The Boyfriend Read online

  The house was exactly what Till had expected. It was the least obtrusive house on a quiet city block. The lawn was mowed, but it wasn’t any greener than the others. The house was exquisitely disguised, a marble in a jar of marbles. It was a place that was forgotten even as the eye moved past it.

  The way to learn about a scene of violence was to let the eyes and ears and muscles feel what had gone on. Till had studied the charts and photographs Rafferty had sent him, and now he was ready to rely on his senses.

  It was the time of night when the Boyfriend would have come. The streets near the house were empty. The last pedestrian had probably walked his dog around ten. The last car had driven up its driveway around midnight. The night belonged to Till now.

  The Boyfriend was a killer, and Till had noticed that some killers came to like the night after a while. They liked invisibility, and after they came to know the night they moved easily in it. They cruised through it, able to interpret the sounds they heard to ensure their safety, and use the silences to reassure themselves that other human beings were far away.

  Till was a night walker too. He had started out hunting predators at night because that was when they were likely to be out, but in time he had come to relish the darkness. Late at night, when nearly all of the ordinary people were asleep, and most of the people out were cops or suspects, there was a kind of clarity to the world. Tonight he hunted as one of the predators, reliving what this one must have felt a few nights ago in this place.

  He stopped in front of the house and studied it, looking for the ways in and the ways that merely looked safe to enter but weren’t. The Boyfriend would have made this examination and then made a choice.

  He opened the gate in the spearhead fence and walked close to the house. The Boyfriend would have heard the noise of the air-conditioning system as he approached. That had been in the police report—the air conditioner running at full strength, turning the place into a refrigerator. It would have puzzled the Boyfriend, at first. Till guessed the Boyfriend would have gone to the back.

  As Till walked around the house he saw that the back door was covered in black dust from a police fingerprint kit. He tried the door, found it locked, and then took out his pocketknife to jimmy the latch. He opened the door and entered. He stood in the entrance with his back to the wall so he had no silhouette and threw no shadow. The Boyfriend would have stood here listening for any sounds below the whir of the air-conditioning. It was here and now that the Boyfriend would have known that something was wrong. Nobody would keep a house that cold. Till shone his small pocket flashlight to be sure he hadn’t missed something he should see, then moved.

  Till stepped into the middle of the kitchen, then into the dining room, which drew him into the living room. The hardwood floor was still painted with the pools of dried blood. There were outlines of the bodies marked near the bigger spots, and circles where the police had found shell casings. Till had seen the photographs. There had been Daniel Cowper, an unremarkable-looking middle-aged man with no shirt on and a sleeve of tattoos, his thorax opened from chest to belly. He had been beaten and burned and tormented before he’d died. Till considered. Would the Boyfriend have tortured and killed him? He certainly wasn’t above it, but Till couldn’t imagine why he would do it. People did that when they wanted some kind of information. That was more likely to have been the outsiders. Till moved ahead on the assumption that Cowper had already been dead when the Boyfriend had arrived.

  If the Boyfriend had walked in and found Cowper dead, he would have been puzzled. Had this been a robbery? Had the house been searched? Was somebody still in the house? He would not have been able to answer any of his questions except by looking. The photographs of this part of the house showed a lot of telephones, bundled wires, computers, routers, and cell phones. This was the house of a man who changed lines frequently and didn’t want to have calls traced. Everything had been damaged by fire and firefighting, but the home had been orderly. Till wandered, looking for anything that might give him a feel for the house’s owner. The bedroom was simple and plain. There had been no pictures of relatives—or of anything else—in the bedroom. It looked like a cheap motel room.

  Till could feel what had happened next, because he had been in situations like this a few times. He returned to the living room. Maybe the Boyfriend had heard a car drive up. Maybe he had heard footsteps or voices inside the house. When the two men entered the living room he was ready, but the two men were not. Maybe they thought they were just coming in to start searching the house in earnest, the way they had been taught in the Public Superior Academy in San Luis Potosí. Maybe they thought they should clean the place of their prints. Whatever they thought, it didn’t prompt them to come in with guns drawn, searching for a target. That was all that mattered.

  He could just about see them now. They would have stepped in, one after the other; seen the Boyfriend; and tried to recover from the surprise. Maybe they had time to reach for their guns, but probably not. Till knew that the Boyfriend had opened up the moment he had seen them—a single shot in the chest to the nearest one to drop him; and then four shots to the chest for the other, who had begun to move. Only after they were both down would he have fired shots into their heads.

  Part of surviving in a world where everybody carried a gun was to be able to think through a situation instantly. Anyone in the house was an enemy. The Boyfriend also knew that there must have been some noise when the man on the floor had been cut open, but nobody had come to investigate. That meant there was no reason to worry about noise. The second the men appeared he was probably aiming, ready to fire.

  So now the Boyfriend was alive, and the two intruders were dead. He must have searched them, taken their guns and money—the absence of guns and money had been noted in the police report—and learned from their wallets that they were Mexican federal cops.

  Till could see that everything in sight that might hold a fingerprint or reveal anything about the kills had been removed from the house. It could take months before the technicians cracked every computer and brought back any bits of information that survived in its memory. There was no guarantee that the fire had left anything. The one who had started the fire must have been the Boyfriend.

  Till closed the house again, then went back to his car. He opened the trunk and took another look at the reproductions of the crime scene photographs. The one taken in the crawl space under the half-burned house finally made sense to him. The object was a fireproof safe that the police had opened. Inside had been a gun, some cash, and a jumble of computer disks and flash drives. Till could feel the urgency that the Boyfriend must be feeling. The Boyfriend thought he had beaten back his enemies for the moment, and had obliterated the information about him by burning the computers. He would be on his way into hiding, relieved but still scared by his close call. But for the first time, what the Boyfriend had to fear most was not Jack Till.

  Joey Moreland drove through the night, heading east. He had been happy when he’d thought finding the Broker would solve his problems, but he had been wrong. The men he’d killed at the Broker’s house were Mexican federal cops. How had they found their way to the Broker? The Broker had told him that the Mexican drug guys were angry at him. Had they been angry enough to tip the Federales to where the Broker was? This wouldn’t be the first time that a hit man had taken out his target and then learned that the client had given him up to the police instead of paying him.

  As Joey drove, he had another thought that agitated him. The Broker had needed the banks and numbers of some of his accounts so he could transfer money in electronically. What if the two Mexican cops had gotten the numbers? And maybe the American cops would get the information off the hard drives at the Broker’s house, though that wouldn’t be easy, after the fire he’d set. Maybe Joey could slip in, get his money out, and go before they decoded everything.

  He stared ahead at the long, open road a
nd thought about how to do it. Holcomb had taught him how to use banks. A name and a social security number and a good identity were always tied to each account. When you wanted to close it, you couldn’t just have the bank write a check to you for the balance and then deposit it in your next bank. You had to take some in cash, and the rest in a check to an imaginary company. Then you made the company real—filed papers to register it, opened a bank account for it, and deposited the money. Then that company wrote a check to another company. Each time, you took out more in cash. If you started with cash, you put as much as you could into a safe-deposit box instead of depositing it.

  He was going to have to go to San Antonio, Texas. He didn’t know San Antonio very well, and he had driven there only once, because Holcomb had told him to keep one of his hoards of money near the Mexican border, and one near the Canadian border.

  Years ago Holcomb had taken Joey to a specialist to buy a Texas driver’s license and some credit cards in the name of James R. Cody. He had used them in San Antonio to start a checking account. He had made a small deposit, and then the Broker had transferred money in over time. James R. Cody’s address was a postal service in Chicago, which forwarded his statements to his PO box in Los Angeles. The account had grown to over a hundred thousand dollars. Converting that to cash would take time, and the money in his safe-deposit box was much more—too much to leave untouched.

  The western part of the country was huge, but nothing ever seemed as huge as Texas. It took him two days of hard driving to reach the Texas border and two more to reach San Antonio. Each afternoon he paid in cash to check into a small hotel near the interstate highway, slept until the middle of the night, then drove on. When he reached San Antonio he checked into a Marriott hotel, got a good night’s sleep, checked out before seven in the morning, then drove to the bank.

  It was a compact, old-fashioned bank building with a concrete facade patterned and etched to look like stone, four thick pillars, and tall, narrow windows. By seven-fifteen he was outside, watching from up the street where the bank’s cameras couldn’t catch him or his car. Cops might be very good at hiding themselves while they waited for a suspect, but they wouldn’t come to the bank three hours early. He planned to watch every one of the bank’s staff arrive for the day, and then figure out who was who. There were no signs of life yet, so he got out of the car.

  He went to a coffee shop across the street from the bank and bought a large coffee, a San Antonio Express-News, and a scone the size of a man’s hand. He sat at a tiny black metal table in the front window, and watched. At seven-fifty he saw the first one, a manager type, arrive, open the door with a key, make some moves that probably had to do with the alarm system, and disappear inside.

  Moreland kept pretending to read his paper from eight to eight-thirty, but didn’t see another employee arrive. He was out of coffee, so he got up to use the men’s room and then came out to buy another. When he turned from the counter carrying his coffee, he saw a man about his age wearing blue jeans and boots and a shirt with no collar come in, take the chair he’d been sitting in and begin reading his newspaper.

  He said quietly, with a smile, “Excuse me, friend. But you seem to have my seat and my paper.”

  The man, still seated, looked up at him. “Oh, was this yours?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is. Sorry.” He could feel an ugly scene happening again, as though it were a play, and each person had to say the same things at each performance. This was happening because of the way Moreland looked. He was slim, and his face was smooth and big-eyed, and he had wavy hair. As much as girls loved the way Moreland looked, some men seemed to think it was an indication of weakness.

  The man gave him a crooked smile and leaned back in the steel chair, making the chair’s front legs lift off the floor. “That’s a shame, son. Now, you’re going to want to stop bothering me before I get irritated.”

  Moreland’s right leg was already in motion before he had time to think. It swept the back legs out from under the man so his chair back hit the floor with a clap and his head bounced against the tile. He began to sit up.

  Moreland dropped before that could happen. He came down with his weight on one knee just at the lower edge of the man’s sternum. He wasn’t sure whether he had caused internal damage or not, but he leaned his forearm on the man’s neck to press him down.

  “Stop! Stop it!” the girl at the counter shouted.

  Moreland’s face was near the man’s, and he spoke just above a whisper. “Now that’s a shame too. But you still have a choice. You can roll over, get up, and walk out the door. What’s it going to be?”

  The man glared up at him but said nothing.

  Moreland’s left hand punched the man’s face hard twice, and then a third time. The man’s eyebrow was bleeding, his lip torn, and his nose broken.

  “All right.”

  Moreland stood up. The man rolled to his side and prepared to rise, but as he rose his right hand retrieved a large pocketknife from his pants pocket. He flicked it open with his thumb and swept it in a semicircle at Moreland’s legs.

  The girl shrieked louder. “Stop! Help!” There were no other customers, so she got no help.

  Moreland jumped back to avoid being slashed, pushed the wrought-iron table over into the man’s way, picked up the other steel chair, and swung it with both hands into the man’s head and shoulders. The man kept coming, but Moreland avoided the knife. He raised the chair again and brought it down on the man’s shoulder. He saw the right moment, threw the chair into the man’s chest, grasped his knife arm, and broke it. Then he picked up the knife and closed it.

  He saw a sudden movement in the corner of his eye. There were three men in suits hurrying out of the bank. He looked at them, then saw two others get out of a van parked near the bank. He could tell they were all cops of some kind. They must have been waiting in ambush, hoping he would come into the bank to get his money. He couldn’t let the man go now.

  In a sudden motion he flicked open the knife, stuck it up under the left side of the man’s sternum to the heart, turned, and looked for the girl at the counter, but she was gone. He ran toward the back room of the coffee shop. The girl had obviously called the police, and now she was gone. He ran to the back door and looked out to the alley behind the building, but he couldn’t see her.

  He looked around him in the storeroom. There were shelves with bags of coffee beans, metal parts that he assumed were for coffeemakers, boxes of pastries to replenish the supplies under glass out front. And there was a green apron with the logo of the coffee shop chain and a box of paper hats like the one the girl had worn. He took off his jacket, put on the hat and apron, rolled the jacket up, and brought it with him.

  In a second he was out the back door into the alley. He ran, listening for the sound of the cops bursting into the coffee shop, expecting at any moment to hear one of them coming out the back of the shop after him. At the end of the alley he threw the apron and hat into a Dumpster, walked to his car, and drove. As he passed the coffee shop he saw men in suits milling around in the front window, and a man in front who seemed to be the boss, talking on a cell phone with his free hand covering his other ear. As he talked, he stared down at the sidewalk. He never noticed the gray car going past him, and in a minute the car was out of sight, heading north out of the city of San Antonio.

  24

  It was night when Till reached San Antonio, and night was not a welcome prospect. Night was an interruption, a shutting down of the pursuit while the Boyfriend dissolved into the darkness again. There had been FBI agents waiting with the cops in the bank for the Boyfriend. They had learned his account number and the name James R. Cody from one of the computer disks that had been found in the fireproof safe under Daniel Cowper’s house. Apparently Cowper had been some kind of agent or paymaster for hired killers.

  The authorities had no idea of the real name of
the man they were looking for. They knew the alias James R. Cody, which he had used at the bank in San Antonio. They also had found aliases connected with about twenty other bank accounts from that cache of computer disks. They didn’t know if the accounts belonged to one man or twenty.

  The cops in the bank had gotten a call from their dispatcher to say that a barista in the coffee shop across the street from the bank had called for help. Two customers were in a knife fight. The whole bunch of law enforcement officers had dashed outside. It was not clear to Till whether they thought the disturbance in the coffee shop was connected with their ambush in the bank, or they all just acted on the policeman’s axiom that a gun could pretty easily end a knife fight. But by the time they made it to the coffee shop, the customer was dead, and the Boyfriend was gone.

  As soon as Till had seen the report that Rafferty in Boston forwarded to him, he had driven to the San Jose airport and bought a ticket to San Antonio, Texas. He had called the local police department and talked to Ron Evans, an old acquaintance in Homicide there.

  Now Till stood in the coffee shop and walked through the crime scene. He put himself in the body of the Boyfriend. He sat at a table that had been put in the place of the one used in the murder. He could tell that was the location because it had been marked on the floor.

  He was surprised when one of the San Antonio cops told him the store would reopen tomorrow. All the crime scene work had been done immediately, because they had known from the beginning that the killer was connected with the murder of two Mexican cops in San Mateo, California, and was suspected of a wide variety of other killings. This was a race, and the Boyfriend had shown that he was good at breaking traps and getting away.

  Till looked at the scene in the coffee shop. He could feel what the Boyfriend had felt. He’d been there early in the morning to case the bank before he went in. He had been alone, or nearly alone. He’d sat where he could see the front door of the bank, and stayed there for a while. He must have been drinking coffee, but Till hadn’t heard anything about fingerprints being found. The Boyfriend had gone to the counter and had his first look at the barista who gave him his coffee. Then he had sat down.