'What the hell is that you're listening to?' a voice said. 'No wonder someone wants you dead, you pitiful fuck.'
Diving forward, I kicked the legs out from under the chair and he, positioned behind with the steel-wire garrote not quite in place yet, went along, splayed across the chair's back. An awkward position. Before he had the chance to correct it, I pivoted over and had an arm locked around his neck, alert to any further sound or signs of intrusion. The garrote, piano wire with tape-wound wood handles, sat at porch's edge looking like a garden implement.
'Simple asphyxiation,' Doc Oldham said an hour later.
I do remember pulling the arm in hard, asking if he was alone, getting no answer and asking again. Was he contract? Who sent him? No response to those questions either. Then the awareness of his body limp beneath me.
'Man obviously didn't care to carry on a conversation with you,' Doc Oldham said, grabbing hold of the windowsill to pull himself erect with difficulty, tottering all the way up and tottering still once there. ''S that coffee I smell?'
'Used to be, anyway. Near dead as this guy by now's my guess.'
'Hey, it's late at night and I'm a doctor. You think I'm so old I forgot my intern days? Bad burned coffee's diesel fuel for us- what I love most. Next to a healthy slug of bourbon.'
Meanwhile J. T. waited, coming to the realization that further black-and-whites would not be barreling up, that there were no fingerprint people or crime lab investigators to call in, no watch commander to pass things off to. It was all on her.
She sat at the kitchen table. Doc nodded to her and said 'Asphyxiation,' poured his coffee and took the glass of bourbon I handed him.
'Tough first day,' I said.
'Technically I haven't even started.'
'Hope you had a good dinner at least.'
'Smothered chicken special.'
'Guess homemaking only goes so far.'
'Give me a break, I'm still trying to find the kitchen. Speaking of which, this coffee really sucks.'
'Don't pay her any mind, Turner,' Doc Oldham said, helping himself to a second cup. 'It's delicious.'
'I'm assuming there's no identification,' J. T. said.
'These guys don't exactly carry passports. There's better than a thousand dollars in a money clip in his left pants pocket, another thousand under a false insole in his shoe. A driver's license that looks like it was made yesterday.'
'Which it probably was. So, we have no way to track where he might have been staying because there isn't any place to stay. And with no bus terminals or airports-'
'No airports? What about Stanley Municipal? Crop duster to the stars.'
'-there's no paper trail.' She sipped coffee and made a face. 'Nothing I know is of any help here.'
'What you know is rarely important. The rest is what matters- all those hours of working the job, interviews, people you've met, the instincts nurtured by all of it. That's what you use.'
'Something you learned in psychology classes?'
'From Eldon, actually. Spend hours practicing scales and learning songs, he said, then you get up there to play and none of it matters. Where you begin and where you wind up have little to do with one another. Meanwhile we,' I said, passing it over, 'do have this.'
I gave her a moment.
'Thing you have to ask is, this is a pro, right? First to last he covers his tracks. That's what he does, how he lives. No wallet, false ID if any at all, he's a ghost, a glimmer. So why does a stub from an airline ticket show up in his inside coat pocket?'
'Carelessness?'
'Possible, sure. But how likely?'
I was, after all, patently an alarmist, possibly paranoid, a man known to have accused a possum of overplanning.
It was only the torn-off stub of a boarding pass and easily enough could have been overlooked. You glance at aisle and seat number, stick it in your pocket just in case, find it there the next time you wear that coat.
But I wasn't running scales, I was up there on stage, playing. And judging from the light in J. T.'s eyes, she was too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
His name, or at least one of his names, was Marc Bruhn, and he'd come in on the redeye, nonstop, from Newark to Little Rock. Ticket paid in cash, round trip, no flags, whistles, or bells. These guys play everything close to the vest. Extrapolating arrival to service-desk time, despite false identification and despite Oxford, Mississippi, having been given as destination, J. T. was able to track a car rental.
'That's the ringer, what got me onto him. Who the hell, if he's heading for Oxford, would fly into Little Rock rather than Memphis?'
'Hey, he's from New Jersey, remember?'
We'd found the car under a copse of trees across the lake. There was a half-depleted six-pack of bottled water on the floorboard, an untouched carton of Little Debbie cakes on the passenger seat, and a self-improvement tape in the player.
June was able to pull out previous transactions in the name of Marc Bruhn, Mark Brown, Matt Browen, and other likely cognates. Newark International, JFK, and La Guardia; Gary, Indiana, and nearby Detroit; Oklahoma City, Dallas, Phoenix; Seattle, St. Louis, L.A.
'That's it, that's as far as my reach goes.'
But good as J. T. and June proved to be, Isaiah Stillman was better.
'You told me you managed a conservatorship via the Internet,' I said on a visit that evening. 'And that's how you put all this together.'
'Yes, sir.' I'd asked him to stop the sir business, but it did no good. 'I grew up limping, one leg snared forever in a modem. The Internet's the other place I live.'
I told him about Bruhn, about the killings. We were dancing in place, I said, painting by numbers, since we were pretty sure who sent him. But we hadn't been able to get past a handful of basic facts and suspicions.
'We take the individual's right to privacy and autonomy very seriously, Mr. Turner.'
'I know.'
'On the other hand, we're in your debt. And however we insist upon holding ourselves apart from it, this community is one we've chosen to live in, which implies certain responsibilities.'
Our eyes held, then his went to the trees about us: the rough ladder, the treehouse built for children to come.
'Excuse me.'
Entering one of the lean-tos, he emerged with a laptop.
'Moira tells me Miss Emily left,' he said.
'And Val.'
'Val will be back. Miss Emily won't. Marc, right? With a c or a k? B-R-U-H-N?' Fingers rippling on keys. 'Commercial history-which you have already. List of Bruhns by geographical distribution, including alternate spellings… Here it is, narrowed down to the New Jersey-New York area… You want copies of any of this, let me know.'
'I don't see a printer.'
'No problem, I can just zap it to your office, right?'
Could he? I had no idea.
'Now for the real fun. I'm putting in the name… commercial transactions we know about… the Jersey-New
