Chapter 17
DESPITE ELWOOD CROW’S proficiency with all things computer and internet related—particularly those things he didn’t strictly have permission to stick his prominent nose into—his expertise did not extend to the telephone. And certainly not texting. Paranoia was his watchword if not his middle name. As a result, Evan was unable to send him a text telling him the bad news about the blank thumb drive. He was going to have to do it in person.
Crow welcomed him in with a big smile, one Evan was going to wipe off his wrinkly old face very soon. He followed him down the hallway to the back room where Crow sank into his favorite chair.
‘What have you got for me?’
‘The police are more convinced than ever that it’s suicide,’ Evan said, then told him the new information about George Winter only owning a minority share in the boat and his imminent eviction.
Crow’s dark eyes lit up as he listened. He put Evan in mind of an ageing vulture, one who’s just been told by another ageing vulture about a new, quicker way to get at all the juicy morsels inside the carcass in front of them.
‘Interesting. I didn’t know that. It explains how George managed to buy such an expensive toy. It won’t take long to find out who it is. Not that it makes any difference. It still wasn’t suicide.’
Evan was tempted to get out his phone, book his flight back down to Florida already.
‘Cortez—’
‘Cortez?’
‘She’s the detective in charge down there.’
Crow nodded to himself as if that explained a lot.
‘Is she pretty?’
Evan made a show of looking under his chair, then behind it.
‘What are you doing?’ Crow said.
‘Looking for Kate. She said exactly the same thing.’
Crow said ah in a way that implied everything was now crystal clear. It was also a way that would have had Evan punching a younger man.
‘I was about to say Cortez wasn’t impressed with your counter-argument that he wasn’t the type to kill himself. A little lacking in hard evidence.’
‘He wasn’t. That’s all there is to it.’
Evan stared at the brick wall sitting in the chair opposite him. Took a deep breath before he banged his head against it.
‘You said on the phone that if I knew what you went through together, I’d know it too. What was that all about?’
‘Did I? Are you sure?’
The only thing Evan was sure about was that he wasn’t going to get an answer.
‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Crow said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to not tell people the most pertinent information until it was squeezed out of them like blood from a stone.
He pushed himself out of his chair, crossed the room to where his laptop sat on the table. Then he brought something back, held it towards Evan.
‘This came in the mail today.’
Evan took it—an identical USB thumb drive to the one he’d found in the fish’s gullet. A frown creased his forehead as he looked to Crow for an explanation.
‘George left it and some other papers with a friend. Told him to mail it to me if he didn’t check in with him every day. The friend got the address wrong so it took an extra couple of days to get here. I think even your Detective Cortez would agree that George was worried something might happen to him.’
‘You couldn’t have told me that earlier.’
Crow shrugged, it passes the time.
‘What’s on it?’ Evan said.
‘It’s the job he was given. A video of a couple of people. And their names. He obviously succeeded in identifying them.’
He paused, waited for Evan to make the connection.
‘You think that’s why he was killed? Why would you pay somebody to identify a couple of people and then kill him? And make it look like suicide too.’
Crow didn’t answer the question. Evan knew him well enough to know that there was more that he was holding back, that it wasn’t worth trying to get it out of him until he was good and ready.
‘You want to watch it?’ Crow said instead.
Evan said why not. They both went over to Crow’s laptop where he’d already made a copy. Paranoid and careful. Crow hit play .
‘What do you make of that?’ Crow said when it was over.
‘Not much. It’s a couple of people taking a selfie video on vacation. Looks like Key West to me. It makes sense, explains why George was given the job. I can’t see anything in it that would make you want to kill the person who identified them. Besides, why would you even need to hire somebody to find out who the people are if you’ve got the phone in the first place?’
The look Crow gave him suggested that while it was sweet that Evan still maintained some of his boyish innocence, it was worrying that he should be so naive given the sleazy divorce work that he had spent so long doing.
‘It’s a burner phone. Look at them.’ He pointed at the screen with a long bony finger where the couple were frozen in time and motion waiting for someone to hit play again. ‘Down in Florida for a weekend of sun and sex. I’d put money on them being married. And not to each other. I bet his wife thinks he’s on an aluminum siding conference.’
Evan looked at the way they were holding onto each other, the rapt smiles on their faces. He couldn’t disagree.
‘Yeah. Even if that’s not the case, lots of people who use dating apps use a burner. So they don’t have to give out their primary number to someone they might not end up with. Everybody’s seen the movie Fatal Attraction .’
Nobody could deny the truth in that. Never had anything as inconsequential as a movie contributed so much to the sanctity of the marriage vows, to the marital fidelity of the American male.
‘None of which explains why the person who identified them would be killed for his trouble,’ Evan said.
Again, Crow didn’t explain. He opened up a text file on the laptop, invited Evan to take a look.
‘Elliott Turner and Grace Davis,’ Evan read out. ‘I assume those are their names.’
‘Were.’
Evan had been about to say the names meant nothing to him when his mind rewound.
‘Were? As in, they’re dead too?’
Crow nodded, in his eyes a mixture of satisfaction that he was being proved right and sadness that it should be so, that this is what it took.
‘Died in a house fire a couple of nights ago. In Key West as you correctly identified.’
‘How do you know?’
Crow shook his head, the youth of today, God help us.
‘I don’t know about you, but if I get a video through the mail from a friend who’s already dead with a couple of names as well, I stick them straight in a search engine, see what pops up. He clicked on the internet browser window, held his hand open towards the news article on the screen. Voilà.
Two dead in house fire.
Evan skimmed the article, found it short on facts beyond the conclusion drawn by both the police and fire departments that the cause of the fire was a cigarette left smouldering in an ashtray while the couple lay passed out on the bed from an excess of alcohol and drugs. There was nothing to indicate that it was anything other than an unfortunate accident, although it appeared that the smoke alarms had been disabled. The owner of the property hadn’t been available for blame. Sorry, comment.
A nervous laugh slipped out of Evan’s mouth.
‘That’s a strange reaction,’ Crow said. ‘Remember not to do it if you meet the next of kin.’
‘Sorry. I got a mental image of Detective Cortez’s face when she hears about it. I’d like to be the one who tells her.’
That got a knowing smile from Crow.
‘For purely professional reasons, of course.’
‘Of course. Even she can’t deny that Winter being found dead as well as the people he was paid to identify is too much of a coincidence. Except she’ll probably say Winter was hired to kill them, not just identify them. Then he killed himself out of remorse. Nice and tidy, case closed. Next! ’
He suddenly realized they were getting ahead of themselves.
‘If the fire wasn’t an accident, why were they killed?’
‘Jealous spouse?’
Evan knew he was only joking. There was no way Crow could know why. He was wrong.
‘Watch the video again.’
Evan watched it again. He saw it this time. As the couple panned around with their faces in the foreground, the scene behind them moved slowly across the screen. It started with the gravestones and vaults of the Key West Cemetery stretching away into the distance. Then it swung around so that the street and the parked cars were behind their heads, then the sidewalk, then, finally, the houses facing the cemetery. Suddenly a door in one of the houses burst open as if a bomb had gone off inside. A man fell out, stumbled. Another man who’d been waiting with his back against the wall to the side of the door, came instantly to life, his reactions those of a well-trained professional. He caught the man’s arm, helped steady him. Steered him towards a car idling at the curb. The first man’s face had been completely obscured behind the faces of the couple taking the selfie. As the bodyguard—because that’s what he was— straightened up after helping his charge into the back seat, he looked directly at the couple taking the selfie. Anger clouded his face. They were too busy smiling at themselves to pay any attention. He started towards them, immediately breaking into a run. Before he’d taken more than a couple of paces, the video ended abruptly. Elliott, the young guy in the video, shouted at somebody to piss off . There was a quick, blurred view of the sidewalk and two pairs of sneaker-clad feet. Then nothing.
‘It must be because of whoever came out of that house,’ Evan said. ‘And what happened inside it.’
He got a slow, deliberate nod back from Crow.
‘You know who it is?’
Crow’s expression said he could no more see through other people’s bodies than Evan could.
‘No. But whoever it is, is very keen to make sure nobody saw him coming out of that house.’
‘And he’s the one who hired George to find out who the witnesses were . . .’
He left the rest of the sentence unspoken—who then got rid of them. And after that got rid of the only person who could tie him in to them.
‘What about the guy shouting piss off at somebody?’ Evan said.
Crow shook his head, said he had no idea. His tone implied that the practice of photographing and videoing oneself at every opportunity and in front of the most mundane backgrounds was so alien to him that for all he knew it was customary to end such videos with a loud shout of piss off , a modern-day equivalent of Bravo! Then he pulled the thumb drive from his laptop, handed it to Evan.
‘You better give that to your new friend, Detective Cortez. And I still want to know who owned the other half of George’s boat.’
On the subject of Crow delving into the nether regions of the ether where much and varied information was to be found by those who knew how to look, Evan asked him if he’d found a name and, better still, an address to go with the phone number that he’d found on the back of the contract killer Todd Strange’s business card.
‘Not yet, no. But I did find the other information you wanted.’
He dug in the pocket of the tatty cardigan sweater that he always wore, produced a folded slip of paper. He handed it to Evan, everything that needed to be said passing unspoken between them.
The unspoken Good Luck or Be Careful could never do justice to what Crow had just set in motion. Or the repercussions it would have for all of them.
Then Crow saw him to the door.
‘Watch your back. Whoever killed George and the two witnesses might already know that you’ve been poking around, that you don’t buy the suicide angle.’
Evan couldn’t help but notice the lack of the word we , the emphasis on you , as the door closed in his face. He supposed that was how Crow had managed to live so long.