The Silent Hour

“I suspect the time has come,” he said, “for us to share some names. You already know mine. What are yours?”

We told him. Names and occupation. He kept rotating the chisel. It had a flared point, ridged with small, sharp teeth. Sweat had slipped behind his glasses and found his eyes, and he blinked it away without dropping his stare.

“Private investigators,” he said. “Then police didn’t send you. So who did? Dunbar?”

I could feel Ken’s who’s Dunbar? question on the way, could also feel the price of it if he let it escape his lips, and rushed out my own response first. “What’s your problem with Dunbar?”

Mark Ruzity switched his eyes to me. “My problem? The son of a bitch has spent twelve years harassing me and sending cops my way. You ask what my problem is?”

I shrugged, and he narrowed his gaze. “Dunbar does his own hassling, though. FBI guys don’t hire anybody else to do it for them. So who the hell you working for?”

“If you don’t mind,” Ken said, “maybe you could answer a question or two and then we will. You know, fair trade.”

“Fair trade?” He took a step closer and drew himself up to his full height, and the muscles in his forearms stood out tight around the chisel and the hammer. Then he paused, as if something had interrupted his forthcoming words, and frowned at Ken.

“Merriman,” he said. “That’s your name?”

“Yes.”

“You came around a long time ago,” he said. “Back at the start.”

“You wouldn’t agree to see me,” Ken said.

“No. And I won’t now. You were working for his parents.” His frown deepened. “What in the hell brings you back all these years later?”

“The case remains unsolved, Mark.”

“No shit. You been working it for the whole time?”

“No. I’m back because they found his body. It . . . stimulated my interest.”

Ruzity pulled his head back, stared down at Ken with his eyes thoughtful and his mouth open, as if Ken had just told him a riddle and Ruzity wanted to be damn sure he got the right answer.

“His body,” Ruzity said at length, “doesn’t mean shit to me. Okay? Unless you want me to carve his headstone, it doesn’t mean shit to me. It shouldn’t to you, either.”

“No? Like I said, the crime remains—”

“Unsolved,” he said. “Yeah, I got it. Maybe it’s better that way, too.”

“Think you can explain that remark?” I said, and he ignored me, still focused on Ken.

“His parents hired you again when the body turned up? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“No. I’m not working for them anymore.”

“Bullshit. Or, wait—give a shit. As in: I don’t. Who sent you here is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you haul your asses out the door and go back to your clients and tell them to stay the hell away from Mark Ruzity.”

“Odd response,” I said, “coming from someone the Cantrells helped. I’d think you would care about seeing Joshua’s death and his wife’s disappearance resolved.”

His head swiveled to me, and I felt a cold tightness along my spine.

“You think you know something about what the Cantrells did for me?” he said. “You think you know a damn thing about that? Let me tell you what they did—showed me that I’m the sort of man who needs his space. Why? To keep from losing a temper that I don’t have real good control over. I’ve controlled it for a while now. Some years, in fact. But it’s a daily chore, and it only works when I keep my space, and other people keep theirs.”

He lifted the chisel, put the tip to my forehead, and then gave it a gentle tap with the hammer. The tiny teeth bit into my skin. Enough that I felt it, but not enough to draw blood. Ken shifted toward us, but Ruzity appeared unconcerned with him.

“Right now?” he said. “You’re in my space, brother.”

He’d lowered the hammer but was still holding the chisel against my forehead. Now he leaned close, so close that his goatee brushed my jaw, and spoke into my ear.

“You want to know what Alexandra Cantrell did for me?” he said. “She taught me how to keep myself from putting that chisel through your brain.”

He popped the chisel free, and I could feel the imprint of the teeth lingering in my skin.

“The door is where you left it,” he said. “Turn your asses around and find it again.”

17

__________

Rehabilitated?” Ken said as we walked to my truck. “Really?”

“Clean since the day he stepped out of prison, is what you said.”

“It’s the truth. But the man seems to have an edge, doesn’t he?”

“An edge,” I said. “Yeah. That’s the word.”

“He’s the only guy Harrison singled out, the only person he told us not to talk to. I wonder what he—”

“I’ll tell you what we need to be wondering about right now: Dunbar. That’s the name. You didn’t mention him to me before. Have you heard the name?”

“No.”

“Ruzity said he was FBI.”

“As far as I know, the FBI had nothing to do with the case.”

“They shouldn’t have,” I said, “but evidently they did.”

“Think we should track him down?”

“Until I hear otherwise from Graham, yeah. And guess what? Graham still hasn’t called.”

_________

John Dunbar had retired from the Bureau four years earlier, but fortunately for us he hadn’t left the Cleveland area. He was living in Sheffield Lake, a small town west of the city and directly on the shore of Lake Erie. I didn’t know the place well, but I’d been there several times, always to a bar called Risko’s Tavern. My father had been close with the guy who’d owned the place when I was a kid, and he used to make the drive out there on the weekend to sip a few beers, talk, and watch the water. Every now and then they’d have a clambake or a cookout outside, and he’d take me along. All I remembered of the place from those early visits was that they’d had a piranha tank inside and that my father always seemed to be in a hell of a good mood when he was there. The bar had changed hands since then, but I still stopped in occasionally to sit with a few drinks and some memories.

The waterfront property in the town had gone through a dramatic transformation in recent years, rich people buying up the old cottages that had lined the shore and tearing them down, building ostentatious temples of wealth in their place. When we got out there and I realized from the addresses that Dunbar’s property would be on the north side of Lake Road, right on the water, my first thought was one of suspicion—these places were going for several million, so how in the hell did a retired FBI agent afford one? Cop on the take?

Then we found his house and that suspicion faded. It was wedged between two brick behemoths but didn’t fit the mold. A simple home, white siding with blue trim, it had just enough room across the front for a door and two square windows on either side. To say the place was tiny didn’t do it justice—beside those sprawling homes, it looked like something made by Lionel.

What the house lacked in size, it made up for in location, though. The perfectly trimmed lawn ran all the way down to a stone retaining wall at the lakeshore’s edge, and beyond it the tossing, petulant gray water spread as far as you could see. There were some beautiful trees in the front yard, with flowers planted around their bases, but the backyard had been wisely kept free of visual obstructions, letting the lake stand out in all its power. The house