Vengeance Road Page 11

  She pawed the floor for the longest time but it was futile. She could not find them. Maybe they’d rolled into a crack, or a seam, or deeper into hell.

  Jolene cursed.

  The keys chimed as she put her head in her hands, the image of the woman’s face seared in her mind.

  What sort of monster had done this?

  And why?

  What had he done to Bernice?

  Would she ever see Cody and her mother again?

  Jolene crawled back to her corner and cried until she lost consciousness.

  25

  Bernice Hogan is standing alone on Niagara Street. A rig—just the tractor, no trailer—rolls by then vanishes. A few minutes later a car emerges and stops. Looked like a Chev Malibu? Bernice leans into the window, hustles the driver. The car leaves without her. Then a man walks up to her. Is it Karl Styebeck? Impossible to say; traffic obscures the view. Then Bernice disappears into the darkness.

  Like she was never there.

  Michael Brent, New York State Police investigator, took a moment to absorb the scenes he was reviewing on the security videotape.

  Had he just watched Bernice Hogan meet her killer?

  As Brent drank coffee from his Buffalo Bills mug, he glimpsed Bernice Hogan’s self-conscious smile from an open folder. He didn’t see a hooker whose lifestyle invited her death. What he saw was a young woman who deserved better and he vowed to avenge her murder.

  But why had her killer marked her?

  Brent pondered the key piece of evidence that he and Esko had kept from nearly everyone, a cryptic message the murderer had carved into Bernice Hogan’s body.

  What did it mean?

  He’d grappled with these questions ever since the autopsy.

  The job was all he had going these days, he thought as he watched the tape again. His stomach tensed the way it always did when his gut told him the answers were in front of him.

  But he was missing them.

  “Who is that guy?” Brent asked the screen as he replayed the tape, losing count of how many times he’d rerun the footage.

  It was 10:30 p.m. in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation offices of State Police Clarence Barracks, Troop A, Zone 2. He was working with Roxanne Esko, preparing for the next case-status meeting of the task force investigating the homicide.

  The video’s quality sucked. It was like looking through a snowstorm. The forensic guys in Batavia had tried to clean it up, but it was still terrible. Going public with it would not have helped. So they kept it as holdback, a card to be played later.

  The tape had been volunteered by Samson’s Music Mansion across the street from Bernice Hogan’s corner at Lafayette. Samson’s sold used guitars, drums and keyboards at a run-down store that had an outdated security system.

  The angle from the store’s camera had captured partial images of Bernice. The last pictures of her. The minutes, hour and date running across the bottom were key to establishing a time frame for her disappearance but little else. Brent shifted his gaze to Esko, who’d stopped watching it to review the files.

  “Your neck muscle’s pulsating, Mike.” Esko worked at her computer. “What’re you thinking?”

  “Jack Gannon’s an asshole.”

  “I know he’s a pain, but he’s just doing his job. Or was.”

  “He messed up my case.”

  “Let it go. Being pissed at him is a waste of time. He’s gone. Fired. We’ve been at this since 6:00 a.m. Why don’t you take a break while I finish up.”

  Brent shook his head.

  He came from a long line of dedicated police officers who were not inclined to take breaks. His great-grandfather, Stanislaw Brentkozeska, had been a cop in Warsaw before arriving in the U.S., where an immigration officer at Ellis Island shortened his name.

  “Welcome to America, Mr. Brent.”

  Brent’s grandfather and father were cops and Brent kept with tradition when he joined the New York State Police, a decision that had nearly cost him his life.

  He was working as a trooper near Watertown when he stopped a car for speeding. While writing the ticket another car struck him. The accident had left him with a lifetime of back trouble and a sour attitude.

  Then his heart broke last winter when his wife died of cancer. Her loss was evident in his weary eyes and fugitive smile. Brent thought of her every day. He dreaded his retirement in a few months. He was a solitary investigator but found that working with Esko made his life bearable.

  Roxanne was happily married to a furniture-store manager she had met while shopping for a bed at the Eastern Hills Mall.

  While Esko entered data on her computer keyboard, Brent removed his bifocals, then reread his notes.

  They had known about Karl Styebeck from the get-go, about the community-cop hero and his volunteer work. But Brent also had statements from hookers alleging Styebeck’s habit of first trying to rescue them, then insulting them. And about his disturbing preference for “young ones.”

  Was he some kind of predator?

  The women had witnessed Styebeck on Niagara talking to Bernice the night she vanished. One recorded a plate number for a rental, which they’d traced to him.

  Why use a rental? Why not a departmental unmarked?

  Styebeck was vague but admitted he’d talked to Bernice; claimed he was on the job talking to informants. Styebeck said he was asking about a strange truck, whose driver had creeped out some of the girls.

  Really? Nobody got the plate? And why would Styebeck care? Protecting the girls is something pimps do.

  That’s when the partner theory arose. Maybe Styebeck and another person were responsible. And maybe Styebeck was protecting them.

  It was tricky but Brent shifted gears. He’d thanked Styebeck for clearing things up and requested his help on the case. Brent couldn’t let Styebeck know that he was a suspect; he even made a cop-to-cop joke about it, while secretly they focused on him.

  They wanted to know his link to Bernice and to the rig. They had partial tire impressions from the unpaved parking lot near the murder scene. They had taken casts of them and of larger tire impressions, consistent with the tires on a rig.

  Brent requested the rental-car company retrieve the car Styebeck had rented from circulation and return it to Buffalo so the lab could analyze it. The company was cooperating, but it would take time.

  The car was in Pittsburgh.

  At this point they still had no solid evidence.

  The District Attorney’s Office had advised them that they didn’t have grounds to charge Styebeck, or even enough leverage to question him.

  Not yet.

  Brent wanted to put Styebeck under surveillance, build a case. Then Gannon blew everything with his front-page story and Brent damn near put his foot through a Sentinel news box. He wanted to know Gannon’s source, wanted to know who in the task force had compromised his investigation.

  As Esko’s keyboard clicked away in the empty office, Brent poured himself fresh coffee and considered Jolene Peller’s file.

  It was a missing-person case that took on a chilling dimension, thanks to Gannon’s discovery of Jolene’s unused bus ticket near the scene. A ticket to Orlando that had been purchased by Styebeck’s outreach group.

  They were working with the FBI on Peller’s case.

  Brent couldn’t believe Gannon’s tenacity and, privately, he was developing a begrudging respect for him. Hell, he could’ve built a bridge with Gannon that would’ve served them both.

  The demand for a retraction hadn’t come from Brent or Esko. Brent didn’t know where the demand had come from. There were rumors that either Brent himself, or the D.A.’s office, had leaned on the Sentinel. Styebeck seemed to be cozy with Fowler, the paper’s managing editor, whose wife, Madeline, worked with the Attorney General’s Office.

  It got strange last night when Styebeck’s wife OD’d after mixing booze and pills following the fund-raiser where Gannon showed up to take another shot at Styebeck while his boss was prais
ing him.

  Which reminded Brent…

  “Rox, did you call the hospital to find out how Alice Styebeck is doing?”

  “She’s not out of the woods yet.” Esko kept working at her keyboard.

  “What about Karl? We need to talk to him again.”

  “That’s not going to happen for a while. He’s with his wife at the hospital.”

  Brent checked his watch.

  “How are you doing there, Rox?”

  “Almost done.”

  Esko was working on their submission to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

  She scrolled through the form on her computer monitor. ViCAP was the nationwide database that gathered and analyzed details of missing-person cases and violent crimes, specifically murder, and linked them to others with similar patterns.

  Brent’s case would first go to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center in Albany. The center administered the state’s ViCAP system and worked with the FBI in Quantico, who operated the national system.

  Esko was a great believer in ViCAP.

  The program’s goal was to detect signature traits that could pinpoint crimes committed by the same offender. Some detectives were anxious about giving up all of the critical key fact evidence and often held back stuff that no one but the primary investigators, or the offender, would know.

  Esko reread the autopsy report, inhaled slowly and flipped through the crime-scene photos of Bernice Hogan.

  In her career, Esko had seen horrible things up close. But nothing, nothing compared to the Hogan case. Esko had fought to maintain her professional composure and kept her game face on for the sake of the other guys at the scene.

  At home, she’d lost it in the shower.

  The photos brought it all back.

  She swallowed hard and closed them.

  They had to catch this guy.

  “Ready to submit it, Mike.”

  “You put in all our holdback, the details on the message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Esko submitted the case then massaged her temples.

  “Mike, do you think our guy’s done this before?”

  “I don’t know.” He studied Jolene Peller’s file. “At this point I’m only concerned with stopping him from doing it again.”

  26

  Gannon gazed at the suds sliding to the bottom of his glass.

  Sorrow hung in the stale air, rippling up to the bar from the blues singer on the lower stage. Gannon tapped the rim.

  “You really think you need another one, sir?” the bartender asked.

  Gannon let the question slosh around in a head numbed by the wreckage of recent catastrophes.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll give you one more, but it’ll be your last.”

  Gannon tried to remember how long he’d been here. His new home. Moved in, what, eight beers ago? It’s starting to look good. Not as empty as the old place. He liked the diamond pattern of the scuffed linoleum floor, the worn wood paneling, the old jukebox and the black-and-white photos of Buffalo’s history.

  That’s Mark Twain. He used to own a newspaper here.

  Jack London did a bit of jail time here.

  And that’s some president waving from a train.

  Goodbye.

  So long to the great Jack Gannon, who almost got a Pulitzer.

  Hello to the loser people blamed for driving Styebeck’s wife to overdose.

  He didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

  Goodbye, Jack. The writing was on the wall and in the letter he reread from his pal in Ethiopia and the application form. Maybe he would chuck journalism and teach English in Africa.

  “Last one,” the bartender said.

  Gannon gripped the sweating glass and thought, here’s to loss. Loss of a career, loss of ten years, loss of his parents, loss of his sister, loss of a dream.

  Loss of himself.

  He took a long gulp.

  Local news flickered on the muted TV above the bar. Gannon saw a still of Styebeck’s hero-cop face, then footage of Bernice Hogan’s crime scene, a still shot of her college-ID photo, then footage of himself in front of the Sentinel building after being fired.

  Gannon turned away and swallowed more beer.

  What went wrong?

  In the far reaches of his mind the remotest grains of self-doubt began to squirm. Was it possible that maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about Styebeck?

  He downed the remainder of his glass. His stomach roiled; his head lolled. His vision blurred but he saw it all clearly.

  He was not wrong.

  Styebeck was involved in this. He’s living some sort of double life. Gannon had to stop feeling sorry for himself and break this story.

  Gannon started ringing.

  He tried to find his cell phone. It rang and rang. He shoved both hands in his pants pockets. No phone. Where was it? The bartender retrieved it from Gannon’s shirt pocket, answered, then handed it to Gannon.

  “Hullo. Jack Gannon, formerly of the Buffalo Sentinel.”

  “Jack, it’s Adell. I’m calling from a pay phone. There’s been a break.”

  Gannon said something before his phone, then his head, hit the counter.

  He could not remember falling asleep.

  He woke with a short-lived memory loss of where he’d been, what he’d done. He was on a strange sofa, under a quilt, in a small pleasant living room with the shades drawn. He was in his clothes, his shoes on the floor beside him. His mouth was dry. His head was nestled in a soft pillow that was hurting him.

  Coffee. He could smell coffee.

  He saw Adell Clark in the adjoining room.

  Bar.

  That’s it. He’d gone to a bar to mourn his termination. He’d gotten drunk. Adell had called.

  “Morning, Jack.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “The bartender picked up your phone and told me about your troubles. You were blathering to him all night. I drove down. We loaded you in my car and with some effort I got you here to sleep it off.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure. Eggs?”

  “God, no.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I need your bathroom first.”

  Gannon washed up and returned to the kitchen where he saw his wallet, and its contents, stacked beside it, on the counter.

  “It fell from your pocket on my driveway last night. Thought you’d want to organize your stuff.” Adell set a cup of black coffee before him. “I wasn’t snooping, but I saw the pictures of your parents and Cora. Are you still looking for your sister?”

  Gannon stared at the age-worn snapshots before sliding them back into place.

  “No, not really.” He drank some coffee. “You said something about a break on the case?”

  “Out-of-state calls on Jolene Peller’s phone have been made after her disappearance. And you won’t believe who they were made to?”

  Gannon looked at her, waiting for the answer.

  “Karl Styebeck,” she said.

  “That means Jolene Peller could be alive,” he said.

  “It means Styebeck has to be tied to her disappearance.”

  27

  Alice was going to make it. She had to make it.

  The room where Karl Styebeck waited was oppressive with antiseptic smells. He stared at the cheerless walls, the drab vinyl couches, the outdated copies of Reader’s Digest and People, as the clock above the nurses’ station swept time forward.

  How long had it been since this morning when Alice wouldn’t wake up?

  She just wouldn’t wake up.

  Sirens screamed when the ambulance came.

  It appeared to be a bad reaction to an accidental but dangerous mix of pills, alcohol and anxiety, the doctor had said.

  “Will she recover?” Styebeck asked him now.

  “She’s stable, but it’ll be touch-and-go for the next few hours.”

  Styebeck sat down, ran his hands o
ver his whiskered face and inventoried the calamities mounting against him. The murder, Gannon’s accusation, his brother’s recording of Bernice Hogan’s dying words implicating him.

  Now, outside his wife’s hospital room, he accepted that for all these years he’d been wrong to think he was free of his father’s curse.

  He had to end it himself.

  To prepare for that moment, he had to confront the greatest pain of his life. He had to take his mind back through time and exhume a long-buried ancestral secret. He had to return to the root of the evil in his blood.

  He had to imagine 1937, Brooks, Alberta, Canada….

  Majestic dust clouds ascended from the parched earth as a lone farm truck cut across the desolate prairie.

  Norris Selkirk drove while his mother, Vida, sat next to him; the sky and worry were reflected in her eyes as she searched the endless horizon.

  Not a sign of life for miles in this quarter of dry grassland where the Blackfeet Nation once hunted the great buffalo herds before treaties were signed and the white homesteaders arrived.

  This morning Vida had told her husband that she needed their son to take her out to the Rudd place.

  “What for? I need Norris here, to help me with the tractor.”

  “Clydell and Eva weren’t at church. The younger ones weren’t at school. And remember, that killer escaped from Stony Mountain prison in Manitoba and was supposed to be headed west.”

  “Vida, we got our own business to mind.”

  “You mind it. I’m going out to see if Eva needs help. Maybe they’re sick.”

  Vida’s husband grunted the way most men did whenever they considered Clydell Rudd and anything related to him.

  The Rudd place was at the edge of Newell County where Clydell kept his wife, Eva, their five daughters and young boy, Deke, isolated from the community.

  Except for church and school, they rarely left their property.

  Clydell never permitted his girls, including the two who were full-grown and unmarried, to go into town.

  Clydell didn’t care for other people, which suited other people just fine.

  Earlier on, there was talk that one of the Rudd girls had become pregnant, then came rumors that Clydell had a criminal past, or owed money to the Chicago mob. Somebody claimed that some nights people had seen Clydell drunk on his own brew, running naked on his land raging at the moon.