Sean Vandervelde was leaning over a display table, its lid raised forty-five degrees, using his phone’s flashlight to browse. He was wearing the same jeans and polo and had a black bandanna pressed to his nose and mouth, and when I charged in yelling police hands hands hands he tripped over his own feet, dropping the phone with a soft thud and sending up the cloth like a penalty flag.
“Get down. Let me see your hands. Hands.”
He didn’t put up a fight. I rolled him onto his stomach. He reeked of booze.
“Get the fuck off me.”
I frisked him, released him, stood back as he crawled toward his phone.
“I’m going to sue your dick off,” he slurred.
He pulled himself up on a club chair. His eyes went wide. “The fuck are you doing here.”
“Let’s start by asking you that.”
“It’s my house.”
“It’s sealed. Maybe you noticed that on the way in, when you violated the order.”
A bottle of Japanese scotch sat uncorked on the mantel. He grabbed it down and took a belt.
“I saw the stuff in the office,” I said. “What else have you taken?”
He took another swallow. Flexed his elbow. “You fucked up my arm.”
“Mr. Vandervelde, what else have you taken?”
“Nothing. I haven’t taken anything. Nothing’s left the premises.”
“What else have you touched?”
His gaze strayed to the open display table. I inspected it. Knives in an intact grid, five by five. He hadn’t finished making his selection before I tackled him.
I shut the lid. “What else?”
“Nothing that isn’t mine.”
“You can work that out on your own time.”
“I’m not talking about all of it,” he said petulantly. “There’s things that belong to me, that he gave to me. The baseball…There’s a knife, he bought it for me when I was twelve. It’s sentimental value, she won’t miss it.”
“So you decided to help yourself.”
“Like she isn’t going to do the same thing.”
“She’s not the one breaking and entering. How’d you get in?”
“Hopped the fence.” He tipped the bottle toward me with a small smile. Proud of his agility.
“How’d you get into the house.”
“I have a key.”
“I’ll take it, please.”
“I don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t have to arrest you, either.”
Defiance puffed up his chest. But it was a chemical bravery, swiftly dissipated. He fished the key out and tossed it to me. Flimsy wire ring; plastic tab with a paper insert. DAD.
“Have you been into any of the other rooms?”
“Just the office.”
“What about the desk? What’d you take?”
“God’s sake, nothing.”
“What were you looking for?”
“His will.”
“It’s not here,” I said. “We have it.”
A long silence.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“Ask the lawyer for a copy.”
“I don’t trust a thing that cocksucker says.”
“Come on. Time to go.”
He bent to grab the bandanna and almost keeled over. Scotch splashed the rug. With exaggerated, drunken care, he folded the bandanna into quarters, covered his nose and mouth, and walked ahead of me into the hall.
A few steps along he halted, staring at the giant bloodstain.
He must have seen it on his way in. Maybe he’d been too intoxicated to care; too hell-bent on collecting his birthright.
He wheezed through the cloth, causing it to pouch in and bulge out. The bottle tilted, about to spill. I put a hand on his shoulder and he allowed himself to be led to the foyer.
“Last chance,” I said. “This is a crime scene. Did you take or touch anything else?”
“No.”
“That?”
Sean peered at the scotch. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious.”
He feinted as if he were going to shotgun the booze, then gave an arrogant snicker. I realized then that my backpack was directly behind him, in the shadow of the entry table. He hadn’t seen it. If he did, he might wonder what was inside. Why I had a backpack with me in the first place.
He set the bottle delicately on the tiles. Curtsied. “As you wish.”
I steered him outside and over the motor court. He moved with a shambling gait, loafers scraping.
“How’d you get here?” I asked.
“Uber.”
“Call it.”
Down by the gates, I picked my way through the planting bed to the shrub that concealed the motor unit. I lifted off the housing, grasped the crank, and began winding. The gates parted with excruciating slowness. I opened them eighteen inches and we shimmied through.
I walked him to the curb. I needed to make sure he was good and gone.
“All I wanted was the Ken Griffey, Jr.,” he said. “That’s all. There was a baseball card show and we went. He took me. Stood in line for two hours to get it autographed. All right? I didn’t…I could’ve taken anything, there’s things worth more. Way more.”
I didn’t point out that the shopping bag held several other collectibles.
Headlights drew near. A black Escalade pulled up.
“Have a good night, Mr. Vandervelde.”
I started for the gates.
“Hang on,” Sean said.
I pretended not to hear him.
“Hey. I said wait.”
I turned. I could see him blundering toward sobriety, his native intelligence piqued. “I need to close the gates,” I said.
The driver peeked out at us. “For Sean?”
“One minute,” Sean said.
The driver withdrew.
Sean said to me, “How did you know I was here?”
“We received a call from one of the neighbors. They must’ve seen you climbing the fence.”
I didn’t stick around for the follow-up questions.
Why would a coroner respond to a break-in?
Where was my vehicle?
Why was I wearing gloves?
“Safe travels,” I said and slipped through the gates.
In Rory Vandervelde’s office I spun the Rolodex to L.
Three from the end.
Luke Camaro guy
My brother’s phone number.
I pulled out the card.
It was my first proof of a prior relationship between the two men.
Exasperated as I was with Andrea, I didn’t think she’d lied about not recognizing Vandervelde’s name. Which meant Luke had chosen to withhold that relationship from her.
She wouldn’t approve. Or he knew better than to try to interest her. She had more important things on her mind.
I pocketed the card and spun the Rolodex to a random entry.
The last time I was here—two days and a hundred years ago—I’d gone through the desk.
Maybe I’d missed something.
A quick search of the drawers failed to turn up a Camaro key or a car key of any kind.
But I’d planned for this contingency.
I restored the baseballs and cards to their cases, sheaved the loose papers in a file folder, stood the snapshots up on the desktop.
I retrieved the bottle of scotch from the foyer and replaced it behind the living room bar.
I shouldered my backpack, left the house, and walked to the garage.
Frail moonlight filtered through the redwoods. Grit blew steadily into my face. The hangar door was cranked shut. Harkless and Bagoyo had gone to town: three seals on each side, four at the bottom, and four more along the top.
The pedestrian door had one over the jamb and one over the lock.
Intellectually, I’d accepted the necessity of what I was about to do. It was no worse than anything else I had done in the last two days: destroying and removing evidence, misrepresenting myself, intruding on a private citizen, lying to my colleagues and my wife.
Nevertheless my hands shook as I used a plastic knife to scrape the seals from the pedestrian door. The paper was designed to show signs of tampering. No matter how slowly I went, it shredded into wisps. One at a time I peeled them off, cleaning the surfaces with adhesive remover.
Letting myself in with the stolen house keys, I crossed the display floor to the Camaro.
I took out another set of items lifted from the body van: a vehicle lockout kit, consisting of a plastic wedge, a second inflatable wedge, and a rod with a curved tip.
With the flashlight in my teeth I worked the plastic wedge between the driver’s-side door and the frame to create a thin gap, which I widened incrementally with the inflatable wedge. The Camaro’s door locks were flared like golf tees. I inserted the rod and snagged the top of the lock.
Hesitated. I didn’t want to set off an alarm.
Late-sixties Camaros didn’t have alarms.
Unless Luke had added one.
He liked to rhapsodize about the art and science of vintage car restoration. What to preserve. What to modernize. Which changes raised value and which lowered it. I tended to zone out. Now I wished I’d listened.
In for a penny.
I popped the lock.
The door opened silently.
I got behind the wheel.
The seat, upgraded from vinyl to leather, was soft and cool through my clothes, its stitching neat as Braille. Woodwork like velvet. Mirror-bright chrome. I curled my fingers around the gearshift and it felt alive. Everything from knobs to vents was solid and crisp and perfect, as if the Camaro had rolled off the showroom that morning, ready to eat up the road.
It was a beautiful car, a stunning achievement; the culmination of a process begun when my brother walked out of prison half a man. Hours and hours alone under the hood, fixing, polishing; keeping company with the trees, with the deer and the sparrows; with his thoughts, and memories, and guilt. Man and machine, evolving, improving, together.
A sad, breathless admiration filled me.
This might be all that was left of him.
The glove box held the registration, a box of tissues, and a chocolate protein shake.
I reached beneath the seats to unearth a paperback. Achieving—and Sustaining!—a Growth Mindset.
I popped the trunk.
Jumper cables, bundled car cover, tire patch kit. I lifted the cover on a black pouch, a larger version of the one Andrea used to protect herself from the dangerous tumor-causing radiation emitted by her phone.
Inside the pouch was a space-gray MacBook.
I touched the power button. Dead.
I tucked the laptop in my backpack, cleaned up, and exited the garage.
I’d brought along several blank coroner’s seals. Copying the date and time from the original seals, doing my best to forge Harkless’s atrocious signature, I applied the new seals to the garage door.
I repeated the process at the main house. Erasing proof of my trespassing, but also Sean’s. Now neither of us had been there.
Eleven minutes later I was pulling up to the bureau.
I returned the lockout kit to the body van.
I returned Rory Vandervelde’s house keys to the property room, sealing them in a new evidence bag that I filled out with Harkless’s name and the old time and date.
In Edmond’s office I put the locker keys in the master safe. I updated the tag on Fletcher Kohn’s locker keys to make it appear as though I had used them.
Down in the men’s room I replaced the purple carabiner in Edmond’s locker.
I kept Sean Vandervelde’s house key.
It was one thirty in the morning. My keycard had been active innumerable times. Cameras had caught me coming and going. But no one would review the log. No one would watch the tape. On the off chance that they did, I had a compelling excuse: I was going beyond the call of duty to help a grieving woman in need.
A few inconsistencies marred that story. It did not, for instance, account for why I’d left the bureau, only to return several hours later. I wasn’t worried. The people in this building were my colleagues and friends. We had a culture, a culture I had helped to foster, grounded in trust. Ten years is a long time.
I emerged into the hall.
“Clay?”
Kat Davenport was walking toward me. She smiled and drew me in for a shoulder bump. “What’s up, dude?”
Davenport was a relative newcomer. She’d never worked in the old building. I’d spent a year with her on night shift, our bond cemented by the trauma of digging up an infant buried in a public park. For months nobody came forward to claim the remains. The family turned out to be a bunch of homicidal neo-Nazis.
She said, “What brings you here at this godforsaken hour?”
I told Kat Davenport the Fabulous Tale of Fletcher Kohn’s Girlfriend.
She shook her head. “Get outta here, bro. You look like shit.”
The drive home was too short for the laptop to charge. I hung my uniform in the bathroom for reuse and went to the Great Wall of Cardboard.
Column three, second from the top: BREAD MACHINE.
I took down a different box, labeled BOOKS (CLAY).
Stack of noir, biography of Jerry West, nine-hundred-page history of Europe that I’d never read, and an equally weighty tome called A Practical Guide to Death Investigation that I had.
I pried out the history book and riffled its pages. Tucked into the chapter about the Ottoman wars was a personal check, made out to my daughter in the amount of a quarter of a million dollars and signed by a man whose missing sister I had found. The case was an outgrowth of the investigation into the dead infant in the park. I’d solved it off the clock. I’d never submitted the requisite paperwork for permission to moonlight and thus was not entitled to any compensation.
I rubbed the check between my fingers. It felt strangely insubstantial, as though the amount of money it represented ought to give it more weight. What I should have done was tear it up a long time ago. It was a temptation and a comfort; half insurance policy, half grenade. Cashing it would cause problems. Could, conceivably, kill my career.
If that wasn’t dead already.