Inspector Specter, page 15
“That’s not the way Anita tells it,” her husband said, watching Ollie loll around on the grass, considering whether there was anything with which he could pull himself up. If he was standing, he wanted to sit. He saw a dog about twenty feet away, a beagle whose owner was naturally not using a leash, because why would you do that? He (Oliver, not the beagle) tried to muscle his way to his feet. He seemed to have it in his head that he could just walk over to the dog. The fact that he had never walked before didn’t really appear to deter him at all.
“She seems to think the two of you make a very good team. She speaks of you with respect and affection.”
I must have given him an incredulous look. “Lieutenant McElone?” I said, gesturing with my hand. “About yay high? Grumpy demeanor? General air of exasperation?”
He laughed. “That’s the one.”
“Well then, maybe I’m not who I think I am.” It was a possibility, and it would actually explain quite a bit.
“Anita trusted you with this case,” he reminded me. “That should indicate a certain level of respect and affection. Maybe she just doesn’t like to show it to you. She can be kind of embarrassed by such things.”
I thought of McElone and the way she always fidgeted when I pointed out that she was afraid of my house. “But tell me what I can do to help find her.”
“Well, any information you have on what she was doing in the investigation would help. It might point me in a direction.”
Oliver rocked back and forth on the cushy disposable diaper under his blue shorts, trying to build up momentum that would take him to a standing position. This whole crawling thing had been fine for a while, but he was so over it now.
“I know what you know,” I told Malcolm. “Martin Ferry was shot a few days ago. The police in his department believe it was an accident. The lieutenant didn’t. She wanted me to . . . consult with some sources on possible information about the shooting, but so far we haven’t come up with much to tell her. I knew she was going to conduct her own investigation, but she never told me how she was going to go about doing that. So I’m at a loss. You haven’t heard from her in almost two whole days.”
“But the cops, even the ones who work with her, will say we have an adult woman who has taken off and jump to the conclusion that she left because of trouble in our marriage,” he said. “That’s what they always assume in cases like this, because most of the time it’s true.”
“Was there trouble in your marriage?” Well, Paul had suggested I explore that possibility, and Malcolm had left the door wide open for me.
He looked at me with some intensity for a moment. “No,” he said. “We’re fine. That’s why I’m worried sick about this. She never doesn’t get in touch. She never doesn’t come home at night. She never doesn’t talk to her children before they go to sleep. My mind is not going in good directions right now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had to ask.”
Malcolm nodded. “I know you did. Anita says you have to ask the questions even if you know the person you’re talking to won’t like hearing them. Maybe especially then. But we have no trouble in our marriage, certainly nothing that would make her slip away and not tell me where she was going. No, this is about Marty and what happened to him.”
Oliver, meanwhile, had rolled himself onto his back like he was going to spring to his feet from a prone position the way Popeye the Sailor Man used to do. Alas, Ollie had not had his spinach that day (although I was sure Jeannie had sent some for him, assuming correctly that I would have none in the fridge), so he was not able to get himself vertical. He started to fuss. I stood up to let him see me, and that provided enough entertainment to quiet him down for a moment.
“So you knew Detective Ferry?” I asked Malcolm.
“Sure. He was Anita’s partner in Seaside. He came over to the house a few times, even after she moved us here to Harbor Haven. Anita always said Marty was a good guy who was trying to act like he was a bad guy so people would respect him out on the street. I guess someone respected him enough to want him gone permanently.”
Oliver was fussing again, so I lifted him just to the point that he was standing. He immediately looked for the irresistible beagle. My new role: boost bar.
“Any idea why?” I asked. Malcolm’s perspective on Ferry wouldn’t be colored by the same loyalty McElone might have had for her old partner. It might be interesting to get another take.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Well, Marty wasn’t the easiest guy in the whole world to get along with. You could ask his ex-wife, Elise, or his daughter, Natasha; she’s about to start college, I think. Elise, well, their divorce wasn’t exactly smooth, you know?”
“You think his ex-wife might have wanted to kill him?” I asked.
Malcolm shook his head. “I think the shooting was business related,” he said. “Anita said she gave you some files about things she’d been working on that might have had Marty’s case files in it. Do you have that stuff?”
There was no sense in telling him that I’d given the flash drive to my deceased friend, or that he and the other ghost from my house were probably going over it right now. On the other hand, he might know what McElone’s password for such things was, and that would be helpful information.
“I have it, but I haven’t been able to open it,” I said. “Do you have any idea how to open her encrypted files?”
Oliver actually tried to take a step and flopped down on his knee, which landed directly on the grass. He cried anyway, so I picked him up, kissed the knee (which had a little mud on it) and set him down again. By then, he’d forgotten the whole incident, but the dog was no longer in sight.
“You mean her personal passwords?” Malcolm asked. “No idea. She doesn’t know mine, either. I guess it would have been a good idea to share. But be careful with whatever she gave you; if it’s encrypted, it must be important.”
“Who else can you think of that she might have talked to, besides the ex-wife and daughter?”
He made a show of thinking, stroking his chin the way Paul strokes his goatee, but without the goatee. “Obviously, the other cops he worked with. They seemed to give up on the case really fast. Someone might be covering. And he had a snitch, an informant, called himself Lay-Z. You might want to talk to him.”
“There was a drug dealer Ferry was investigating. Buster somebody?” I wasn’t going to see him if I could help it, but there was a possibility the mention would trigger something for Malcolm.
“Buster? I don’t know a Buster. Maybe it’s in the files Anita gave you.”
I picked up the diaper bag and stood. “Well, I guess I’m off to talk to the cops in Seaside Heights,” I said. I reached down, and Oliver held out his arms. “Come on, Ollie.” I picked him up and put him in the stroller I’d parked next to the bench.
“Let me know what you find out,” Malcolm said. “You have my number.”
I shook his hand. “I will. And you do the same if you hear from the lieutenant—”
Malcolm raised his left hand and pointed a finger straight up. “Anita,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Anita.”
* * *
“Martin Ferry was a world-class pain in the ass,” said Captain Charles Stella of the Seaside Heights Police Department. I had been anticipating such a response on the thirty-five-minute drive here, so I didn’t blink. “But he wasn’t bad at what he did, and he was an irritant, not a threat. Nobody wanted to kill him. It was an accident.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “What did the crime scene team report?”
“Crime scene team? What do you think this is, CSI? We sent over a detective because it was one of our own, but under most circumstances, the uniforms who answered the call would have been able to close the case.” Stella was not an imposing physical specimen—I doubt he stood five feet seven—but he was solidly built and had a very authoritative voice.
I wanted to cower in intimidation and thank him for his time, but I had an agenda. “Were you here when Detective Ferry was working with Detective McElone?” I asked.
“No, she was gone before I got here,” Stella answered, leaning forward on his desk and looking as attentive as he could. “But I met her two days ago, when she came by to ask me all the same questions you’re asking now and suggest that somebody killed Ferry. Nobody killed Ferry. His gun went off when he was putting it away, and he got unlucky. There’s no two ways around it.”
“What’s the evidence?” I said. “I’ve been to his apartment and seen the place, but I don’t understand how the gun got out of his desk and shot him by accident.”
Oliver, asleep in his stroller, wasn’t helping me look terrifically tough, but I wasn’t going to be all that scary even without him. Stella looked at Ollie a second because babies are interesting to look at, then regarded me with somewhat less indulgent eyes.
“What makes you think the gun was ever in Ferry’s desk?” he asked. “Your Lieutenant McElone said the same thing. The gun was out, lying on the floor not far from his right hand. The desk drawer was open and the key was in the lock. So you tell me why you think someone came in and shot Ferry when he obviously was going through his routine, and maybe forgot there was a round in the chamber?”
“I’m not suggesting I know your job,” I told Stella. “I’m not a police officer, and I’m only a part-time PI. So maybe you can explain to me—for the purpose of my own education—how the key dangling from the lock tells you he was putting the gun away. Doesn’t it suggest that Ferry had put the gun away and then he . . . or someone . . . had unlocked the drawer to get it out again?”
Stella looked disgusted. “Because, as a ‘PI’”—you could hear the quote marks in his voice—“no doubt you know that a key is used to open a drawer before you put something in it if it was locked before.”
“It’s also used to lock the drawer after you take something out,” I said. “How can you tell by looking at it that the key was used for opening the drawer and not waiting for it to be closed again?”
Stella regarded me for a moment, and I wasn’t crazy about his condescending expression. “You put the key in your pocket until you’re going to lock it again.”
“Maybe you do, but are you sure Martin Ferry did?”
Stella bit his lips, perhaps in an effort not to let what he was thinking pass between them. “Is there anything else?” he squeezed out.
“Yeah.” I had no reason to try to butter him up now. “If I found a body on the floor with a gunshot wound and a gun right next to his hand, I might think it was a suicide. Why wasn’t that considered?”
Now Stella regarded me with a sneer. “A cop eats his gun if he’s going to off himself,” he said. “Nobody shoots himself in the belly and waits to bleed out.”
“He was shot in the stomach?” That fact was news to me, though I should have known it already. I wasn’t sure why it made a difference, but it did. Even I knew that getting “gut shot” was a really bad thing. In the movies, it’s always accompanied by ominous chords on the soundtrack and a wince from the otherwise stoic leading man.
Stella nodded. “I don’t know how it was he didn’t get to a phone and call for help,” he said. “He couldn’t have died instantly.”
“Doesn’t that merit further investigation?” I asked.
Stella looked me dead in the eye. “No,” he said.
That did it; I’d have to go back to Ferry’s apartment and try to persuade him to trust me again. Without McElone, it wouldn’t be easy.
But that was the key.
Nineteen
After conferring with Paul via text in my car (and yes, Jeannie, I was parked while texting), I told my GPS to take me back to Martin Ferry’s apartment. I don’t know Seaside Heights that well; we tend to go to Point Pleasant when we want a taste of the boardwalk, usually in September when the crowds have thinned a little.
The whole way there I ruminated over the disappearance of Lieutenant McElone. According to her husband, she considered me more fondly than a mere annoyance, which was news to me. She was out of touch somewhere, possibly in danger, and I felt a sense of responsibility. But the only thing I could think to do—the only thing that no one else looking for McElone could do—was talk to ghosts for information. And the ghost with the best information to share was Martin Ferry. In McElone’s absence, Martin Ferry was the best cop contact I had. And he had been shot dead. This is how my life works.
I pulled up to his apartment building with Ollie asleep in his car seat, and felt bad about waking him to get him out of the car and into the stroller, and then out of the stroller in order to climb the stairs to Ferry’s apartment.
At the door to Ferry’s apartment, I set a grumpy Oliver back down in his stroller with the Superman action figure Melissa had found in the basement and cleaned up, then felt in the notch behind the molding for the key Ferry had said he’d left there. It took a moment, but reaching a little above my head, the fingers of my left hand found the key and extracted it.
An awful thought hit me as I put the key in the lock: What if Alice, the lackluster real estate agent, had managed to rent out Ferry’s apartment already? Granted, it would have been swift for anyone, let alone Alice, to do so, but in that unlikely event, this could get awkward in a big hurry.
I opened the door cautiously, spotted no one—living or otherwise—and rolled Ollie inside. Then I made sure the door was locked behind me.
Ferry was not immediately visible in the living room, but both times I’d been here before, I’d found him in the spare bedroom where the computer was, apparently trying to will his fingers to work on the keyboard. I did the usual check of the other rooms and then opened the door to the spare bedroom.
I gasped when I first looked inside: The desk, the desk chair, the daybed and all the other furnishings that had been there before were gone. The room was completely empty, looking as sad and lonely as a room could.
Except for Martin Ferry, who was floating in its center, head in his hands. I knew he couldn’t be asleep (ghosts don’t sleep), but he could be resting. It wasn’t that, though, I realized as I walked quietly inside. Ferry’s shoulders were quaking, in spasm. His head shook. He kept gasping, as if he could take in air.
He technically wasn’t crying, since it wasn’t physically possible. But in every other way, Martin Ferry was weeping silently.
“Detective Ferry,” I whispered, afraid to startle him. Oliver, freed from the stroller, was crawling around the room looking for something with which he could pull himself up. There was nothing left.
Ferry turned suddenly at my voice; he hadn’t known we were in the room. He blinked a couple of times and wiped invisible tears from his cheeks and eyes. “My daughter was here,” he said. “She was right here—and she didn’t even know I was in the room.” The man was distraught, and I understood, even if I couldn’t empathize. Every dead person I knew could see me, and I could see many of them, although not as many as Mom or Melissa, I’m told.
Accepting what’s happened is a difficult task for any new ghost, and Paul tells me that the shock of death can be extra complicated when it’s unexpected: Martin Ferry hadn’t been ill, hadn’t contemplated the idea that his life was about to end. He had been going through a routine day, and then he was . . . something else entirely.
“I know it’s really hard to take,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t appear to have heard me speak. “She was crying, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it,” he rasped. “I couldn’t let her know I was here with her the whole time.” He descended toward the floor, at the same time contracting himself, bending into something past a sitting position, holding his ankles with his hands.
Maybe I could ease him away from the memory. “Where did your furniture go?” I asked.
Ferry didn’t look up. “She took it with her. This was her room when she came to see me. She took the bed and the desk. Had some guy with her, and I didn’t even know him.” Then he did raise his eyes to mine. “I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.”
“Did she take the computer, too?” I asked. Ferry had been trying to do something with the computer both times I’d been here before now, and it was possible I could find out what, and why, through this avenue.
His eyes focused, and he started to become a cop again. “No. That was Lay-Z. Showed up here late last night, out of nowhere.”
Lay-Z. “Your informant?” I said.
“Yeah. He must have picked the lock. He’s good at that. He came right in, took the computer, walked out. Didn’t look around, didn’t take anything else, and he’s the type who would.” Ferry straightened up, slowly, and while he didn’t pace the air, he was moving through it without conscious effort. “No, wait. He took a DVD, too. Weekend at Bernie’s.”
“So what does that tell you?” I asked. “That he has ironic taste in movies?”
“That somebody sent him. Told him to get the computer and nothing else; don’t make it look like the place was burglarized. Somebody wanted that laptop. The DVD was probably for him.”
Oliver, having crawled to a spot under the window, was attempting to reach the sill and pull himself to a standing position. As this was occupying his time and didn’t seem to be frustrating him to the point of crying, I saw it as a positive development and made note to tell Jeannie about it.
“The other times I was here you were all over your computer, and now someone took it. Why?” I asked Ferry. “What is there on your hard drive that would be valuable?”
“Notes. That’s what I was trying to access, anyway. Notes about Buster.” He finally seemed to notice Oliver by the window and swooped over for a look. “Hey, pal. You tryin’ to climb up?” Ferry was about to reach down, then looked at his hands. “I can’t help you much.”
