Page 61 of Nobody's Hero
Draper opened her laptop. ‘Now, I have to tell Pete’s parents their son is dead.’ She glanced at Koenig. ‘What are you going to do?’
He touched an imaginary cap. ‘Police work, ma’am,’ he said.
‘Police work, Benjamin?’ Margaret said.
‘I’ll go through the reports on the men and women who Bess thinks have been murdered. I used to be part of the oldest law enforcement agency in the country. Crime detection is in my DNA, Margaret.’
‘So is arrogance,’ Draper said.
Chapter 66
Koenig grabbed another beer and made his way to the Gulfstream’s intelligence hub. He closed the door behind him. He set up a laptop on the narrow table and opened the police files Draper’s guys had uploaded.
He started with Hank Reynolds, the man who’d hanged himself with the cord from his hotel dressing gown. A suicide note had been found on his open laptop. It hinted, but didn’t explicitly say, that he was tired of living as a straight man. Koenig thought this death would be the easiest to confirm one way or the other. Hangings and strangulations left different wounds. He would know if someone had staged a hanging. The ligature furrow would be horizontal. He scrolled through to the autopsy photographs. Sure enough, the wound was where he’d have expected it to be – underneath the jaw.
He read the suicide note, but it offered nothing. It was vague, but the language was consistent with other documents he’d written. The investigating cop’s report stated that Reynolds had dinner with an unidentified male and had seemed in good spirits. He’d had half a dozen whiskey sours, then returned to his room. He was discovered in the morning by the maid. The police report didn’t offer an opinion as to why Reynolds had chosen to kill himself in Coos County, Oregon, but suicidal people were rarely thinking clearly.
Koenig read about Louise Durose next. She was a sanitation engineer from San Diego. She and the man she’d hooked up with at a convention had been beaten to death in a New Jersey alley. Carlyle believed Louise was the target, and the man was collateral damage. She refused to explain why. Condoms and erectile dysfunction pills had been found in Louise’s purse. The detective investigating the double murder concluded they’d been looking for a third person to turn a twosome into a threesome – his words, not Koenig’s – and had crossed the wrong pimp. Koenig thought that was a jump. Pimps lived under near constant threat, and they habitually carried firearms. He didn’t think a pimp would use a brick. He thought a mugging gone wrong was more likely. That someone had used a weapon of convenience. Other than that, Koenig couldn’t see anything to suggest their deaths were anything other than a tragic case of wrong place, wrong time.
He read the statement from the cop who’d delivered the death knock to her ex-partner, the man who was battling Louise Durose for custody of their chocolate Labrador, Dexter. On hearing about her murder, he’d said, ‘Does this mean I can sell this asshole dog now?’ Nice guy.
The last file belonged to Michael Gibbs, the guy who’d driven his wife’s station wagon off Park Loop Road in Acadia National Park. Koenig spent the least amount of time on this one. The accident investigation unit report was unequivocal. It had been an accident. The officer in charge said it was likely Gibbs had fallen asleep at the wheel after a heavy meal. It was why there were no skid marks on the bend in the road. The barriers had been no match for the heavy station wagon.
Koenig shut the laptop and sighed. Reading reports like these had been part of the job in his SOG days. He hadn’t missed them.
The soundproof door opened. Draper stepped through. She shut it behind her.
‘Smerconish has called. He wants to know what happened in Scotland.’
‘How did he know it was us?’
‘We left the embassy Jag.’
‘Of course. What did you tell him?’
‘Not as much as he wanted.’
Koenig grunted. He didn’t trust Smerconish. The firefight at the airstrip meant someone had accessed the Gulfstream’s flight plan. That kind of information wasn’t readily available.
‘Anything?’ Draper asked, tilting her head at the laptop.
He shook his head. ‘A suicide, a mugging and an accident, as far as I can tell. With the same information, I’d have reached the same conclusions.’ He paused a beat. Opened the laptop again. ‘But I’m going to keep looking.’
Chapter 67
Koenig fixed himself a pot of coffee, then figured out how to wirelessly connect the laptop to the printer. He printed hard copies of every photograph in the reports. There were 164 in total. He had to refill the printer’s ink twice. He then printed a bunch of documents.
When he was done, he gathered the untidy stack and carried it to the conference table. Instead of sorting them into three case-related piles, he arranged them in evidence types. When you’re looking for connections, you don’t look at things in isolation; you look at them together.
He started with where the bodies were found – Oregon, Maine and New Jersey. Oregon was in the Pacific Northwest. Maine was in New England. Neither state had flourishing organised crime, certainly nothing big enough to collaborate across the three thousand miles that separated them. New Jerseydidhave organised crime, but their collaborations and feuds tended to be with New York, Chicago and Philly. Sometimes Boston and Pittsburgh. Koenig shuffled the location pile together and set it to one side.
He moved on to the victim biographies. Where they lived. What they did for a living. What they got up to in their spare time. That kind of thing. Louise Durose had been a sanitation engineer with an expertise in landfill management. Hank Reynolds worked in cybersecurity. Michael Gibbs had something to do with deepwater port productivity. Important jobs, but not the kind of thing that got you murdered. He jotted down a note to find out exactly what Reynolds’s work had entailed. Cybersecurity was Draper’s area of expertise, not his.
The photographs taken at the scene were next. All 164 of them. Most were of Louise Durose and the man she’d been with. Homicides generated more paperwork than suicides and accidents. The CSI guys had photographed the bodies, the alley they’d been found in, the murder weapon. They’d documented the blood spatter on the walls and the alley debris. The empty liquor bottles, the cigarette butts, the broken glass. They’d gone to her hotel room and photographed her possessions.
Koenig reread the autopsy reports. He flicked through the cause-of-death sections. Cause of death was never as useful as the movies made out. Pathologists rarely provided the golden bullet. Their role was mainly confirming what the cops already suspected, and gathering the evidence that would convict the perpetrator. Cause of death was about facts. It was black and white. It wasmannerof death that was interesting. Manner of death wasn’t black and white. It fooled around in the grey areas. Cause of death was the specific injury that began a lethal chain of events that resulted in death. Manner of death washowthe injury happened. Cerebral hypoxia, where the brain is cut off from its supply of oxygen, caused the death of Hank Reynolds. Themannerof his death was that he was hanged.
If you knew what pathologists looked for, it was possible to stage a hanging. Koenig hadn’t seen it for himself, but he’d once spoken to a detective who had. The sergeant, a barrel-chested Irishman from Boston, was called to a suicide. A woman had jumped through her loft hatch with a towrope around her neck. The detective said he only caught it as the drop was long enough to have snapped the woman’s neck. Instead, she’d died by strangulation. They’d arrested the victim’s brother, and he eventually admitted to lying in wait in the loft, slipping the noose over her head, then yanking her up like the rope was a spring-loaded snare.