Blood Men

chapter twenty-six

It’s their first serious lead.

Fifteen one-hundred-dollar notes are hanging from a line strung across the back of the laundry. A tray of water and bleach next to them. Most of the notes are stained in red ink, the bleach doing nothing to clean them up, but a few are okay, the serial numbers matching the notes taken from the bank. Others are damaged from the small explosion, perhaps too badly in some cases. These are from the blocks of cash that had the ink packs inserted next to them.

Shane Kingsly has a rap sheet going back almost twenty years. It began with shoplifting and ended with armed robbery, the years in between littered with burglary charges. In fact the few times Kingsly hasn’t been in trouble were the times he’s spent in jail.

Schroder already knows none of the neighbors have seen anything. He already knew before any of them were questioned. This isn’t what he’d call a police-friendly neighborhood. Nobody here is opening their doors and offering information and coffee and kind helpful words.

The house is a death trap, and according to the ME, Kingsly would have survived the attack if not for the overload of electricity. Schroder imagines living in a place like this but doesn’t imagine it for too long-the mere thought of it is enough to make him want to go and take a bath. Cables are running from the fuse box to the marijuana room where they were powering heat and light. The house smells of dirt and in one room the air is so dry he’s worried it’s going to ignite. In another room it’s cold and damp even though it’s over thirty degrees outside. Nearly every wall in the house has mold growing on it, and every light fitting is covered in cobwebs.

“What do you think?” Landry asks. “A drug thing?”

Landry looks tired, with dark bags beneath his eyes. He looks in need of this Christmas break more than anybody.

“Unlikely. They’d have taken the drugs. If Kingsly was part of the robbery, then whoever killed him took his share of the cash, assuming it was here to begin with. So either it’s one of his own crew, or somebody else.”

“You think Hunter?”

“I don’t want it to be him, but there’s something else.” He leads Landry down the hall to the back door. Outside, next to the step, is a solid-aluminium box with walls an inch thick, big enough to fit a soccer ball.

“What is it?” Landry asks. “Some kind of safe?”

“There’s no lock on it. Doesn’t even have a door. Just a lid. Open it up.”

Landry lifts the top. “Jesus, is that blood?” he asks.

“Dye.”

“Dye? From the exploding dye pack?”

“Yep.”

“So the bank robbers isolated the bundles with the dye packs to protect the rest of the cash,” Landry says.

“They came prepared. They must have had the box inside the van, and they knew they had only a couple of minutes to transfer the dangerous cash into it.”

“They really knew their stuff,” Landry says.

“Only it doesn’t make sense,” Schroder says. “Why not throw the cash out the window? Why go to the effort to keep it, and even then, why not leave the metal box with the van? Why bring it here?”

“Maybe they’re planning on using it again?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s it,” Schroder answers. “There were hundreds of bricks of cash thrown into those bags, how do you think they knew which ones had the dye unit in it?”

“Maybe they used some kind of metal detector?”

“Yeah, and if they did, why hide it?”

“I’m not following. .”

“I think they had inside help.”

“What?”

“Think about it. When the four people went back to the vault, they all knew the dye packs had to be inserted. If somebody forgot, they’d look suspicious. But what if somebody loaded them into a specific place? Laid them on top, maybe marked them somehow? The bank crew get the bags back into the car and take out the marked notes and contain them immediately in the metal box. They can’t throw them out the window because then we’d wonder how they found the dye packs among all that other cash. They couldn’t leave the box with the van because we’d think the same thing.”

“Jesus, you think somebody from the bank was in on it?”

“It makes sense,” Schroder answers.

“You think this is the person who killed Kingsly?”

“They’d have taken the box.”

“Maybe they didn’t see it,” Landry says.

“Maybe. Other possibility is this person, whoever they are, might be after the others. Next step is to run down Kingsly’s known accomplices. See if we can find a link between somebody and the bank.”

“So you think Hunter is capable of this?” Landry asks, nodding toward Shane Kingsly as he’s carried from the house in a body bag on a stretcher.

“I don’t know.” Schroder thinks about Benson Barlow and his warning. “I hope not,” he says, “but let’s go find out.”