MONICA
my legal pad, disjointed thoughts racing out of my mind. I wrote names. I wrote dates. I wrote theoretic connections between people. I asked questions. I suggested leads to follow up on. I ground my forehead into the hand supporting it, wracking my brain for answers.
Who was The Man Upstairs?
The second-floor meeting room at the LGPD buzzed with half-sleepy, nine-in-the-morning conversation. The air smelled of fresh-brewed coffee, donuts, various brands of shampoo and aftershave, paper and ink, and the electricity from the projector. People were dressed in suits and ties, or in slacks and polo shirts like me. They all carried a service weapon on their hip. I could identify the badges of half a dozen departments—Walworth County Sheriff’s Office, as a matter of course; a humbling array of nearby city and county principalities which had volunteered their personnel and resources; and one agent each from the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigations, the FBI, and the ATF.
After three homicides, a shooting, and a bombing—all in the course of two weeks—the workload was simply more than Lehman, Neumiller, and I could handle on our own. So we’d formed an investigative task force and invited the entire cavalry. For the most part, we weren’t even sure yet what we were investigating. Why had the surviving members of the Markham Ring been murdered? Why were near family apparently being targeted, as well? Jason’s father, Tommy Thomlin, had been shot, while Bobby’s father, Roland Markham had been warned.
And then a boy named Jimmy Beacon had detonated a bomb in the middle of downtown on the Fourth of July. The incident wouldn’t have been related at all, except for that anonymous phone call I’d gotten afterwards. Someone calling himself The Man Upstairs. Someone claiming to be behind it all, the bombing included. Someone saying he knew the town’s deepest secrets.
Including mine.
I frowned at my tangled swamp of notes. Finding The Man himself wasn’t supposed to be my part of the investigation. I was assigned to follow up on Fritz Geissler, the first murder victim.
I snorted. Like hell I was going to leave it alone. I wasn’t going to let someone get under my skin like that.
My partner, Stan Lehman, stepped behind the desk at the front of the room. “Good morning, good morning,” he said, tapping a stack of papers together loudly.
Members of the task force grabbed last-minute muffins and cups of coffee, then migrated toward their seats. Metal chair legs clanged against tables. People flowed around me like a herd of cows, while I was a rock in the middle, already at my desk. I frowned down at my black leather portfolio and the yellow legal pad inside. The page looked like the ravings of a madwoman. Maybe they were.
Mark Neumiller, my other partner in the LGPD Detective Bureau, pulled up a chair beside me and set down a notebook and a paper cup full of water from the cooler. I flipped the cover of my portfolio to conceal what I’d been working on and turned my attention to the front of the room.
Leadership of the task force had fallen to Lehman, as Detective Sergeant of the department where the case had originated. To colleagues who only knew us marginally, it had apparently come as a surprise that Lehman held rank over me. Based on their expressions, it was even more stunning that I could sit amongst the rank and file and take orders from someone else. Even in passing, I tended to form a reputation as a strong woman. (Read that “bitch.”) But I didn’t like people well enough to lead them. Lehman could have that job. Besides, in our bureau, we knew who really wore the pants.
Lehman picked up a marker from the whiteboard tray and glanced over his notes, scrawled in a first-grader’s handwriting. While we all had access to a database containing every detail of the case, Lehman still insisted on his color-coded note system. No one else bothered to reference it, especially as new notes in unestablished colors were squeezed in at odd angles. So far as I could tell, Lehman just wanted to play with markers while looking important.
“Okay,” he said, popping the marker cap on and off. “Neumiller, Thompson, how are we doing on Amelia Beacon’s case?”
Mark Neumiller had partnered up with Detective Al Thompson from Racine PD to investigate that angle. Before detonating his bomb, Jimmy Beacon had accused his boss, Bud Weber, of murdering his little sister years ago when his family lived in Racine. Weber had been interrogated twenty ways to Sunday that night. He’d admitted to living in the same city at that time, but maintained his innocence, even refusing a lawyer. But it didn’t help his case that he’d been recently under investigation for allegedly abusing his foster child, Bailey Johnson. We were merely looking for the chink in the story that would blow it all apart.
Neumiller sipped his water and glanced over his notes. “We’ve been to the apartment complex where Weber lived. It’s literally ten minutes from the playground where Amelia was kidnapped.”
“Weber declined a voluntary DNA swab?”
“That’s right.”
“Can we court order him yet?”
Neumiller shook his head. “I’ve hashed that over with the DA. He doesn’t think the judge will go for it without more evidence.”
I tapped my foot impatiently. Suspicions and proof were two different things, and the gray zone in between was where scum like Bud Weber thrived and did their dirty work.
“We’re talking to the landlord and the neighbors,” Neumiller went on, “trying to dig up Bud’s friends and figure out if we can confirm a location for Weber that day. His reference swore Bud was at work. Bud’s employer said he might be able to produce records of who was on shift that day and when. He’s just got some digging to do.”
“That’s a good lead. Do we know where Jimmy got the pink bow?”
Witnesses on the day of the bombing claimed Jimmy had confronted Bud with a pink bow, which he claimed his sister had been wearing the day she disappeared. Later, we found remnants of pink polyester satin in the blast zone.
Neumiller shook his head again. “No one ever saw him with it until he displayed it to Weber.”
“Who, of course, never saw it in his life…” Lehman’s sarcastic comment trailed off as he added new notes to his marker board. “Anything else?”
“Nope. We’ll keep you posted.”
Footwork. Rock-turning. Haystack-poking. Paper pushing. Those words described the nature of the entire investigation. It wasn’t that we had a lack of leads; it was that we had too many, and yet not enough. Every tiny fact could prove pointless, or it could be the clue we so desperately needed to unravel the entire case.
There was a subdued vibration in the air that was palpable. Our focus was controlled, intense. I’d once seen a bloodhound track a scent for thirty miles on winding county highways, never giving up, never forgetting what he was after, never being distracted by irrelevant scents. That was us. At the end of the trail, there would be arrests, at least two of them—Bud Weber and The Man Upstairs.
Lehman twiddled his marker. “All right. Let’s talk about God. I mean, The Man Upstairs.”
People snickered. But I leaned on my hand to shield my face from the room. I didn’t need my cheeks to flush. Every time The Man came up in discussion, I felt exposed. Vulnerable. Afraid of what my unknown nemesis knew. Equally afraid of what my colleagues might find out. The men and women of the Lake Geneva Police were something like family to me. But to this day, not one of them knew about my baby or my abortion. It was a side of me I’d never shown. A side I was still hopeful never to reveal. No one belonged in that sanctuary of pain and confusion but me.
So how had The Man Upstairs gotten in? I had questions. And I had ideas on how to find the answer.
Lehman was still talking. “Hayworth, you were cleaning up that audio file. Did you get anything?”
Detective Adam Hayworth from Walworth County tapped the touchpad on his laptop. “I don’t know what he did to conceal his voice. I haven’t been able to strip it out yet.” He frowned at his screen. “But I managed to pick out some noises in the background. Listen to this.”
He clicked his mouse again. Sound came from a USB speaker plugged into his laptop.
“I even know how to exploit your children,” the rasping voice said—the one I couldn’t get out of my dreams at night. “Yes, Monica. YOUR children.”
Hayworth had clearly rebalanced the sound to emphasize the background. But all I heard was the voice. Taunting me. Challenging me. Whispering to me. I know you were going to have a child. And I know you ended the pregnancy without even telling your husband. And I know how badly you want to protect that information…
The first time Lehman had played the recording for the task force, half the room had turned to look at me. They knew I didn’t have kids.
“There’s, ah… There’s nothing personal to that, right?” Lehman had asked uncomfortably.
“No,” I snapped back. And since that was my usual tone of voice, no one had questioned me further.
Maybe even I was paranoid. Children? There had only been one pregnancy, one fetus. Had The Man really been suggesting he had information on me personally? If so, it was bad information.
Or had he used the plural on purpose? To keep me guessing? Doubting? Underestimating my opponent? Was he inviting me to assume he was stupid? He claimed to know the deepest secrets of the entire town. Did he want me to think he didn’t?
I shot breath through my nose. This was why I couldn’t sleep at night. Why the bullet journal in my ledger was more like the chalk on the walls drawn by an inmate at an asylum for the insane.
As Hayworth played the audio again now, I bit my lip and forced myself to concentrate. I had to catch this guy. I had to catch him…
A rhythmic ticking sounded quietly in the background noises that Hayworth had isolated.
“That’s a clock,” Lehman observed.
“So he made the call indoors in a room with a clock,” Neumiller concluded. Pens scribbled around the room and keyboards clicked.
“An old clock,” Hayworth added. “I haven’t fully isolated this sound yet, but you can just hear the gears turning, and then—there. That was the clock striking the quarter hour.”
“The Man Upstairs hangs out with Father Time,” quipped a young detective from Janesville. The room laughed.
“So, is this a grandfather clock? A wall clock? A mantle clock?” asked Lehman.
Hayworth shook his head. “Sounds old. Mechanical, obviously. I have an appointment with a clockmaker this afternoon. I’ll run it past him and see what he knows.”
It would have been far more helpful to pick out a Harley Davidson idling in the driveway, or better yet, a recorded voice for the blind saying that it was safe to cross name-of-street now. Something that could help us identify the location from outside. With the audio of the clock, all we could do was verify we had the right place after we’d found it and physically been inside. Good stuff if this all came to trial—but the slow boat to China while we were still trying to find the place.
But if the clockmaker was good—and if clocks could, in fact, be identified merely by their sound—we could turn more stones. If it was a rare antique, we could possibly create a list of those clocks still in existence. From there, it would be a matter of tracking down every single one until we found an owner and a location that might fit the case.
This was the nature of the evidence we had to work with. It was going to be a long, long road. Normally, this was the kind of tedious, OCD work I thrived on.
But it was hard to focus on the details when I heard The Man’s voice screaming in the back of my head day and night. I wanted him behind bars now.
Lehman’s marker squeaked across the board, leaving a trail of orange. “Were you able to pick out anything else? Traffic? Other voices?”
Hayworth shook his head. “Just the clock.”
Lehman nodded. “All right. Well. Let us know if you make any more progress on the disguised voice.”
“Will do.”
Lehman capped his orange marker. “Okay. What else? Oh, right. Brandt. You turned up something on the abuse case. Bailey Johnson. Why don’t you fill us in?”
People shifted in their seats to face Ryan. He sat near the door, dressed in a patrolman’s uniform—navy blue, almost dark enough to be black. The lack of reflective striping, royal blue yoke, and cargo shorts meant he wasn’t on bike patrol today. Still, this was the first I’d ever heard of a seasonal bike patrol officer getting a seat in an investigative task force. But in the earliest days of the case, Lehman, Neumiller, and I had been strapped with the murder investigations. So Ryan had ended up spearheading the investigation into Bud Weber, Jimmy’s boss and Bailey’s foster dad. Ryan had a rapport with Bailey, plus plenty of past experience as a detective, and that had landed him the project. Even after the case had grown, the task force had seen no reason not to let him continue his investigation on Weber. The chief had promised to allow for room in his schedule.
Before Ryan could speak, Lehman added, “Oh, and congrats on the promotion.”
Neumiller leaned back in his chair to address the room. “He’s permanent now,” he announced.
The room applauded politely and a few hands thumped Ryan on the back. He grinned appreciatively.
So it had happened, then. Ryan was year-round. Dammit. I gripped my pen so tightly, I felt plastic crackle. I’d sworn I’d leave if he stayed. Would I? With a case like this on my hands? With a madman toying with the intimate details of my life?
Ryan stood, staring at a printout in his hand. “Okay. I don’t have a lot. I mean—” he lifted the paper. “I found this half an hour before the meeting started.”
Maybe Wade “making room” in Ryan’s schedule was a little too generous an expression.
Ryan scratched his head, scanning the writing. “Anyway, Bud Weber is listed as a witness in regard to a murder that took place in downtown Chicago on October 29, 1994.”
“Who was the victim?” asked Lehman.
“Zayne Mars,” Ryan read. “Male, twenty-one years of age. He was Bud’s roommate.”
Lehman paused, purple marker hovering. “And you say Bud was a witness? Not a suspect?”
Ryan scanned the report again. “Yeah.” He shrugged. “Go figure.”
A few detectives smothered laughter. There was no love lost around here on Bud Weber.
“Anything else?” Lehman asked.
“No, just that.” Ryan shrugged as he sat down. “I’m heading to his bar after the meeting to see what I can learn.”
“Okay. Interesting lead. Keep us posted.” Lehman twiddled the marker. “Who’s next? Tolsky, you were piecing together a timeline for Jason Thomlin. What’ve you got?”
I sat through another hour of reports, jotting the occasional note, bouncing my foot, itching to get out of this meeting room and back on the street. Lehman and I planned to speak with the staff at the Abbey Resort in Fontana. We now had all of Fritz Geissler’s phone and Internet data as well as his bank records. With that, we’d pieced together a timeline of exactly where he’d been and when, from the day he flew out of Los Angeles to the day he was murdered in Lake Geneva. He’d spent his last night on earth at the Abbey Resort. We wanted to talk with the staff to see what they knew and if he met anyone while he was there.
Anyone like The Man Upstairs.
The sooner we caught the bastard behind all this, the sooner I could sit him in a chair and demand an answer out of him.
How did you know?
“All right,” Lehman said. “Good work, everybody. You all have your assignments. We meet again tomorrow, same time, same place. Good luck.”
Chairs bumped over carpeted floor. Conversations resumed. Notes were compared in more detail. Empty coffee cups were thrown into the trash can by the door, Styrofoam gliding down the filmy trash can liner.
I closed my portfolio and made for the escape, avoiding eye contact with anyone in the room. I didn’t need questions. I’d recorded my conversation with The Man Upstairs and I’d shared it with the task force. I’d been a very good girl, sharing it at all. I didn’t need to be taken off the case because I was suddenly too close to it. Worse, I didn’t need prying eyes and ears inside my personal business. I didn’t need a whole crowd inside my confused and ravished heart. It had already been invaded. It had already been ransacked. I didn’t…
I bit my lips so I wouldn’t cry and sucked in air through my nose. I didn’t need to fall apart in front of all my colleagues. Because fall apart was all I knew how to do when it came to the questions that clandestinely defined my life—the questions of what exactly I’d done ten years ago and why and if I should have waited until I was less furious with Ryan and if I should have told him.
Ryan. Against my bidding, my eyes flickered to him as I passed. He was looking at me, too. Of course he would be. I moved faster so he couldn’t stop me. No, I didn’t want to go out for drinks. No, I didn’t want to talk about the case or his promotion or anything else on the face of the earth.
I just wanted to disappear. I wanted to feel safe again, all my secrets hidden where only I could find them, hold them, comfort them.
No one was supposed to be allowed in there.