“Do you mean Ambrose Bierce?”
“Yeah, the guy who walked into Mexico and disappeared. And that’s what they’ll say about Hansen twenty years from now: he was on to something big and he vanished.”
Dillon liked to quote Ambrose Bierce, one his favorites being: An idiot: a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence on human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
“I also had an agent search Hansen’s apartment,” Claire said, “but she didn’t find anything helpful. She said the place might have been searched before she got there, but Hansen was such a slob it was hard to be sure.”
“I know Hansen’s laptop went missing with him,” Dillon said, “but could he have e-mailed something from it?”
“No. Hansen used his laptop like a typewriter and when it was time to file a story he’d copy it to a disc and take the disc to work. He never e-mailed anything related to his stories. Maybe he was afraid to.”
“So another dead end,” Dillon said.
“Yes. Which is why I need DeMarco for a Judas goat. Please, Dillon. Let me tether his ass to a stake and see who comes to eat him.”
“No, Claire,” Dillon said. “Find another way.”
21
DeMarco knocked again on Betty’s door, and she frowned when she saw who was standing on her porch. He wondered if she’d forgotten who he was.
“Hi, Betty. Joe DeMarco, Paul’s cousin? Remember?”
“Of course I remember. Why do people your age always assume someone my age can’t remember anything?”
Sheesh. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t implying-”
“Oh, never mind. What do you want?”
“Well, I was wondering if you’d mind letting me into Paul’s apartment again. I still can’t find his will.”
And then he told Betty what the lawyer had said, how she might be forced to store all of Paul’s things until Paul’s estate was settled by the state, which could take until the next ice age. He could tell Betty wasn’t too happy to hear that-and she gave him the key.
There was no Rolodex or address book in Paul’s apartment.
This whole thing was really beginning to piss him off. He’d just blown a hundred and twenty bucks on a lawyer who’d been no help at all, and now he was wasting more time on a guy he barely knew. And the worst thing was, it was a gorgeous day outside, a perfect day for golf, and he was inside a stuffy apartment.
The money he’d paid the lawyer made him think he should go through Paul’s bills again. If a lawyer had prepared a will for him, there would definitely be a bill, and since he couldn’t find a file labeled LAWYER, he spent forty minutes looking at old Visa bills and canceled checks. No joy.
Then another thought occurred to him: he kept his really important papers in a safe deposit box at his bank, things like his own will and the deed for his house. But he also had a little fireproof box down in his basement where he put semi-important stuff like his passport, his insurance policies, and his disaster cash. Maybe Paul had a box like that, too.
He rooted around in Paul’s closets-one in his bedroom, one in his office, and one by the front door. It was a small house and there was no basement. All he found was the usual crap people dump on the top shelves of their closets, things they never use but are too lazy to throw out. He didn’t find a strongbox, but he did find a cardboard box filled with photographs.
He flipped through the box and saw a picture of his mom, Paul’s mom, and Paul’s Aunt Lena-the person who, if she wasn’t eighty-seven years old, should be dealing with this. Then there were the usual snapshots people take and never look at again: pictures of people sitting at barbecue tables, in front of Christmas trees, posed like they were guests at a wedding or some other celebration. There was one guy who was with Paul in a lot of the pictures, and there were several pictures of the guy standing alone. Hmm, he thought.
He knocked on Betty’s door again-he could tell Betty was becoming a wee bit tired of him-and showed her the picture of the man he’d found so frequently in Paul’s photo collection. “Do you know who this is?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s Anthony,” she said. “He and Paul dated for about two years, but they broke up over a year ago. Paul took it very hard. I felt so sorry for him.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said. “Do you know Anthony’s last name?”
“McGuire. He lives in Fairfax.”
An ex-lover. Maybe he’d know if Paul had a will.
But then he looked up at the sky-that beautiful, cloudless blue sky-and he thought, Life is too short. Look at Mahoney. One day he’s running around, on top of the world, and the next day, with no warning at all, he’s on his back, in a coma, half a step from death’s door. Yeah, life is too short and to hell with Paul, his furniture, and his will. He was gonna spend the afternoon playing golf. He’d go see this McGuire guy tomorrow.
The small conference table in Claire’s office was piled with paper, stacks of paper, all the records she’d asked her people to pull on Russo and Hopper. And because she didn’t know what she was looking for, she couldn’t tell her techs to go through the papers and find whatever it was she needed to find; she had to do it herself, and the task was taking forever. She was just burning time and it was really pissing her off.
That damn Dillon. If he would just let her use DeMarco like she wanted.
The records provided a fairly complete picture of Russo: he was heavily involved in his church, donated much of his salary to charities, had no expensive hobbies, ate lunch at Subway almost every day. One thing she couldn’t find from the records, however, was a person Russo was particularly close to-somebody he might have confided in, somebody who might have been able to explain what he was doing at the Iwo Jima Memorial. Based on his phone bills for the last six months, this person didn’t exist. There wasn’t anyone he called every day or every other day, the way a husband might call his wife or a guy might call his girlfriend.
“I want Russo’s house searched,” Claire said. “Really searched.”
Claire was speaking to her favorite agent, a young lady in her thirties named Alice. Unlike most of the people who worked for her, Alice wasn’t afraid of her. Alice sat there impassively, saying nothing.
Alice was very good at her job, but she had the emotional range of cork.
The reason Claire was talking to Alice was because she knew one thing to be absolutely true: Men can’t find anything. This was an axiom as certain and valid as any law of physics.
One night-she remembered it like it was yesterday-Mark had decided he wanted peanut butter after they finished making love. God knows why he wanted peanut butter at one in the morning, but he did. She was still lying in bed, feeling kinda sore between her legs but sore in that good way, and he yelled out to her, Hey, where’s the peanut butter? Top shelf of the cupboard, she yelled back, right next to the stove. A minute later, he yelled again: I can’t find it. So she had to get up, put on a robe, go into the kitchen, and there he was, buck-naked, staring helplessly into the cupboard. Claire remembered thinking at the time how absolutely perfect he looked and what a lucky girl she was. I thought you said it was on this shelf, he said. It is, she said, and she moved one box out of the way- one box — and there was the peanut butter.
Mark may have been perfect but he was still a man-and men can’t find anything.
So when Claire wanted a place searched she assigned a woman, in this case Alice. She would have assigned Alberta because Alberta had more patience than Alice, but Alberta was dead.
Claire still couldn’t believe it. Alberta had only been thirty-seven. One of the agents who knew her well said her mom had died of a coronary at forty-two, and it looked as if the same thing had happened to Alberta. They were holding a wake for her tomorrow night but Claire didn’t plan to attend. She wanted to go but she knew her presence at the event would make Alberta’s co-workers uncomfortable.
“An FBI agent has already been in there,” Claire said. “He took Russo’s computer and I’m guessing he searched the place as well. So if Russo hid something and it’s still in his apartment, it’s not going to be in any of the usual places.”
“What am I looking for?” Alice asked.
