CHAPTER NINE

MONICA

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shit!

I called into the handset—“Hello? Hello?”—but the girl was gone. So I hung up and dialed the Communications Center. While it rang, I rapped a pen and stared at the wall of my cubicle. Nothing but a fuzzy gray backdrop, it was utterly devoid of photos, sticky notes, or (God forbid) succulents in tiny hanging vases. A clean space fostered a clear mind.

“Angie,” I said when the telecommunicator picked up, “what’s the phone number on that call you sent up to me?”

“Just a sec.” Angie was silent while her computer mouse clicked in the background. “Oh… Oops.”

Oops? What did oops mean? “What?”

“Um… I must have picked up too fast. The number didn’t have a chance to register.”

I braced my elbow on my desk and pinched the bridge of my nose. Angie had been working here for nine years. What was she doing making rookie mistakes?

“Sorry, Steele,” she said, and I could hear her bracing for a tongue lashing.

“It’s okay,” I sighed. It wasn’t. But I didn’t have time for tirades. “Thanks for checking.”

“Of course.”

I hung up. “Shit!”

Lehman rolled away from his desk and peered around the divider between our cubicles. His, I knew, was littered with pics of his kids at various ages—his ex conveniently excluded—and magazine clippings of sports cars he’d never be able to afford. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We’ve got a lead.” I flipped open my portfolio and scribbled notes from the all-too-brief conversation.

Lehman spread his arms. “What’d I tell you! Someone had to know something.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have the PR’s contact info.”

“Oh. Well, shit,” Lehman agreed.

I ripped the sheet from my notebook and handed it to him. “Call D.C.I. and pass that on to them.” I turned to my computer and pulled up our driver’s license database, clacking my keyboard furiously.

Lehman stuck on a pair of reading glasses and stared at my note. “So, our anonymous PR could provide evidence that this—” he frowned at my note “—Baron Hackett was the one who broke in?”

“No. She didn’t even accuse him of anything. She just said, ‘He knows stuff.’” I lifted my hands from my keyboard long enough to make air quotes. “But she was hella nervous. I think she was afraid of saying too much.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll pass it on.” He pushed off and rolled back to his own desk. His phone clicked out of its cradle.

“Wait,” I said.

“What?”

I was staring at the info I needed. A search for Baron’s driver’s license had brought up his home address. From there, I’d hopped over to the county’s database of properties and found the owner.

“Tell D.C.I. they might want to be careful,” I said. “Looks like his dad’s Richard Hackett.”

“Who?” Lehman demanded from the other side of the divider. Most of our conversations took place with a wall between us, and I liked it better that way.

“Richard Hackett,” I said. “He moved his family here about a year ago.” I studied the map provided by the county property database. “Apparently they have one of the big houses on the South Shore. Hackett originally made his fortune in Silicon Valley. Then his daughter had a career in Hollywood. That’s why they moved here, to get away from the hype. Now Hackett’s an angel investor.”

“Geez, what do you do, read the social column?”

“No, politics. Hackett’s running for the county board of supervisors.”

“Shit, do we have an election this fall?”

I rolled my eyes, leaned against the back of my chair, and spoke to the ceiling. “The point is, with Hackett’s background, he’s used to playing in the Big Leagues. The moment D.C.I. so much as asks to speak to Baron, his dad’ll have the top lawyer in the country at his side in ten seconds.”

Of course, Baron had the right to get a lawyer whenever he so chose. But whether Baron was innocent or guilty, it was a lot harder getting answers out of a lawyer than out of the lawyer’s client.

“Oh. That’s a good point. I’ll give them the head’s up.”

“Thank you,” I hissed under my breath and returned to my computer. With Lehman, there was no such thing as a simple conversation.

While he put in the call, I returned to my databases. My next stop was NCIC, or the National Crime Information Center, a phenomenal black hole of criminal information maintained by the FBI. I plugged Baron’s name, driver’s license, and license plate into every search I could think of: Criminal history, negative. Past arrests, negative. Warrants, negative. I finally tried a QQ—also known as a Query Query and the ultimate proof that cop speak is redundant. With the QQ, I could see the last search someone else had made on Baron and where that cop or investigator was from. Maybe Baron had been pulled over for a traffic violation and some beat cop had run his license plate.

But even the QQ turned up a negative.

“Damn it,” I muttered. Had he never so much as run out a parking meter?

I didn’t notice Lehman hovering behind my chair until he slurped noisily out of the giant coffee mug he carried around the office. Top Cop, it said. I took umbrage with that mug.

“You realize D.C.I. will take care of all that?” he said, waving the mug at my screen.

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

“Well, just don’t let curiosity kill the cop. There’s a reason we handed this case over.”

“If I find anything interesting, I’ll turn it over to D.C.I.”

Lehman shrugged. “Okay, I guess you’re a big girl now. Oh, that reminds me, I got you a present.” He snagged a rectangular box off the corner of his desk and plopped it onto the corner of mine. No bigger than his hand, it was wrapped in paper featuring a dozen varieties of fish.

I glanced between it and him. “What is this?”

“Open it.”

I did. Inside the box was a foam fish, colored like a rainbow trout. Printed along the side were the words Gone Fishin’.

“It’s a stress ball,” Lehman explained. “Only it’s a fish.”

Eyes glazed, I stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Now you don’t need your Glock.”

I balled up the fish and threw it at the middle of his chest. Snickering, he beat a hasty retreat to his own desk. I left the fish abandoned in the middle of the floor and focused my attention once again on my screen. Out for blood now for any scrap of info I could find on Baron Hackett, I turned to Facebook and Twitter, then remembered to check this thing that was getting popular with teens, Instagram.

Baron’s Facebook profile was shut up tight. I couldn’t see anything beyond his profile picture and header image without friending him. Made sense. It sounded like the Hackett family had had problems with both the paparazzi and rabid fans in Hollywood. Baron apparently took his and his sister’s security seriously.

His Twitter feed was almost as sparse. Maybe twice a month, he retweeted people like Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Tony Robbins. On occasion, he linked to various newspaper articles. On closer inspection, they were all about his family members. His dad’s bid for office in Walworth County. His sister winning an acting award. His father backing a zero-waste factory in Iowa. One article from the local paper showed how Baron himself was spearheading an effort by local teens to keep blue-green algae blooms from appearing on Geneva Lake. Another article from his days in California showed him as the spokesperson for a teen mission to help homeless youth in LA.

I clicked through to the website of the Lake Geneva Regional News and placed a search for Baron’s name. During a ceremony at the high school last spring, Baron had won no fewer than three awards.

I frowned at my screen. This couldn’t be the same kid who’d broken into our police station.

“Hello, hello, hello!” A cheerful voice broke the silence as a uniformed officer walked into the detective bureau, a cardboard box under his arm. Thirty-something, hair cropped military-style, he had the easy-going manner of a man whose job it was to be cool in the eyes of fifteen hundred teenagers. For nine months out of the year, Mark Neumiller was our school resource officer at Badger High, where he had an office. In the summer, when Lake Geneva could swell to three times its normal size, Neumiller served as a third detective in our bureau.

Lehman’s chair groaned as he leaned back. “My God, they let you out of school? You passed your final exams?”

Neumiller grinned and pinched his fingers together. “Scraped by, just barely.” He set the box on a third desk against the wall, shoving aside stacks of paper and a model of a red-hot Porsche. “Dude, seriously what is all this?”

Lehman waved casually at the clutter. “I’m utilizing departmental resources. You’re not even at that desk for nine months out of the year.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. But this spot is mine now, so shove this shit somewhere else.”

Lehman groaned and got out of his chair, then began to stack the paperwork on his own desk.

Neumiller nodded across the room as he unpacked his cardboard box. “Steele, how’s it going?”

I leaned around my cubicle wall, eyes narrowed. “Do you know Baron Hackett?”

Neumiller placed a family photo next to his computer monitor. “Baron? Sure. Everybody knows him. Why?”

“We just got an anonymous tip that he might be involved in our break-in.”

Neumiller pulled a skeptical frown. “Probably some jealous classmate trying to take him down a peg. Baron’s a straight-A student. Team quarterback. National Honor Society. He was school treasurer this year. Next year, he’s running for president.” Neumiller shrugged. “He’s a good kid, you know? Everybody loves him.”

I frowned and chewed a hangnail. This wasn’t adding up. The girl I’d just talked to over the phone was almost too nervous to talk. Then again, she would be, if she was turning in the most popular boy in school. If personal experience had taught me anything, it was that people could change radically, even when you thought you knew them as well as your own soul. It was hard to believe sometimes that the man I’d married was the same asshole I’d eventually divorced.

Still, I was faced with two versions of Baron Hackett. Was one real, the other fake? If so… which one?