The house was as benign as a sugar cookie, sitting there on a tree-lined street that must have been positively leafy during the spring, summer, and fall. There was nothing going on behind the shaded windows as far as Behr could tell in the two hours he’d been sitting there. Every few years or so, it seemed, a nondescript home like this one was revealed in the news to be a house of horrors, a wife kept prisoner by an abusive husband, kidnap victims locked up in the basement. He’d even had his own experience with a place more run-down than this, in a worse part of town, used as a temporary depot for unimaginable crimes, where again, the bland facade of suburbia masked pure malice. But this time it wasn’t the house itself that held his attention. No, this time his gaze kept shifting to the oversized detached two-car garage. There were no windows on the garage bay doors, which was a bit odd, and the sliver of window on the side of the structure that he could just glimpse from where he sat appeared to be blacked out.
About halfway through his sit, a somewhat portly middle-aged woman arrived and entered the house. After the camera store, Behr had run a quick background, which he finished on his laptop with a Wi-Fi card on his stakeout. So he had the plate on the Toyota Corolla station wagon she had driven up in. He knew she was Margaret Abler and that she had been married to Reinhard Peter Abler, his subject, for the past eighteen years.
Abler himself had served a five-year stint in the army and had gotten out with the rank of first sergeant via honorable discharge. This was about eighteen years ago as well. He had no criminal record, was listed as a member in good standing of and donor to the Bethel Lutheran Church, and was currently employed by Martin, Miller & Elkin, a firm that provided audits, tax management, and advisory services to corporate clients. Though not as large as PricewaterhouseCoopers or Deloitte & Touche, MM&E was in the same mold, and as a director of accounting services, Abler was firmly middle management. He had a blue 2004 Buick Park Avenue registered to him, and Behr had the plate number on that. He had modest credit card bills, low outstanding balances, and no liens against him. On paper he was a most innocuous individual, a solid citizen. But Behr was interested in what was off the paper.
That was when Abler’s wife exited the house after fifteen minutes inside, got in her car, and drove off.
His gaze pulled away from the house once again and landed on that garage. That garage. They didn’t use it for parking their cars. She didn’t anyway. Maybe there was a way inside, so he could take a look. He sat there for a long half hour wondering, thinking, sweeping the neighborhood with his eyes in all directions for witnesses. And then he reached for the door handle.
His feet felt like they were hovering inches above the ground, such was the deftness with which he tried to move as he crossed the street, then the lawn, and slipped between the house and the garage. His big concern was that he’d be spotted, perhaps by a neighbor, who would alert Abler that someone was creeping around, giving him the chance to clear out evidence and cover his tracks. Behr couldn’t let that happen. He moved along the wall until he got to the window. He peered inside, or tried to anyway. The window had been treated with a darkened film, and there seemed to be another layer of solid blacking on the inside, so there was no seeing through it, and it wasn’t the type that opened. Behr moved on until he reached the rear, where there was a regular door. He didn’t have to try the knob to determine if it was locked, because there was a chunky stainless-steel padlock with a thick hasp securing the portal. It was a security measure, to be sure, but to what end—to safeguard valuables inside, to keep people out, or to keep someone in?
Behr gave a quick glance over to the house. The back door would present less of a challenge than the garage and that padlock, but the house didn’t hold the answers. Of that he was sure. Then, as he headed back to his car and got in, a sick feeling descended upon him. He took out his phone and looked at it. It was a miserable call to have to make, but he went ahead and placed it.
“Hey, Breslau, it’s—”
“I know who it is. Your number comes up under ‘asshole.’ What do you want?”
“I was thinking about that DB you mentioned, the little girl. Did her aunt turn up yet?”
“No,” Breslau said.
“You got a description on her?”
“She’s thirty-two, Caucasian, five foot nine, eyes blue, hair blond.”
The facts settled on Behr. He felt his eyes go to the garage.
“Have you looked out by where the other bodies were found?” he asked.
“Of course. And by the tracks where Quinn turned up. We’re looking everywhere,” Breslau said.
“If I had an idea—”
“Yeah?”
“A potentially related crime that led to a search warrant on a location …” Behr was thinking about the assault at the massage parlor, and how he’d made the ID at the photo store. It was circumstantial, potentially rickety in court. Breslau was ahead of him.
“Did this related crime get reported?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
“We’d need solid linkage. Will the victim come forward?”
“Doubtful,” Behr said.
Breslau took a breath. “All I can tell you is: I cannot afford a bad search or any other brand of bullshit right now. And neither can you.”
“Shit …” Behr breathed. “You got a pic on the aunt?”
“E-mailing you now,” Breslau said, and hung up.
A moment later Behr’s phone buzzed with the incoming message. He opened the attachment, and the photo scrolled onto his screen. Pam Cupersmith was young, lovely, and blond. As Behr stared at the picture, an urgency to get inside that garage exploded within him. She was right there, across the street and inside that small structure, he suddenly knew, in whatever condition, mere wood and glass and metal all that was separating him from recovering her. Hell, maybe she was even alive, as doubtful as that seemed.
But Breslau and the rest of the cops weren’t going to help him. They couldn’t. He had to help them. He jerked his car into gear and stepped on the accelerator. He drove for MM&E, where Abler worked, moving like an automaton now, programmed for one function at any cost: entry.
Amber plate-glass windows reflected the late-afternoon sun onto a dozen rows of vehicles. Behr had arrived at the office building that housed MM&E, and he drove slowly up and down the columns of cars until he spotted Abler’s Park Avenue. Advertised as a slice of American automotive luxury when it was new, it was more like the baked potato of cars now. Innocuous and forgettable, and in a dark blue color that vaguely connoted authority, the car was getting old. But he imagined Abler’s reluctance to sell it considering what Behr imagined it had been used for—the collection and transportation of victims. Behr had dug up a police report on file back from 2003 when Abler’s prior car, a Pontiac Grand Prix, had been “stolen.” The car had been found three days later, burned. Abler had collected the insurance. It read like an effective sterilization of evidence to Behr, but it wasn’t a move that could be repeated often, if ever, and Abler was smart enough to know that.
Behr continued past the car, drove out of the lot, and parked on the street. He took a page out of Abler’s book, got a baseball cap from the trunk, and pulled it down low. He had to assume there were security cameras in the lot. That was the assumption he labored under in almost every public place these days. He wasn’t stealing anything, so there’d be little reason for the footage to be reviewed before it was recycled, but since he was illegally entering a vehicle, he didn’t want to be easily identified. He got organized with a few other items he kept stored in his trunk, slammed it shut, and started walking with bland purpose toward the Park Avenue.
No one who saw him from a distance of more than five feet could see the clear vinyl gloves that covered his hands, nor could they see the slim jim he slid out of his sleeve when he reached the driver’s door. He hadn’t worked a car lock in a while, but it wasn’t a skill that took a lot of maintenance, and the age of the car helped. He fed the slender piece of metal between the window glass and the rubber seal, down into the door panel, and fished around for a moment before he was able to pop the lock. Then he opened the door and got in. He slammed the door behind him and breathed in pine-scented air freshener before he found what he was looking for: the automatic garage door opener, clipped on the passenger-side visor.
Behr took out his Horizon-net, a device the size of a key fob. Technically a backup or replacement remote, for all intents and purposes it was a code grabber. If Abler’s opener was part of a high-end modern system, with a rolling combination that created a completely new code each time it was used, Behr would be at a dead end because he’d need access to the main unit in the garage in order to duplicate the frequency. But the more basic brands of garage door openers, especially older ones, created codes with the same basic values, and the Horizon-net was able to run a simple resynchronization protocol that basically cloned the remote. Behr took Abler’s from the visor and saw it was a Genie that was a good ten years old. He opened the Horizon-net and set the brand jumper switch to Genie. He pressed Abler’s remote and then the Horizon-net. His unit blinked red a few times and then went green.
He was done with his business in the car. He put Abler’s remote back on the visor and opened the door. He was ready to walk away, but then couldn’t resist doing one more thing: he pressed the trunk release button next to the steering column and heard the latch disengage. He got out, circled around to the back, and took a look. The trunk was completely empty, immaculate. Behr didn’t know what he expected—handcuffs, knives, bloodstains, a body? There was nothing inside but factory-installed industrial carpet like the day it rolled off the assembly line. He closed the trunk and walked back across the lot toward his car. A tall blonde, about Susan’s height, maybe a few years younger, caught his eye as she exited the building, but she peeled off in the opposite direction.
When Behr got back in his car, the sun was already disappearing from the building’s side, and he dialed a call on his cell phone.
“Good afternoon, MM&E,” a bright-voiced receptionist answered.
“Yeah, this is John Daniels from Lucas,” Behr said, naming the biggest petroleum company in town. If MM&E didn’t handle them, they wanted to. “I’ve got some P&Ls to drop off for an Abler in accounting. How late are you folks around?”
“Would you like me to connect you?” she asked.
Behr considered chancing it and actually getting the man on the phone, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Nah, that’s all right. What time does he usually clear out of there?”
“Usually about quarter to six, six.”
“Great, I oughtta just be able to make it,” Behr said, hanging up. He glanced at the clock on the dash. If he drove fast he’d have just shy of ninety minutes.
I oughtta just be able to make it, he said, this time to himself.