It was what homicide investigators always said about tough cases: somewhere in the reinforced cardboard file boxes that held case documentation were the facts that could clear the case. An interview transcript containing something meaningful that had been missed. An interview transcript that didn’t include a question that should have been asked. A reference to an individual that hadn’t been followed up with an interview. Forensic evidence that new technology could reinterpret.
The box sitting on Mars Bahr’s desk wasn’t a formal case file as no investigation had been opened in Frank Beck’s death. What was in the box were remnants. The noose from which Beck had hanged himself. An address book. The clothes Beck had been wearing when he died. Copies of Danny Borg’s case summary, including Borg’s hand-written summary of interviews he’d conducted with Beck family members and one friend. An envelope containing a handful of lottery tickets. Mars pulled on latex gloves and started going through the box, beginning with the noose.
“Look at this,” Mars said to Nettie. He put the noose back into the plastic evidence bag and tossed it over to Nettie. Nettie caught the bag with two hands and held the bag up, peering at the noose.
“Nice piece of work—the knot, that is,” Nettie said. “What kind of fabric would you say?”
“Not a clue. Maybe wool? But kind of a loose weave.”
Nettie pulled open a desk drawer, took out a pair of gloves, and after snapping them on, took the noose out of the bag. She looked closer at the noose, then gave a tug at both ends. “Loose, but plenty strong. Tough fiber.” She put the plastic bag down on her desk, laying the noose on top of the bag. With her face down close, she turned the noose around. “Looks like the fabric was sewn into a tube shape before tying the knot … .”
“Can you tell how it was sewn—by hand or machine?”
Nettie shook her head. “Nope. You’re asking the wrong lady. Betsy Ross I ain’t.” She got up, put the noose back in the bag, and dropped the bag on Mars’s desk. She stood behind him for a moment. “So. You’re opening an investigation on Beck?”
Mars sat up straight in his chair, held his arms out straight in front of him, twisting his wrists, and yawned. Then, ruffling his hands through his hair, he said, “Just trying to make a decision if there’s enough here to investigate.” He looked around the box. “I was supposed to get photos from the medical examiner’s office. You see anything …”
Nettie bent over, picking up the box. Underneath was a manila envelope. “The envelope came up first thing this morning. Whoever brought the box up dropped it on the envelope.” She moved away from Mars. “I’m going back to the fridge to get my Evian water. You want a Coke?”
“Not now …”
“This is a one-time-only offer, partner. You want a Coke later, you get it yourself.”
“As if I didn’t know that,” Mars muttered. He pulled black-and-white photos out of the envelope. Two of the photos were standard black-and-white shots of Beck’s naked body on a stainless steel exam table, front and back. Beck’s face was still swollen and dark from the hanging, his tongue protruding between his lips. The noose had left a clear mark around his neck.
Mars flipped through the photos taken in Beck’s warehouse office. An overturned chair just underneath Beck’s hanging legs. The office door ajar. An office window open.
The last photo was the one he’d been looking for. A close-up shot of the numbers written on the inside of Beck’s right arm. 2822173631958.
From behind Mars came a loud, sharp crack. He jumped, then turned toward Nettie, pissed that she’d caught him off guard again.
Nettie gave him a sweet, false smile. “Sorry.”
It was a daily ritual. As soon as Nettie got in, she’d put a half-liter bottle of Evian water into the freezer in the department fridge. After it was partially frozen, she’d take it out, slamming the bottom of the bottle on her desk to break up the ice. And every morning she’d startle the hell out of Mars—and anyone else in the squad room.
Mars passed the photo of Beck over to Nettie. “You’ve got fifteen seconds. ‘You know what I think when I see somebody like that? I think, that was somebody’s baby boy.’”
“Ohhh,” Nettie said, “I know it, I know it. Give me a minute.”
“Ten seconds and counting,” Mars said.
Nettie made fists with her hands and pressed them to her forehead, elbows on her desk. As the second hand on Mars’s watch jerked, Nettie’s voice came out fast and clipped. “The Conversation. What’s her name—oh, damn—Laverne and Shirley, she played Shirley. Williams! Cindy Williams. She’s walking with, uh, Forrest—I can’t remember if that’s his first name or last name—in Union Square in San Francisco. And Gene Hackman was taping them from a van. God, I loved that movie.”
“You got in on that one just under the wire.” Mars pulled out Danny Borg’s case summary, which was a copy of the report Mars had already looked at. He confirmed the last time Beck had been seen alive—approximately three o’clock in the afternoon on the day his body had been found. Mars looked for an explanation of the open window and door in the office, but didn’t see anything. Then he went through the lottery tickets. Geez. Twenty-five dollars’ worth of Powerball tickets—five tickets with five chances on each ticket—all for the drawing held the Saturday after the Friday Beck died.
Something clicked for Mars, and he looked closely at the tickets, searching for numbers on the tickets that would tell a date and time when the tickets had been sold. There were a lot of random numbers on the tickets, other than the Powerball numbers, but nothing Mars could decipher as a purchase date and time. He wheeled over to Nettie on his chair.
“Do something for me, will you? In fact, do two things. Call the state lottery office and see if we can find out when the tickets were sold—date and time, if they can give us both.” Mars rose, pulling on his jacket.
“And?”
Mars stared at the photo that showed the numbers on Beck’s arm. “Send out a request for information to the five-state area. Ask for information regarding any hanging deaths where those numbers are found on the victims’ bodies.”
Mars slapped a magnetic flasher on the roof of the Pontiac and double-parked outside Glen’s Handi-Store that was kitty-corner from the Dachota. Borg’s notes had indicated that the last person to see Frank Beck alive had been a store clerk, Colette Magnuson.
The store was deserted when Mars pushed in through the front door, except for a heavy-set older woman standing behind a counter next to the cash register.
“Hello!” she called out. “How can I help you?” Mars guessed a woman working a convenience store alone kept one finger on the counter alarm. He pulled out his badge, flapping it open in her direction. Her relief was visible.
“I’m looking for Colette Magnuson.”
“Stop looking. That’s me. You’re asking about Mr. Beck?”
“I understand you saw Mr. Beck here on December sixth. Just wanted to confirm the time he was here and ask your impression of his state of mind.”
“I told that to the other young man who came in. That one had a uniform. You have to be on the job a certain amount of time before they give you the uniform?”
A surprising question. Mars suppressed a smile and considered
his answer. “Depends on what your job is. I think the other officer you spoke with was a patrolman. I’m in the investigative division. Investigators don’t get uniforms.”
“Hardly seems fair,” Colette said. Mars could see his stock had fallen in Colette’s estimation. Clearly appearances counted for a lot with her. She wore a silver blond wig with a high pompadour, a rigid bang falling in little curlicues over her forehead. She was fully made up with eyebrows that flew in a sharp arch over green eye shadow. Her skin was layered with a thick pink foundation, and her mouth was an outsized, startling red. Every finger of her hands—other than the thumbs—was heavily ringed.
“Do you get a gun?” Her eyes dropped down to his jacket, her expression doubtful.
“I do,” Mars said. Anticipating that she would next ask to see the gun he did not carry, he quickly asked a question. “I understand from Officer Borg that you saw Frank Beck around three o’clock the afternoon of December sixth, is that right?”
She nodded emphatically. “That’s what I told the young fellow in the uniform.”
“May I ask how you’re sure of the time?”
“Simple. My shift ends at three. I was wondering where the second shift clerk was and had been checking my watch when Frank came in. That was the other thing. Frank usually came in around nine in the morning, bought a Wall Street Journal, then would run back to the Dachota. He was the nicest fellow. Always had something to say. Liked to tease. Just couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened after he left here … .”
“Couldn’t believe it because of how he seemed that day—or just what you knew of him in general?”
“Both,” Colette said. “He was always in a good mood. Always pleasant. Same as ever that day. Not that he didn’t have his problems.”
“He talked to you about that?”
Colette brushed the suggestion away with a wave of her hand. “He wasn’t the kind of guy that whined about his problems.
No, the first I heard was from a couple of other tenants in the Dachota. Ad agency guys who’d been standing around shooting the breeze one morning when Frank came in for his paper. After Frank left, I heard them talking.” Colette paused, “I wasn’t eavesdropping, you know. Couldn’t not hear it, they were standing right about where you are. Anyway, after that, I saw some things in the Tribune. Then, couple months ago when he came in for his paper, I said to him, ‘Frank, how is it your office always looks dark?’ He looked kind of embarrassed and said they were going to be changing locations and he didn’t have any staff coming in anymore. Well, I can put two and two together. But Frank didn’t complain. He was always a cheerful, considerate guy.”
“Even at three o’clock in the afternoon on December sixth?”
“I’ll tell you something. I’d say he was even cheerier than usual. I was sold out of Journals by three o’clock, and I offered to call the other Handi-Store that’s over on the skyway to see if they had any left. He said not to bother, he had someone coming in to his office shortly and he needed to get back … .”
“He said he was going to be meeting someone in his office that afternoon?”
“That’s what I just said, wasn’t it?”
“You haven’t mentioned this to anyone before?”
“Nobody asked, did they? That young fellow in the uniform, he just came in by chance. Was asking around about when somebody might have seen Frank on the sixth. Someone in the Dachota told him Frank always came over here for a newspaper. I told him about seeing Frank at three o’-clock, then he went on his way. Didn’t seem like he had a lot of time.”
“No,” Mars said. “He wouldn’t have. And in your judgment, Beck seemed to be in good spirits—even better spirits than usual.”
“Yes, he was. He even said as he left that he had a good feeling about the day. Felt lucky.”
Mars, noticing the little promotional sign on the counter
for lottery tickets, said, “He buy any lottery tickets while he was here?”
Colette Magnuson thought about it. “Frank usually did buy tickets. And more than one. Can’t remember if he bought any that day or not. Maybe that’s why he said he felt that Friday was his lucky day. I just can’t remember if I sold him tickets then or not.”
“As it happened,” Mars said, “December sixth wasn’t Frank Beck’s lucky day.”
Mars was moving and thinking faster based on his interview with Colette Magnuson. There was nothing Magnuson had said that supported a conclusion that Beck had committed suicide, and there was plenty she said that had raised new questions. Number one: who had Beck been scheduled to meet with after three o’clock on the sixth? Number two: it seemed more than likely that Beck had bought his lottery tickets from Colette Magnuson just hours before he was killed. Would a guy who was hours away from committing suicide spend twenty-five bucks on lottery tickets? Back in the car, Mars called Nettie.
“You get hold of the state lottery office yet?”
“Waiting for a call back.”
“You can skip it. The convenience store clerk who was the second-to-last person to see Beck alive said she sometimes sold him lottery tickets. I think it’s a safe bet that’s when he bought the tickets. If we need to prove that at some point in the future, we can get back to the state lottery office then.”
“The second-to-last person to see Beck alive? I thought the clerk was the last person to see him alive … .”
“Maybe not.”
Mars had been uneasy about meeting with Joey Beck because he didn’t want to raise the kid’s expectations. It still made sense not to raise Joey’s expectations, but Mars was increasingly confident there was something to investigate. He debated
whether to give Joey a call or to just drop by. He decided the drop-by would give him more control over the meeting. If Joey wasn’t around, Mars would call and leave a message.
Joey Beck lived in a two-and-a-half-story walk-up apartment near the university. He buzzed Mars up immediately, but was pulling a jacket on when Mars came in.
“If you don’t mind, let’s walk over to the Dunn Brothers on the corner. I’m finishing a paper that’s due day after tomorrow, and I’ve been in all day. A change of scenery might clear my head.”
They didn’t say much walking over to Dunn Brothers. Both were concentrating on not feeling the cold, keeping their heads tucked into raised collars, walking with tight, contracted muscles. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Mars walked a little behind, watching Joey Beck. Nettie had gotten it exactly right. It was going to be real hard not to project Chris into Joey Beck’s place.
It wasn’t that Chris and Joey Beck looked a lot alike. Apart from the age difference, their coloring was different, and Joey Beck’s features were sharper than Chris’s were or would be. The similarity went deeper than looks. There was a seriousness, a quiet, active intelligence that Mars had seen from day one in Chris that was also part of who Joey Beck was. An old-fashioned word came to mind: both Joey Beck and Chris had an earnest quality that Mars found deeply endearing.
Pushing into the damp warmth of the coffeehouse, Mars and Joey loosened up, simultaneously unzipping jackets as if to release accumulated cold. Mars pulled a Coke out of the cooler while Beck ordered fancy coffee at the counter. Finally settled at a corner table, Joey Beck said, “I really appreciate this. I mean, you being willing to look at what happened when my dad died.”
“It’s part of the job. But you need to appreciate that as things stand, the evidence supporting suicide is very strong … .”
Joey nodded, his head down. He twisted the coffee cup between his two hands. “I suppose you always hear this
when there’s a suicide. Somebody who’s sure the guy wouldn’t do it.”
“It is pretty usual. What I need you to do is to tell me why you feel so strongly that your dad didn’t commit suicide.”
Joey’s face tightened at the effort of explaining. “If you knew him—”
“Joey, a lot of people who knew your dad didn’t find it all that hard to believe. I need something specific. In fact, I need two things. I need specific reasons why your dad wouldn’t have committed suicide, and I need specific reasons why somebody would have murdered him.”
The kid’s head came up fast. Then, shaking his head, he said, “That’s it, isn’t it. If Dad didn’t commit suicide, he was murdered.”
“So? Start with specific reasons why your dad wouldn’t commit suicide.”
Concentration was visible on Joey’s face the same way it showed on Chris’s face. Joey’s color rose, his pupils dilated. “The thing about my dad was that he really thrived on trouble. He was big on adventure travel—you know, where you spend a small fortune to be miserable and risk death in some remote place. He always had the most energy, was the most excited, when there were problems in the business. When things were going well? That’s when he’d get sort of down. He’d get restless. As bad as things were with this last business, I never saw him down about it. He was the eternal optimist … .”
“Your mother left him, Joey.”
Joey raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Okay. That was a blow. But the way it looked to me, it made Dad even more determined to salvage something. He was never ready to give up on getting her back. This will sound weird, but if my dad had been in one of those periods when everything was in equilibrium, it would have been easier for me to believe he would have become despondent. Not when he was facing a challenge.”
“And the cancer?”
“Everybody says he had to be feeling bad. But I was the
one that saw the most of him the last six months, and I never noticed anything. He seemed fine to me. He was real motivated. Still hustling. Still expecting to pull this one out of the fire.”
“Joey, do you know if your dad had any appointments the afternoon of the day he died?”
“Appointments? You mean, at the office?”
Mars nodded.
“I don’t really know. But I don’t think so. I mean, nothing was happening at the office. No staff, no electricity, no phones. If he needed to meet with someone, my guess is he’d do it at a restaurant.” Joey looked closely at Mars. “Why do you ask?”
“Just routine. Back to my original questions. Can you think of anybody who had a reason to murder your dad? How about people who lost money because of your dad’s business failures?”
Joey shook his head. “You’ve got to understand. My dad always paid people back. Maybe they never made much on their investments with him, but sooner or later he’d pay back their original investments. It was the first thing he’d do when he made any money. Which is part of the reason it pisses me off so much that people walked away from him on this last deal. They all talked about how they couldn’t go through another failure. Well, the failures never cost them all that much. What they were really ticked off about was that they hadn’t gotten rich quick off my dad. They were mad at themselves for buying into his ideas. They didn’t want to be reminded of their own bad judgment, so they cut him off. Greedy bastards.”
“But this last failure—from everything I’ve been told—was on a much larger scale. It follows that disappointment among investors must have been greater … .”
“So someone murders him to make sure there’s no chance they’re gonna get anything back?”
“You’re making a lot of sense, Joey. Problem is, what you’re saying really is an argument against anyone having a motive to murder your dad.”
Joey edged up a little, took a sip of what was now cold
coffee, and said, “Something I’ve been thinking about. When I got to my dad’s office, the door was open, and there was an open window in the office. Dad still had a lot of computer equipment in the office. It was on a three-year lease. It wasn’t any secret that the office was empty most of the time. Even Dad didn’t go in much. What I was thinking was, maybe someone went in to steal the computers. If they’d taken the computers out the front, they’d have attracted a lot of attention. But there’s this parking bay in the alley behind the building, five floors below my dad’s office. Maybe they were going to rig something up to pass the electronics equipment out the window and lower it down to a truck or whatever—and my dad came in and surprised them … .”
Joey’s eyes were fixed on Mars’s face, waiting for a sign that Mars was caught up in what he was saying. It was almost painful for Mars to say what had to be said.
“What you’ve described would make a lot of sense if your dad had died almost any way other than how he did.”
Joey’s brow rumpled. “How do you mean?”
“Your dad’s death was clean, precise. If someone was in your dad’s office, he was there for one reason: to kill your dad. I haven’t been in the office yet—but from what I read of the scene report, the only thing disrupted was the tipped chair your dad stood on to hang himself. All the equipment was in place—if your dad had walked into the office and found strangers there, without them actually being in the process of taking out equipment, there wouldn’t have been any need for violence. The intruders could have come up with any number of explanations for what they were doing there.” Mars hesitated. He was finding it difficult to speak in clinical terms of the circumstances of a death that had so deeply affected the young man before him.
Joey Beck understood Mars’s hesitation, and said, “It’s okay. I’ve already been through the worst. Remember, I found my dad’s body. And this thing has played through my mind a hundred times a day every day since then. What you’re saying is stuff nobody has wanted to talk about. It feels good to be talking about this. Keep going.”
Mars cleared his throat. “If your scenario is right, the office would have been in disarray, and your dad would have been shot, stabbed, beaten—thieves wouldn’t have taken time to tie a noose and hang your dad. Especially to tie a noose the way that noose was tied. Nothing sloppy. A real work of art.”
Joey’s face tensed. “The noose was carefully tied?”
Mars knew what was coming next.
“I guess I hadn’t noticed. I mean, all I remember is getting my dad down. I don’t remember even looking at the noose.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, pressing both hands to his temples. “It doesn’t make sense at all. My dad tying a precise knot? I don’t think so.”
Mars said, “There seems to be a consensus developing on that point.” If Joey hadn’t been so absorbed in thinking about a precisely tied knot, it would have occurred to him that Mars had just said something that tipped Mars’s own suspicions that Frank Beck had not committed suicide.
“Okay. So I get what you’re saying about how my dad died. But what about the open window and door? Why would he have done that? And something else. My dad would know I’d come looking for him if he missed our dinner date.” Joey fixed Mars with an intense stare. “Something I know for absolutely sure is that my dad wouldn’t have wanted me to find him like that. No way.”
“I’ve been thinking about the same things,” Mars said. “And there could be a link between the open door and window and you being the one to find your dad. The fact is, Joey, that at that point in your dad’s life, there wasn’t much of anybody who would go looking for him, other than you. So the open door and window could be one of two things: your dad anticipated you’d find him and he wanted to make that as simple as possible—which is why he left the door open—and,” Mars stopped, then said, “the cold was a way of preserving his body. So you wouldn’t find a decaying corpse when you came in … .”
At this, Joey’s eyes teared. But he didn’t flinch. “You said the open door and window could mean one of two things. What’s the other thing?”
“That you’re right. That your dad didn’t want you to be the one to find his body. So he left the door and window open to attract attention, hoping that somebody in the building would notice and check out the office.”
Mars could tell from watching Joey’s face that he accepted the logic of what Mars had said. He could also tell that accepting what Mars said had let the air out of Joey’s last hopes. Mars felt a rush of guilt. Because there was a third possibility about why the door and window had been left open. The third possibility was that whoever murdered Frank Beck had left the window open to complicate a determination of time of death and that in the killer’s haste to leave, he had failed to shut the door firmly. The door to the office opened out into the hallway. Cold air being heavier than warm air, the cold air behind the door had held it open.
Mars resisted the temptation to offer Joey the consolation of the third explanation. “One other thing, Joey. There was a number written in ballpoint pen on your dad’s right arm … .”
“A number?”
“Yeah.” Mars stopped, pulled out his notebook and flipped back a few pages. He read the number out loud to Joey. “Mean anything to you—either the number, or why your dad might have written a number on his arm?”
Joey looked blank. “No. Nothing. I don’t ever remember my dad writing something on himself—that many numbers, it couldn’t even be a telephone number, could it?”
“No,” Mars said. “It doesn’t appear to be a phone number, social security number—anything like that. And we checked your dad’s account numbers against the number. Nothing matched.”
Joey said, “Which arm did you say it was written on?”
Mars had said the right arm, but he took a second to think back to the photos before he said again, “The right arm.”
A gotcha look covered Joey Beck’s face.
“My dad was right-handed, Mr. Bahr. If he was going to write something on his arm, wouldn’t it have been on the left arm?”
Back at the squad room, Mars returned to the file box that contained the remnants of Frank Beck’s death. He took out two things: The photo of Frank Beck’s arm that showed the numbers written on Beck’s right arm and Frank Beck’s address book. If Frank Beck had written the numbers on his right arm with his left hand, the numbers would look misformed. They didn’t. Allowing for the fact that human flesh is an imperfect writing surface, the numbers were precisely formed. Mars opened Beck’s address book. He compared numbers Beck had entered for addresses and phone numbers in the book with the numbers written on Beck’s arm. Frank Beck’s numbers were sharp, sans-serif numbers that conveyed an impression of having been written in haste. The numbers on his arm were foursquare, with serifs, the seven with a little horizontal line drawn through the rising line. It was less than improbable that Frank Beck had written the numbers on his arm.
Mars pushed back from his desk and stretched out on his chair, legs extended, hands cupped over his head. Nettie came in behind him.
“I recognize that pose,” she said. “You’re thinking big thoughts.”
“I’m thinking,” Mars said, “that the critical mass of evidence in the Frank Beck case has shifted. I’m thinking it wasn’t suicide.” With his hands still clasped on top of his head, he turned sideways to look at Nettie. Her sleek black hair had fallen forward, so he couldn’t read the expression on her face. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that I need to talk to the chief about opening an investigation—which means I need you to start a file.”
Without saying anything, Nettie leaned across her desk and picked up a black vinyl three-ring binder. She dropped it on his desk. On the binder’s spine in a plastic pocket was a white card which read Homicide Case 00-48, Franklin Beck.
“The paperwork,” Nettie said, “is in the binder.”