Moving Target, page 14
part #9 of Ali Reynolds Series
All his life, Lowell Dunn had been early to bed and early to rise. Eventually, weariness got the better of him. When he felt himself starting to snooze a little after eleven, he dumped the long-extinguished contents of his ashtray into the trash can beside his chair. Then he got up, switched off the lights, and went into the bedroom.
Once undressed, he sat on the side of the bed and considered what it meant to be an old man alone in the house. He remembered all too well that after Juanita died, the girls had suggested that he get a dog to keep him company, and a telephone so he could call for help if the need arose, but Lowell Dunn had implacably resisted both. Now, still unsettled by the thought that some stranger might have gained entry to his house, he wished he hadn’t been so stubborn. He was tempted to try sleeping without removing his hearing aids, but as soon as he put his head down on the pillow, the ungodly screeching in his ear made him rethink. He sat back up and removed both hearing aids, putting them on his bedside table as a cloud of cottony silence descended around him.
He was restless. He tossed and turned for some time before he fell asleep. The last time he looked at the clock, it was after one. He knew that, in a few hours, when the alarm went off at five, it would be tough to drag his weary body out of bed.
At last he drifted into a sleep so sound that he never heard the tiny click of the front door as someone used a key to gain entry to the living room. He didn’t notice the brief flare of a cigarette lighter as someone moved the tail of the living room curtain into the trash can by his chair and set it on fire. After that, there was another small click as someone went back out the front door and used the key again to lock the deadbolt.
Had the smoke alarm installed by his son-in-law two years earlier been operational, the din might have been enough to awaken Lowell Dunn. Oddly enough, the batteries had been removed. The silenced smoke alarm gave out no warning at all.
By the time a passing motorist saw the flames an hour or so later, the house was fully engulfed. Unable to go in through the front door, firefighters broke down the back one. They had hoped to find someone alive, but it was too late. The house was a total loss, and Lowell Dunn, evidently overcome by smoke, never managed to get out of bed.
The fire trucks were putting out hot spots when LaVonn Bissell came by on his bicycle on his way to school. The poor kid came running into the yard, screaming for his grandfather. So much for making a proper notification to the next of kin. As for the guys investigating the incident? Once the fire cooled off enough so they could work, the cause was readily apparent. The fire had obviously started in a trash can next to the remains of a leather recliner. When they pulled the crushed trash can out from under the collapsed roof and ceiling, they found the telltale remains of dozens of cigarette filters. One of the investigators held one up for his partner to see.
“Is that what I think it is,” the second one asked, “a cigarette butt?” The first guy nodded. “The trash can is full of them.”
“Figures.”
They examined the house for residue of accelerants and found only the track where the blazing curtain had run up the wall, setting fire to first the ceiling and then the rafters. They found the melted remains of a smoke alarm from which the batteries had been removed.
As far as the investigators were concerned, the story was clear: The fire, although accidental, was neither unexpected nor inexplicable. Another careless smoker bites the dust. What else is new?
Watching the news in her hotel room the next morning, Ali learned that the Internet was still being disrupted throughout Europe. It was provoking to realize that some kids in Shanghai with too much time on their hands could inconvenience people half the world away. Knowing that, she didn’t bother trying to log on to the hotel’s system. Instead, she stopped in the dining room for the breakfast buffet and then headed out. Without Leland along, she programmed Banshee Group’s address into the Land Rover’s GPS.
By the time she had negotiated her third roundabout in under a mile, she was grateful to have the chirpy female voice keeping her on the right path. The balmy weather was gone on this cold and frosty morning. The predicted storm, complete with another round of snow, was heading south, but it wasn’t due to hit Bournemouth until late in the afternoon. There were patches of fog here and there on the roadway as she headed north, but that was all. She wondered where B. was in his ten-hour flight from Tokyo to Helsinki. When the phone rang, Ali was surprised to hear Sister Anselm’s voice.
“I understand you’re in Texas,” Ali said. “Will you be home in time for the wedding? You’re not calling to back out on being matron of honor, are you?”
“Certainly not,” Sister Anselm replied. “I fully expect to be back home by then. I wouldn’t want to miss the wedding. I take it you know why I’m here?”
“I’m assuming you were dispatched by Bishop Gillespie at B.’s request, right?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“It must be late at night there.”
“Yes, it is,” Sister Anselm replied. “The witching hour. Someone needs to be with the patient around the clock, and I volunteered for the night shift. Since my charge’s mother hasn’t slept in a real bed for days, I gave her the key to my hotel room at the Omni and told her to get a good night’s sleep. In the meantime, I wanted to run something past you. Do you know anything at all about this case?”
“Some,” Ali admitted. More than I should, she thought.
“For some reason, Bishop Gillespie directed me not to contact B. about any of this directly, so I decided to work through you instead. If I’m not mistaken, people at High Noon are able to gain access to information that might be problematic for other people.”
“What do you need?” Ali asked.
“A couple of things happened today that I think B. needs to know about. For instance, you know about the tagging situation at the school, that landed my patient, Lance Tucker, in jail?”
“Yes.”
“B. should know that a representative from that company, United Tracking Incorporated, sent a smarmy guy named Crutcher to the hospital today. He offered Lance’s mother a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty thousand?” Ali repeated.
“That’s right. Crutcher said it was a good-faith gesture to show how sorry they were that Lance had been injured.”
“That’s a lot of money for an apology,” Ali said. “Why would they do something like that?”
“That’s what I wondered, too,” Sister Anselm said. “It sounded fishy to me. I’m worried that the company is trying to worm its way into the family’s good graces for reasons we don’t understand. Lance’s mother could certainly use the money, but I advised her not to take it.”
“Probably a good call,” Ali said.
“In the course of the day I asked some pointed questions about the family’s financial situation. It sounds as though thirty-seven thousand dollars would be enough to keep them out of foreclosure. Having had her turn down the check, I’m looking into some other avenues to help her out.”
Ali had a pretty good idea where Sister Anselm would go looking for help.
“This evening,” Sister Anselm continued, “a kid named Andrew, a friend of Lance’s, came by to visit. He told us that Lance and his former computer science teacher, a guy named Mr. Jackson, were working on a computer application that would make it easier to access something called the ‘dark Web.’ Do you know anything about that?”
“Nothing,” Ali said. “B. and Stuart Ramey probably do.”
“That’s why I’m calling. Andrew seems to think that Lance’s invention, whatever it is, might be really valuable in the right hands. Mr. Jackson, the guy helping with the project, supposedly committed suicide, and now someone tried to murder Lance. That got me to thinking,” Sister Anselm continued. “I’d like someone from High Noon to look into Everett Jackson’s alleged suicide.”
“Since you used the word ‘supposedly,’ I take it you don’t believe Jackson took his own life?”
“I’d like to know for sure if he did or didn’t. The people who frequent this dark Web sound rather dodgy to me—drug dealers and such. For all I know, my patient is as bad as they are, but if the dark Web is at the bottom of all this, maybe whoever targeted Lance targeted the teacher as well.”
“Targeted him and got away with it,” Ali said. “I’ll be glad to check into this, but I can’t right now. I’m on the road. The Internet on this side of the pond is currently having a major malfunction, so it may take longer for me to reach either Stuart or B. As soon as I do or as soon as I find out anything, I’ll get back to you.” By then Ali was past Winchester and on the A34.
“Good enough,” Sister Anselm said. “I need to go now. Travel safe.”
Ali spent the rest of the trip mulling over everything Sister Anselm had told her. Ali herself had no idea what the dark Web was, but she had an idea that it was something with which both B. Simpson and Stuart Ramey would be well acquainted.
She made good time. An hour and forty minutes after leaving Bournemouth she arrived in Littlemore and located the Oxford Science Park and the parking lot for the Danby Building. The word “Oxford” had evoked images in Ali’s mind of gown-clad dons striding through a campus made up of ancient stone buildings. The buildings of the science park, however, looked more like modern multistory office structures, complete with walls that were more glass than anything else. The contemporary buildings plunked down in the middle of the English countryside made it all more than slightly jarring. Leaving the car downstairs, Ali took the lift up to the main lobby, where a directory sent her to Banshee Group’s space on the fourth floor. The firm’s light and airy reception area was dominated by large pieces of brightly colored modern art. Other than the presence of a staffed reception desk, the place might have been an art gallery, with a reception desk. Nowhere was there any clue about Banshee’s darker reality, the task of identifying war dead from atrocities all over the globe.
The young blond woman seated at the desk greeted Ali with a warm smile. “Ms. Benchley is expecting you, Ms. Reynolds. She’s just through there.” She gestured toward a door that led to an inner office.
Once inside Ali found herself facing a huge desk made of some exotic hardwood. Behind it sat a small green-eyed woman with a huge halo of wiry bright red hair. When Kate Benchley stood up, Ali realized that her hostess probably didn’t clear five feet. “Ms. Reynolds, I presume?” Kate said, holding out her hand.
Ali nodded.
“Welcome to our little corner of hell.” She gestured behind her. Through a floor-to-ceiling double-paned glass barrier Ali saw a well-lit laboratory space filled with banks of expensive-looking equipment, each with its own computer terminal. Six or seven white-coated technicians, all women and all wearing protective caps and latex gloves, bustled around the room.
“I’m sure Marjorie told you what we do here,” Kate resumed. “Unfortunately, no matter what the politicians promise, say, or do, we always have a ready supply of bodies in need of identification.”
“You bring them here?” Ali asked.
“No,” Kate answered. “We have a whole group of people who spend most of their time on the road, flying from one war zone’s mass grave sites to another—war zones in parts of the world most of us have never heard of. They go to the graves, collect tissue samples from the remains and from any possible relatives. They then see to it that the remains are stored in an organized fashion so they can be retrieved for reburial once an identification is made. After that the samples from the victims and the survivors are sent here for processing.”
“That’s what the lab is for?” Ali asked.
Kate nodded. “First we try to create a profile. If that’s possible, we hope to get a match. What breaks my heart is when we get a whole collection of samples, ones from a pile of bodies that contain both adults and children. It’s clear that they all match each other, but we’re unable to connect them to any other survivor. It means that a whole family has been wiped off the face of the earth.” She paused but only briefly. “Now tell me, would you care for some tea, or would you rather have coffee instead?”
“Coffee, please,” Ali said, taking a seat in one of two black leather guest chairs. “Black.”
There was a door to the right of the massive desk. Kate disappeared through that into what sounded like a galley kitchen. She emerged a few moments later, carrying two dainty bone-china cups and saucers. “When my uncle was alive, that was used more as a bar than a kitchen,” she said. “He had a seemingly endless supply of Scotch in there. I’m more of a gin-and-tonic girl myself, but not until much later in the day. So tell me about your cold case. It must be something if Madge is willing to lift evidence from an evidence room and hand it over. You must have made quite an impression on her.”
“I think what she did has more to do with being annoyed with her coworkers than it was with being impressed by me.” Ali set her cup on the desk and retrieved two items from her purse—Margaret Elkins’s envelope and the cup she had lifted from the hotel dining room. “This is from the evidence locker,” she said, pushing the envelope across the desk. “And the cup contains what I hope will turn out to be comparison DNA. The murder victim, Jonah Brooks, died in the fifties. The victim’s vehicle was stolen. Investigators assumed it was a robbery gone bad, and the car thief was never found. Investigators stopped working the case years ago.”
Kate slit open the envelope and lifted out two see-through envelopes, each containing a small swatch of white material covered with brown stains. “What you’re seeing are pieces of material cut from the victim’s shirt, both the collar and the cuffs,” Ali explained. “The blood may belong solely to the victim, but since there were defensive wounds on the victim’s body, we’re hoping some of the killer’s might be there, too.”
“Are you thinking that whoever stole the car may have gone on to be a career criminal and that his DNA will be found in the criminal database?”
“No,” Ali said. I suspect that car theft had nothing to do with it and that the killer was a lot closer to Mr. Brooks than anyone ever suspected.”
“Do you have someone in particular in mind?”
“The victim had three sons,” Ali explained. “Langston, Lawrence, and my friend Leland, who moved to the States shortly before his father’s death. He was out of the country and was never considered a suspect.”
“I take it the other two brothers were investigated and ruled out?”
“They may have been investigated,” Ali said, “but it sounds to me as though everyone accepted the robbery story at face value and let it go at that. I think it’s possible that either one or both brothers were involved.”
Kate slipped the evidence bags back into the envelope. “Where are the other brothers now?” she asked.
“Both of them are deceased.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“The third brother, Leland, is back in the UK for the first time in sixty years. He wants to get to the bottom of this. That cup is the one he used last night at dinner.”
“You and the third brother do realize that our findings won’t be admissible in a court of law?”
“We do.”
“What about the two who are deceased?” Kate asked. “Do the other brothers have surviving children?”
“Both do,” Ali answered. “Children and grandchildren.”
“What happens to them if after all this time one of their forebears is blamed in absentia for something that happened decades ago? Even if there’s no legal conviction, finding out that one’s father or grandfather was a cold-blooded killer might make things a bit dicey at the next holiday get-together.”
Kate’s warning was delivered with a smile, but with the specter of next summer’s Jeffrey Brooks’s family reunion hanging in the balance, Ali took the remark quite seriously.
“My obligation is to learn what I can and give the information to my friend. What he decides to do with it will be entirely up to him. I can tell you, however, that since he’s one of the kindest men I know, I don’t see him going around blowing up other people’s lives just for the fun of it.”
Kate nodded. “Very well,” she said. “We may be putting the cart before the horse anyway. Getting a profile from samples this old, especially ones that haven’t been stored properly, can be challenging. That’s why I invest in all the latest equipment. Samples that were totally useless only a few years ago are yielding positive results.” She stood up. “If you don’t mind, I’d like one more cup of coffee before we head into the lab.”
Kate disappeared into the lab, taking both cups and saucers with her.
“How long have you been running this place?” Ali asked when she returned.
“Almost from the time I graduated from university,” Kate said. “My parents died in a car crash when I was little. We were living in the States then. They named my father’s brother, Arnold, as my guardian, and I came here to live. Uncle Arnold was a bachelor with no children of his own, so he had some rather outrageous ideas about child rearing. I was barely out of primary school when he took me to Bosnia to deal with mass graves. My father’s parents had a fit, but Uncle Arnold had more money and better lawyers. Eventually, the other grandparents gave up.
“Arnold Benchley was an Oxford man through and through. That’s where he wanted me to go, too, but they used some lame excuse to bar me from admission. Uncle Arnold shipped me off to UCLA to get my degree. Three years after I came back to Oxford, he died, leaving me in charge. Now I’m back in Oxford, running his company and living in his house. When it comes time for me to do some hiring, people from Oxford come crawling to me with their little hands out, begging for jobs. Sometimes I take them. Sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, I chalk it up to the jerks on that admissions board. All of whom were male, by the way.”
