Criminal past, p.42
Criminal Past, page 42
part #6 of Hazard and Somerset Series
Some other guarantee. Something to make sure that the evidence didn’t disappear if a very bad accident happened to Graham.
Hazard took the stairs two at a time down, but instead of heading to the car, he went into the motel office. It was a small room with a divider. Bulletproof glass and a turnstile told a story about the Deluxe Drive-in. Hazard rapped on the glass.
The guy who answered was probably in his thirties, his hair thinning and combed over in a part that started at his ear. “Twenty dollars by the hour.”
“What about a day?”
“Thirty. But you’ll have to take the second floor.”
“The guys who rented those third-floor rooms.”
“What about them?”
Hazard produced his badge and pressed it against the glass. “Tell me about them.”
“Come on, man.”
Hazard clinked the badge against the glass again.
“What’s there to tell? They rented rooms for the weekend, but the older guy paid extra, cash, so I’d hold the rooms for the rest of the week. They never even come out. They must be like bunnies. Maybe they go out to eat or something, but otherwise, they must be a couple of jackrabbits.”
“What did the older guy give you?”
“Like, how much? Two hundred.”
“No. What did he give you?”
The guy frowned, and the wrinkles ran all the way up under his combover. “Like, what bills? I don’t know. Twenties. Maybe a fifty. We don’t take anything bigger than a fifty.”
“Bullshit me one more time and I’ll find a way around that glass.”
“I don’t even know what you’re asking.”
“What did he give you?”
“Nothing. Cash. That was it.”
Hazard tapped steadily on the glass with his badge, measuring the beat to his words. “Here’s how this is going to go: either you give me what he gave you, or we make this official. And then I’ll have to file a report about minors engaging in illicit activities on the premises. And I’ll have to file a report about sex trafficking on the premises. And I’ll have to make a report about the sale and possibly manufacture of drugs on the premises.”
The guy with his hair parted right above his ear mouthed each significant word as Hazard said it: minors, trafficking, manufacture, drugs. He took each word like a punch. “No way. That’s not even true, man. None of that stuff, we don’t have any of it at the Deluxe.”
“I think you do. But I guess we’ll have to see what an official investigation turns up. We might even have to shut this place down for a while. Six weeks should do it.”
Six weeks, the guy mouthed.
“He still didn’t give you anything?”
“It’s just an envelope. I mean, he asked me to put it in the safe, and I said sure, even though we don’t have a safe. But I kept it for him because he gave me fifty bucks. It’s just an envelope.”
Hazard rolled his hand.
“He asked me to hold onto it for him.”
“Yeah. And now I’m asking you to get it. And I have a badge.”
The balding guy scurried into the back. When he returned, he held a manila envelope that he passed through the turnstile.
“He gave me fifty bucks to hold onto it.”
“If you wanted money, you shouldn’t have passed it through already. And you really shouldn’t try to extort a cop.” Hazard rapped the edge of his badge on the glass one last time and left. In the car, he checked the envelope: a flash drive. On the front of the envelope was scribbled an address in St. Louis. That was it.
The patrol car roared to life, and Hazard drove back to the apartment. As he drove, he put the flash drive out of his mind for the moment and thought. All the jams, all the kinks, all the disruptions to Hazard’s thinking had burned off in the intensity of this new state. He only had three things to worry about, and he was going to deal with them in order. First: link Sherman Newton to Jeff’s murder.
The connection was already there, Hazard knew. He had known there was something, some link, between the mayor and Jeff because of the package Ted Kjar had sent to the Langhams and that picture of Jeff standing outside a cabin. But now, after speaking to Schaming in the hospital, Hazard knew that Jeff’s death was tied up in the recent events. It was more than a tragedy from the past. It was more, even, than a killer’s successful ploy to pass off a murder as a suicide. Jeff’s death had to do with things today, right now. And Hazard felt like he had the first thread on how it connected.
Ted Kjar was that thread. Ted Kjar was the link. The FBI agents had come here, following up on a cold case—but a white-collar case, a corporate fraud case. And Hollace had come here, with his gang war, and told Hazard that Jeff’s death hadn’t been a suicide. But only Ted Kjar had links to both. Ted Kjar had been an accountant. Ted Kjar had been an employee at InnovateMidwest, conducting internal audits. He had been a good accountant. Until now, Hazard had assumed that Ted had somehow run afoul of the mayor in two separate ways: first, by uncovering some sort of illegal dealing within InnovateMidwest and threatening to expose it; then, in a bizarre coincidence, by uncovering some truth about Jeff during his research for his book. But that didn’t make sense, Hazard realized. It was too much coincidence. What if, instead, Kjar’s forensic accounting had led him to the truth about Jeff’s death?
Hazard grimaced as he pulled into the Crofter’s Mark parking garage. If Somers were here, he’d push back on Hazard’s theory. He’d say something about how that was still a huge coincidence. He’d say that it wasn’t really any better than Hazard’s original explanation that Ted Kjar had somehow separately uncovered two separate conspiracies. And, Hazard felt a hint of smile crack the edges of his mouth, Somers would point out that since Hazard wasn’t a trained accountant, they’d need an expert to comb through all of InnovateMidwest’s paperwork if they wanted to have a hope of finding what Kjar had found. And then, indulging in his general preference for pushing every single one of Hazard’s buttons, Somers would have said something stupid, something like, It might as well have been the other way. Maybe Kjar was doing research for his book and—
Hazard braked so hard that the cruiser’s tires screeched, and George Larsen, from 3C, stopped in the middle of the parking garage and glared. Hazard barely saw him.
For fuck’s sake.
Even when Somers was absent, even when he was tied up and being tortured and God only knew how far away, he was still an inescapable asshole. And he was right.
Somers—it barely mattered now that Hazard had imagined the whole conversation—Somers was right. Going through the finances, going through all of that, that was the wrong way. That was a dead end. And Ted Kjar had known it. He hadn’t sent extensive financial records and a detailed paper trail to the Langham household. What had he sent?
Hazard’s smile was so cold he thought it might have frosted the glass. Kjar had sent his book. Chapter four. The missing manuscript. And he had sent it to the family of a boy who had been murdered as insurance so that in case he died, there would be a way for someone else to follow the trail back to Newton.
Why hadn’t Kjar included a note or a letter? Why hadn’t he explained what he had discovered? Why hadn’t he gone to the police? Hazard didn’t know, but he remembered Jo Kjar telling them about interrupted phone calls, and Ted’s increasing paranoia, and his inexplicable disappearances. He swore at himself, loudly, and hammered the dash. Hazard had missed the most important, the most obvious fact about the whole case, the one that explained Kjar’s erratic behavior and the convoluted course of this case: Mayor Newton had been telling the truth.
At their first and only meeting with the mayor, Newton had provided Hazard and Somers with documentation about Ted Kjar’s mental health. It had all seemed too convenient: from the beginning, Hazard had suspected that the documents were the first steps in Mayor Newton’s plan to invalidate anything Ted Kjar might reveal. After Kjar’s death, Hazard had wondered if those documents had been the groundwork for Ted Kjar’s murder. It was a great deal easier, after all, to believe that Ted Kjar had broken into the mayor’s house and attacked him, only to be fatally wounded by a protective detail of police, if Ted Kjar was certifiably crazy. In Hazard’s opinion, it had all been much too convenient.
But—and here Hazard felt that tingling awareness of what Somers might have said—what if both things were true? What if Ted Kjar really had been using drugs and been mentally ill, and Newton had used that to discredit him and to frame him for his own murder? What if Kjar’s break had been triggered not only by drugs but also by escalating confrontations with Newton about corporate fraud and a decades-old murder? It would explain so much; most importantly, it would explain why Kjar hadn’t taken his discoveries to the local police. Instead, he had tried to work through the FBI, but his increasing paranoia had made him unstable, and it seemed that no one had taken his claims seriously.
And then Mayor Newton had decided to eliminate Ted Kjar. Hazard remembered what he had learned at the ME’s office: Dr. Boyer had run drug tests, and Kjar had tested positive for uppers and downers. Someone had kidnapped Kjar. Hazard thought of the Kum-n-Go, the last night anyone had seen Kjar before he disappeared, and the clerk telling them that Mikey had driven past in his truck. Somehow Mikey had convinced Kjar to get in. Mikey had doped him, sedated him, and hidden him until the mayor had acquired a protective detail. Then, shot up with coke and crystal, Kjar had been turned loose on the mayor.
That, Hazard realized, was where things had gone wrong for Sherman Newton. Mikey had been helping him, and then Mikey had betrayed him. Hazard could still hear the mayor’s shocked words in those few moments before he broke down the door. What are you doing? No. You can’t—Those words were really the only clue Hazard had, but they were enough. The plan was for Kjar to appear to be attacking the mayor, and then for Hazard and Somers to break in and kill him. Instead, Kjar very nearly succeeded at taking the mayor’s life.
And what about the rest of it? What about everything with Ted Kjar? Was he looking for a way to keep the mayor from retaliating? There were threads Hazard couldn’t line up. His explanation, he knew, wasn’t perfect. But it was the closest he’d come to something coherent since Chief Cravens had called him into her office.
Seated in the living room, Hazard booted up Ted Kjar’s computer and inserted the flash drive. There was a single large video file, which he opened, and it began to play. The shot was poor quality, and the camera showed a cramped room with a TV, a bed, and a single lamp. Crepe myrtle patterned the teal wallpaper, which was pulling back from the upper right corner.
As Hazard watched, the grainy black-and-white footage flickered, and a door slammed shut. The shift in the camera’s picture and the sound came so close together that Hazard realized the camera must have been embedded in the wall. Hidden. And recording something that was supposed to be a secret.
A man wandered into the room and sat on the bed, his face toward the camera. He was middle-aged, his donut of graying hair frizzy on one side, his stomach filling out the white dress shirt that he wore. The camera shook again, and the door closed again, and two more people came into the room.
One walked across camera’s field, but his height put his head out of the frame. The other walked more slowly. A girl. Naked. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. Maybe, maybe at the outside, thirteen. And she wore a Halloween mask, the rubberized kind, that looked like a knock-off Molly Ringwald.
There was no subtlety. No pretense. The balding man drew a wad of cash from his pocket and passed it to the standing man, and the standing man left.
Hazard fast-forwarded when he couldn’t stand it anymore.
There were hours of footage. There were businessmen in middle age. There were old men, so old Hazard half-expected to see a heart attack. There were young men. One, Hazard thought he recognized as a minor athlete, a wide receiver who had played for the Chiefs in the 1990s and had gotten an extra fifteen minutes of fame when rumors started flying about his frequent trips to Thailand. There were girls who wore scarves, who wore mirrored glasses, who wore masks like the knock-off Molly Ringwald. There were so many girls, and all of them barely more than children.
There were more boys. The athlete, the one from the Chiefs, liked to spank them. There was a businessman who liked to tie them up. There were boys who painted their faces. There were boys who wore cowboy hats tipped low and bandanas tied high. There was one boy who wore a rubberized Halloween mask, and if the first girl’s had been a knock-off Molly Ringwald, this was a knock-off Jonathan Taylor Thomas. The message wasn’t subtle at all: this was the boy next door, but the boy next door you could fuck.
And Hazard’s hands tingled when he saw that boy with the mask. His breathing seemed to shift into neutral; nothing in, nothing out. He leaned forward, nose brushing the screen, and looked for that Cupid-shaped mole. The boy in the JTT mask showed up a lot. One guy, one of the older guys, made the boy ride him and call him daddy. The old man’s hands wrapped tight around the boy’s hips. Was it there? Was that a smudge on the camera, was it a bruise, was it a shadow? Was it the Cupid mole that marked Jeff low on his waist?
Hazard finished his fast-forward viewing of the footage. He rewatched the parts with the boy, and then, halfway through the old man asking to be called daddy, Hazard lurched into the bathroom and bent over the toilet. His stomach heaved like a giant fist was crushing it, but nothing came out. He heaved again. Nothing. And then he wiped his forehead and spat and wiped his cheeks and spat and wiped his eyes and spat and flushed and went back to the computer.
He turned off the video; he couldn’t watch anymore. This was what Graham had: a video that showed someone—presumably Sherman Newton—trafficking minors for sex. The faces of the clients were visible. That was, perhaps, maybe the whole point; blackmail was a lot more profitable than a one-night stand, no matter how much Newton was charging. But the problem was that Newton’s face didn’t show in the recording. And all the kids—the ones who might testify, the ones who had been the victims, the ones that Graham might otherwise have tracked down and asked for help—had their faces hidden.
Like the boy in the Jonathan Taylor Thomas mask. The one who might have had a mole on his hip just like Jeff.
The video was something, but it wasn’t enough. For a moment, Hazard allowed himself to wonder: how had Graham acquired the video? How long had he possessed it? Possibilities ran through Hazard’s mind. Had Newton—because Hazard was convinced that the man in the video was the mayor, even if he couldn’t see his face—been betrayed by an accomplice? Or had a third party filmed everything and, under duress, turned over the material to the FBI? Or had it been someone else, some middleman with no real role? A tech guy paid by Newton to convert the video to a digital format? Christ, how many possibilities were there?
Hazard went back to the bathroom and washed his face. Then he returned to the computer and looked through Ted Kjar’s recovered files. He could still smell the summer heat on him, in the toasted smell of his wool trousers, in the sweat slicking his hair, but it contrasted now with the cool rush of air conditioning. His stomach rumbled; he wasn’t sure when he had last eaten. He pushed those thoughts away to focus on the task in front of him. He needed to find something that linked Newton to Jeff. His best chance seemed the cabin. And Ted Kjar had believed that the necessary information was in the chapter of his history that he had mailed to the Langhams.
Only Cairndow didn’t show up in that chapter. Not anywhere. Hazard read through it again, and then, just to be sure, he opened the digital file, recovered from Kjar’s computer, and ran a search. Nothing. Nothing even remotely resembling Cairndow.
Hazard scrolled through the recovered files again. He wanted to dive into the financial records, but he resisted. Kjar had put the spotlight on this manuscript, on the history of the Works Progress Administration in Dore County in the early 1940s. Only Cairndow wasn’t listed in any of the Works Progress Administration projects. It sounded like—
With a shiver, Hazard fell back into memory: the glow of the Aston Martin’s interior, and Glenn Somerset’s dispirited voice as he said, He changed the name of that place so many times, Scottish names, English names, country club names, and it turned a profit every time.
He changed the name.
So it wouldn’t be listed as Cairndow. Maybe it was never listed as Cairndow. Or maybe it was listed once, in that snowfall of financial records, as Cairndow. But it had been something else first.
On the computer, Hazard pulled up Google Maps. Then he worked his way through Ted Kjar’s manuscript, dropping pins for every WPA project mentioned: the Ozark Courthouse, Fort Winston, the Wyatt Earp Ranger station, on and on, a total of fourteen projects until he had turned the last page of the printout and could study the map before him. Then, zooming in, he marked the county into quadrants. He eliminated both western quadrants immediately; Schaming had given enough information that Hazard knew the FBI were interested in a property east of Wahredua. The northeast quadrant held two WPA sites: the Beaumont-Jefferson Loop, a sixteen-mile trail through heavily wooded country; and the Cropper Memorial Pavilion at a local state park. It was possible that the cabin was located on the Loop, but for the moment, Hazard dismissed the northeast quadrant.
That left only the southwest quadrant, which had four WPA projects on record: the Arrowrock Trailhead; the Old County jail; Ulysses S. Grant High School; and Camp Winnipeg. The jail and the high school Hazard ignored. A quick search turned up six cabins built by the WPA at Camp Winnipeg, but a Google Image search showed a green, riverside backdrop, nothing like the rough hardscratch in the photograph of Jeff. That left only the Arrowrock Trailhead. Hazard keyed the name into Google. He had to dig to the third page of Google results, but there it was: the Arrowrock Trailhead, located on private property, not accessible to hikers.
Private property.
For the first time that day, a white, phosphorous-fire hope burned inside Hazard. This was it. He was sure this was it. Nothing on the Google search indicated who owned that private property, but with a little more sifting, Hazard found an address for the Arrowrock property: 1722 Missouri Highway 29. He plugged that address into Google, and swore, grinning, at the result.
