The Killing House

12

‘I assumed you’d heard it on the news or read about it on the Internet,’ Karim said.

Fletcher shook his head. He had taken few breaks on his journey from Colorado to Chicago, and these had been spent processing the information he’d collected, forming possible theories about the Herrera family, the female shooter and what had been occurring inside the house before he showed up.

‘What happened?’

‘An explosion took down most of Theresa Herrera’s house,’ Karim said. ‘It happened before the police arrived. The shock wave shattered the windows of nearby homes, and the falling debris caused significant property damage. No casualties, thank God, just minor injuries from the exploding glass and the usual trauma one experiences in such things.’ Karim flicked his ash on the plate. ‘The Applewood police station is small, and since they’re ill-equipped to deal with something like this, they called on their brothers in blue in Denver for assistance. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, incidentally, has a field office in Denver, so they too were summoned.

‘The preliminary theory is that the bomb was placed on the first floor. The blast pattern suggests dynamite. You didn’t hear it go off?’

‘No,’ Fletcher said. ‘And I doubt the shooter returned to the house to plant the bomb, so it was detonated either by a timer or remotely by a beeper or a cell phone.’

‘Why plant a bomb?’

‘To destroy evidence. Is there any evidence?’

Karim let loose a dark chuckle. ‘The storm dumped almost two feet of snow by the time it tapered off late yesterday afternoon. It’s going to be quite some time before the police find anything of value — it will be weeks before any information trickles my way.’

‘From your source.’

‘ Sources. Now that the ATF is in play, the agent I know there will discreetly send me copies of the reports once they’ve been filed. The Colorado homicide detective has agreed to keep me in the loop. He knows that, when the time is right, I’ll give him the information he needs to make an arrest. These sort of high-profile cases come around once in a lifetime. They can make or break a career.’

‘So you intend on pursuing this.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I gave my word to Theresa Herrera that I’d look into her son’s abduction.’

‘And now her murder.’

‘And now her murder,’ Karim repeated softly. ‘There’s also a personal reason.’

‘Which is?’

‘Like you, I don’t enjoy loose ends — or mysteries. I want to find this woman.’ Karim tapped a finger against the sketch. ‘I want to know what she was doing inside Theresa Herrera’s house.’

‘And you don’t believe Colorado is up to the task.’

Karim shrugged. ‘Who’s to say? You know how it goes with small-town police departments. The best talent moves on to greener and more lucrative pastures, and what’s left behind is more often than not a midlevel offering of people who are constantly being threatened by yet another round of budget cuts, bureaucratic red-tape and superiors who are more concerned about advancing up the career ladder than rolling up their sleeves and doing actual work.’

‘Denver is assisting them.’

‘But that will last for only so long. Denver has its own problems, and as for the ATF… When it comes to bureaucracies, it’s been my experience that shit always floats to the top. I saw it happen at the Agency, and I know you witnessed it at the FBI. I’ve learned not to place my trust in such things.’

Fletcher drank some of his coffee.

‘Theresa Herrera told me her husband had gone out that night with a friend. Has he shown up?’

‘The police have been unable to locate him,’ Karim said. ‘At the moment they have him listed as a “person of interest”. Until they find him — or what’s left of him, if he was inside the house when it exploded — they’re obligated to investigate the theory that he planted the bomb, which only benefits us. While they’re chasing their straw man, we can pursue this mystery woman who shot you without them looking over our shoulders.’

‘What can you tell me about Barry Herrera? I assume you conducted a background check.’

‘I always perform a thorough search on anyone looking to hire me.’

‘And?’

‘He’s as clean as a whistle,’ Karim said. ‘The man was born and raised in Montpelier, Vermont, the only child of Marcus and Samantha Herrera. They both died of cancer — the father in 1978, the mother in 1984. Barry attended the local high school, where he excelled in academics and tennis. Brown offered him a scholarship. He graduated summa cum lade and moved on to the BU School of Medicine, where he picked psychiatry as his field of study. From there he, like many doctors, bounced around various public and private hospitals, working mainly with troubled children. In 1989 he met Theresa Henderson, an office assistant at a privately owned clinic in Raleigh, South Carolina. They married in 1993 and moved to Applewood, Colorado, in 1998, when he accepted a job.’

‘And the wife?’

‘Unremarkable. Born Theresa King in Danbury, Connecticut. Went to the public school and local college. Moved with a college friend to South Carolina, met Barry Herrera, married.’

‘How deep did you dig?’

‘As deep as I could,’ Karim said. ‘A routine background check provides a snapshot — a starting point. The real treasures, as you well know, are locked behind secured databases scattered all across the Internet. I assigned someone else to do the actual data mining. This person is as good with computers as you are.’ Then, with a sly grin, Karim added, ‘Maybe even better.’

‘Anything jump out?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Financials?’

‘Barry made a good living, so the wife stayed at home. They had a reasonable mortgage, which they paid on time every month, along with their credit card and car loans. They invested in their retirement accounts and saved a tidy sum for an emergency. No suspicious payments or withdrawals. They were a boring, upper-middle-class couple living the American dream.’

‘Until someone abducted their son.’

‘Yes,’ Karim said sombrely. ‘Until that.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘No. I was scheduled to meet him and his wife yesterday at their home. I never spoke to the man on the phone, only his wife. She was the one who initiated contact.’

‘Did he share his wife’s belief that her son was still alive?’

‘She never mentioned anything to the contrary.’

‘What did she say about her husband?’

‘Just that he was busy. That in the last two years he spent more time away from home, burying himself in his work as a child psychiatrist. What happened to their son put a strain on their marriage. These things often do.’

Karim, Fletcher knew, had first-hand experience with such matters.

For years Karim had maintained a rather bonhomie relationship with his ex-wife, Judith, often travelling to England to share holidays with her extended family, who still welcomed him into the fold. Their son had wanted to attend high school in the States, and at age fifteen moved across the pond to live with his father.

Jason Karim was seventeen years old when he was abducted on his way home from a private Manhattan school. Karim had endured five dreadful, nightmarish days before his son’s body turned up in an alley in the Bronx. Karim flew to London to deliver the news to his ex-wife.

Judith blamed him for their son’s murder. Jason should never have been allowed to navigate his way through such a dangerous city, especially at night. Karim acquiesced to his ex-wife’s wishes to have their son buried in London. But Judith had attended neither the wake nor the service; she’d suffered a breakdown and was now confined to a private hospital paid for by Karim.

Karim still made semi-annual pilgrimages to visit Judith, who had retreated to a cocoon of fantasy, telling doctors that her son was alive, travelling the globe as a hedge-fund manager. Despite medication and therapy, she still regularly picked up the phone, dialled an imaginary number and pretended to speak to her imaginary son, his imaginary wife and her two imaginary grandchildren — a boy named Bradley and a girl named Clare.

Karim had used his personal loss as a turning point. The ghost of Jason Karim was both the inspiration for, and a silent partner in, his father’s enterprise of helping fellow victims who called on him for assistance. Each case he solved, each missing child he recovered, provided not only a purpose to his life but also helped him to manage the considerable guilt he dragged like shackles through his days.

‘Clearly something has aroused your curiosity,’ Karim said. ‘Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked me to fly out and personally hand-deliver a portable mass spectrometer.’

Fletcher finished the last of his coffee, thinking about the manila folder in front of him, wondering where he should start.

‘Meet me in the dining room,’ he said.