Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

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.’