Echoes in the Darkness

16

Chris Pappas was probably never closer to reviving the stomach ulcer he’d had at the age of ten. The summer session at St. Johns in Santa Fe was an endurance test. It took every bit of self-discipline and self-delusion to pretend that the glory that was Greece had any relevance.

They were getting clippings from the Philly newspapers. And Chris was no longer electric. His wiring was as tangled as Lebanese politics. It was bad enough when he thought Jay Smith had gone and done it, but somehow it was even worse when Bill Bradfield made an announcement.

“Chris,” he said, “I don’t think Doctor Smith killed Susan Reinert. It’s not his style. I think he was set up by the mob to make it look like he did it.”

Chris used the word “fuzzy” to describe what he felt when trying to follow Bill Bradfield’s logic. After hearing that Jay Smith hadn’t done it, he was fuzzier than Burlington Mills. Even as he was trying to articulate a logical response, Bill Bradfield had another notion for him.

“Of course,” Bill Bradfield conceded, “it could have just been Alex, the kinky black guy from Carlisle. I told her a hundred times to stay away from that guy!”

“The mob,” Chris Pappas mumbled. “Alex.”

“If the police should ever talk to us, we’ve got to downplay our involvement with Doctor Smith,” he warned. “For example, let’s say that the police find out that you filed the serial numbers off Doctor Smith’s rifle, that wouldn’t look very good for you, would it?”

Chris had only a couple of questions. The first was “Am I in trouble?”

“Trouble? Well, there’s potential trouble for us, but not if we’re careful,” Bill Bradfield said.

“When we first heard about Susan Reinert’s death, you said, ‘Doctor Smith finally went and did it.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“Ah, yes. But that was before I talked to his attorney on the phone. Didn’t I tell you? Doctor Smith had an alibi?”

Chris felt as if somebody just wrapped his brain in ten yards of angora. He felt fuzzier than the whole peach crop of the goddamn state of Georgia.

The living arrangements at St. John’s College in Santa Fe were simple but comfortable. They had dormitory accommodations and were all settled by the time Rachel arrived with the Volkswagen Beetle. The ice maiden was pretty well thawed after driving alone across the desert. She and Bill Bradfield went off in private to get intelligence reports on Susan Reinert and do whatever they did together. Chris was never sure what that was.

Bill Bradfield and Rachel had two adjoining dorm rooms with two desks in one room and two beds pushed together in the other. In the room with the desks was Sue Myers’s red IBM typewriter, which Rachel had brought in the Volkswagen. The typewriter had suddenly gotten very important. Chris Pappas was told for the first time that Bill Bradfield had “lent the machine” to Susan Reinert.

Bill Bradfield informed him that he was afraid that Susan Reinert had used the typewriter to type “certain legal papers.” The legal papers had to do with her “financial situation.”

That particular statement stuck like a turkey bone in the esophagus. Chris couldn’t forget it.

“I was snakebit from the start,” Joe VanNort said, referring to his hot new case involving a dead schoolteacher and two missing children.

The first reptile bite was indirectly caused by Three Mile Island. Due to the meltdown scare at the nuclear power station, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the U.S. government had placed a hold on all broadcast tapes in the possession of the Dauphin County emergency radio system. Somebody apparently thought there was something to be learned from listening to the panicked citizens who phoned in messages which were recorded as a matter of policy.

The trooper who was sent to pick up the tape containing the voice of “Larry Brown” who had reported the “sick woman” in the Host Inn parking lot was told that he’d need a court order.

He wasn’t an old-school homicide investigator like Joe VanNort who would’ve walked over the guy and snatched the tape. So he went through the delay of getting a court order while Joe VanNort lined up a voiceprint expert in New Jersey.

But because of the NRC edict, there was a shortage of tape. And someone had inadvertently reused the one in question. They’d taped over and obliterated Larry Brown forever.

The second screw-up was the homicide equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.

“They what?” Joe VanNort yelled into the telephone Wednesday afternoon.

It was true. They’d lost the body for good.

The autopsy had been done on Monday, and VanNort was not satisfied. He was trying to arrange for a more experienced forensic pathologist to come in to do a lot more work.

They’d told the funeral home on Tuesday that they did not want the body cremated. Susan Reinert’s brother had requested cremation, thinking the cops were finished. Somebody didn’t get the word. On Wednesday Susan Reinert’s body was burned to dust.

So they’d lost their voiceprint. And they’d lost their corpse. Joe VanNort called it snakebite, but the snake was a python and the evidence was being swallowed whole. Before he went home that night, he finished his eightieth Marlboro of the day and asked if anybody had stolen Susan Reinert’s car yet.

On Thursday, the news of the Reinert murder and the disappearance of the children was all over the Philadelphia area, along with the information that she was heavily insured. Vince Valaitis had even heard himself described as a “Bradfield intimate.”

When his phone rang that evening he thought it was just somebody from the English department, or some nosy old sandbox pal, and he was getting ready to deny again that he’d ever been “intimate” with anybody. Which every close friend of Vince Valaitis knew was surely true.

It was Bill Bradfield on the phone. He had a little summer shoptalk for Vince Valaitis.

He said, “If you speak to the police again you’re going to put me in the electric chair.”

Vince knew Bill Bradfield was always a great one for exaggeration and resorted to hyperbole to get his way, but the electric chair?

In fact, Vince said, “What electric chair?”

And Bill Bradfield, who wasn’t keeping too cool these days out in New Mexico, said, “What goddamn electric chair do you think?”

“But Bill,” Vince said, “you haven’t done anything wrong! Jay Smith killed Susan Reinert. You tried your best to prevent it.”

Bill Bradfield had a little news flash of his own that Vince hadn’t heard.

“Jay Smith didn’t do it.”

And now Vince had to sit down. If Jay Smith didn’t do it, and Bill Bradfield was worrying about having his skull shaved for ten thousand volts, who the hell did it?

“Who the hell did it?” Vince asked bleakly. He was afraid to hear that maybe the real killer was Ida Micucci.

“I don’t know who did it,” Bill Bradfield said. “But it’s not Doctor Smith’s style. I want you to go back to the shore and cover all our steps to verify our whereabouts last weekend.”

“Back to the … I won’t do it!” Vince Valaitis said. “I won’t go near the shore! I haven’t done anything. You haven’t done anything. Maybe we should tell the police what we know.”

“No!” Bill Bradfield said. “You mustn’t talk to them.”

“Then what should I do?” Vince cried.

“I think you should get a lawyer,” Bill Bradfield said.

After he hung up, Vince Valaitis searched his video collection for some sci-fi. There had to be a better world than this one. Somewhere in a galaxy far away.

Jeff Olsen was attending summer school at St. John’s and living in a professor’s apartment with his bride. He had frequent visits from his former teacher who was usually accompanied by Chris or Rachel.

Jeff was twenty-two years old then, a clean-cut, fair-haired lad, who, like Shelly and several others, had followed Bill Bradfields advice to enroll at St. John’s.

Jeff Olsen had met Bill Bradfield when he was a sixteen-year-old student at Upper Merion and they became close friends over the years. He’d been to the apartment of Bill Bradfield and Sue Myers many times, and like all the others, had been told by his teacher that the living arrangement with Sue was purely platonic, and that Jeff should strive for chastity and even celibacy in his own life.

When Jeff Olsen was just eighteen years old, about to begin his college education, Bill Bradfield said to him, “Jeffrey, you’re a good man. In fact, you’re such a good man that if anyone came to me at some point in the future and told me that you’d killed eight or nine kids, that wouldn’t shake my feeling for you as a quality human being.”

Jeff Olsen never forgot that remarkable statement, particularly now that the newspapers were implying terrible things about his former teacher and friend.

The young man had many conversations with Bill Bradfield about the murder of Susan Reinert, particularly since Jeff was one of the madding crowd who’d heard that it might occur.

And now that it had, and now that reporters were writing about insurance and a will, Bill Bradfield came to Jeff for reassurance that his friend was not doubting him.

“I don’t want the goddamn money,” Bill Bradfield told the young man on more than one occasion.

But then he modified that declaration by saying, “But if I end up with it I’ll put it in trust for the children.”

Joe VanNort was the first to ask the question: “Where’s this pond I keep hearin’ about? This Ezra Pond?”

On July 4th, Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz were on their way to Santa Fe for a talk with Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas.

The Cape May crowd hadn’t given them much, and the cops were considering the possibility that they’d all conspired to murder Susan Reinert for insurance in favor of William Bradfield. Since she’d died sometime Saturday or Sunday when they were together, it was certain that if one of them had done it they’d all done it.

The cops touched down in Albuquerque and rented a car to drive to Santa Fe. It was hot and tiring and it wasn’t all that easy to find a motel on the 4th of July holiday, particularly since the state cops had Pennsylvania “hotel orders” that were reimbursed by the commonwealth but not honored by all lodging places.

That evening, Jack Holtz was sitting in a bar and looking up at the Rockies for the first time in his life and drinking a Coors. Joe VanNort didn’t order a Manhattan as he usually did, but had his second favorite drink, Black Velvet with water back. He smoked a dozen cigarettes while they enjoyed the New Mexico sunset.

They arrived on campus by late morning. To Jack Holtz the college looked like a place where old hippies go to meditate. Their business suits were definitely out of place, at least in the summer session. People were flopping around in go-aheads or sandals, dragging their beads and rawhide behind them.

Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz were accompanied by a New Mexico state policeman just in case anything terrific happened, like Bill Bradfield throwing himself on the floor and confessing to the murder of his girlfriend. The cops were already convinced that Susan Reinert had definitely been his blanket partner.

Through prior arrangements with the school administrators they met Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas in the school library. Naturally, the cops tried to separate them, but Bill Bradfield refused.

“We’ll answer questions together,” he told Joe VanNort who said okay and tried to keep it friendly. After commenting on how hot it was and what pretty Indian jewelry everybody was clanging around in he asked Bill Bradfield to tell him a little about his relationship with Susan Reinert.

Bill Bradfield said, “No, we don’t wish to talk to you. We both have attorneys and they’ve advised against it.”

“Who’s your lawyer?” Joe VanNort asked.

“John Paul Curran of Philadelphia,” Bill Bradfield said.

“And who’s your attorney, Mister Pappas?” Joe VanNort asked.

“John Paul Curran,” Bill Bradfield answered.

So far, Chris Pappas hadn’t done anything except sit there with his head on a swivel.

“Have you ever been in Susan Reinert’s car?” VanNort asked.

“Yes,” Bill Bradfield said.

“No,” Chris Pappas said, so they knew he could talk.

Bill Bradfield said, “Write your questions down and we’ll review them and answer them after our attorneys have gotten a chance to look them over.”

The cops trucked on back to the headquarters of the New Mexico state police and typed up twelve questions that they’d just love to have answered. Then they called the college and scheduled another meeting. But not before Joe VanNort had called the office of John Curran in Philadelphia and talked with a law partner who verified that they did represent William S. Bradfield, Jr., but said they didn’t represent a person named Christopher Pappas.

VanNort and Holtz arrived back at St. John’s at 1:00 P.M. and presented their written questions to the summer scholars.

But Bill Bradfield said, “I’m sorry, we can’t answer them at all. I’ve just talked to my lawyer.”

“I’ve been told that John Curran doesn’t represent you,” Joe VanNort said to Chris Pappas. “How about you looking over the questions?”

“John Curran represents him now,” Bill Bradfield said. “And I’m afraid we have to go back to our work. You can mail your questions to our attorney and he’ll forward them to us.”

Jack Holtz decided to take a shot. “That’d be very time consuming,” he said to Bill Bradfield. “We’re trying to locate two missing children and we need your help.”

“I’d like to help,” Bill Bradfield told him, “but my first concern is with my studies.”

It was a long flight home. Joe VanNort was no longer so concerned about Ken Reinert or anybody else. He wanted Bill Bradfield and his little gang.

Bill Bradfield had a few duties for Shelly that summer which the teenager performed with varying degrees of proficiency. The duties involved banking, ordnance and cryptology.

Shelly was instucted to take $300 out of her $28,000 secret treasure and put it into the safety deposit box. Bill Bradfield had been stewing over the notion that the cops might somehow find the box, and he thought that an empty safety deposit box might not look kosher.

Then Chris got on the phone and asked Shelly and her girlfriend to go to his house and dismantle the gun with the silencer and dump the pieces in the Schuylkill River.

But then Bill Bradfield threw her a knuckleball. He told the teenager that he feared his mail might get intercepted by the police who would be trying to link him to Dr. Smith. So he would have to write to her in the code they’d discussed.

And Shelly, who’d tried so hard to master Ezra Pound, and Greek, and his Bible studies, and had even become a Catholic for him, said sure she could. But that code was tougher than the Pittsburgh Steelers. Little Shelly failed him.

Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz were both suspicious, cautious, deliberate crime men. Jack Holtz’s caution extended into all phases of his life. He did very little on impulse and didn’t like surprises. Perhaps his personality was the wrong kind to mesh with his former wife’s. She had a flair for art and always talked of a need for self-expression.

The first time Charlotte left him, he did all of his “hurting and healing,” as he put it. But then “Chaz,” as he called her, came home. A little later she left for good, seemingly on impulse.

He claimed that when she left the second time it didn’t hurt, especially since she didn’t try to take Jason away from him. He and his son lived in a little house he’d bought on a twenty-eight-year loan. He’d put a workout room and a weight machine in the basement and decorated the place with lots of ducks and outdoors pictures.

He dated occasionally, but always felt that his job and his son kept him too busy for chasing around. He was thirty-two years old and Jason was nearly eleven so he figured with his mother helping they could go it the rest of the way without a woman in the house.

He could cook Chinese and had decent recipes for shish kebab and chicken cordon bleu, but Jason would rather have a steak than the fancy stuff so Jack Holtz got pretty good on the grill.

Jack Holtz had thick black hair, and behind his aviator glasses were large, heavily lashed dark eyes, the kind they used to call “bedroom eyes.” As a result of an incorrect bite alignment his lower jaw looked unusually small and called attention away from the large neck below it and the big chest below that-the neck and chest of a guy who’d pushed some iron around. You had to be around him a bit before you noticed that he was fairly tall and well put together.

That hair of his was the kind you see on the Bryl-Creem ads, full and dense and black. Before he was finished with this case it’d be the kind you see on the Grecian Formula ads: steel-gray, all of it.

He was something of a loner and didn’t hang around with other cops, but the relationship between Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz worked for them. Jack Holtz was the kind of investigator who wanted to be as good as he could be, but wasn’t sure he could be better than that. He worried about not having been to college. He thought he didn’t express himself well, especially in court, when in fact he was an excellent witness. He was content to play second banana.

Joe VanNort on the other hand pointed out that the Bill Bradfield gang had a whole bushel of college degrees and not one of them could tell a cat turd from a Candy Kiss. He wasn’t intimidated by sheepskins and mortarboards. He was a confident top banana.

The comb found in the trunk of Susan Reinert’s car got worked during July. Information arrived in bits and pieces. A call to the War College in Carlisle identified the acronym, 79th USARCOM. A call from a cop in the King of Prussia area gave them a lead on a former principal named Dr. Jay C. Smith who’d taught at the same school where Susan Reinert had worked. Another call to the 79th Army Reserve Command brought the news that Jay C. Smith had been a colonel in the command prior to his retirement. Then they learned that Jay Smith had gone to prison on Monday, June 25th, from a Harrisburg courtroom.

When the comb and the Jay Smith connection was explained to Joe VanNort, he wasn’t impressed.

“It’s too obvious,” he said. “This Jay C. Smith is in a whole pack of trouble and a comb from his army outfit ends up under the body. Too obvious. Sounds like something our pal Bradfield might dream up to throw suspicion on his old nut-case principal.”

Joe VanNort stuck with that notion for several months.

While Bill Bradfield and Chris were winding up their summer studies Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz made another trip to St. John’s. Only this time they made a prearranged visit to a New Mexico judge and had a court order when they arrived, an order requiring Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas to submit to fingerprinting so that their prints could be compared to unidentified lifts taken in the Reinert home and car.

Bill Bradfield didn’t like any of it, paricularly the ride to the state police headquarters where he was mugged and printed like a thug. And he really didn’t like being driven in a separate car from Chris Pappas. And Chris didn’t like being photographed, because the mug shot had nothing to do with fingerprint comparison.

When Bill Bradfield next called home he told Vince Valaitis that Joe VanNort was an extremely “unintelligent” man, and that as far as VanNort’s partner was concerned, he’d like to have thrown Holtz into the school fountain.

He was incensed with Holtz because when he was trying to explain to the cretinous cop about the Great Books Program at St. John’s, and how demanding it was, and how he resented being subjected to police harassment, Jack Holtz had said, “The Bible’s a great book. I don’t read it myself, but I know it says in there, thou shalt not kill.”

Bill Bradfield asked only one question the whole time he was with the cops during their second visit to Santa Fe.

He asked, “How long do the state police stay on a murder case?”

When the cops had made their second appointment at St. John’s a college staff member informed Chris Pappas they were coming, and Chris told his mentor who ordered him to get the IBM typewriter out of Bill Bradfields room and into his own.

After the cops went home, Bill Bradfield visited the Olsens after class and brought a small metal strongbox with him.

“I’ve got some papers in here,” he told Jeff Olsen. “They’re not really important, but the police might find them and manipulate them to try to manufacture some evidence. Could you hold this box for me?”

“Sure,” Jeff Olsen said. “I’ll lock it in the trunk of my car.”

“And I’d like you to keep a typewriter for me,” Bill Bradfield said. “It was used to write some letters to Susan Reinert. They were nothing of course, but you know the cops.”

“Just leave it in this apartment,” Jeff Olsen said. “Put it right there on the dining room table.”

Naturally, Chris got the assignment of lugging the heavy typewriter to the Olsen apartment. These days he was all muscle and faith.

Later, Bill Bradfield, accompanied by Rachel, came again to the apartment of Jeff Olsen, with another important request. He wanted to use the fireplace. Bill Bradfield was carrying a wastebasket filled with documents of one sort or another.

“These’re just school papers and things belonging to Susan Reinert,” Bill Bradfield explained. “I don’t know why I save everything. It’s mostly stuff from her students.”

Young Olsen told him to fire away and Bill Bradfield fed the papers into the fireplace and burned them and stirred up the ashes.

Then he said, “Jeffrey, if the police should come here or contact you at any time, you don’t have to cooperate with them. They’ll try to trick you. But don’t tell them that I warned you of that because then they’ll twist what you say and try to make me look as though I’m obstructing their investigation.”

And the student nodded and said, “Gotcha.”

“I simply trusted Bill Bradfield completely. I believed he was not guilty,” Jeff Olsen reported at a later time.

“I need a favor,” Bill Bradfield said to Chris as they were preparing for departure from Santa Fe. “Could you switch typing elements for me? You have a machine just like it, and I’m sure the typing balls are interchangeable.”

But now for the first time Chris was thinking about saving his own skin. He was starting to get some very funny feelings about the whole business.

He said, “Bill, why don’t you just throw the typing ball away if it bothers you?”

The answer was pure Bradfield. “I’m afraid to,” he said. “You never know when you might need something and if you throw it away it’s gone for good. I’d feel so much better if you kept it. You know how to remove them, don’t you?”

“After we get home I’ll see what I can do,” Chris Pappas said.

But the handyman realized it didn’t take a Wernher von Braun to replace typing balls. Chris had started worrying a whole lot when Bill Bradfield first said that he’d loaned the typewriter to Susan Reinert. And it goosed Chris a bit when he heard about a $25,000 “money receipt.”

He’d read a news report that Susan Reinert had been unable to remove her $25,000 in large increments, and had to withdraw it in smaller increments. He started thinking about Bill Bradfield claiming that his life savings of $28,000 had to be removed in increments of $5,000.

Chris Pappas felt like a cripple who didn’t want to walk, but some hairy gorilla in a white smock kept dumping his wheelchair and forcing those baby steps.

He was beginning to put Bill Bradfields stories under a bright light for a little third degree. And the answers were not in English, Latin or Greek. Bill Bradfield just might have had a little something to do with misappropriating the $25,000 investment of Susan Reinert.

As to Bill Bradfield having something to do with the murder of Susan Reinert and the disappearance of her children, Chris Pappas wasn’t ready to deal with that one yet. He was protected by deductive reasoning. To Chris Pappas it was a simple syllogism. If Bill Bradfield revered Thomas Aquinas, then he could never be a truly bad man. At worst he could be a flawed good man. A flawed good man might be tempted to misappropriate a sum of money that he intended to repay, but only a truly evil man could do the other thing.

It can be theorized that Chris Pappas suffered a bit of added torment over the whole business of the “flawed good man” and the “misappropriation” of money. It is not precisely clear whether he actually informed Bill Bradfield that he was taking $1,300 out of the safety deposit box to buy his brothers trade-in car.

Flawed good men. The concentric circles around William Bradfield were full of them, and Chris Pappas was beginning to indulge some uncomfortable ideas. He absolutely refused to give Bill Bradfield his own typing ball. The typeface style on Bill Bradfields typewriter was Gothic, of course.

The commandant of the Pennsylvania state troopers, a recent appointee of Governor Thornburgh, was a former special agent of the FBI from the Pittsburgh office. The governor had served western Pennsylvania for several years as a U.S. attorney so they knew each other pretty well.

Ken Reinert had been calling his congressman and the U.S. attorney trying to persuade somebody to bring the FBI into the case. He didn’t have faith in Joe VanNort and his state troopers. So whether it was pressure from the congressman or from Senator Schweiker or Governor Thornburgh, the FBI agreed to enter the Reinert case on the pretext that the children were possibly kidnap victims being held in some other state for a future ransom demand. Farfetched, but it satisfied federal requirements for the time being.

Joe VanNort treated the news that the feds were coming as if the Reds were coming. He had a little talk with his team of five cops telling them what to expect.

“Okay, we gotta cooperate with them,” he said. “But they ain’t never goin’ in the Reinert house unless there’s a trooper with them. Got that? And if anybody tries to push you around, you come to me and tell me right now! Remember, they know nothin’ about homicide. They’re glory boys. They come in and give press conferences, and like that. They got no real field experience. They got no real court experience. No real police experience. They’re not cops. They’re a bunch of lawyers and bookkeepers. No, they’re a bunch a … schoolteachers, is what they are!”

It was the worst thing Joe VanNort could think of to describe a special agent of the FBI.

Civilians have seldom understood the real danger inherent in police work. It has never been particularly hazardous to the body, not since Sir Robert Peel first organized his corps of bobbies. This line of work has always been a threat to the spirit.

That summer it was dramatized. It was a night like other nights since the investigation had started: frustrating, fruitless, maddening. And now they were awaiting the arrival of eighteen special agents to form a joint task force.

There they sat long after they should have gone home: Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz and a few other troopers. No one remembers who started it, but it was a night when the spirit of a cop could burst loose and show itself without the badge and veneer of cynicism. That scarred-up cop spirit can turn as panicky as a colt in a barn fire.

One of the troopers had a bad thought, just a little jock-itch of a thought, but within five minutes it was like a raging syphilis epidemic.

The trooper said, “Do you know something? Our photos of the corpse aren’t all that recognizable. I mean, she was beat up pretty bad. I mean, a person who knew her could look at our photos and think it was Susan Rienert. But what if it was somebody else?”

Everybody laughed.

But then Jack Holtz said, “You know, that mortician who cremated her said he was a little mixed up by what her brother told him to do. What if Pat Gallagher told him to burn the body, and after it was done tried to convince the mortician that he misunderstood the instructions?”

“You mean what if Pat Gallagher is in on it with …”

“Bill Bradfield!”

“And Ken Reinert is …”

“Also in on it! He identified the wrong corpse on purpose!”

“And Susan Reinert is …”

“In England with her kids waiting for her boyfriend to inherit seven hundred and thirty G’s!”

“And the body we have is …”

“Maybe some poor hooker that could pass for Susan Reinert in morgue photos!”

“And then Bradfield …”

“Gives Gallagher and Ken Reinert their quiet money and goes off to England and meets his new family and they buy a boat and go sailing off to …”

“The Greek islands or the Aegean Sea or some canal in Venice where Ezra Pound mighta flushed his freaking toilet one time!”

Well, there it was. The homicide investigator’s nightmare. All the cops were sitting around stunned. And Joe VanNort’s cynical blackjack mouth was hanging open, about to lose his eighty-first Marlboro of the day.

Jack Holtz was beating his snuff to death and spitting juice into a Coke bottle at a rate of forty globs per minute. He was also pressing the nose piece on his glasses, which is a laugh because he was so cautious and controlled you could heave him off a cliff in Acapulco and he’d come up with his Timex and those glasses digging into his cheeks like surgical implants.

Every cop in the room had a nightmare vision of eighteen FBI agents strutting in long enough to have lunch. Then in forty-eight hours they’d load the real Susan Reinert and her kids on a London Concorde heading for JFK and a press conference where Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz and all the others wouldn’t be heard over the thunder of cackles, snorts and guffaws. The horror of it all was professional humiliation.

A telephone call was made. The latent-prints specialist verified that the fingerprints on the corpse matched the lifts found all over the bedroom and bathroom of Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore.

The cops all looked at each other with shit-I-knew-it-all-the-time grins.

And that’s how a cop’s mind works.