The Scapegoat, page 17
“What Wallfisch said about your wife. Was that true?”
He stopped eating and glanced at Sato.
“You mean, that she’s seeing someone? Yes.”
She dried the corners of her mouth with a napkin but said nothing.
“Yesterday, after my meeting with Tremaine, I went home for lunch. I was three or four blocks away, so I figure why not? I find wine glasses and an empty bottle of Champagne on the coffee table. We used to drink Prosecco a lot, Julie called it pre-sex-o. I should’ve just left but I had to see it to the end. I walked in on them going at it like he’s pounding steak with a hammer. The man didn’t stop to draw breath, he just kept going. Told me to get lost.”
“Jesus.”
He looked at the windshield, which was steaming up on the inside.
“I thought about shooting him. For nearly ten seconds I was good with being a murderer. I’d kill him, then I’d kill her. You know how that goes; I wouldn’t have been able to stop.”
“Is this because of us?”
Coombes shook his head and quickly regretted it. His brain seemed to swirl inside his skull, the pain coming thundering back.
“Me and Julie have been living separate lives. She’s been seeing someone for a while now, I’ve known since before Christmas. Before us. You could call me a hypocrite and you’d be right, but it turns out there’s a difference between knowing it and seeing it.”
They finished eating in silence. The last third of his ramen had cooled but he finished it anyway and moved on to the edamame. Sato turned to him.
“What now?”
“Now we speak to Alex Holland about his old buddy Nathan Marks.”
“I meant between us, idiot.”
“Well, Grace. It looks like a couple more spots have opened up on my dance card if you’re still interested. Unfortunately, I’m ugly now.”
She touched his face, her fingers stopping short of the bump on his forehead.
“I’ve kissed worse.”
The address he had for Alex Holland in Highland Park had a new black Ford F-150 Raptor parked out front. If he still lived there, he was in. This suited Coombes just fine, he hated having to run down witnesses and suspects; whichever category Holland fell into. Sato pulled the Charger up behind the truck and killed the engine.
He’d spent most of the ride over catching her up on his investigation of Nathan Marks and what had happened to him that caused him to leave Tremaine’s employment.
Holland opened his front door wearing a zip-up track top, camouflage shorts down to his knees, and a pair of open toe sandals. A cloud of marijuana smoke hung around him like a fog bank. He looked at the two of them standing there without surprise.
“Oh shit, 5-0! 5-0!” Holland grinned like he’d made a joke, then stared at Coombes’ forehead like a rare butterfly had landed on it. “Hey man, what happened to your face?”
“Baseball practice. Open the door or it might be contagious.”
Holland stepped aside to let them in and took a draw from a large joint in his hand. He smirked as Coombes passed him. They were the same height and build, but there was no focus in the other man’s eyes. He’d smoked it all away.
“I know what this is about, Abigail called me this morning. Said some cop was sniffing around, asking questions about Nate. I’m guessing that’s you?”
“Detective Coombes and Sato.”
“Whatever.”
Holland walked to the back of the property, toward the kitchen. He still walked like a Marine, shoulders swinging. It was amazing how much swagger could build up protecting diplomats in one of the safest places in the world.
Holland took a beer out his fridge, twisted the cap off and drank from the bottle as his eyes moved slowly over Sato’s body. What a creep. Coombes cleared his throat and the sound brought the Marine back into the moment.
“If you’re here looking for Nate, you’re wasting your time. He’s not here. I haven’t seen him for four years. If you think he’s hiding under the bed you’re welcome to take a look.”
“Is there somewhere we can sit?”
Holland sighed and walked them back through into his main living space and plopped himself down on a sofa where he stretched himself out horizontally.
Coombes sat opposite and took out his notebook. Sato remained standing.
“You think he’s dead?”
“Do I think who’s dead?”
“Nate. He disappeared. Even you, his best buddy, hasn’t seen him.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Is that because the two of you had a fight and you killed him? If we come back with cadaver dogs are we going to find anything buried in your yard?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Marks’ parents say you helped pay for the private investigator to look for their son. That sounds like guilt to me, what does it sound like to you, Grace?”
“An alibi,” she said.
Coombes nodded.
“Right. So how about it, Holland? Shall we get the dogs and a backhoe and pull up your yard?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Look at my face. I’m just getting started.”
Holland took another mouthful of beer. Coombes understood now why he’d pulled it from the fridge, the beer gave him longer to think about awkward questions without it appearing like he was thinking for too long.
“I never thought of Nate as disappearing, I just stopped hearing from him. How many people have you ever met that just cut you off without warning? One minute they’re there, you’re having beers with them every Friday night, the next? Nothing. It happens.”
“And yet you gave his parents what they needed to pay that PI.”
“Nate dropping me is one thing. Dropping your family, that’s not right.”
“Still. Pretty generous, giving them that money.”
Holland shrugged.
“I can afford it. You got to understand, Abigail and Robert are like second parents. Me and Nate were in and out of each other’s houses growing up, eating meals, or candy, or soda. I was just paying back what I probably owed them anyway. They’re good people.”
Coombes glanced up at Sato and angled his head to the side. She uncrossed her arms and moved off, into the back of the property. Holland sat up and put his feet on the floor. His eyes flicking nervously between Coombes and Sato’s retreating back.
“Where’s she going?”
Coombes ignored him.
“What is it you do for a living, Mr. Holland?”
“I’m an ironworker. I put the beams in high-rises.”
“No kidding. And you smoke that shit?”
“Not when I’m working.”
“Are you currently out of work?”
“We’re building a tower downtown but the site’s closed. We get our steel from China and it’s all dried up because of COVID. I get paid either way so I’m not bothered.”
“The last time you spoke with Nathan, was that before or after he was fired?”
Holland took a draw on his joint.
It was almost finished and he had to hold it carefully with his fingernails which were heavily discolored. He blew out a cloud of thick smoke.
“After. He was framed by that woman and if you want my opinion, that rich old asshole was in on it.”
“Olaf Dekker?”
“Tremaine.”
Coombes stared at Holland for a moment, letting the penny drop.
“You think Nate’s involved in the kidnapping.”
“That’s right.”
“There’s no way, man! He’s a boy scout.”
“Not anymore. We have him on video grabbing Amy Tremaine and throwing her into the back of a van.”
Holland stubbed out what remained of his joint into an ashtray. His joking face had hardened into a mask.
“Uh-uh. You got the wrong guy.”
“Well, if it isn’t him then the quicker we locate him, the sooner we can clear him and find the real kidnapper, right? He’s got nothing to worry about.”
“Like I said, I don’t know where he is.”
“Let’s leave that for now. Tell me, you ever see Marks with a date?”
“Plenty of times. Women sure like that man’s face.”
“What age were they, these women?”
“Our age,” Holland said, then smirked. “Older sometimes.”
“How much older?”
“Twenty years? He said he didn’t care what age they were as long as there was a connection. I’d joke about it sometimes, that he always seemed happiest when he was with one of his cougars.”
He made a note in his notebook. Cougars. The term seemed offensive to him, but he understood many women applied it playfully to themselves.
Despite the failed IDs he’d had with Marks, this aligned perfectly with Adam Finley’s account of the men Elizabeth Walton brought back to her apartment.
It seemed possible that after leaving Tremaine’s service Marks and Walton had crossed paths again on the dating circuit and a new type of relationship had formed.
Sato returned and shook her head.
Hell, it wasn’t like he’d expected Marks to be hiding in a closet.
“One last question. You said you thought Tremaine had been in on the frame-up with the Dekker woman. Is that what Nate thought too?”
“Of course!” Holland said, then froze, realizing he’d implicated his friend. “But that was a long time ago, you can’t think this is revenge after all this time, that’s insane.”
Coombes put his notebook away and stood.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Holland. We’ll be seeing you again soon.”
He walked to the front door with Sato alongside.
“What the hell does that mean?“ Holland shouted.
When they got outside, he made for the driver’s side of the Dodge before he remembered Sato was driving. The friction with Holland had made him forget about his injuries.
Once they were seated, they sat for a moment watching the house. After about twenty seconds the curtains moved and Holland looked out at where they were parked.
“He’s lying about something,” Sato said.
“That’s for sure. Any sign of Marks in the house?”
“No. There’s a spare room, but it’s full of gear for Holland’s job. Boots, harnesses, all that stuff. It didn’t look like the room’s been used as a sleeping space for a long time and I don’t figure Holland and Marks are the type for sharing a bed.”
“His reaction to the kidnapping seemed real.”
“Nobody knows anybody,” Sato said, starting the engine.
Holland was still watching them as they pulled away.
27
When he got back to the PAB, he walked straight across the detective bureau to catch up with Becker. Some of the other detectives made remarks about his appearance. Becker just whistled and allowed his eyes to move with frank interest over the damage to his face.
“What happened to you, Coombes?”
“I was ambushed by Nathan Marks and his psycho girlfriend.”
“No kidding. Did he say what he wanted?”
“To play baseball, apparently. But we were all out of baseballs.”
Becker laughed.
“I have news from SID about Tremaine’s security system.”
“Let me guess, they got zip.”
“Correct. No recordings on the local drive or on the cloud backup.”
“Whoever did this not only knew how to disable the alarm and wipe the recordings but knew about the cloud backups as well. Like someone that used to work there.”
“Not exactly. The tech said that when a file is deleted it remains on the drive until it is over-written. Until then, all that happens is a pointer to the file is erased and the operating system sees it as available space. For a window of time the file can be found again, its pointer restored, and the file brought back. However, there was no deleted file to bring back.”
Coombes nodded.
He knew about deleted files but let Becker finish. If you give a member of your team a moment to shine, it’ll be something they’ll want to do again.
“All right. Then our killer must’ve used a shredder program to permanently delete it so that there’s nothing to bring back.”
“Wait, John, it gets better. Our guy decided to look at previous recordings. He wanted to know what file format he was looking for, likely size, anything to help him find the missing data. What he found was that the last recorded file was over two months old. The system was off. It wasn’t deactivated by some master crook, it just wasn’t on.”
“Goddammit.”
Coombes found that he wasn’t surprised.
He recalled a Times story about thieves whose m.o. involved putting cats over walls of target properties. The cat walked about, triggering false alarms. After being woken at 3 a.m. several nights in a row, the victims stopped setting their alarms. As soon as the thieves put a cat in and got no alarm, they knew it was safe to enter.
“Did SID have any good news?”
“If they did, they didn’t mention it to me.”
Coombes sighed.
“How are you getting on with the PI files?”
“More than half-way. I’ve looked at the timeline on this and I’m not hopeful. By the time he was hired, eighteen months had passed and all trace of Nathan Marks had vanished. The PI has nothing to work with and cast a pretty wide net hoping to get lucky.”
“That may be, but the timeline’s even worse now.”
“For sure. I checked out this Lester Crumb character by the way. He used to be on the job, worked in the Real Estate Fraud Unit for three years. He solved no cases in that time. Not one. Looking at his notes here, I think I know why. He’s a clown of the first order.”
“Keep at it. Could be he had the answer and didn’t know it.”
“That I can believe.”
Across the room, Sato was back to digging through the socials on Elizabeth Walton and Amy Tremaine.
They were at the end of day three and they were still looking for angles on social media. That told him all he needed to know about how well things were going with the investigation.
“Anything?”
“The only interesting thing is that Amy and her father don’t follow each other on any platform. They both follow Elizabeth Walton and Tremaine’s foundation, but there’s no direct contact between father and daughter.”
“You think there was a rift between them?”
“Maybe, or they just respected boundaries.”
That didn’t sound like the Tremaine he knew, but he’d been in Afghanistan for most of the former governor’s time in office. Maybe he missed a memo.
“Any other links between Amy and Elizabeth?”
“Just one. Cora Roche.”
“Hmm,” he said.
It didn’t surprise him that Cora added Amy as a friend, oftentimes people make friends through other friends and online was no different. The part that surprised him, was that she’d been so bitter about Amy’s abduction getting media attention when it turned out they were friends.
“What kind of things did Cora post on Amy’s page?”
“Funny stuff. Animal videos. Pandas farting and scaring themselves, you know the kind of thing. No politics, nothing about men. Early posts are signed Cora with a single x after it.”
“And later posts?”
Sato smiled. “No x.”
He nodded but said nothing. Cora wore her heart on her sleeve, she didn’t hide it away. She had been attracted to Elizabeth Walton, then to Amy. They were completely different people, but they were both out there getting things done, which was attractive.
It didn’t fit anywhere into their case, so he discarded the information. Sato spoke again.
“Assuming we’re right and Nathan Marks is behind all this. That would mean Amy would recognize him, right? I mean, he must’ve been hanging around her dad through most of her teenage years and it’s only been four years since he was fired.”
His brain jumped to the proof of life clip.
“Oh, man!”
“What?”
“Amy did recognize him, don’t you see? She’s been telling us the whole time.”
Sato frowned. “How?”
“The video in the water tank, she told us who it was.”
Sato had only seen the video once and had been blocking it out ever since.
“All I remember is she punched the glass.”
“Then what did she do?”
“Uh. She pointed at the camera.”
He shook his head.
“I thought the same thing, but it’s the water. Refraction. It distorted what she was really pointing at, which was the glass and what she’d done to it.”
“To the cracks?”
“To the marks.”
Sato’s face twisted.
“That’s a little cute, isn’t it?”
“If she was only pointing at the person working the camera she would’ve pointed once or kept pointing. Same if she was pointing through the lens at her dad. You did this to me. Or whatever. But she didn’t, she pointed, then pointed again. Two distinct motions.”
“I don’t know how to feel about this, Johnny. If you’re right, we wasted all that time finding the tank, then James Anderson, all because we missed a clue right in front of us.”
“Anderson wasn’t a waste of time, he got us to Marks.”
“What about the tattoo?”
“I figure Marks flipped the video left-to-right. I bet there’s a pale band of skin on his wrist. He knew Tremaine would recognize his watch, so he took it off.”
“This is bad, Johnny.”
“It is what it is.”
His cell phone vibrated. A text from Gantz.
My office, now.
Word of his injuries had obviously filtered through the office network.
He found Gantz sitting on the edge of her desk, head tilted forward like she was looking at her shoes. The glass window that separated her from the detective bureau had a venetian blind on it. The blind was closed. It was never closed.
