Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

9

Sheriff Michael Halloran pushed his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he opened them again, he saw Sharon Mueller standing in his office doorway.

‘Those things’ll kill your eyes.’ She nodded toward the green-shaded lamp on his desk.

‘It’s a reading lamp. I’ve been reading.’

‘It’s too dark in here for reading.’ She reached for the wall switch, dropped her hand when he shook his head. She was wearing her heavy jacket, collar pulled up around her ears because her hair was too short to do the job.

‘You coming or going?’ Halloran asked. ‘And if you’re going, what’re you still doing here? It’s almost midnight.’

‘Stuff on the Kleinfeldts. Don’t worry. I’m off the clock.’

‘I’m not worried, and you’re not off the clock.’

She wandered into the office and started touching things – furniture, books, the cord for the blinds Halloran never pulled over the big window. He’d known a lot of women who did that whenever they entered someone else’s environment, as if they could gather information through their fingertips. She stopped directly in front of his desk. ‘How’s your hand?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Bonar said you put it through a wall at Kleinfeldts’ this afternoon.’

‘I was annoyed.’ And he was annoyed now, too. ‘I asked you what you were doing here so late.’

She looked at him for a minute, then sat down in a chair facing his desk. ‘I’ve been looking at all the interviews from today. Mine and everybody else’s.’

‘Did Simons tell you to do that?’

‘No, but it needed doing.’ She tossed a thick file folder onto his desk. Several sheets of paper were stapled to the front cover. ‘Individual reports are inside. That’s a list of all the parishioners, all checked off except a couple – one guy was in the hospital, another couple was visiting their daughter in Nebraska, like that. No red flags anywhere.’

‘You talked to everybody they tried getting banned from the church?’

‘Oh yeah. Twenty-three of them, can you believe that? Four are actually gay, in case you’re interested.’

‘They told you that?’

‘Hell, no. But they are.’

Halloran glanced down at the list and saw names he’d known his whole life. Sharon had marked the ones the Kleinfeldts had accused of homosexuality with a yellow highlighter. When he caught himself wondering which ones were actually gay, he set the list aside. ‘But no red flags.’

Sharon shrugged. ‘Not really. Oh, a lot of them were pissed; a few of them even tried beating the Kleinfeldts at their own game – getting them kicked out of the church for bearing false witness or something like that. But it turns out the Catholics will forgive you for breaking one of the Ten Commandments. You can still be a card-carrying Pope dope. On the other hand, practice a sexual preference in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult and you’re out of there. Jerks.’ She blew out a long, exasperated sigh. ‘Anyway, after the first few accusations, nobody paid much attention anymore. I mean, the Kleinfeldts thought Mrs Wickers was gay. The woman is eighty-three years old and totally around the bend, doesn’t have a clue what a homosexual is, let alone if she might be one. Her kids are bitter about it – hell, a lot of the twenty-three are – but none of them are homicidal. Trust me.’

‘I do.’

‘Okay. I also checked in with VICAP and NCIC. We’ve got the only creative thoracic carver in the country at the moment. At least with a religious theme. There’s a guy in Omaha doing breasts, but he’s just chopping them off, and if you were talking genitalia, even faces, they’ve got a wide assortment . . .’ Suddenly she pressed her lips together and stared hard at a point on the wall behind his head. ‘There’s stuff going on out there you wouldn’t believe, Halloran, you know?’

She looked at him, stood up, then sat down again. ‘You look bad. You need to go home.’

‘So do you. Good night, Sharon.’ He pulled a stack of papers into the pool of light and started reading again.

‘You want to talk about it?’

‘About what?’

‘Danny.’

‘Christ, no.’ He kept reading.

‘Well, I do.’

‘Then go do it somewhere else.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Mike.’

‘I am not one of your abuse cases, Sharon, and I don’t need analysis from a kid with a penny-ante U of W psych degree, so give it a rest.’

‘You’re doing the mea culpa Catholic thing. It’s stupid.’

‘Fuck you, Sharon, goddamnit.’

‘Well, that might help, but I don’t think you’re ready for it yet. Never heard you say the F-word before.’

Halloran looked at this nice young Wisconsin woman who dealt with sexual abuse of children almost every day of her life, and yet couldn’t bring herself to say the F-word. ‘Get out of here,’ he said wearily. ‘Go home. Leave me alone.’

She sat there quietly for a moment, staring at the stacks of papers on his desk. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Go.’

‘Can’t do it. I love this place. The buzzing fluorescent lights, the lingering smell of sweat, the sexual harassment – I can’t get enough.’

Halloran pushed his chair a few inches back from his desk and looked at her. ‘Tell me what I’ve got to do to get rid of you.’

‘What are all those?’ She nodded at the stacks of papers.

Halloran sighed. ‘Stuff we pulled out of a home office at Kleinfeldts’. Paid bills, some receipts, tax returns, mostly.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Bank statements, correspondence . . . ?’

Halloran shook his head. ‘Nothing. They paid cash for everything. I ran a credit check this afternoon when we came up empty at the house, and these people simply did not exist in any databank in the country.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘That’s what I would have said before today, but I’m running out of rocks to turn over. DMV didn’t even have anything, and that really frosts me. As far as I can tell, the Kleinfeldts have been driving in my county for the past ten years without a driver’s license.’

Sharon was really interested now. She was leaning forward, eyeing the papers on his desk trying to read upside down. ‘They were really hiding.’

‘They really were.’

‘And whoever they were hiding from obviously found them.’

‘Unless you ascribe to Commissioner Heimke’s theory that it was either a gangland slaying or a nomadic psycho.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I kid you not.’ He thumbed through a packet of papers on top of one of the stacks: a five-year-old tax return. ‘Anyway, if you’re nixing disgruntled parishioners, I’ve got to find somebody else who at least knew these people enough to want them dead, and there certainly isn’t anyone in this county that qualifies. They might as well have been hermits.’

‘So you’re getting their old addresses from tax returns.’

‘That’s what I thought I was doing, but the copies only go back ten years, just as long as they’ve lived here. So I called the IRS to request previous addresses and got some song and dance about privileged information and special dispensation, and when I threatened warrant the little snip on the other end said good luck on the journey through Federal court, he’d talk to me in about fifty years.’

‘Jerks,’ Sharon muttered, getting up and heading for the door.

‘I thought the Catholics were the jerks.’

‘It’s a big category. There’s room for everybody. Give me a minute.’

‘To what?’ He followed her out into the main office, squinting in the sudden brightness, noticing for the first time the persistent buzz of the overhead fluorescents. He looked around at all the empty desks. ‘Where are Cleaton and Billings?’

‘Downstairs.’ Sharon settled into her chair, grabbed the phone, and punched in a number from memory. ‘Melissa’s on dispatch tonight. Nobody works up here when Melissa’s on dispatch. Haven’t you ever been here for the third?’

‘Not that I can remember.’ Halloran dropped into Cleaton’s chair at the desk next to Sharon’s and called up a mental image of Melissa Kemke, the Marilyn Monroe lookalike who was the deputy manning dispatch tonight. ‘They don’t harass her, do they?’

Sharon snorted. ‘Not unless they have a death wish. They just like to look at her. She thinks it’s funny.’

‘She does?’

‘Of course.’

Of course? He was missing something about women. Again. ‘Who are you calling at this hour anyway?’

‘A guy who never sleeps . . . Jimmy? Sharon. Listen, we’re looking for previous addresses on the Kleinfeldts, you heard about them? Yeah, well, we’re getting stonewalled by your people. Some sort of special dispensation shit . . .’ She listened silently for a moment, then said, ‘You can do that? Bonzai.’

She hung up and spun her chair to face Halloran.

‘You got a mole in the IRS?’ he asked.

She ignored the question. ‘Apparently it’s possible to keep your addresses off the form under special circumstances. Witness protection, stalkers, stuff like that. That’s probably what the Kleinfeldts did, and addresses like that aren’t accessible, even by subpoena. IRS keeps them locked down. Now under the circumstances, since they’re dead and all, we might be able to get them after we jump through about a thousand hoops at the Federal level, like your guy said, but that could take months.’

‘Damnit.’

‘Anyway, he’s gonna call back. Shouldn’t take long.’

Halloran blinked at her. ‘He’s going to get the addresses? Now?’

‘Sure.’

‘Isn’t that against the law?’

‘Oh yeah, but Jimmy’s a pretty decent hacker. He can hook up to the database from his home computer and make it look like the contact came from Timbuktu. They’ll never figure it out. He’s the guy they call when someone else tries to do it.’

‘Jimmy must owe you big time.’

Sharon shrugged. ‘Sort of. I sleep with him every now and then.’

Halloran just sat there and tried not to look surprised.

Sharon said, ‘That’s a pretty good poker face, Mike.’

‘Thanks. I’m working hard at it.’ Nice Wisconsin women might not say the F-word, but apparently they could do it.

‘Just because you’re a monk doesn’t mean the rest of the world . . .’ The phone rang and she snatched it off the hook. ‘Yeah, Jimmy.’ She listened for a time, then said, ‘No kidding. How many? Huh. Okay. Thanks. No, I do not owe you, you four-sided fool.’ She hung up and went over to the fax machine. ‘He’s sending a list.’

Right on cue, the machine hummed and started to kick out a page. Sharon tipped her head to read the lines as they appeared. ‘These were some strange ducks,’ she murmured. ‘Kleinfeldt isn’t their real name, for one thing.’

Halloran raised his brows and waited.

‘Looks like they had . . . Jesus . . . they changed their name every time they moved, and these people moved a lot.’ She handed the first page to Halloran and started reading the second as it scrolled out of the machine. ‘Okay. This looks like the first joint return, almost forty years ago in Atlanta. They were the Bradfords then. Stayed in Atlanta for four years, then moved to New York City, stayed there twelve years, then they turn up in Chicago as the Sandfords . . . Huh. Only nine months there, then they start hopping all over the place.’ She passed Halloran page two and started reading the third. ‘Mauers in Dallas, the Beamises in Denver, the Chitterings in California, off the books for a year, maybe out of the country, then they land here as the Kleinfeldts.’

‘And they’ve been here for ten years.’

‘Right. Must have been a good safe house.’

Halloran grunted. ‘For a while.’ He took the last sheet from her and sat up a little straighter, energized. ‘This is great, Sharon. Thanks. Now go home, get some rest.’ He took a look at Cleaton’s phone, thought maybe he should be wearing rubber gloves before he touched it, then said the hell with it and dragged it toward him across the desk.

‘Who are you calling?’

‘The locals at all these old addresses.’

She sighed and slipped out of her jacket, then readjusted her shoulder holster. ‘It’s a long list. Give me half.’

‘You’ve done enough . . .’

‘Gimme.’ She wiggled her fingers at him.

‘You’re going to take some grief for being here alone with me this late.’

‘No problem. I’ll just tell them I was trying to sleep my way to the top of the Kingsford County Sheriff’s Department.’

‘You don’t have to go that far. Tonight I’d give this job away.’

Sharon smiled. ‘The job wasn’t exactly what I wanted.’

Halloran watched her punching numbers on her own phone, thinking that he would never understand women.

After an hour working the phones, making enemies of sleeping law officers all across the country, Halloran finally caught a break.

‘Chitterings? Hell, yes, I remember them.’

The minute Halloran had mentioned the name to the California detective, the sleep had gone out of his voice. Halloran could almost imagine him jerking up in bed. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Sharon, ‘Got something.’

‘Damn explosions could have taken out the whole neighborhood if the houses hadn’t been so far apart,’ the detective went on.

‘Explosions?’

‘Yeah. What happened was somebody turned on all the gas in the house, dumped the pilots, then torched it. Blew like a son of a bitch, then burned right to the ground before FD even made it to the scene. Santa Anas that night, you know. Fire rules the world when there’s a Santa Ana wind blowing.’

Halloran was scribbling furiously on the back of an envelope. ‘What about the Chitterings?’

‘Well, that’s the weird part,’ the detective said. ‘They had a little guest house out by the pool. Said they were sleeping there that night, for no good reason I ever heard. And that’s about all I’m going to give until you tell me what you’re working.’

‘Double homicide.’

‘No shit. The Chitterings?’

‘I guess. Only they called themselves the Kleinfeldts here.’

‘Huh. Might have guessed. You know I worked that case for about a week, but before I could really get into it they just disappeared. Poof. Sent me a note, if you can believe that. Sent me a goddamned note saying the fire was their fault, some kind of bullshit about trying to fix the hot water heater.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Hell, no, it isn’t possible. Arson confirmed accelerants, kerosene, in five different locations in the house, and you know what the Chitterings said? Lamps. Friggin’ kerosene lamps. Bullshit is what I said, but my chief is clicking his heels because we can clear a case, and so he shuts me down cold.’

‘I hear you,’ Halloran said.

‘So they bought it, huh?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Listen. Department doesn’t have a file here, since according to the vics there was no crime, but I’ve still got my notes. Keep ’em at home. I’ll fax them out to you in the morning if you let me know what you dig up. Damn case has been driving me nuts for years.’

Halloran agreed, gave him the fax number, then hung up and filled in Sharon. When he finished, she leaned back in her chair and whistled softly. ‘Man, that was twelve years ago, and they were still scared. This has got to be some serious vendetta.’

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and thought that if he didn’t move soon, he’d fall asleep where he sat. ‘You get anything?’

‘Zilch in Dallas. Chicago is a maybe. The on-duty guy thought he remembered some hullabaloo about a Sandford family – that’s the name they were using there – that went down years ago, just before he joined up. Sandford’s not exactly a unique name, though, so it could be nothing. Said he’d have someone dig through the archives tomorrow.’

She yawned and raised her arms in a stretch that showed Halloran a little more than he thought he should see of what was under her uniform shirt. ‘I’m whipped.’

‘I seem to remember telling you to go home a long time ago.’

‘Yeah, well, I seem to remember telling you the same thing.’ She gave him a glance. ‘You look worse than I do.’

‘Always did.’

She smiled a little, stood, pulled on her jacket, reached in to settle her shoulder holster properly, then zipped up. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Getting the first date out of the way.’ She pulled a dark watch cap over her head, flattening a fringe of brown against her forehead. ‘Next time we can sleep together.’

Well, that certainly woke him up.