The Innocent (Will Robie 1)

He examined the door and the framing around it. “Steel on steel. Tough stuff. But there’s always a way.”

“What kind of Fed are you?” she asked, her eyebrows hiked.

“Not the career-kissing type obviously. Stay here.”

“Robie, you can’t just—”

He drew his pistol, fired three times, and the trio of locks fell out onto the sidewalk.

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Vance as she jumped back. They heard running feet, as the other two agents were no doubt coming to find out what had happened.

“An alarm will probably go off,” said Robie calmly. “You might want to call the cops and tell them not to bother.” Before she could say anything, he opened the door and stepped inside.

No alarm went off.

Robie did not take that as a positive sign. He kept his gun out, felt for the light switch, hit it, and the pawnshop was quickly draped in weak light. Robie had been in pawnshops before and this looked pretty typical. Watches, lamps, rings, and an assortment of other items were stacked neatly in bins or inside glass cabinets. All had tags with numbers written on them. The man’s military background, thought Robie. You never lost that precision. Or at least most didn’t.

But the floorboards smelled of urine and the ceiling was blackened with decades of grime. Robie didn’t know what the place had been before it was a pawnshop, but it had not worn well.

There was a cash register cage. Robie noted the bulletproof glass. There were scratches on the glass and what looked to be two dents from gunshots. Upset customers or people looking to rip the guy off. Ex-military Rick Wind probably dealt with that with his own hardware. Robie figured there were at least two guns in that cage somewhere.

He looked toward the ceiling corners and saw the camera mounted in one. It had a direct shot of the cage. That might come in handy.

Robie moved forward, doing visual sweeps. He heard nothing except the sounds of life outside. A breeze pushed through the open door, rustling lampshades and lifting tags on the merchandise. When he heard footsteps behind him he turned to see Vance there, gun out, her expression seriously pissed off.

“You’re an idiot,” she hissed.

“I told you to stay outside,” he whispered back.

“You don’t tell me to do anything. Not unless you want your ass—”

Robie put a finger to his lips. He’d heard it before her.

A squeak. And then another.

He pointed to the back of the shop. She nodded, her angry expression gone.

Robie led the way, turning down one aisle, and rode it back to a pair of swinging doors with a gap between. The doors were moving slightly, but that was not the source of the squeak.

He looked at Vance, pointed to himself and then the door, and then motioned to the right. She nodded in understanding and took up position on his right flank.

Robie lifted one foot, kicked one of the swing doors open and bulled inside, his gun making arcs and ready to fire as he stepped to the left. Vance followed on the right and cleared that part of the room.

Nothing.

She looked down and grimaced as the gray critter skittered into a darkened corner.

“Rats.”

Robie looked down and saw the animal’s tail before it whisked out of sight.

“I don’t think rats squeak like that,” said Robie.

“Then what?” she asked.

“That.”

He pointed to one darkened corner of the room on the left side.

Vance looked that way and caught a breath.

The man was hanging upside down from the exposed rafter.

They approached. His body was swinging slightly. And the rope was squeaking against the wooden beam. Robie looked at the slit between the pair of swing doors.

“Acted like a funnel with the front door open,” he said. “With the wind outside. Got the body to move a bit.”

Vance looked at the dead man. He was black.

And green. And purple.

“Is that Rick Wind?” asked Robie.

“Who the hell can tell?” replied Vance. “He’s been dead a while.”

“Didn’t kill himself. Hands are bound. Not strangulation.” He touched the man’s arm. “And he didn’t kill his wife and kid. Condition of the body means he was dead before they were. Rigor’s long since passed.”

Robie bent over and looked at the man’s open mouth. “And there’s something else.”

“What?”

“It seems they cut out his tongue.”

CHAPTER

29

ROBIE HAD LEFT Agent Vance to deal with the new body in the pawnshop. They had confirmed that it was Rick Wind. The cause of death was not obvious and would probably require a medical examiner to figure out. They had checked the shop’s surveillance camera. Someone had taken the DVD. Robie was now sitting in his apartment typing on his computer. He was not working the murders of Jane Wind and her ex-husband. He had his mind on something else, at least for now.

He typed in the name Gerald Dixon. He got too many hits, because it was too common a name. He switched tactics, going from Google to a more exclusive database to which he had access. The hits that came back were more manageable. He refined his search, utilizing other databases. It finally narrowed to one name. Robie looked at the street address. It did not match the one that Julie had gone to in the cab.

But one line on the man’s record caught his attention.

Foster care provider.

The guy and his wife took in foster kids.

He wrote down the address and then checked his tracking device. Its range was long enough for it to reach here. Julie had not moved from the crummy hotel. That seemed unusual unless she was afraid of being spotted. In any event, she apparently was no longer interested in leaving town.

He wondered what had changed her mind. Was it the house where she had stopped? Robie was going to find out. But he had somewhere else to go first.

Gerald Dixon lived in a two-story duplex in a lousy neighborhood. When Robie knocked on the door it took a long time to get a response, and he heard noises inside that bespoke of frenzied activity. When the guy finally opened the door Robie noted the crimson patches on his cheeks, the bloodshot eyes, and the smell of breath freshener that shot like a cannonball from his mouth.

The idiot’s been slapping himself to get sober and sucking on Listerine to hide the booze smell. The foster care standards must be plummeting in this country.

“Yeah?” the man said in an unfriendly tone.

“Gerald Dixon?”

“Who wants to know?”

Robie flashed his badge. “I’m with D.C. Internal Affairs.”

Dixon took a step back. He was an inch shorter than Robie but unhealthily thin. Most of his hair was gone, though he couldn’t have been much over forty. He had the pale, translucent skin and jerky manner of someone whose body and mind had been substance-abused to the point of no return.

“Internal Affairs. Ain’t that for cops?”

“It’s for a lot of things,” said Robie. “Including your situation. May I come in?”

“Why?”

“To talk about Julie.” It was Robie’s gut instinct that the girl had used her real first name.

Dixon’s face screwed up. “If you find her you tell her she better get her butt back here. If she ain’t here I don’t get paid.”

“So she’s gone missing?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I come in?”

Dixon looked put out, but he nodded, stepped back, and let Robie pass through.

The inside of the house looked no better than the outside. They sat on tattered chairs. Baskets of dirty laundry were piled everywhere, but Robie had a notion that before he knocked on the door all the clothes had been strewn on the floor. He also noted papers and the edge of a beer can sticking out from under a chair. He wondered what else was under there. His seat was very hard. He didn’t think it was the cushion.

A

small, curvy woman wearing tight jeans and an even tighter blouse came out of the back, wiping her hands on her pants leg. She looked to be at most thirty. She had mousy brown hair, a heavily made up face, and the air of someone who was totally disconnected from reality. She lit up a cigarette and eyed Robie.