investigations that didn’t go in the direction it should have. What the clients wanted was some kind of explanation as to why a man they had esteemed for his character could first of all abandon his pious and do-gooding proclivities at one jump and secondly, commit suicide in a state of despair.

What Ginny and I found, though, was a different mystery raising a set of new questions that didn’t resolve the original issues or even have much to do with them.

It was simple enough to theorize or even conclude that Tom Kostner grew to hate his job, the steady-paying one he took on in 2008 and still held four years later, but it was hard, nearly impossible, to credit such hatred as the single factor leading to suicide. For a man like him, who lived alone and had no dependents, the option to quit seemed an easy choice over self-destruction.

I spent a few hours before heading off to Manitoba trying to dig up something about the guy’s personal life and got results that confirmed his desperate state, but only in a negative sense. The neighbors in his former apartment complex said he was out early in the morning and came in around six most workday evenings, including Saturdays. Once in he stayed in and entertained no friends of either sex except occasionally his son or daughter in town to visit. In years past, according to a longtime neighbor, he had been friendly and cheerful when encountered, but more recently he’d become withdrawn and morose, as if human contact “gave him pain.”

To me the possibility of drug or alcohol dependence as a factor seemed unlikely, but it had to be looked into, so I found out what I could. A friend who knew him well before the break said he’d been a two-beer-limit type of guy, with “zero tolerance for controlled substances” — the going phrase just then. Through the manager of the apartment complex I got onto the local cops who’d gone over his place after the Facebook posting, and they gave me a similar picture: three bottles of Miller Lite on the fridge door, no signs of drug abuse anywhere, and no dubious prescription pills hidden away.

Had he sought some kind of counseling? The Facebook posting and subsequent news coverage didn’t bring anyone forth claiming him as a counselee or patient, and that, to both Ginny and me, was consistent with what we knew of him. Earlier in his life he might possibly have taken his woes to a priest, but his encounter with Father Daly was fairly convincing evidence that, whatever battle he’d been fighting, he fought it alone.

Our trip to Manitoba intervened before I could dig into Kostner’s employment woes, and it was in Grand Fork that the case started to shift in emphasis away from establishing the guy’s motives for killing himself — concerning which we’d made almost no headway — and toward how he’d done it and how it had been reported. The next day, when we learned that his grown daughter had been seen eating dinner with him the evening before his death, the project of checking into his job difficulties stayed on hold. Our flight home from Winnipeg was succeeded by a drive to Minneapolis — cheaper than airfare — with a day off in between for the retirees to recuperate.

By then Father Daly had touched a few new suckers to keep things going.

When I got back to our motel from a nine A.M. interview with the daughter, Ginny was up and about and ready to talk. I’d made her stay behind, due to her waking up suffering from severe arrhythmia, an inherited disposition she’d given in to telling me about once we retired.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Miffed. I’ve interviewed students at least five or six times during an episode, and I’m—”

“One, you’re older now, and two, you don’t have to anymore. Would you like a report?”

“Grr.”

“Now you know how I feel when you get bossy.”

“But I only do it for your own good. You’re overprotective.”

“Hah.”

“Hah, yourself.”

I secured a can of diet cola from our stash in the room refrigerator, flopped on a bed, and started in.

“In detail,” Ginny commented from where she sat.

“Right. Teresa Kostner: twenty-six years old, five seven in height, maybe a hundred sixty pounds, dark blonde hair cut Buster Brown style, not a beautiful face, but not plain. Dressed in leggings and layers. On most days I’d guess she was fairly upbeat and outgoing, but this wasn’t one of them.

“She lives in an old, run-down house with three other people near the university campus, and she’s into theater at the back end, production supervisor for some local professional troupe that performs in a converted warehouse. Does temping to make ends meet.

“Here’s her story: The theater company was performing in Winnipeg for a month, and her father planned his vacation with that in mind. He came in on Sunday and they had some time together before he headed on to Arborg. She had Monday off and drove up in her own car to spend the day with him. The young man with them at dinner was a member of the troupe named Jess, who, if I’m interpreting correctly, was dating her at the time, but not anymore.

“She wasn’t going to tell me about him, by the way, and when I raised the subject she got flustered.”

“Ah.”

“I agree. Anyway, she said this about her father during their day together, and I’m quoting: ‘He wasn’t sad, but he wasn’t relaxed either. He didn’t want to talk about himself.’ According to her he never did. She sensed that he was having a fairly rough time, but that was all. He told her one thing, that he was ‘thinking of making a big change,’ and she assumed it was about finding different work, maybe going back to a one-man operation.”

“Did she explain why she hadn’t told the police about seeing him that day?”

“They didn’t ask.”

“What? That’s outrageous.”

“Yep.”

“But that reminds me— Why do you suppose Doreen at the lodge didn’t want to talk to the police either?”

“You want a guess? I’d guess she wasn’t on the books of the restaurant — maybe others weren’t either — and got paid under the table in cash and tips, no taxes, no paper trail. She didn’t want to draw police attention there, anyway.”

“That, at least, makes sense. What else about the daughter?”

“A lot of what she told me was the truth, but not all of the truth, and sometimes it wasn’t the truth at all.”

“About the young man, you mean? But how or why? And about the police, of course.”

“Also, for no reason that makes sense, she was dodgy on the subject of her dad’s unhappiness at work, as if she wanted to downplay it even though she didn’t offer any other cause for him wanting to kill himself”

“And in doing so, of course, she drew your attention to what she was trying to minimize. But again, why? When everything has always pointed to that as the major dissatisfaction in his life?”

“Don’t know. You haven’t asked yet, but she’s got an alibi for the next day, so if her dad had a helper, she wasn’t it.”

“Ye-e-es. Or rather, no. But I—” Ginny suddenly stood up from the chair and took a deep breath. “I think the arrhythmia’s gone.” She felt her own pulse. “Yes. Good. Hurray, in fact. So now—”

“Uh-oh,” I said. There was a familiar look in her eye.

“R. J., please. No teasing. Especially since I’ve held back till now, admit it.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you. And so...”

“Go ahead.”

“While you were out interviewing the daughter this morning, I spent my enforced rest thinking about all the things in those three scenarios that don’t seem to fit—”

“I see.”

“—and now, now I’m going to ask a few pertinent questions and provide a like number of possible answers to address those incongruities — without comment, please until I’m finished.”

“Fine. Fire away.”

She paced and pondered for a moment, then stopped and faced me. “Question one: Why did Tom Kostner go all the way to Grand Fork, Manitoba, to hang himself when, if he wanted isolated wilderness, there are thousands of square miles of it much closer in Northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota? Answer: Because he wanted to be sure of being out of cell phone range as well. Question two: Why out of cell phone range? Answer: To be sure that his remains couldn’t be found by triangulation using the phone. Question three: Why were the photos posted on his Facebook page? Answer: To let family and friends know what he’d done, even though he didn’t want his remains found. Question four: Why didn’t he want his remains found? Answer: To spare those same people the ethical conundrum of where to bury a Catholic who has committed suicide. Question five: How could he know that the photos would be taken, much less posted? Answer: He engaged a helper or at least someone to accompany him or follow after him to the isolated site for the purpose of recording his demise and then returning to Grand Fork, not only to broadcast it over the Internet, but to leave the phone as evidence.”

She looked down at the floor for a moment, then up at me. “What else? I think... Yes, yes — because it makes sense. Question six: Who was Tom Kostner’s helper, since it wasn’t the daughter? Answer: It was the young man who had dinner with them. Question the last: Who was the young man, or rather, why was the daughter evasive about him? Answer the last: Because he wasn’t who she claimed. He was her brother.”

“Okay,” I said right away, “sure, but—”

“No!” She shook her head and raised a hand. “Wait.”

I waited. She stared through me for several seconds, concentrating intently, then came and sat down on the bed beside me with a defeated expression on her face. “I’ve been theorizing on the basis of insufficient data and I’ve been caught.”

“I’ll grant the theorizing, but—”

“No. If I’m right about the brother, R. J., don’t you see? — then I have to be wrong about some of the rest, maybe most of it. Do you think I’m right about him?”

My turn to ponder. “I... wouldn’t bet against it. In fact, it makes almost too much sense.”

“Odds in favor?”

“Oh... two to one, at least, or, no, I’d say ten to one.”

“Oh, dear.”

“But why does that make the rest of it wrong?”

“Not wrong so much as untenable.” She rubbed her forehead, a rare gesture. “What are the chances of both children willingly conspiring in their father’s suicide?”

“You’re the psychologist.”

“Remote, R. J., extremely remote. With Catholics especially, such a prospect would be nearly unthinkable, and for two...” She looked away, concentrating again. “Of course, there is an alternative scenario...”

“Yep. Always has been. So what do we tell the clients?”

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 cluttered the Chicago suburbs with a variety of mostly oversized, overpriced, and underfunded real estate, making the row of large, pretentious townhomes no particular surprise, except for the fact that Mark Kostner was living in one of them. In late 2012 the development they populated was still only half completed, and about one finished unit in four stood empty, haunted by the ghosts of unrealized expectations and financial betrayal.

Three days after our return from Minneapolis I toured the models, paying special attention to the version the Kostner son lived in and filling the ear of the woman in the sales office with plausible guff about how we’d just retired and were looking for a place with no yard work. That night, while Ginny cruised close by, I went calling for the first time in six years, not exactly breaking but definitely entering the young man’s abode, after ringing the doorbell to make sure he was really off at his law school class in DeKalb.

Six years is a long time not to have done something, and once inside the townhome I was nearly stopped cold by the realization that I had no notion of what I was trying to find and only a hazy recollection of how to go about looking for it. I stood there in the foyer telling myself what I used to tell other people — don’t panic — while the seconds ticked away on my mental clock.

“Documents,” I finally muttered when my brain kicked in, after which I shot my flashlight’s beam into all the rooms on the ground floor before heading up the dark stairway. Mark Kostner, second-year law student, was doing some rent-free house-sitting this term for a relative to save on living costs — or so he’d explained to Ginny that afternoon while I’d viewed the models — and therefore, in theory, at least, I could ignore anything that didn’t appear to be his.

The stairs led into a loft with four doorways leading on to other rooms, and the first I peered into was Mark’s: An open textbook beside a closed laptop was evidence enough, and a trio of record storage boxes in a corner clinched the matter. I gave the boxes a temporary pass and looked instead in a dresser and then a cheap rolling file. That’s where — still by flashlight — I found exactly one significant document, a passport issued June 2012 that had been used twice, both on trips to Canada, the first in early July for three days to Manitoba, the second from August 12 — the exit point into Ontario being Grand Portage, Minnesota — to August 23 — reentry made from Manitoba into the Lost River State Forest.

I’d been hoping for more, but either times had changed or Mark was too young for me, probably both. The outcome, at least, was that he’d grown up in a world where records were no longer kept, not even in record storage boxes. Instead they were locked away in computer files or accessed online, and since he was probably far too tech savvy not to have set up logins and passwords beyond my skill to break, even looking at his laptop was going to be a waste of time.

I looked anyway, and to my surprise it came alive when I lifted the lid, showing a glowing desktop screen covered over with icons and images, one of which appeared to be a photograph in miniature of Mark’s father and sister against a woodsy background. After studying the keyboard for a moment I maneuvered the cursor to the image and opened it to full size, revealing Tom and Teresa Kostner arm in arm grinning at the camera, the former wearing what appeared to be the same dark shirt and Levis as in the suicide photos. Light filtered down through the surrounding trees in a way that seemed familiar, too, and the nearest thick trunk behind the pair on their left could have doubled for that of the hanging tree.

It was a photo I knew I wanted a copy of, and for once in my life I had a brainwave in front of a computer. I opened Mark’s e-mail and sent a message to myself with the photo attached, then buried the evidence of doing so in the trash.

This was just about the moment when I heard a soft, rustling sound coming at me through the darkness from off toward the doorway to the loft. A flashlight beam sprang on just as I looked, nearly blinding me to the silhouetted figure behind. I did see the gun.

I also heard the voice saying, “And just who the hell are you?”

Ginny Carr

In October 2002, shortly before Steve joined Carr Investigations and Security, I helped R. J. twice on one case, and now, almost exactly ten years later, I was at last “in the field” and on my own again, although facing a far easier task and one, thank God, that involved very little overt lying.

I’d garbed myself in an outmoded business suit and low heels befitting my advanced age and fictional supernumerary position with CIS — “Part-time Field Interviewer” — but otherwise I appeared as myself, with a minimum of makeup and my hair in its usual form and coloring. I did use my maiden name. Discovering Mark Kostner’s place of residence and getting hold of his cell number had been unexpected challenges, and I began the interview by saying so.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Sorry. The chance came along to house-sit for my uncle, and I bailed on the grad student dorm.” His gaze took in the large living room. “It’s about six thousand cheaper here, even with the commute, and just slightly more roomy.”

“It’s very nice, yes,” I agreed, then went on, “As I mentioned in our phone conversation, Carr Investigations and Security has been engaged to look into you father’s suicide. A group of his old friends are the clients of record, and they’re anxious to have a fuller explanation. Mr. Carr, senior, even went to Minneapolis to talk to your sister, since she actually spent some time with your father in the days before his death. Unfortunately, she was unable to add much to what we’d already discovered.

“I’m here today, of course, because we’re hoping that you might shed some additional light on the subject.”

The young man before me appeared to be entirely unmoved by my appeal. He wasn’t particularly tall, perhaps five feet nine, stocky, with sandy brown hair in a longish crew cut. Facially he resembled his father, having a broad forehead and small features. A gruff voice from out of those features replied woodenly, “I can try, I guess.”

“Thinking about your father’s death must be difficult,” I responded, “so let’s leave that subject alone for now. I assume that you and he were close?”

“Yeah, pretty close.” His gaze continued to avoid mine.

“Did you talk often?”

“Yeah.” A shrug. “FaceTime once a week.”

“And did you notice any change in him over the course of the last two or three years? Was he less happy, for instance?”

“Yeah, well, we’d gone off to school, he was alone, he wouldn’t date. He was this rigid, old-school Catholic, so whatever Mom did, they were still married.”

“And his work?”

“Long hours. Six days most weeks.”

I waited for an elaboration and got none, then said, “Do you have any theory, since he was so religious, as to why he left off attending Mass and gave up all his church and community affairs?”

The young man continued to stare beyond me. Finally, he shook his head. “I won’t theorize about Dad. He was unhappy, yeah, and depressed. Maybe life just got to him.”

“When did you last see him in person?”

“Oh... I stayed overnight with him, early August. He... he didn’t seem suicidal then.”

Rather than challenge what I presumed was a lie, I said, “Was he close to anyone else that you know of? Your uncle, perhaps?”

“My uncle?” His puzzlement at the question was a puzzle in itself. After a moment of rather obvious mental calculation, he gestured and said, “I guess you mean Harry. He’s Mom’s side of the family. Dad’s pretty much — or was pretty much — alone except for us, Teresa and me.”

“You must miss him terribly. I’m very sorry.”

As he mumbled something commonplace I rose to my feet and looked across the open floor plan toward the dining area. “This is a very attractive layout. Could I just poke my head here and there before leaving?”

“Sure — I don’t mind. It’s neat for once. And, say, I feel sorry for Dad’s old friends. Tell ’em that. The whole things’s been a kind of dark mystery.”

I circled through the dining area and kitchen commenting on a few features but in fact looking out for signs of home security and surveillance devices, then I left the young man standing in the front doorway with a blank expression on his face.

The previous day R. J. had tried to find out something about Tom Kostner’s employment at Home Dealers of Chicagoland, and you may judge for yourself how well he succeeded. A visit to the company office in Schaumburg resulted in a brief conversation with a receptionist, who verified that Kostner had been the firm’s only property appraiser and that he covered the metropolitan area and beyond, sometimes going as far a Rockford and LaSalle-Peru. The receptionist, who was, in fact, the only employee on the premises, took R. J.’s card and said that she would make the company president aware of his visit. As for R. J.’s contacting the president or vice president directly, though, she expressed doubt, as they worked away from the office and she couldn’t give out their private information.

Then, were there any other higher-ups — managers, brokers — I could talk to, he enquired. No, none, was the reply, now that Mr. Kostner was gone. He’d been company treasurer, too, and hadn’t as yet been replaced.

“Ginny, the place was a flashy suite in a high-rise, big, glass and chrome reception area, but I’m betting there was nothing behind most of those closed doors but air, and the girl ran the whole show.”

“You think it’s a sham company? That might explain a great deal, but... the long hours, the large territory, it couldn’t have... that is, the one thing I believe absolutely is that Tom Kostner was out appraising property to the point of exhaustion.”

“Right. That’s exactly what he was doing. The key, though, is what the other two guys were up to with the data he supplied. You’re always proposing working hypotheses. How about this one: Kostner took the job in good faith, hustled all over evaluating property and submitting his reports without any interest in the other side of the business, or maybe he was too busy to pay much attention or was lied to. Doesn’t matter. Going on for two years into the job he started to notice signs that things weren’t what they seemed or what he was told. By then, unfortunately, he was... enmeshed, maybe? Yeah. He was company treasurer, remember, so whatever fraud or wrongdoing there was, he was technically complicit. ‘Treasurer’ in a lot of companies is just a courtesy title for incorporation purposes, so that makes sense. He felt like he was in too deep to pull out, at any rate, but staying in and going along poisoned his life.”

“No, R. J. It made him feel as if he himself were poison. Remember what he said to the priest? ‘You don’t want to come near me. You don’t want to know me.’”

“Then you like the hypothesis?”

“It accounts for everything — up to a point. Although...”

“Yeah?”

“It does sound to me just a tiny bit like theorizing on the basis of insufficient data.”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s what happens to us old detectives when we go senile.”

At 8:04 on the evening of the day I interviewed Mark Kostner, I slowed the minivan to a stop fifty yards down the street from the young man’s temporary home, but only long enough for R. J. to step onto the pavement and close the door. I then drove off not looking back, and he, doubtless, approached the townhome openly with the insouciance of a bored salesman on his way to a cold call.

I knew differently. In his pocket was a set of master keys to get him past the high-security deadbolt lock, a feature that R. J. had warned me to look out for on my afternoon visit, just in case, citing his favorite private paradox: Precautions are only necessary when you fail to take them. His aim, of course, was to search Mark Kostner’s belongings with an eye out for evidence of any kind to advance the investigation, since it seemed virtually certain that the Kostner siblings were lying about their father, their awareness of his desperate mental and emotional condition, and what really happened to him the previous August in Manitoba.

My aim, while simpler, was no less difficult. I was to absent myself from the vicinity for twenty-six minutes with nothing whatsoever to do but drive the minivan as I battled feelings of ongoing uncertainty and ever-increasing, if irrational, fear for R. J.’s safety. Three minutes brought me to a major thoroughfare, and in another minute I found myself positioning the vehicle along the boundary of a brightly lit parking lot adjacent to a chain drugstore.

Being parked ought to have been better than driving, but it wasn’t. I was too on edge to read, and my thoughts were dark, my emotions overtaxed. The anxieties I’d suffered for over thirty years as the wife of a private detective — and which had now been happily nonexistent for nearly four — were returned in full force and nearly overcame my unaccustomed senses.

Eleven difficult minutes crawled by before my whole being was jolted with the trilling of the cell phone in my jacket pocket. I drew it out at once and examined the bright screen, thanking God for a respite, for something real to attend to. The caller number displayed was unknown, a cipher, but I fathomed somehow — the circumstances, the local area code, the timing — that the person making the call was my husband.

“Hello?” I answered. “R. J.?”

“Yeah, right. Good guess. You’d better come. There’s a development and—” A banging noise made him break off. “Whoops! Gotta go!”

The trip that had taken four minutes to make in one direction lasted no more than two and a half in return. I braked to a jerking halt, nearly leaped from the minivan to the pavement in spite of my aging bones, slammed the door, and hurried to the illuminated townhome entrance, where R. J. stood peering out, almost filling the doorframe. Lights were on behind him in the foyer, too, and — the most unsettling thing — I could just make out the top of an automatic pistol projecting from beneath the waistband of his slacks.

Wanting desperately to scream but preferring not to shout, I waited until he reached out and took my hand before exclaiming, “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Come with me.”

He ushered me ahead of him into the brightly lit living room, where I saw at once a rather short, heavily bearded man standing in a defiant posture with his arms drawn uncomfortably behind him and his pants fallen to his ankles.

“Are you going to behave?” R. J. said, and without waiting on a reply he stepped behind the man and undid what proved to be the man’s belt tied around his wrists. “Here. Fix yourself, then sit down.”

The man only glowered in response, but he complied with the directive by pulling up his slacks and threading the belt through the waist loops.

When I caught R. J.’s eye, he shrugged and said, “He crept in maybe ten minutes after I did and stuck me up with this.” R. J. flourished the pistol, then handed it to me. “He got so close I could see that the safety was on, so I took a chance and grabbed it away before someone got hurt. We talked. He agreed to be reasonable and let me use his phone. This was in an upstairs room. As soon as I turned away, though, he took off, banged the door closed, and headed down the stairs.” A massive sigh. “I’m too old for this stuff anymore. If he hadn’t slipped on that rug over there, I would have been chasing him down the street. Anyway, I tied him up to let him stew a little. He can’t very well call the cops with a complaint.”

“No,” I agreed. “No, I don’t suppose he would care to do that.”

The poor man had a broad forehead and small features — recognizable despite the beard. He was Tom Kostner, of course, in person, still alive as we had hypothesized the previous week in Minneapolis, but hardly where we had expected to find him.

After being introduced, I waited with the pistol in hand until R. J. returned from the kitchen with three glasses of water. Then we sat and sipped until R. J. spoke.

“I’m going to save you some explaining, Mr. Kostner, by telling you what we already know. After that you’d be wise to fill in the blanks. Okay?”

The man nodded warily.

“I’ll start in two thousand and eight. The economy was down, and you needed more income to finance your son’s college education, so you went to work for a concern called Home Dealers of Chicagoland, whose business was turning residential real estate. Thanks to the burst housing bubble, there were tremendous numbers of homes coming up for sale whose owners were desperate. Your job was to assess and evaluate properties the company gave you leads on, but you had nothing to do with what happened beyond that in terms of negotiating with homeowners, buying, reselling, financing, remortgaging, whatever — your superiors in the company handled that end.

“By sometime in two thousand and ten you became aware that the company was playing fast and loose with the properties it handled. I’m no expert on real estate fraud, but I’d say with certainty that a lot of people got fleeced whose homes you evaluated, and when that fact became clear, you felt repulsed. Trouble was, as company treasurer you were in too deep just to walk away, and for the next two years you went along because you couldn’t see any way out, and you got more and more disgusted with yourself as time went on.

“Well — you finally thought of a way out. You got your daughter and son on board to meet you while you were on vacation in a little resort town up in Manitoba near a wilderness park. Your daughter was theatrical and brought along some stage makeup, and the three of you went out deep into the woods of that park and faked your suicide, taking photos of it all with a cell phone, but not the iPhone you usually used, which you conveniently left behind in your motel room to be recovered later, so I could call Ginny with it here tonight. Comic relief.

“Anyway, the first picture taken was a long shot in which you used a body harness to take the weight off your neck so you wouldn’t actually strangle. In the first close-up your face was made up by your daughter to look like death, and that shot and the one of the suicide note were taken from a low angle, but probably while you stood on the ground.

“The next day you and your son drove in tandem up to Grand Fork on the edge of cell phone range to ditch your car, transmit the pictures to your Facebook page, and plant the cell phone to confuse the police, and then, somehow or other, you sneaked back into the U.S. with your son’s help.

“All this is pretty clear. You couldn’t stand the life you were forced to live, and you found a way out that didn’t involve hurting your children, although it did hurt a lot of other people to a lesser degree, and it damaged your image in their minds as much as a stretch in jail for fraud would have done.” R. J. ceased talking to glance at me. “Anything to add?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or rather, a question to ask: Who owns this townhome, Mr. Kostner?”

“The... ah...” He stopped to clear his throat. “It’s owned by the Harry and Vicki Algauer Family Trust. Vicki’s gone. Harry’s in a home. Vicki died in two thousand nine. Last April Harry had a stroke, and I was the successor trustee. Back in the seventies, when the orphanage closed, I was fostered to them. They were older and childless, that’s the connection, and we stayed in touch. I didn’t exactly think of them as parents, but in a lot of ways they treated me as the son they couldn’t have. Harry put money away for my kids’ education.

“Anyway, just to clarify things, the trusteeship pays fifteen hundred a month, and it’s what I’m living on — if I were alive.” He grimaced and looked away.

“Don’t stop, keep going,” said R. J.

“Why? I mean, give me a single reason for saying anything more. You promised not to go the police, remember.”

He glared at R. J., who nodded vaguely but replied otherwise, “That was before you tried your run off and broke the agreement. As for a reason, we need to know your version of things.”

“If you tell us,” I added, “then we’ll reinstate the promise, provided you’ve committed no really serious crime.”

Quite unexpectedly, the poor man burst out laughing. “Does embezzling three million dollars count as ‘really serious crime’?”

A brief silence ensued at this revelation. “That still depends,” I finally remarked, “on what you have to say for yourself.”

“In my own defense? I’m defenseless. I feel defenseless, anyway. And the three million wasn’t enough. I just couldn’t get my hands on more. I... look at me. Take a close look. I was party to defrauding over a hundred mortgage holders to the tune of about five million dollars. I’m not talking property value, God knows, or even equity. That was just what our company gained at their expense, most of the time without really breaking the law. We ended up with money that could have been credited to them if they’d taken someone else’s advice, not ours.”

“So you...?” R. J. began.

“I was a coward. But when Harry had his stroke, and I had another income source, something to fall back on, I suddenly got some backbone. Before that I hadn’t wanted to know, not the details, but I started going into the office late at night and looking at things. Andy and Les, my bosses, had each taken almost a million in ‘bonuses’ over the years, on top of salaries in six figures. We did legitimate business, too, of course, and I suppose that’s how I justified myself. My work was legitimate, so it didn’t matter.

“The point is, I looked in every file and found a hundred seven cases where we’d... scammed, I guess, we’d scammed a hundred seven desperate mortgage holders, not out of their homes — they were going to lose their homes, most of them, that was inevitable — bu... but anyway, here I am talking, so you’ve got me.”

“And the three million?” R. J. prodded.

“It took some time. There was supposed to be a reserve account. I knew there was — I’d signed some papers — and this account was special, hidden offshore and structured in the company, so I was — if we got audited for taxes, the treasurer was the fall guy. I found that out when I found the trail to it.

“It took some time, though. I waited until the monthly statement date passed, then I used my authority as treasurer to close the account and transferred the money to a new one, also offshore, in the name of Home Dealers of Chicagoland Fund. I was the fund’s only signatory. I also set up another account at the same time that could draw on the fund’s account. This was the week before I committed suicide.”

He reflected for a moment. “Without a body, though, they can’t declare me dead for quite a while, and news about unproved deaths by suicide travels slow to offshore banks, so my signature still appears to be valid. And no one, as far as I know, is looking for me anyway — except you. My kids aren’t. Andy and Les wouldn’t dare draw attention to themselves, even if they thought I was alive, but I’d guess they don’t. I’m not wanted for any known crime either, except... by you.”

“The crime I’d accuse you of,” I said, “is disingenuousness. You’re here in the Chicago area living off a meager trusteeship, not somewhere ‘offshore’ reveling in three million dollars worth of ill-gotten luxury. You aren’t precisely hiding out either. You weren’t here this afternoon, and you came in late this evening. You’re only — how far, I wonder? — twenty-five or thirty miles from where you used to live; therefore you run a much greater risk of being recognized than if you’d gone to Minneapolis to be near your daughter.

“Frankly, I think you’ve come back here because... because you’re doing penance.”

“In other words,” R. J. added, “how much of the loot have you dispersed to victims?”

Kostner turned his head to stare across the room at nothing. “Not enough. They left their homes. They declared bankruptcy. They moved away or in with relatives or onto the streets — and I can’t go around too openly asking questions, or I’ll defeat my own purpose. In numbers, well — I’ve traced eleven on the list, contacted and settled with ten. ‘My name’s Don K. Hodey from the HDC Restitution Program, and if you’ll just sign this document I’ll hand over a cashier’s check for X amount.’

“The document — they don’t really read it, most of them, but it’s mainly to keep the taxman off their backs and their lips sealed. My son wrote it — checked the general idea out with a professor of his first, so it’s legal.” He sighed. “But whatever you do, leave Mark out of it.”

R. J. glanced my way, then addressed our semicaptive: “Can you be trusted not to run off, or do I tie you up again? Ginny and I need to talk.”

“Go talk, for Pete’s sake.”

“Fine.” We rounded a corner into the open kitchen, where R. J. stood against a counter watching Kostner over my head. “What do you think?”

“First of all, I don’t think we can give him away, do you? On the other hand, I have no notion of what kind of report you can make to the clients. My most pertinent thought...”

“Yeah?”

“He can’t be very adept at tracing people, can he, if he’s only found eleven victims in six or seven weeks.”

“Meaning?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Uh-huh. Otherwise known as compounding a felony. Well, my thought is this: Let’s get out of here and head for home. I’m too old for this kind of stuff anymore.”

Between late October 2012 and mid-January 2013, R. J. spent a day and a half a week helping Tom Kostner discover the whereabouts of the remaining ninety-six parties on his list. Three had died and twenty had moved away from Chicago, but the rest were scattered across the immediate six counties. By August, a year after his presumed death, Tom had dealt out the entire three million dollars in the restitution fund in one hundred four apportioned shares and gone to live in seclusion in a place I won’t identify using a name not his own, but still in a penitential mood.

As to R. J.’s report to Tom’s friends and Father Daly, he merely told the truth — or part of the truth. When the man discovered that the company he worked for was using legal means to cheat the homeowners it claimed to help, he apparently felt complicit by association and so mortified over time that he became suicidal.

In 2014, Home Dealers of Chicagoland was cited in a media expose of shady real estate “predators,” but by then the company had been out of business for over a year, and owners Andrew and Lester Trainor couldn’t be found for comment.

That aged couple, the Carrs? They sank back into their retirement with a mutual, if metaphoric, sigh of relief.